Andrew Clavin’s The Killer and the Clowns skewers Biden’s chaotic Ukraine speech—blending sanctions with $1.5T German-language pledges—while framing Putin’s invasion as a calculated revival of Russian pride, mirroring Hitler’s Sudetenland gambit but with colder precision. He slams Western fecklessness (Biden, Trudeau) and media hypocrisy (Obama’s Iran deal vs. Trump’s terrorism strikes), warning that moral drift—from redefined marriage to woke Hollywood—weakens democracy against authoritarian cunning. A 10-book crash course in Western heritage (Luke’s Gospel to Gawain) contrasts with cancel culture’s relentless virtue-signaling, while listener Q&A exposes generational fractures: a conservative Airman grapples with same-sex attraction, and Clavin dismisses the Oscars as a relic of alienated elites. The takeaway? Freedom hinges on values—not just trade—and Putin’s rise proves history repeats when the West forgets its own foundation. [Automatically generated summary]
In response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, an angry president and venal house plant, Joe Biden, has unleashed a withering barrage of maundering platitudes that has left Russian leader Vladimir Putin trembling in the 190,000 square foot Italianate palace he built by stealing a billion dollars from his people's health care budget.
In a speech made to the Capitol Hall of Statues, which he mistook for Disneyland, which he mistook for the real world, Biden said, quote, who in the Lord's name told Putin he could send Russian tanks into a sovereign country and face nothing but useless half-measures and meaningless rhetoric, because whoever it was, he sure knew what he was talking about, unquote.
President Biden then went on to tell the statue of Sarah Winnemucca, whom he mistook for Pocahontas, whom he mistook for Mulan, because all those pandering princess movies get mixed up in his mind sometimes, that he'd forgotten what he was going to say next because he was trying to remember the lyrics to Color of the Wind.
Then after a few moments muttering something about the wolf crying to the blue corn moon, the president unveiled the sanctions which he would impose on Putin if the murderous Russian gangstocrat would not stop making him look like a senal buffoon in front of the entire world.
First, Biden said, if Putin would not stop his invasion, he would start to blame him for the high gas prices which he had previously been blaming on the Chinese virus in order to avoid blaming them on the idiotic Democrat energy policies which had set Putin free to invade Ukraine in the first place.
Second, he would send Vice President Kamala Harris to protect the Ukrainian border like she protected our border right up until the moment it ceased to exist.
Third, since a Democrat Congress lost the Vietnam War after Nixon ended it, and since Barack Obama lost the war in Iraq after Bush won it, and since he has now lost the Cold War that Reagan won, Biden promised to spend $1,500 billion teaching Americans German for when the next Democrat president loses World War II.
President Hausplant then wandered off to sniff the hair of the statue of suffragist Francis Willard, whom he mistook for Justin Trudeau, because Trudeau is just such a pansy.
That meant commentators on the political left and right had to try to make sense of his speech, especially the whole bit about the blue corn moon, whatever the hell that is.
On the left, commentators said that Putin's Ukraine invasion could be seen to be Donald Trump's fault if you looked at it in just the right way by first putting your head up your ass, then whistling the international through your navel.
On the right, some commentators sided with Putin, saying just because he pillaged the Russian treasury for his own gain, murdered 300 of his own people to give himself an excuse for slaughtering Chechens, then invaded Georgia, then invaded Crimea while murdering anyone who criticized him both at home and abroad, that doesn't mean he isn't a nice guy when you get him alone.
Conservatives also praised Putin's pre-invasion speech, saying that by recycling Hitler's excuses for invading Czechoslovakia, Putin had saved paper and helped the environment.
Meanwhile, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley said he was intensifying the military's readiness by allowing more transgender people to enlist, all of whom will be renamed Millie, which should be really cute during their synchronized dance numbers to music from Thoroughly Modern Millie.
So everything's going to be fine.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is ticky-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-donkey.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bibby-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoora.
All right, we are back laughing our way, actually laughing our way through World War III, which I think is great.
You know, just if they could have held off a few more years, I could have been watching it from heaven.
But no, they just had to get going right away.
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Give us a five-star review so that you too can go to heaven when the bombs hit.
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Subscribe to the Andrew Clavin Show.
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You know, I just read the audio book of this, and I was reminded that a lot of people are afraid it's just a book about poetry, just kind of intellectual stuff, but it's really not.
It's a book of stories of these incredible geniuses, the greatest poets who ever lived, and the wild things they did and said and thought about and how it applies, how it reanimates the way you look at the gospels.
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Also, subscribe to the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
This is very important.
If you press that little bell when your house explodes because a nuclear weapon has gone on it, you'll actually hear that bell ping just seconds before the bomb hits.
Also, if you leave a comment and the comment is just disgustingly immoral, we'll read it on the show because what's the difference?
Joshua Stanley left a comment, says Clavin keeps saying Alexandria Occasional Cortex is hot.
Virginia must have washed California standards out of his system.
Well, you know, she's hot for politics.
They say that politics is Hollywood for ugly people, and she's hot for politics.
That is basically my point.
And also, my point is basically go on and look on all those clickbait things that try to get you to look at them.
Every single picture, what is it?
A woman with a great rack.
That's what it is.
There's something magical about that.
She has that magic, and that makes her really terrifying because she's also a fascist.
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Tragic Fecklessness00:15:39
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So, all right, let us talk about the war.
Here is our old pal, Vladimir Putin, cut nine.
I have decided to conduct a special military operation.
The goal is to protect the people who for eight years suffer bullying and genocide from the Kiev regime.
And for this, we aim for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.
Yeah, going to denazify a country that has a Jew for president.
So that's really helpful.
Listen, I'm laughing, but this is a big, big deal.
The dream of a globalist peace and with security forever is over.
The idea that this is the 21st century, no one is going to go to war is done.
The fantasy of international community, international law, which was always a fantasy, is over.
The world, it turns out, is exactly what it always was.
And anybody who is surprised by that, which seems to be our entire Western leadership, not just in America, but in Europe, is a dangerous child and shouldn't be anywhere near the controls of power.
Before I say more about this, though, I want to put what I'm about to say in context.
I sometimes tell my wife that there are two kinds of people in the world, people who think there are two kinds of people in the world and the other kind of person, and I'm the other kind of person.
And that's a Zen joke, because I practice Zen for many, many years.
And when you do that, what you're trying to do is see through the binary thinking that paralyzes most people and see reality in total without kind of dividing things into this and that and posing them against each other.
And the reason I bring this up is because one of the things I've noticed doing this podcast is that there is a select group of people who simply cannot hear what you actually say.
What they hear is they're having an argument in their head, and A is fighting with B.
And if you don't say A, they think you said B, and if you don't say B, they think you said A.
It's like they have two slots in their head, and if you don't go into one slot, they put you in the other slot.
So, I mean, for instance, the one that bedevils me most, but there's plenty of other examples.
If I say Donald Trump had a tragic flaw and that the very character traits that made him sometimes great as a president also thwarted and sullied a lot of what he accomplished and what he was trying to do, every single week I swear I get email telling me that I hate Donald Trump and email telling me that I'm Donald Trump's mindless slave, okay?
Because they only see two possibilities.
Those are the only two possibilities in their heads.
And if I don't go into one slot, I go into the other slot.
I'm either an ever-Trumper who just does whatever Trump says, or I just hate him and I'm a never-Trumper.
And obviously neither of those things is true, since I voted for him and always had a lot of good things to say about the wonderful things he did, but also pointed out from the very beginning, from the moment he was elected, how his presidency was going to end.
It ended exactly the way I said it was going to end because we always give you tomorrow's news today.
Binary thinking, which is a false way of seeing reality, is encouraged in a two-party state, a two-party system, where you have to make a choice between the evil party and the stupid party.
And it's not always clear which is which, right?
I always tell my few remaining Democrat friends, I always say to them, you know, you're not wrong about how bad the Republicans are.
You're wrong about how bad the Democrats are.
It's like you think that because the Republicans are annoying, the Democrats must be better, but that's simply not the case.
And what you have is because people take sides and they identify with their side and they identify with the people on their side and they hero worship and their idea.
The heart is a natural idolater.
The heart just manufactures idolatry out of nothing.
So you get a politician that you like and suddenly he can do no wrong.
And suddenly even if he completely upends your values, you follow him down that hole.
And clever politicians use that.
They all use it to some degree.
But if you say, if they say, well, the police are racist, the police are racist.
And you say, well, no, actually, there may be racist police, but police are dealing with high crime in black neighborhoods, which are caused by social dysfunction in black neighborhoods, which are in turn caused by great society policies that the Democrats don't want to get rid of because they enrich them.
They enrich the politicians, but they decimated black communities.
And if we truly love our black fellow citizens, we have to start holding them responsible for their own outcomes, even in the face of occasional racism.
And we have to destroy the great society.
And they respond, so you're a racist.
So you're a racist, right?
And eventually you get so upset, you sort of say, well, okay, if the only way I can tell the truth is by being racist, I will be racist.
And then you're a wicked idiot, and they've won.
They've won because now you're outside the realm of the Overton window.
It's a really good trick.
It works almost every time because people lose their temper.
They hammer it.
They've got the communications territory to do it.
So the only way out is just to continue always to speak the truth and let him who has ears to hear hear what you're saying.
And this is what, and that's the context in which I want to talk about Putin and Ukraine, because I'm going to talk today a lot about the stupidity and fecklessness of Western leaders and Western culture that has led us to this moment.
And this is a really bad moment.
I mean, don't mistake it.
This is going to go away.
What's happening now, the big headlines, all that stuff is going to go away.
But it's only the beginning of what's going to happen if things go as they almost must.
There's always a way out, but we'll see.
So this is a big moment.
I'm going to talk about the stupidity and fecklessness of Western culture and Western leaders that has led us to this moment.
But do not for a second think that that means that Vladimir Putin is anything but a wicked gangster.
He is a bad, bad, bad guy.
And the West and its freedoms are not only still worth fighting for, but basically they're the only things that are worth fighting for.
You know, the Ukrainians are out there.
They're being invaded by Russia, still one of the most powerful military forces on the planet.
And they are fighting bravely.
The foreign minister who was out of the country just went back into the country knowing what Putin said he's going to do.
He's going to decapitate the government.
That means he's going to arrest and probably kill everybody who runs the country and install his own people there.
The foreign minister whose name is definitely on Putin's list is going back into the country because he can't stand for the soldiers to be fighting while he's out of harm's way.
That's what he's doing.
I don't know if you heard that story about the Snake Island where the Russian Navy approached and they sent a message saying this is the Russian Navy.
You know, please surrender.
You know, it's time to surrender.
And the 13 soldiers who were on the island sent back a note saying, Russian Navy, go F yourself.
And all of them were killed.
And this is something to remember when moral midgets like Andrew Cuomo and virtually the entire news media during COVID told us we had to shut down Western culture.
We had to shut down Western civilization, destroy our economy, weaken our nation, weaken our children, hurt our children, because death was the worst thing.
Remember Andrew Cuomo saying that?
It's death.
There's nothing worse than death.
It's death.
Remember when one Republican, I'm sorry I can't remember his name because he deserves credit, he went on and said there are worse things than death, you know, because I want to make sure my children are getting their education.
There are worse things than death.
And everybody just said, what do you mean worse than death?
Well, you bet there are worse things than death.
People didn't believe that.
If people didn't fight to be free, if they didn't fight for their freedom, you wouldn't have all the things that you have.
Everything you have is built on the body of soldiers who died thinking, this is worth it.
This is worth risking my life for.
So because a senile and venal version of Neville Chamberlain as president, I mean, you know, President Biden is just, you know, we thought that, oh my gosh, or somebody thought, not me, but a lot of people thought that Donald Trump was so out there that we had to get this basement boy, this old man in there, and it couldn't be worse.
It's worse.
It is worse.
He has taken one year and he has destroyed just about everything that Trump did and so many things that Trump didn't even do that predated Trump.
But I am not going to be called unpatriotic for speaking the truth about Western leadership, especially by a press that elevated terrorists as austere religious scholars.
Remember that?
The Washington Post said that.
They condemned Trump for killing Iranian terrorists.
They said, oh, he's going to start a war.
What a terrible thing.
They interrupted or they condemned Trump for interrupting Iran's nuclear program because they thought Obama was the son of God.
So anything he did must have been great where really Obama just made it easier.
Look, they have been picking, they blamed George W. Bush for a hurricane when he was fighting two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I'm not going to suddenly be accused of being unpatriotic by these clowns who are only patriotic.
They're only patriotic when they're fighting for their side, which is the left, which is leftism.
And they have a Democrat president in play.
He can do nothing wrong.
And suddenly we're not supposed to say this is a weak old blithering idiot who brought us to this brink into this war, not because he's the bad guy, but because he doesn't know how to deal with the bad guy, Putin is the bad guy.
You cannot say that just because I'm talking, it's telling the truth about Biden and other Western leaders, that I'm giving any credence to Vladimir Putin.
Do not fall for that.
I mean, these buffoons are part of the problem, as we know.
This leftist media, they only become patriots at the moment when they're defending their side.
And the thing is, because of Western fecklessness, not because of Western evil, Putin's the evil one, but because of Western fecklessness in dealing with evil, we are now in a tragic situation.
And when I use the word tragic, that doesn't mean sad.
I've said this a lot, but it's hard to explain to Americans what tragic means because we don't experience tragedy that often in this country.
We're too powerful, we're too safe, or have been for so long.
But tragedy is not just sad stuff.
Tragedy is like being in checkmate.
It's like a moral version of checkmate.
You move one way, you lose your king to a bishop.
You move another way, you lose your king to a knight.
You lose your king to a pawn.
If you lose the third way, there are no good answers.
And the thing about this is when you find yourself in a tragic situation, it means you made a mistake a long way back during the game and your opponent outplays you.
That's what it means when you're in a tragic situation, because tragic situations have to be avoided before you get into them.
Once you're in checkmate, you're screwed, right?
You can still move, but every move you make is going to be bad.
So now we're in a situation where we can't go into Ukraine against Putin.
Nobody wants to go have boots on the ground in Ukraine.
And if we do, we risk starting nuclear war.
I mean, we risk starting a huge, huge war.
If we don't go into Ukraine right now, Putin and Xi and China are going to know that they are free to keep pushing what they're pushing, which is the end of the Western world order in favor of an authoritarianism that they have developed that now basically can still run a decent economy, at least so far, while enslaving its people.
And part of the problem is that too many of our elites, like that jerk, Justin Trudeau, that blackface pansy, Justin Trudeau, and AOC, speaking of hot bodies, AOC, people like that, are already enamored of authoritarianism.
So they may not be too sure what they're fighting for, even.
You know, like this idiot Trudeau, I mean, this guy really is something else.
He has a peaceful demonstration going on.
He has a peaceful demonstration going on.
He doesn't just break it up, which would be one thing.
And this is, remember, a guy who knelt down to celebrate Black Lives Matter burning down our cities.
So now it's him who looks bad.
He cancels people's bank accounts.
He steals their money.
He says the police are going to hunt you down wherever you are.
He denies them bail, just like they're doing to the January 6th people, which might be fair if they did it to the BLM people too, but they don't.
And then he makes this speech when Putin goes into Ukraine.
This is cut five.
As we see a rise of authoritarianism around the world, as we see challenges increasingly to democracies, to democratic principles, we need to all stand strong in defense of those values and principles.
Somebody should take this guy by the heels and dump his head in ice water because he is really something else.
I mean, this is the problem.
Our side, he's our side, theoretically, he's the West, has lost the plot of freedom, has lost the plot of what it means to be a free people.
Now, when I say this is a tragic situation and every move is bad, it's fortunate for us because there's a God and because Doris Day, who personally knows God, was right and the future is not ours to know.
History is never decidedly tragic.
You never know if there might still be a way to avoid the global conflagration which is going to come if we don't stand by and do absolutely nothing.
But to do that, we're going to have to take a hard look at ourselves and we're going to have to take a hard look at Vladimir Putin and at what just happened.
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there are no ease in clavin so vladimir putin is an important guy to understand right now obviously because he's operating on his own and he's operating out of his own mode motives and And this is one of those places where binary thinking gets you in trouble.
The people who spend all their time hating Trump, dreaming up new ways to attack Trump, they go insane every time Trump says something like, he just said, oh, what Putin is doing is genius.
Putin is a genius.
And then you get the crap like this from Liz Cheney and from Joe Scarborough's Cut 28.
Ms. Liz Cheney says, former President Donald Trump's adulation of Putin today, AIDS are enemy.
Yeah.
In the process of the people who are in the world.
AIDS are enemies.
Trump's interests don't align with the interests of the United States of America.
They do not.
Mike Pompeo's interests do not align with the interests of the United States of America or of the NATO alliance that we fought so hard as a country to continue to work together with.
You know, look, nobody can deny Trump has a big mouth and he speaks carelessly, but he didn't say Putin wasn't a bad guy.
In fact, he was talking sardonically and he's basically said Putin's a bad guy.
I mean, Jack the Ripper was clever too.
Jack the Ripper evaded the police.
That doesn't mean you have him over for brunch.
When Trump and Pompeo say this guy is brilliant, they're talking about a realism that he has that the West doesn't have.
That doesn't mean he's good.
Striving Toward Westernness00:10:43
I've already said he's an evil gangster.
It simply means that he sees the situation more clearly than guys like Biden and John Kerry and all these people who have been getting us into this fix for a long time.
Conversely, when people tell the truth and say Putin is an evildoer and a gangster, you know, and he steals people's money and he oppresses his people and he murders people, you get people on the right, you know, who start to say, well, you just want another one of these endless wars.
That's what you want, another one of these endless.
Well, you know, I want to play Tucker Carlson.
Now, I don't like attacking people on the right because the left is so powerful and so bad.
And I personally like Tucker Carlson, both his show.
I've only met him a couple of times, but I've always enjoyed him.
I like his show.
I frequently agree with him.
I don't always agree with him.
He does good journalism.
But he has been saying things, well, like this as a cut forward.
It might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious, what is this really about?
Why do I hate Putin so much?
Has Putin ever called me a racist?
Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?
Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia?
Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years?
Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination?
Is he making fentanyl?
Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?
Does he eat dogs?
These are fair questions.
And the answer to all of them is no.
Vladimir Putin didn't do any of that.
So, you know, I ask myself what he's saying, because he's obviously a smart guy.
And like I said, I frequently agree with what he's talking about.
Maybe he's trying to get people not to get caught up in war fever or something like that to cool their emotions.
But who cares if you hate him?
I don't hate him.
I don't hate him at all.
He's a force.
I don't, you know, I used to get into fights with bullies when I was a little kid.
I didn't hate the bully.
I hated the bullying.
Because if you let it go, it just keeps on going.
And if you don't, you know, the world goes down the drain if good people let wickedness thrive.
And yes, there's a difference between Russia and Ukraine.
Ukraine is striving toward westernness.
It's corrupt like all post-Soviet countries, but it's striving toward freedom.
It's striving toward Westernness.
And, you know, we've got to give some credit to our pal Ben Shapiro here.
When Ben says, facts don't care about your feelings.
This is what he's talking about, right?
Putin is a fact.
What Putin is doing is a fact.
It doesn't matter whether you hate him.
It matters what you do about him to keep the world safe and to keep people free.
So what is Putin?
What are the facts about Putin?
What Putin is, he's a thug, and he's not Hitler, but he is in a political situation that is so much like Hitler's political situation that he's going to do a lot of the same things Hitler did, okay?
He's a nasty criminal like Hitler was, but he's not a psychopath, and that makes him less dangerous in some ways, but it also, of course, makes him more dangerous in other ways.
I mean, Hitler was a Jew-hating maniac.
He was a madman.
He really was a psychopath.
And Hitler helped destroy himself in that way.
If he hadn't wasted time and money slaughtering his own Jewish population, the Jewish population of Eastern Europe, if he hadn't wasted effort attacking Russia before he was secure on his Western flank, he might have won that war, right?
So that's something for being a psychopath who was an overblown egomaniac.
At least he made mistakes while he was murdering people in his evil psychopathy.
But Putin is not mad in that sense.
He's evil, and he's more dangerous in some ways because he's not nuts, and he won't make the same kinds of mistakes that Hitler made, right?
He's a much more considered person in what he's doing.
But think of how amazingly similar his position is to Hitler's position.
The Germans thought they were going to win, were absolutely certain they were going to win World War I and that it was going to be a path to glory.
They were certain about this until the moment the surrender happened, the surrender came.
For them, it was like a bolt from the blue.
They thought this is Germany's finest hour.
All this time we've been behind all of Europe and now finally we're going to get the respect that we deserve.
We're taking over all these countries.
It's going to be great.
And then it was over and they had lost.
And you know, you go on Twitter, you know what happens when people lose things, when people lose an election.
Oh, suddenly it's really Russian collusion with Trump.
We didn't just lose because we suck and because Trump outsmarted us.
Couldn't be that.
Or it was stolen.
It couldn't be that Trump alienated a lot of people who would have voted for him.
That couldn't be the explanation.
It's got to be that it was stolen.
It's always a conspiracy and that's what the Germans did.
People don't like to lose.
I don't like to lose.
Nobody likes to lose.
And that's what the Germans did when they lost World War I.
They said, oh, we were stabbed in the back by the Jews.
It wasn't just that we went into this war and we got defeated.
We were stabbed in the back by the Jews.
And then Hitler started to win the war.
They lost.
And even people who hated what Hitler stood for, and even people who disdained his madness and his wickedness and his started to think, well, yeah, but at least we have pride again.
At least we're not the laughing stock of Europe anymore.
At least we're not humiliated, okay?
That is the way Hitler sort of won back the populace, even as he was doing things that many people in the population thought were bad, you know, were actually evil.
So it's the same thing that happened to the Soviet Union.
The Soviets thought they were the cutting edge of a worldwide workers' revolution that was going to bring equality and socialism and peace to all.
They thought like we are the, we're it, we are it.
They really were told this.
They really believed it.
Even as they were being oppressed, even as they were standing on breadlines, they were whispering to one another about the movement and what was going on and talking about the West, but also talking about the corruption of the West and the decadence of the West, because that's all the news they were getting.
And suddenly it was over.
You know, when Ronald Reagan made his famous speech where he said this is an evil empire, where he called the Soviet Union an evil empire, even some of the people high up in the Communist Party thought, we're the baddies?
We're the evil ones.
They were shocked.
They were shocked that anyone could say that because nobody in the West had really come out and said it who had the kind of cred that Ronald Reagan had.
They didn't know.
They didn't know.
And when their empire collapsed, suddenly, suddenly they were a laughingstock, right?
And so now Putin comes along.
And it's amazing.
It's amazing.
When Hitler wanted to take the Sudetenland, what he said was the Sudetenland was made after World War I, and it's mostly German people, which was true.
It was German-speaking people and racially German people.
And it was tacked on to this created country, this Czechoslovakia, which was created out of the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
So Hitler got up and he made these speeches and he said, you know, you've got to give me the Sudetenland.
It's just natural.
And they gave it to him.
And it's exactly the same speech that Putin made about Ukraine.
Here's cut 15, where he explained why he's going to go into Ukraine.
I would like to start by saying that the modern Ukraine is completely, was completely created by Russia.
To be more exact, by Bolsheviks, Bolshevik communist Russia.
This process has started almost immediately after the 1917 revolution.
And he said the same thing.
The Ukrainians are really Russian.
We're one people, one culture.
So, you know, we have a right to go into Russia.
And the first thing he did was he said, I just, these parts have declared themselves independent.
So I'm going to go in and protect their independence.
And that's what Hitler did.
He said, I just give me the Sudetenland.
And that's the Munich Pact, the famous Munich Pact where Neville Chamberlain went and said, I've achieved peace in our time by giving the Sudetenland to Hitler, whereupon Hitler just conquered the rest of Czechoslovakia, then went on to Poland, then finally, finally, finally, they had to declare war.
And people, you know, we think of World War II as a triumph because we won, but it was a tragedy, right?
It was a tragedy.
I mean, 80 million people died.
And each one of those people, their life was just as real to them as your life is to you right now.
Each one of them had a mother who loved them.
Each one of them smelled the flowers and saw the sky and fell in love.
80 million people died.
And it's a good thing we won.
Of course, it's a good thing we won.
But it still doesn't stop it from being a tragedy.
A triumph would have been stopping Hitler before he got going.
So now you've got the Soviet Union, and they're in almost the same situation.
They're humiliated.
And a criminal is basically in charge of the country, but he's a criminal who gives them pride again.
He does the same thing that Hitler does.
He gives them pride.
Now, remember, Putin went in there with his cronies after the Soviet Union fell.
There was a brief period of semi-democracy that was chaos and it was terrible.
And Putin came in and he pillaged.
He and his cronies, they call them the oligarchs.
Since communism, socialism, communism slash socialism pulls all the money in the state, they just pillaged it.
They became billionaires.
When I was talking about that mansion, we have a picture of that mansion.
I mean, this is the mansion that he got by taking a billion dollars out of what was supposed to be their health care fund.
And I mean, look at it.
I mean, Versailles doesn't even hold a candle to it.
It's an amazing place.
And that's what they did.
They became wealthy, but they started to, but Putin basically started to give people pride by marching on other countries.
Putin and his friends, they're not doing anything for Russia.
They're off educating their kids in Europe.
They have billions of dollars.
They're pillaging the money.
They don't do anything.
The people don't have a good economy because the entire economy is based on oil.
If Europe stopped buying oil from them, they'd be in big trouble.
And he is just, you know, he's not, like I said, he's not Hitler, but he's in the same position.
He's in this, can shore up his power the same way.
And he makes the people feel like big shots.
When he went into Crimea, his popularity soared.
And for years, people were saying, well, things aren't really great here, but at least we're back on the world stage.
At least people are afraid of us again.
At least people are taking us seriously again.
We're not humiliated anymore, just like Hitler.
The other way that Putin is like Hitler, they both have an idea.
And this is important because the world is about ideas.
Hitler believed in an idea.
He had an idea of what Germany was.
And Putin truly believes in the Russia of his youth.
He believes that the fall of the Soviet Union was a bad thing to him, and he wants to build back.
I don't know how far he thinks he can get, but obviously he's testing the waters.
He's going to test the waters.
And the less we stand up to him, the further he's going to go.
So here's the first place where our leaders are feckless and he's not, right?
What did our leaders believe in?
World About Ideas00:03:30
What do our leaders believe in, right?
Do they believe in the founding?
Do they believe in freedom?
Do they believe in the God who gives us his rights?
You know, our leaders believe in trade.
That has been their mantra all this time, even on the right.
And this is true on the right.
You know, people yammer about God and they yammer about values, but do they really believe in them?
Do they really believe in them?
Because it's not what a politician says.
After all, Putin, I love when conservatives say this.
This drives me crazy.
They say, well, Putin at least is standing up for Christianity.
That's like Michael Corleone at the baptism scene standing up for Christianity while all his enemies are being slaughtered.
No, he's not.
No, he's not.
He will say anything to keep power, right?
But our leaders forgot that freedom comes before trade and values come before freedom.
And they haven't stood up for moral truth and self-discipline and ultimately religious faith because faith in the God who endowed us with our rights.
You know, I don't want to get off on a long tangent about this, but the stuff that I talk about when I talk about the family, you know, I've talked a lot about gay rights and my son being gay and my son now getting married.
And obviously, I think you can all tell how much I love my son, like my daughter, they are.
I love them more than myself.
And my son is getting married to a guy that I love and I'm happy to have him in my family.
I'm proud to have him in my family.
The guy is a wonderful addition.
My problem is not with gay people having relationships.
My problem is with the definition of marriage being changed by straight people so that it no longer means a sacred bond between a man and a woman to create a family because the family is everything, man.
The family is the first church.
The family is the first government.
The family is where souls are shaped and values are given.
And the head of the family is the father, but the center of the family is the mother.
And I know people criticize me because they say, you don't talk about how important fathers are.
You're always talking about mothers.
I think that criticism, there's fairness to that.
I can't talk about everything all at once.
But the fact is, the fact is that femininity is a primary trait.
Women are women because that's the genius of the virgin birth, by the way.
Women are who they are because they're women.
Men are who they are because women are women.
Men have responsibilities to women.
They have to protect them.
They have to lead.
They have to lead their families.
They have to support them so that women can do the important thing of creating people.
Creating people not just physically, but also spiritually and mentally.
You know, men don't support abortion and birth control and anti-family feminism because they love women.
They support those things because it gets them off the hook for doing the things that men are supposed to be doing, right?
This is why it's not about gay people.
It's about what we have done to marriage.
There has to be a hierarchy.
This is the thing.
There can be gay relationships.
It's a better world without gay people being arrested for who they are.
It's a better world without gay people being oppressed for who they are.
But that still doesn't take from the center of human life motherhood, fatherhood, the family.
That doesn't.
And we have let that go because it's easier, because we don't like the binary situation where we get called bigots when we say that.
We hate being called bigots.
Nobody likes a bigot.
And so they create this binary way of thinking where you say, well, you can't say that because you're excluding.
Doesn't matter.
There is a hierarchy.
Hierarchy is a sacred order.
That's what hierarchy originally meant.
It's an order of sacredness.
And the mother and father family and what is marriage, what is marriage, is the most sacred thing and the place where all freedoms come from.
Priceline's Stand Against Putin00:15:14
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You know, right, Knowles, I hate to, you know, this will just tell you how serious I am because you know how it pains me to say this, but Knowles is right about this.
We are not in an argument when we're arguing about this stuff.
We're not in an argument between free speech and oppression.
They say, well, we say, well, you know, it's cancel culture when you take somebody's job away because he disapproves of homosexuality.
And they say, well, it's cancel culture when you fire a teacher because he taught racism and groomed children for pedophilia.
No, one is free speech, the other is evil.
All right.
So anyway, we've gutted our society of every value but money.
And we think, hey, they're going to love money too.
Qi's going to love money too.
You know, we'll get him some money and we'll give Putin some money and they're all going to trade.
We're all going to have this one big trading block.
And Qi and Putin basically say, no, no.
We don't want, we have values.
Are they evil values?
Yes, they are.
I mean, China is, you know, a hive mind.
It's being forced into being a hive mind by their social engineering.
Russia is a czarist state again.
You know, yeah, it's evil.
It's retrograde.
It is all those things.
But those are values.
And that is what the world is about.
The world is about.
History is not a struggle between systems of trade.
History is a struggle between values.
And if you condemn religion, you can get rid of religion.
You can get rid of tradition.
And guess what?
One day you're going to open your door and another religion you don't like so much and another tradition that's oppressive is going to be waiting there with a gun.
I want to show you though.
I mean, because I'm sorry, I know I'm going off on a tangent in a way, but Putin and she must look at us turning boys into girls and destroying our energy industry over computer models, that something might happen in 100 years and firing people from their jobs for being white and attacking our own heritage, tearing down our own statues.
And look, boys can become girls.
Look at Justin Trudeau.
But while we're sitting around making Rachel Levine the first male who's a female admiral so she can gather her pink cloud ships and wage war against reality on a make when you see Putin and she are drinking and laughing and they're thinking, you know, yeah, that's good.
You guys keep doing that and we'll teach your children to.
We'll send over TikTok and we'll teach your children to do that too.
And we are going to take over the world bit by bit by bit.
First our part, then your part.
So, you know, we convinced Ukraine.
So we're fools.
We're fools.
We thought all this was over.
It's never over.
It is never over.
The mind of man, the brain of man, the consciousness of man evolves.
But the heart of man is crooked and it never changes, never, ever, ever changes.
We talked Ukraine into giving up their nuclear weapons.
We said we protect them in the crunch.
And Russia said, and yes, and we'll never attack them.
But Russia doesn't care about treaties.
They don't care about anything.
They do not care about anything except what they're doing.
So our treaties don't mean anything to them.
And now we see they don't mean anything to us, right?
I mean, the sanctions that Biden has unleashed on these guys are a joke.
They are a joke.
Still, he's, oh, these are the worst sanctions ever.
This is really going to do it to him.
No, no, it's not.
It's not going to do anything to them.
They're not making the oligarchs pay.
They're not cutting them off.
There are so many exceptions in their energy sanctions that they're not sanctions at all.
And this is a result of just a fantasy that we were in.
I mean, let's go back in time just a little bit.
Remember George Bush meeting Vladimir Putin for the first time as cut one?
I looked the man in the eye.
I found it to be very straightforward and trustworthy.
And we had a very good dialogue.
I was able to get a sense of his soul.
He's a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.
And I appreciated very much the Frank dialogue.
George W. Bush looked into Putin's eyes and he saw himself.
You know, he's a good man.
He's dedicated to the good of his country.
And he is.
He is those things.
But he was looking at a monster.
He was looking at a guy who was just thinking, yeah, whatever.
I don't care about it.
And then, of course, Obama sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over there to talk to, who was it, Lavrov, the foreign minister, and she gave him the reset button, as cut two.
In anticipation of this important meeting and our time here together, I wanted to present you with a little gift which represents what President Obama and Vice President Biden and I have been saying.
And that is, we want to reset our relationship.
Let's lose forgetting.
And we will do it together, okay?
Thank you very much.
You're very welcome.
We worked hard to get the right Russian word.
Do you think we got it?
You get that wrong.
I got it wrong.
It should be Perezagruska.
And this says Peregruska, which means overcharge.
And everybody's laughing.
And Lavrov is wondering what Hillary is going to taste like when he cooks her and eats her, right?
Because Obama and she are thinking money, money, money.
They're thinking everybody is themselves.
Everybody's looking at these people and seeing themselves and thinking, well, we like money.
We like cheap iPhones.
We have no values anymore.
So why should they have values?
But they do.
They have the wrong values, but they have values.
And that is what history is about.
History is about values fighting with values.
You know how I always say, you don't preach to people because it's annoying.
You preach by living out your values with joy.
And then people see that and they think, hey, what is this guy on?
What is he smoking?
And they join.
That's appealing to people.
That is appealing.
But you've got to feel that joy.
You've got to live into those values.
Have we done that?
Have we shown anybody values?
I mean, when we're sitting around putting up rainbow flags in Afghanistan, are we showing anybody anything except decadence and stupidity and a complete misunderstanding of where the center of life is and what life is about?
I mean, people are looking at us.
Yeah, yeah, a man can turn into a woman.
Sure, he can.
They're looking at us like we're nuts.
And you know why?
Because we're nuts.
We're nuts because we have no values.
And so they're thinking everything's going to be great because we have a global world economy.
And Putin and his friend in China, they're both thinking, no, no, no.
What you're saying is we're going to have a world economy, but it's an American world.
And I've said this a million times.
I'm for globalism as long as it's American globalism.
As long as all the values that we spread throughout the globe are the good old-fashioned founding fathers, American values, I'm there.
But that's not going to happen because other people have their values and some of their values are bad and they defend them to the death, right?
No evil villain thinks he's a villain.
No villain thinks he's a villain.
A friend of mine said to me the other day, even Hitler thought he was doing the world a favor.
Yes, that's right.
Even Hitler thought he was doing the world a favor.
These guys don't think they're villains.
They just are villains because their values suck.
They're not different.
I mean, this is a thing that used to bother me about Trump.
Trump would say, well, Putin just happens to have a different economic system or a different political system, and I don't happen to like a system.
No, That's not it.
His system is wrong.
His system is wrong, and our system is right.
Freedom is what God wants from human beings.
That's what he gave us.
That is his gift to us.
And I'm sorry if you don't like God.
And I'm sorry if you don't like that kind of absolutism.
I'm not an absolutist.
I'm not even an absolutist about freedom, but I know that that is the good thing that human beings are supposed to have.
And here's Obama.
You remember Mitt Romney?
I'm sure everybody remembers this, Mitt Romney saying that Russia was our biggest geopolitical enemy, which probably isn't true.
It's probably China.
But still, Obama laughed at him.
It's CUP 13.
Governor Romney, I'm glad that you recognize that Al-Qaeda is a threat.
Because a few months ago, when you were asked, what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia.
Not Al-Qaeda.
You said Russia.
In the 1980s, they're calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War has been over for 20 years.
But, Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.
Ha All right.
And like, you know, again, you could just as easily have said, Chamberlain could just as easily have said to Churchill, and probably did, you know, World War I is over.
You know, you're still fighting World War I, pal.
We got to give the Sudetenland to Hitler.
And again, Putin's not Hitler, but he's a criminal, just like Hitler was.
And so, you know, you can say the same thing.
This part of the world doesn't change.
And this dream that they had, this fantasy, this pink fantasy we've been living in, that every time I hear people say, you know, oh, it's the 21st century, nobody's going to invade anybody anymore.
I just think, what are you talking about?
When has the heart, when did I, the heart of man straightened out and I missed it.
So let me bring this to a close with this.
Now we know.
Now we know.
All the people who said he'll never invade, they were wrong.
All the people who said we can bargain with him and we're holding these great sanctions in reserve and they'll turn him back, they were wrong.
Will they learn anything?
Here's John Kerry.
This is before the, I think this is before the invasion, but it's the same week.
I mean, we already knew this was coming down the pike.
And here is John Kerry giving an interview about what's wrong with this invasion.
If John Kerry, you know, remember they sold us, John Kerry, how smart he was because he was running against W and the line on W was the W was stupid.
So John Kerry, oh, he's so smart.
Just listen to the way he talks.
He mustn't be smart.
He can't even open his mouth.
That's so smart.
If John Kerry were any stupider, he'd be too John Kerry's.
Here's what he said.
I'm very concerned about, I'm concerned about Ukraine because of the people of Ukraine and because of the principles that are at risk in terms of international law and trying to change boundaries of international law by force.
I thought we lived in a world that had said no to that kind of activity.
And I hope diplomacy will win.
But massive emissions consequences to the war.
But equally importantly, you're going to lose people's focus.
You're going to lose certainly big country attention because they will be diverted.
And I think it could have a damaging impact.
So, you know, I think hopefully President Putin would realize that in the northern part of his country, they used to live on 66% of a nation that was over frozen land.
Now it's thawing.
And his infrastructure is at risk.
And the people of Russia are at risk.
And so I hope President Putin will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate.
He's hoping that murdering people and conquering their countries is not going to distract him from climate change.
What an idiot.
I mean, the poor Arab babe is watching him going like, I'm talking to a crazy man.
I don't know what this is.
Unbelievable.
Our people are clowns.
I'm sorry.
You cannot go up against Al Capone without Elliot Ness.
You can't go up against these people if you are clowns.
You know, I just want to show you one other thing, a couple of other things, actually.
This is an actress who calls herself an activist, Anna Lynn McCord, very pretty girl, usually plays kind of vixens.
She put out a video, Dear President Vladimir Putin, and it's a poem.
So she sent Putin a poem.
Here's what she says.
Dear President Vladimir Putin, I'm so sorry that I was not your mother.
If I was your mother, you would have been so loved, held in the arms of joyous light.
Never would the story's plight, the world unfurled before our eyes, a pure demise of nations sitting peaceful under a night sky.
If I was your mother, the world would have been warm.
So much laughter and joy and nothing would harm.
I can't imagine the stain, the soul-stealing pain that the little boy you must have seen and believed.
And the formulation of thought quickly taught that you lived in a cruel, unjust world.
Is this why you now decide no one will get the best of you?
Is this why you do not hide nor away shy from taking back the world?
Was it because so early in life, all that strife wrapped your little body with fear?
It's unbelievable.
This is our entertainment class that gets up on Oscar night, which people used to watch.
It's Oscar.
You've probably forgotten what that is, but Oscars were this award show and people watch it a lot.
And they would get up and lecture us about politics.
These are the people.
Joy Behart, this is her problem with the invasion.
I love this.
This is from The View 35.
Yeah.
Estimates are 50,000 Ukrainians will be dead or wounded and that this is going to start a humanitarian crisis, a refugee crisis in Europe.
We're talking about 5 million people that are going to be displaced.
I mean, it's heartbreaking to hear what is going to happen.
Well, I'm scared of what's going to happen in Western Europe, too.
Yeah.
You know, you just, you plan a trip, you want to go there.
I want to go to Italy for four years.
I haven't been able to make it because of the pandemic and now this, you know, it's like, what's going to happen there?
She's ruining her Italy trip.
And, you know, it's funny, but these are the people who speak about the news on our TV.
And you wonder why we're stupid.
You know, I mean, how can we be smart unless we're actually reading books?
Because these are the people who are talking about the news on TV.
And when Trump says that Putin's a genius, I mean, compared to these people, compared to John Kerry, compared to John Kerry, Putin is Thomas Edison.
He's Albert Einstein.
It's like, I mean, that's what he, I think that's what he means.
What he means is we have been such, such fools.
When we lost Vietnam, I mean, the Soviets went on the march in Afghanistan.
They invaded Afghanistan.
They went on the march in Africa and South America.
They were really taking over the world in the 70s until Reagan spent them to death and opposed them with moral clarity, which really was a powerful thing because he had values, or at least he stood for values.
When we bungled Afghanistan and let Hong Kong go under without saying a word, right?
Trump's Moral Remind00:02:22
Putin and Xi, you know, they got the message too.
They saw what's going on and they are on the move.
And, you know, if you don't think Taiwan is going to go, if you don't think, I mean, he's already flying missions over Taiwan.
They're already sending planes over Taiwan, threatening them.
You know, they react to what we do.
And the Republican Party and the conservatives lost their way when they forgot what values are, when they forgot to stand for anything, when they forgot to stand up.
I mean, say what you will about Trump, but he reminded them of that, even if he was not, he hadn't lived the most moral life, but he reminded them that this is a moral fight we're in.
It is a moral fight.
If we don't stand for the values that uphold freedom, then we won't have free trade, right?
It's like values create freedom.
Freedom creates the free trade that makes us rich.
And then when we get rich, of course, we forget the values and the freedom goes away.
It's a hierarchy.
We have to live in that hierarchy of values first.
Values first, then freedom, then free trade.
Then you can be rich and you can stay free if you don't lose the values.
Joe Biden, he is just, he is the new Neville Chamberlain and the Democrats are an entire party of Neville Chamberlains.
They're backing him to the hilt.
They're saying, what a wonderful thing that Trump isn't president anymore.
And Putin didn't do this when Trump was president because Trump took care of business.
He took care of business.
He let the energy market thrive.
Biden didn't do that.
Biden cut down our Keystone pipeline and gave an allowance to the Nord Stream II pipeline, Putin's pipeline, into Germany.
And he said, well, that will give us leverage because we'll be able to cut it off.
Putin doesn't care.
There's plenty of natural gas.
He's taken over in Ukraine, by the way.
It's something like the fourth largest producer of natural gas in the world.
And the Nord Stream pipeline bypasses Ukraine.
So if he has Ukraine, he doesn't need that pipeline.
You know, it's not all about economics.
It is about values.
And if we don't have values and if we don't recognize the values of the people we oppose, if we don't recognize the evil of the values that we oppose, whether they're Islamists who didn't kill because they were out of work, as David Brooks once said, they didn't kill because they were out of work.
They killed because they believed in a God who wanted us dead.
The Islamists did.
Now these guys kill because they believe in a world in which they dominate.
Their way of thinking dominates.
Their authoritarianism dominates.
Human consciousness evolves, but sinful human nature never changes.
Read Some Ovid00:15:13
And this guy, you know, we thought we could tell reality how it was supposed to behave.
We thought we could tell reality.
We thought, oh, men can be women and, you know, people can be civilized by giving them a lot of money and people don't need values.
We can live without that.
We thought we were going to tell reality how to behave.
This thug, Putin, he is reality.
And he's not going to be deterred except by the kind of real power, which is the only thing that he can understand.
So I just heard a great story from McKenna, who runs the sound on the show and does everything essentially.
I mean, nobody else is any use around here, does everything except the words coming out of my mouth, which some of which are mine.
But her dad recently saw a guy breaking into his duplex on a ring video doorbell, and it saved him.
He got to call the police and chase the guy off.
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He'll take off like a shot.
Singing that song.
So we're talking about the West and what the West means.
And one of the emails I get most frequently says something like this.
You know, I want to read the art and literature of the West, and I really want to know more about my culture and my heritage.
But I tried to read Crime and Punishment, or I tried to read Les Miserables, or I tried to read Hamlet, or watch Hamlet, and I just couldn't understand it, or it was too long.
And the next line is always, would you please, you're always talking about books, would you please make a list of 100 great books?
And the thing is, I'm not going to do that because all you got to do is go back to, say, 1950, find a list from 1950, the 100 great books, before they went woke, and they started including garbage that's just politically correct.
And you'll find the books that are there.
Everybody knows what the great books of the West are, except for the woke people who think it's something else.
But, you know, those lists you can find.
But the thing I really think is that if you haven't dedicated your life to reading literature, if you haven't, and it's not something you've made a habit of, to start with crime and punishment, a book that's difficult to read.
It's a foreign book, first of all, and Dostoevsky had a foreign way of looking at the world because he was Russian.
He had a different way than that.
It's hard sometimes to get into that unless you've been reading a lot of stuff.
If you read Les Miserables, it's like a thousand pages.
He has these whole like 100 pages on the Battle of Waterloo, which has nothing to do with the rest of the novel.
Hamlet, of course, is in Old English, older English, and can be very hard to understand the diction.
You want to start with things that you can grasp.
You want to start with things that you can read quickly and enjoy and really get a lot out of and really educate yourself.
And then maybe find, say, gee, I could understand that.
Maybe I can go on to this.
Or maybe I read part of this.
Maybe I can read more of it.
And so I wanted to put together a list of 10 really short things that you could read that would give you a greater sense of where the West comes from so that you can say, you know, oh, wait, now I start to get it.
I've read that.
I've seen that.
And now when there's a reference to it, I know what it is.
And I can go and look at something else about that or something that refers to it.
And I can see, you know, one of the, it's a silly story, but one of the most exciting moments in my reading life was when I realized that a book I was reading was a metaphor for the Gospels and I understood how it was going to end because of that.
I understood how the story would end because I understood that it was referring to the Gospels.
Once you start to get that kind of referential idea, you start to see that everything people are saying in the West, everything we're arguing about, everything that's happening right now, we've been talking about forever.
You know, we've been talking about forever.
So I want to give a list of 10 very short things that you could read that would just give you a sense of who we are and where we come from.
Of course, you've got to start with the Bible.
If you've read the Bible or if you've gone to church all your life, you hear a lot about the Bible, but it's not a bad thing to sit down.
I would take the Gospel of Luke.
I think it is the most entertaining possibly of the Gospel, the most complete, most, it's the most modern in some ways of the Gospels.
Get the New International Version.
You will miss the beauty of the King James Version.
There's nothing like the King James Version, but the King James Version is hard to understand.
So read the New International Version first.
Understand what's there.
If you want to, go back and read the King James.
And, you know, you almost think like I shouldn't have to say that and I shouldn't have to say it, but I do.
So make sure you read that.
And make sure you read the letter to the Romans.
Also in the New International Version, this is Paul's letter to the Roman church where he explains what his theology is, what he sees in the Christian story, what he makes, what Paul makes of the story you just read in Luke's Gospel.
Because it's not necessarily the first thing that leaps off the page.
It's something that he saw and it became the theology of the church.
And so if you read the book of Romans and try to understand his logic, which is actually quite good, quite powerful, you get a lot of where our religious background comes from.
Then you want to go to the Greeks, of course.
And you don't want to start reading the most complicated philosophy and all this, but there is one thing that you really should read.
I always say that the West was built on the shoulders of Jesus and Socrates.
They're like telemons, those pillars that hold up the world.
They hold up the cathedral of the West.
They both lived, they had a lot in common, the two of them.
They both lived in a world where it was kind of cool to think that moral truth was relative and they both believed in truth, but they both were very indirect about how they approached truth and how they got people to see truth for themselves through parables or through questions.
And both of them were judiciously murdered for heresy.
They were both killed for heresy by the powers that be, and then their philosophies took over the West and became the West and even were brought together in the thought of Aquinas to become the West.
So you've met Jesus, you've read the book of Luke, you want to read Plato's Apologia, which is Socrates, or sometimes called the Apology.
It's Socrates' speech when he is put on trial for his life for corrupting the youth of Athens.
And he makes a defense, and it tells the whole story of how he got into this situation and what the court decides.
It tells the whole story straight through from the whole trial.
You get the whole trial and the whole arrest and why it happened.
And it is one of these centerpieces of our culture.
And it's just not that long, maybe 30 pages at most.
You do not want to go online and get the free version of it, unfortunately, because it's always by Benjamin Jowett.
It's old-fashioned.
I don't think it's a very good translation.
My Greek is pretty lousy, but still, I don't think it's a great translation.
What you want is the Groube version, which you can get for eight bucks on Amazon.
And you can get all the, there are four dialogues about the trial and his execution, I think.
I think they're four, and you can get for five bucks on Kindle or for eight bucks.
You can order a little booklet of them.
You want to read the apology.
It tells the famous story of what happened when the oracle at Delphi said that there was no man in Athens, no man in Greece who was wiser than Socrates.
And Socrates said, how can that be true when I know that I know nothing?
And he began to question the powerful and the wise and the good of Athens and to see if they had to be wiser than he was because he knew that he knew nothing.
And of course, it really annoyed them as he exploded each one of them in turn.
It really annoyed the powers that be.
And this idea of questioning authority, questioning the wisdom of the experts, something you hear us do on the show, something I hope you hear us here on Knowles' show and Ben's show and Walsh's show.
You know, this is something that is very much a part of the West and it's something you get killed for in other places and it's something Socrates did get killed for.
I always remember reading a dialogue, rereading a dialogue of Plato's with Socrates, Plato writing about his teacher, Socrates.
And I remember reading a dialogue, and I said to my son Spencer, no relation, I said, you know, I really am nostalgic for this day when Socrates and his friends could sit around and just talk about ideas.
And there was this long pause, and Spencer said, dad, they killed Socrates.
I was like, oh yeah, I forgot.
It's always been like this.
The other book of the Greeks you want to read is a Greek tragedy, a play by Sophocles.
It's called Antigone.
It is a play that takes place after the civil war in Thebes when the king decides to disgrace the loser of the civil war, Polyneises, by leaving his body unburied.
And his sister, Antigone, says she is going to bury the body.
That's a very disgraceful thing to leave the body unburied.
This is just an absolute, you know, it's like desecrating the corpse.
It's just the worst thing that can happen.
And Antigone says, no, I have an obligation to bury my brother's body.
And the king says, we will kill you if you break the law and bury the body.
And so what you have is this tension that exists in the West forever, which is the tension before between the responsibilities of the individual and the responsibilities and your responsibility to the state.
And how do you solve this?
And what do you do about it?
And where does one end and the other begin?
Now, Greek plays are not the most exciting plays to watch, but there is a very good version of this on the BBC, which I think you can get on Amazon Prime, made by the BBC.
It has the wonderful Juliet Stevens as a wonderful actress as a young woman.
And you can get that on Amazon Prime and watch Antigone or read it.
You can read it.
Greek plays, I like reading them better because they're all there on the page.
So from there, you go to Rome.
And this was one of the things that happened to me.
I was a very, very bad student, and I did not learn anything about any of this until I graduated finally from college.
And then I started to read all the books that I had bought.
But there was a moment when I was in college when I had this stupendous revelation, which was I suddenly realized that, oh, the Greeks came first, and then the Romans came first, and second and learned from the Greece, and then the Europeans came, and then we came, and all of these things feed into one another.
So I'm kind of taking you through that passage.
First, you've got to read yourself some Ovid.
This may be one of my favorite books ever.
I think I've read the entire poem.
It's a huge epic poem.
I think I've read it four, five, I've read it a lot.
The Metamorphosis, it's called.
The Metamorphosis tells all the myths of the Roman people that really, many of them come from Greece, and it tells just wonderful, wonderful stories and beautifully written.
Take a look at, I think it is the fourth book of Ovid.
It's long, so I'm not telling you to read the whole thing, but read some of it.
You'll get the story of Perseus and Andromeda and the Kraken.
Remember Trump's lawyer saying, I'm going to release the Kraken.
This is where that story comes from.
You'll be able to look at the night sky and see all the, see Perseus and see the Kraken and see Andromeda.
They're all constellations.
But it tells all that story.
I believe it also tells the story of how Dis, basically the devil, kidnapped a woman and what happened to her.
And these myths just populate our imagination.
They are part of it.
Yes, it's book four.
Pyramus and Thisbe is in there.
I don't know if you remember Pyramus and Thisbe, the two lovers were forbidden to talk to each other, so they talk to each other through a hole in the wall.
That's in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream.
He does a parody of Pyramus and Thisbe.
So there's so much of this that feeds into our culture, feeds into our stories.
If you read Ovid, you'll have read almost every important story in the West.
Get the Alan Mandelbaum translation.
It is cool.
It's dirty.
And it tells you, you know, it's a lot of fun to read.
He's a really good translator.
I always like him.
His Virgil is very, his Aeneid is very good too.
But you want to read book four of The Metamorphosis just to get some of the myths of the Greeks and Romans that have spoken so much to us, just like the Bible has spoken so much to us.
And the other book I would read from the Romans is I would read a chapter of Suetonius, the 12 Caesars.
It is pure political gossip.
It is about the Caesars and what they did to each other, who they screwed, who they killed, who they murdered.
And Suetonius was a supporter of the Senate after the Senate had basically lost all power to the empire after the Republic had fallen.
And it's where the founders and we get our ideas that maybe unifying power in one man is not such a good idea.
And he was just telling you every dirty thing you want to know.
And what you want to read is the chapter on Caligula.
He is the guy who just did the worst stuff.
He was nuts.
He just humiliated the Senate by appointing his horse as a senator.
And it is really, it's really good stuff.
It's just entertaining.
Read the chapter on Caligula.
If you like it, read the rest.
So you've got the Gospel of Luke, the letter to the Romans, the Apologia of Plato, Antigone, chapter 4 of Ovid and the Caligula section of Suetonius' 12 Caesars, and then two books from Europe.
I'm running out of time, so I want to say them fast.
Sir Gowan and the Green Knight.
There's a new translation by Simon Armitage, which is just great.
J.R.L. Tolkien has one that I haven't read, but if you like Lord of the Rings, you might want to read this one.
Absolute great story that gives you the Middle Ages.
The wonderful story of a Christmas party at King Arthur's court.
Green Knight enters and challenges any knight that he can fight with him.
But whatever he does to this knight, the knight gets to do back to him a year from now.
And it is about honor.
It's about religion.
It is just a world that is imbued with religion.
It won't take you more than a couple hours to read.
And it is a terrific, weird ghost story and night story, just terrific.
Then you want to go to Heart of Darkness.
I'm skipping centuries here, but this is Joseph Conrad, written at the end of the 19th century.
If you've seen Apocalypse Now, you know the story.
It's about a journey into the African jungle to get a guy who has vanished into the jungle and the horror that they see there.
You know, Francis Ford Coppola applied it to the Vietnam War, but you want to go back and read the original because what it is, is about, once you've read Sir Gowan and the Green Knight, you'll realize this is the civilization that has lost its religion.
It's lost its comfort with the mystical.
It has lost its comfort with the supernatural.
And it is also exploring Africa.
It's exploring a primitive society.
And it's going back basically into its own past and seeing the horror of a primitive world, but also the incredible attraction of the primitive world.
This is a culture that is losing its way.
It's 14 years away from the world wars that will destroy the civilization of Europe.
It is a wonderful book, and it's very, very short.
You can read it maybe in two days, and you'll like it.
Huckleberry Finn's Journey00:02:21
All right, two more, The Americans.
This is the only full-length book I'll recommend.
Read Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.
It is the book of the, it's the American consciousness distilled.
It really is.
This book is not just Huckleberry Finn sort of discovering the immorality of slavery.
It's not just the slave looking for freedom.
It's also all the fakes and phonies along the way, because you're in a country where anybody can become anybody.
So they can become anybody they want.
So just like a man pretending he's a woman, they pretend to be things that they are not and expect everyone to believe them and con everybody they can.
Which finally brings me to the last one, a very short novel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
It may be the best American novel ever written, besides Werewolf Cop.
It is a great, great novel.
So romantic, so wonderful.
And if Huckleberry Finn is about the yearning for the territories, because Huckleberry Finn wants to go out into the future, the Great Gatsby is about yearning back toward that European civilization.
So just like the Great Gatsby is this mysterious millionaire.
No one knows where he comes from.
He throws a wild party every week or so.
And what is he waiting for?
He's waiting for somebody to walk into that party that he is looking for.
Just an incredibly romantic, incredibly wonderfully, beautifully written story.
And it basically takes you through a cycle, right?
If you start with Christianity, you start with Socrates.
You go to the Europe where that Christianity and that Greek worldview has. infused itself into consciousness.
You get to Sergowan and the Green Knight.
Then you get to Heart of Darkness where they've become separated from that.
And then you get into America where they're looking into a future.
They're hoping there's going to be a brand new future.
But in fact, they're still drawn back ceaselessly into the past, trying to reconnect with the past they lost, the past that's represented by Europe and European society.
You will know a lot about the West if you read those 10 short books and it will steal you to read more.
It'll teach you how to read more.
And it'll give you a sense of who you are because there has been an absolutely purposeful attempt to rid us, to strip us of our culture, of our heritage, of the things that made us who we are, to teach us that we're evil, that we're wrong.
It is a beautiful story, the story of the West, and it's not going to end here no matter what happens to us.
It's going to continue, continue for centuries, hopefully millennia to come.
The Story of the West00:05:43
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If you don't know by now, you should.
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As Russia descends upon Ukraine, one thing has become clear: Putin is calling the West bluff.
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So we're talking a lot about Western values.
And when I think of Western values, I think of Hollywood because it's kind of like when you think of morality, you think of the Sopranos because you can see what morality is by looking at the opposite.
Christian Toto is an award-winning film critic journalist.
He's the founder of HollywoodToto.com.
If you don't go to HollywoodandToto.com and you are interested in movies at all, you're missing out.
Joe Rogan's Influence on Hollywood00:14:47
It is a really sound, right-wing take on what's going on in the entertainment world, especially the Hollywood world.
Christian also hosts the Write on Hollywood podcast, and he's got a book, Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul.
It has a foreword by Andrew Clavin.
But aside from that, it's actually a really good book.
Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul.
Christian, it's good to see you.
Good to be here.
Thanks so much.
I appreciate the kind words.
So, when you write in your book about the fact that Hollywood has just gone incredibly woke, and I've seen, I saw for myself before I left, racial quotas in writers' rooms, people being fired for being white people, being forced to take on black writers onto their project, even though the black writers weren't going to write anything.
And is that getting worse or is there any chance of that getting better?
I sense it's getting worse at the moment.
I've talked to a few comedians who happen to be white and male, and they tell me that it used to be happening behind the scenes, but no one would talk about it directly.
Now they talk about it directly.
Like it's gotten to that level.
So I think that's a sign it's getting worse.
There seems to be no pressure on it to get better, honestly.
I think everyone in the industry is either scared, laying low, unable to kind of reach out and make some sort of progress.
So I think for all those reasons, it's not getting better.
It's a strange thing because the prophets seem still to be coming into Hollywood, from what I can make out.
They still seem to be making money with their bigger movies.
And now that the theaters are opening up, I'm sure they'll release even bigger movies and make even more money.
But at the same time, they've lost prestige.
I mean, does anybody listen to what a Hollywood actor says anymore?
Does anybody care what their politics are anymore?
There must be, you think they'll get any sense that they've made themselves obsolete?
No, you know, the second part of what you said is correct.
But the first part is the one that kind of puzzles me because listen, I can't go behind the scenes.
I can't crunch the numbers behind what's happening in Hollywood.
But they seem to be having success because they keep doing the same thing.
So until there is a kind of pain in the pocketbook in the wallet, I don't think there's any real change that's going to happen within the industry.
You know, maybe X amount of projects fail, but then a Spider-Man sequel comes around and, you know, everyone's flushed with cash, so they're fine.
And I don't think that the public at large is really aggressively tuning them out or going to alternate platforms for their entertainment.
I think it's happened to a small degree, but I don't think that they're suffering.
I mean, I don't want suffering in general, but from a fiscal point of view, I think they have to feel some sort of pinch before they say, wait a minute, what we're doing may not be working.
I don't think we're there yet either.
You know, one thing I've noticed that it may just be anecdotal.
I can't say about the numbers, but every movie now has to have black characters.
They cast black people playing as white people.
They'll have somebody who's a daughter of the American Revolution.
She'll be black.
You know, it just doesn't make any sense.
There's no such thing as a married couple who's just two white people.
There's got to be a black person on there.
But one of the things I've noticed is when I go on, say, Netflix and they show you what the 10 top things, or they show you what's trending on Netflix, it's never any of those woke pictures.
It's always something that either is older and has kind of old, more realistic pairings of people, or it's something that is absolutely just like a white story.
And I kind of wonder if behind the scenes, they're turning out these pictures like they turned out movies attacking the American military during the wars on terror, but nobody went to see them, but they kept turning them out because it gave them their virtue.
But maybe people aren't watching them.
Yeah, it's interesting what's happening because I think what you're seeing is sort of anecdotal, but also seems to be correct.
We track a lot of movies that are doing poorly.
You know, a TV reboot that gets super woke and then collapses upon itself, doesn't get a second season.
So I think there are many, many examples of that.
But I don't know if the average person within the Hollywood ecosystem gets that message.
And I, you know, I wish they would read my book, even if they disagree with 90% of it.
If they just get the message, and there are a lot of great YouTubers out there who are kind of geek friendly, but they love content.
They love Hollywood.
And if only at the powers that be would listen to them and say, hey, they're not just bashing us.
They actually have good advice for how to kind of bring more eyeballs in.
They would learn something and they'd get better attendance.
So yeah, it's fascinating to see what's happening.
And again, we haven't reached that stage of the, we just made the 18th anti-war movie.
They've all flopped.
We're going to course correct.
We're not there.
Yeah.
I mean, the title of your book, Virtue Bombs, is obviously a pun because I think I do think some of these things bomb, but because of their virtue signaling.
On the other hand, we just had this thing with Joe Rogan.
And I found this, you know, I'm not sure what I make of this yet.
I'm going to ask you about it because you follow these things so closely.
Rogan gets attacked for, not for racism, he gets attacked for bringing on doctors who aren't entirely satisfied that vaccinations are a good thing.
We now have learned that the CDC, we learned from the New York Times of all places, that the CDC has been withholding information about vaccines because they were afraid it would make it look like the vaccines don't work, which does make it look like the vaccines don't work.
So Rogan gets attacked for that when Spotify stands up for him.
They go racial on him.
Where are we at now?
It's sort of a lull in the storm.
I don't think this is over by any stretch.
I don't guarantee that Spotify is going to stand by Rogan.
People say, oh, that huge contract.
Spotify just offered $100 million for people of color to do podcasting and other, they are flush with cash, and they will lose cash if they have to, if they think that's the right move.
So don't look at the fiscal issue.
That's not the end result here.
But he has got a target on his back.
He will continue to have a target on his back.
And if he says something untoward, if there's someone unveils some new back, you know, old episode of Joe Rogan that puts him in a negative light, that's still a possibility.
I don't think Joe himself, who seems like a genuinely nice fellow, I don't think he gets the forces aligned against him.
I don't think he really truly understands the culture war right now.
And I guess if you're in his ecosystem, you're podcasting, you're successful, you have a lot of friends who love you, you get a lot of attention, you get a lot of cash.
He doesn't understand the stakes here.
And just to give a quick example, sorry, is, you know, Howard Stern, if you look at his back catalog, and I listened to it for 30 years, you could cancel him for each day of the week, of every installment, but they don't because Howard Stern now aligns with the narrative.
He's very pro-vaccine.
He's very anti-Trump.
He's very pro-government.
He even said blank your freedom.
He's all on board.
So the people who are in the cancel culture mob, they stand down.
They don't want to go after him.
They're going to go after Joe and they're going to keep going after Joe.
And he's got to realize he's in a street fight.
And as tough as he is, I don't know if he realizes that.
You know, it is a funny thing.
You know, I've only met Rogan once, but he seemed like a very nice fellow.
And like they use that because we're all sinful.
We're all broken.
And so they say, well, you know, you use the N-word.
And, you know, you look back on that and think, yeah, maybe I shouldn't have done that as if that mattered to them.
But it doesn't matter to them.
What matters is dragging him out into the street and tearing him to pieces and then eating the bits of his flesh.
And once you realize that, your really only answer is, you know, get stuffed, basically.
I mean, you have no choice but to say that.
I know this because I've been saying it now for over 50 years.
And Rogan, they play on your niceness, essentially.
Yeah, they demand apologies and they don't accept apologies.
And listen, if you look at almost any person, they've got flaws in their background.
I think Joe Rogan was an incomplete soul for quite a while.
He seemed aggressive.
He seemed kind of meandering at times.
Now he's married.
Now he's kind of channeling a lot of his energy through the martial arts.
He seems like a better human being.
He's evolving.
And that's a good thing.
And by the way, when he was reciting the N-word, he wasn't calling anyone the N-word.
Right, of course.
He was using it in a more clinical form.
And that context is stripped away by the cancel culture mob.
It's what they do.
It's what they're good at.
And it's so funny because then, you know, Hunter Biden used the N-word in text multiple times.
He's fine.
He gets to sell his artwork for any price he wants.
That's how you know it's all a shell game.
That's how you know it's not real.
Right.
And they're relentless.
I mean, we lose our, you know, Rush Limbaugh used to talk about the drive-by media.
We lose our attention on Rogan and we move on, but they will not move on.
They'll keep coming after him again and again and again.
Let's talk about the Oscars a little bit because the Oscars seem to me to be the incarnation, the avatar of this phenomenon of lost prestige.
Is anybody going to watch the Oscars at all this year?
I don't think so.
There aren't many populist movies, so there's no reason to kind of rally around them.
You've got three hosts that don't draw a crowd.
You know, if the main, if one of the key complaints is that half the country doesn't watch the show because they insult conservatives, and who do they hire?
Wanda Sykes and Amy Schumer?
It's a thumb in the eye.
They don't care.
Ultimately, in their deepest, darkest souls, they don't want the ratings that go up because they know if they wanted the ratings to go up, you have a call to Ricky Gervais tomorrow.
And when he hangs up and you call Dave Chappelle, that's how you get the ratings up.
I would actually watch that.
No, I have to watch it because it's my job, but I'm dreading it.
I'm not looking forward to it.
It used to be my favorite night of the year.
Now it's one of my least favorite nights of the year.
It is, there are reasons why it's not as successful as it has been for cultural reasons, for reasons not even connected to their, not even their fault.
You know, stars aren't as climbers as they used to be.
Stars are everywhere now.
We're on social media.
It's not special to see a Jane Fonda now because we see her everywhere.
So there's cultural reasons why it's not an event anymore.
But a lot of this is self-inflicted.
They have no real interest in fixing that.
You know, it really, first of all, they don't know who we are at all.
I mean, they don't know who conservatives are at all.
They never meet us.
They don't like you, though.
Yeah, no, they don't.
They just, they want to say, you know, they're Nazis, they're racist, they're all these things.
It is one of the funniest things to watch former leftists come into the Daily Wire and meet people and say, like, everybody's so nice here.
You know, and it's true.
Everybody really is nice here.
You know, even Shapiro, who likes to come across like he's not, he's really a lovely guy.
You know, and this is the this is the funny thing, you know, that they are so cut off from us that they really don't know who we are in the least.
You know, putting I mean, so much has happened to the movie business in the years that since I've been in it or when I've been in it.
They've lost the knack of making popular films that are also good movies, that are also deep and important movies.
That used to be, if you go back way back into old movies like 1939, you're seeing some of the greatest movies ever made that also were the top box office pictures.
That's not happening anymore.
So the movies themselves, the industry itself has kind of gone south in a lot of ways.
When they put Wanda Sykes in, I mean, does anybody like her?
Even the left, do they like her?
You know, she's a talented comedian.
I don't begrudge her skills, but she's not a name in 2022.
She's someone who's been around for 10, 20 years.
She's done a bunch of shows and movies.
She's got some ability.
But if you're looking to get the ratings up, you don't say, get me Sykes.
I also think maybe there were dozens of people that turned down this invitation.
But I think what you're saying is so interesting because you think about movies like Moonlight and The Shape of Water.
I never want to watch them again.
And they're not bad movies per se, but you think about Oscar, the best picture, you want to see it again and again.
You want to introduce your kids and grandchildren to the movie.
There's a populism that's so lost in Hollywood.
And I don't begrudge.
I mean, people say, oh, these are artsy movies.
There's a place for artsy movies.
They're wonderful.
I enjoy them.
But even like the King's speech look back is sort of a rallying where it was Oscar worthy.
It was sort of had the gravitas.
But it was a beautiful story and it was uplifting.
It was emotional.
It really kind of rallied a lot of people.
You didn't have to be in this demographic or that demographic to enjoy it.
It just was a good movie.
And I don't see many projects like that these days, honestly.
No, it's really true.
Talking to Christian Toto, his site is called Hollywood and Toto.
Book is Virtue Bombs and How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost His Soul.
I'm just about out of time, Christian, but I want to ask you one thing.
You know, the Daily Wire has gotten into making movies, and we've got one coming out, I think, next month, and one coming out in April in May.
We're bringing out movies.
They're solid movies.
I've heard the one with Gina Carano is terrific.
I haven't seen it yet, but I hear it's great.
Will anybody copy us?
I mean, will anybody join this fight with us?
Are we alone in this?
Because it seems to me that we have to, we can't.
It's wonderful what the Daily Wire is doing.
I'm so thrilled and excited about it and so proud of it.
But at the same time, we can't do it alone.
I mean, this has got to be a movement.
Do you think there's any chance of that?
I couldn't agree with everything you've said anymore.
I don't know.
I think we're seeing things on a smaller scale.
The Federalists just put out a documentary.
I've heard other whispers about other organizations kind of getting into that space as well.
But, you know, the Daily Wire is really focused on this, is really primed to do something of substance.
And I don't see something of that size or even lesser size right now.
But boy, do we need it.
You know, when I think about all the stories that are out there right now that aren't being told and will never be told, it is shocking.
You know, Philip McAlier is making My Son Hunter right now.
There should be a dozen studios racing to make that movie because there's so much sex and addiction and tragedy and everything.
It's almost a farce how great it would be to make that into a movie.
But it took Philim's team, you know, crowdfunding to make this happen.
So, you know, you've been banging the drum about the culture forever.
I think conservatives are getting the message, but there's the next step where maybe the big benefactors have to say, I'm going to write a big check to Breitbart or to, you know, the Daily Caller and get them in the movie business as well.
My only real hope here is that I think the Daily Wire will be successful, but that someone will look at that and say, hey, we could do that too.
Yeah.
I got to stop there.
Christian Toto, Virtue Bombs, How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost His Soul.
Go get it.
Go support him.
Support him over at Hollywood and Toto.
Conservatives and Crowdfunding00:04:07
Christian, always good talking to you.
Let's do it again soon.
Thanks so much.
All right.
We're running long, so I've got to get right into the mailbag.
We may be the last people left laughing.
From Elizabeth, greetings from another member of the cadre of moms who were inspired by you to quit their jobs and stay home with their kids.
Thanks for the encouragement.
I've never been happier.
I've been reading your books to survive the Clavenless Week.
I just read your memoir, The Great Good Thing, to Get Ready for the Truth and Beauty, which I already pre-ordered.
I love this woman.
Elizabeth is also my favorite woman's name in the world.
But I just love it.
My question is on prayer.
I'm a believer, but find my prayer short and somewhat rote.
I crave the rich prayer life that you described in The Great Good Thing as a mom of two young children.
I don't have the luxury of long drives or even long moments of silences.
Do you have any suggestions on how I approach improving my conversations with God?
Yeah, you know, this is a problem.
It really is a problem.
Being alone so you can talk out loud to God for 15, 20 minutes is very hard.
You got to do it.
You got to make sure you do it.
But look, look at your life.
There's only one way to do this.
And, you know, this is important because I get a lot of letters from people who I feel like they don't take any time.
They don't take any time to connect with God.
They don't take any time to improve their lives or improve their minds.
And prayer, I think, is the best way because you not only ask questions, you get answers.
And that's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
So look at your life.
See what you can find, even 15 minutes in a week.
You got to begin somewhere.
I know what a mom's life is like.
Believe me, I know it's hard to find that time, that moment of silence, but maybe there's 15 minutes when you're watching TV when you could talk to God instead.
And maybe it's not every day.
Maybe it's every other day.
Maybe it's once a week, something.
But make the commitment.
If you make the commitment and you say, this is the time, get your husband to help, maybe give you 15 minutes off, tell him what you're doing.
Just say, I'm going to go off by myself and pray.
You've got to make that time to do it because it's not going to happen by magic.
It's just not.
You have to do it.
And once you make that commitment, you will see you'll get addicted to it.
You won't be able to not do it because it's just so fruitful.
It just changes your life so much.
It gives you so much.
You can bring anything to God.
This is the thing.
You can bring anything to God.
You don't have to listen to what people tell you to pray about.
You don't have to be holy.
He knows you're not holy.
He knows who you are.
You have no secrets from him.
So you can tell him every single thing that's going on in your mind.
And it's incredibly helpful.
From Emily, hi, Andrew Clavin.
Why are you so quick to forgive and move on with the tyrants and the government?
What happened to accountability and justice?
None of these government officials should be forgiven and forgotten regarding their tyrannical COVID policies.
They should be held accountable, potentially charged with crimes and removed from office in disgrace.
What happened to accountability and justice?
You know, revenge, resentment, somebody once said.
I don't know who they always attributed to somebody else.
It's like taking poison and waiting for your enemy to die.
I don't care.
I don't care.
First of all, I don't think they've broken any laws.
I think they just overstepped their authority.
I think they overstepped their power and their authority.
And it's the biggest cock-up in decades.
It is the biggest mistake in decades.
And it has been oppressive.
And it has been wrong.
And it has been anti-American values.
And some of them, I think, were trying to do the right thing, but they lied to us and they made a mistake and they didn't back down.
And it's really bad.
I get it.
What do we want?
We want to be happy.
We want to live a free life.
We want our freedoms back.
That's what I want.
Throwing politicians in jail unless they've really done something criminal is a mistake.
I mean, what we want is to vote them out of office.
We want to punish them by taking their power away legally.
And we want to get on with our lives.
If they have committed crimes, let them stand trial.
But I don't know if that's what they've done.
They just misused emergency powers and they made a mistake.
From Luke, and it is about the way we live, right?
We want to live in joy and worrying about things that are past that we want to correct these things by political means.
They made political mistakes.
We want to correct them by political means, which means voting them out of office en masse.
From Luke, my name is Luke.
I'm a six foot five tall guy.
Struggling Values00:03:16
I'm 20 years old.
I'm in the Air Force and I'm quite single.
It's a question I've been struggling with for a while now.
Four months ago, I went on a trip with some fellow airmen and met this guy, one guy.
I was raised in a conservative, semi-religious household that raised me with the value of marriage.
But after meeting the guy, I've had a very strong feelings toward him in a romantic sense.
I'm extremely torn in what I am to do.
On one side, I have a dream of one day having, at the minimum, seven children and being happily married with a woman I love, but on the other, I can also see myself with a man, but the image is something I've never thought of until now.
My question is a religious one because I know your views on homosexuality.
I don't know if I'm to pursue this man that I feel so strongly and differently for or if I'm to suppress the emotions I feel for a different, more familiar lifestyle.
Your supreme knowledge in this regard is most appreciated.
Well, you know, I got to tell you, I've almost, I can't think of ever hearing this story before that you're in your 20s and you're surprised by a romantic attachment to a man.
Most of the time, people know what they're attracted to.
And that's what sexuality is.
It is who you attract.
Who turns you on?
Who turns you on?
And I'm not a big believer in bisexuality.
I usually believe that people are straight or gay.
I mean, I'm sure there are exceptions.
But I've never heard of somebody who didn't know into his 20s that he was attracted to men at all or even suspected and then suddenly fell in love with a man.
So here's what I would say.
I mean, I've lived a lot.
I thought I'd seen everything, but this is a slightly new one.
And here's what I would say.
Look at your fantasies.
You know, all men have sexual fantasies of some kind.
When you say you have a fantasy of living with a woman, is it a real fantasy?
Is it a sexual fantasy?
Do you fantasize about women, a specific woman?
Do you see the woman?
Do you understand?
Are you attracted to her?
And then suddenly you have this crush on this boy, which I suppose could happen, but I wouldn't make a move on it unless I was sure that that's what I was doing.
Or have you been suppressing these gay fantasies, fantasies for men all this time?
What I would say now is you have a crush on somebody.
And before you make a decision in your life, you better like take a look at yourself.
You better understand who you are, what you love, where you're going, because it is a terrible thing to marry a woman and then not be sexually attracted to her and dump her because you now have found that your real self is gay.
That's an awful thing to do to a woman.
But also to run off with a guy and do something that you might later regret and feel bad about when you're not sure of who you are is also a mistake.
So I think the thing is to stop thinking about this guy and think about yourself.
Who are you?
What do you want?
What turns you on really?
Are you hiding something from yourself?
Or have you always known that you were attracted to men?
Or is this just some kind of weird crush, which I guess could happen?
And you should find out, think less about this guy and more about yourself and who you are before making a decision about how you want to go forward, given your values, given your values.
Who are you?
What do you want?
What are you really attracted to overall?
And are these dreams of having a family with a woman just technical dreams?
Or are they real actual daydreams and romantic yearnings that you have?
Because you ought to know that before you do anything to anybody or join up with anybody.
I got to stop there.
Production Notes00:01:30
But hopefully the world will still be here and we will be back after the Clavin.
You know, with this Clavenless weekend coming up, this Clavenless Week coming up, you know, who knows?
Putin may just invade California, although, frankly, he can have it.
But next Friday, we'll be back with the Andrew Clavin Show.
I am Andrew Clayton.
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.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, basically wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, remember to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thank you for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Lisa Bacon, executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
Production manager, Pavel Wadowski.
Editor and Associate Producer, Danny D'AMico.
Our audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Hair and makeup is done by Cherokee Hart.
Our production coordinator is McKenna Waters.
And our production assistant is Jacob Falash.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2022.
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