Ep. 1071 – Evil East, Weak West dissects the UN’s euphemism-driven "neutrality" on Russia’s Ukraine war—shelling maternity hospitals like Mariupol—while exposing Biden’s "Bidenflation" and Jussie Smollett’s fraudulent hate-crime hoax as symptoms of a culture trading truth for woke ideology. Florida’s gender-discussion ban clashes with Cornell’s flawed transgender study, while climate activism is framed as Kremlin-funded distraction. The Beatles’ legacy marks music’s descent into self-referential decay, mirroring CRT-infested schools where Gates-backed unions prioritize racial grievances over literacy (36% of 12th graders can’t read). A lonely 20-year-old’s letter reveals how modern men chase relationships without purpose, while Philip’s biblical doubts highlight scriptural contradictions—yet the host insists Jesus’ radical love remains the litmus test. The episode ends with a warning: Western decline stems from lies, not just Putin’s nukes. [Automatically generated summary]
The Irish Times reports that the United Nations has sent out an email instructing UN staff not to use the words invasion or war when describing the big red flashes that are causing buildings to fall down with dead people inside them in the disputed territory south of Russia, which is called Ukraine, or the Ukraine, depending on which people with guns and helmets are left in Kyiv or Kiev after all the red flashes and buildings falling down stop happening.
Whatever they are.
The United Nations responded to the Irish Times report with a statement saying, quote, we have never sent out an email telling our staff what words to use, unquote.
The Irish Times then published a screenshot of the email, whereupon the United Nations issued another statement saying, quote, oh, you mean that email?
Yeah, we did send that, unquote.
The email instructed UN staff to remain neutral during the red flash building falling down event in Ukraine, or the Ukraine, and not to appear to choose sides between the men, women, and children who have suddenly stopped being alive for some reason and the evil gangster who has somehow caused their cities to explode.
The words gangster and evil should also not be used when describing gangsters or evil.
The UN says that it hopes calling the war a conflict will transform the war into peace in the same way that calling men women has transformed women's sports into a sad and humiliating waste of time.
This strategy has worked for the United Nations in the past as when a scheming group of decadent tyrants was renamed the United Nations, transforming them into scheming tyrants who could double park in Manhattan without getting a ticket.
Calling UN workers peacekeepers has also been helpful, allowing the peacekeepers to wear attractive blue helmets when they bravely enter war-torn hellholes in order to organize child sex rings.
Impressed by the success of this word-changing strategy, the Biden administration has also begun replacing words with other words in order to magically change reality, a technique sometimes referred to as lying or journalism.
For instance, the administration will now use the term renewable energy instead of $7 a gallon for gas.
They'll also say equity instead of slavering race hatred and criminal justice reform instead of give me your money or I'll blow your head off.
They will also soon beginning to use the term President Biden instead of sad old man who spent a lifetime trading political favors for cash and is now the soulless husk of a human being wandering days through the sunset of his life,
not to mention the sunset of Western civilization and who can't even get Saudi Arabia to return his phone calls when he's trying to buy oil from the tyrants there instead of the tyrants in Russia because the Russians are making buildings fall down in Ukraine or the Ukraine depending on who wins whatever is happening over there which isn't happening according to the men at the United Nations who are now women and win all the sports.
Andrew Clavin's Hunky-Dunky Show00:04:56
In response to these and other reality transforming word replacements, Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued his own statement praising the United Nations because they've made it so much easier for him to park in Manhattan.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Hurrah, we are back laughing our way through the end of life as we know it.
Today I'm going to demonstrate a stupid novelist trick that will help you to read the news better in these confusing times.
We'll be talking about Russia and Jussie Smollett and why Stephen Colbert is going to hell.
This is a great time for you to pause for a minute.
I just got the Truth and Beauty, the actual finished copies.
They did such a beautiful job.
The Truth and Beauty, how the lives and works of England's greatest poets point the way to a deeper understanding of the words of Jesus.
It is also now available to pre-order as an audiobook.
I read it myself.
Please pre-order it if you think you'll be interested.
I think you're really going to like this book.
I think it will change the way you look at the Bible, look at the Gospels, and I think if you pre-order it, it will help the publisher know that you're interested.
It's got great blurbs from Steve Meyer.
He says it's a stunningly original work.
Then it says Andrew Clavin has long since secured his spot as one of the most brilliant writers of our age, but that's Michael Knowles, so that's probably not true.
But Carl Truman says, for those who love Christ and great literature, this book is a delight.
Anyway, the truth and beauty, please go on and pre-order it.
And if you like audiobooks instead, pre-order it as an audiobook.
Also, subscribe to this podcast wherever you get your podcast.
Leave a five-star review.
Also, very helpful because that helps us out in basically peddling the show.
Go on YouTube to my personal channel, the Andrew Clavin channel, and you can get exclusive material there.
If you ring that little bell, someone you don't know will die somewhere, but what do you care?
And if you leave a comment and the comment is sufficiently ugly and soulless and inhuman, we'll read it on the show as fitting right in.
Today's comment comes from Marcus W., who's said, this is like a book here.
It says, Clavin, would you please time your podcast so that it coincides with the start of the upcoming nuclear apocalypse?
My wife and I would like to spend a romantic evening together listening to your show, roasting marshmallows and laughing along as the incoming warheads rain hellfire down around us.
She keeps insisting that your bald head, cunning wit, and conservative worldview get most women hotter than any new could ever hope to achieve.
Fact check, true.
Thank you in advance for helping create the perfect evening right before our corporeal forms are destroyed.
And you're in luck.
We did, in fact, time this show to coincide with the upcoming nuclear apocalypse.
So I hope you enjoy it.
All right, listen up.
The Daily Wire is creating a universe of woke-free entertainment just for you.
That means we have your weekend entertainment covered.
Our latest movie, The Hyperions, debuted last night on our Daily Wire premiere event.
The Hyperions is a film unlike any you've ever seen, and that's why we love it.
It's a highly artistic, fantastically fun movie about a dysfunctional hero family with a decidedly retro vibe.
The Hyperions won't lecture you with predictable woke characters and cliché storylines.
It's just pure entertainment the way movies ought to be.
Speaking of our movies, you should see Shut In, the Daily Wire's first original film.
It's a riveting story about redemption and has an audience score of 96% on Rotten Tomatoes.
You can watch The Hyperions and Shut In right now.
And coming soon, Gina Carano will be starring in Daily Wire's summer blockbuster, Terror on the Prairie.
Speaking of must-see weekend entertainment, Sunday, Ben will be sitting down with the one and only Bill Maher for his Sunday special show.
It's Bill Maher Unleashed.
There'll be no censorship or apologies.
Newsweek even wrote up the interview, quoting Bill, My politics haven't changed, they've changed.
And you don't want to miss our documentaries like China, The Enemy Within, a gripping five-part series from the creator of the plot against the president, Lee Smith.
I've watched that.
It's terrific.
Did I mention our one-of-a-kind shows like Third Thursday Book Club, Candice, Debunked, and The Search?
And this is where you come in.
Your membership makes all of this possible.
By the way, when you join the Daily Wire, not only do you get great movies, documentaries, and original shows, you also get our investigative journalism that fearlessly goes wherever the story goes.
So become a member.
Go to dailywire.com/slash watch today.
Help us build a universe of news and entertainment that reflects your values.
Again, go to dailywire.com/slash watch today.
So the other day, I was looking up Michael Knowles in the hope of getting something on him.
But, you know, I don't want people thinking that I actually listened to Knowles.
Lies And Lying Leaders00:16:05
That would be absurd.
But you can't protect yourself just by using incognito mode.
Incognito mode does not hide your activity.
It doesn't matter what mode you use or how many times you clear your browsing history, your internet service provider can still see every single website you've ever visited, and you could be linked to Michael Knowles, which would end your career.
That's why even when I'm at home, I never go online without using Express VPN.
ExpressVPN is an app that reroutes your internet connection through their secure servers so your ISP can't see the sites you visit.
ExpressVPN also keeps all of your information secure by encryption.
encrypting 100% of your data with the most powerful encryption available.
Most of the time, I don't even realize I have ExpressVPN on.
It runs seamlessly in the background and it's so easy to use.
All you have to do is tap one button and you're protected.
Protect your online activity today with a VPN rated number one by Business Insider.
Visit my exclusive link, expressvpn.com slash clavin, and you can get an extra three months free on a one-year package.
You want to look up how to spell clavin, and you don't want anybody to know you're doing that because you don't want to be linked with me either, but it's K-L-A-V-A-N.
You know, many years ago, Peter Robinson, terrific interviewer on Uncommon Knowledge out of the Hoover Institution, he asked me why I was so obsessed with lies.
I'd written a novel called Empire of Lies.
I'd written a big article for City Journal called The Big White Lie describing political correctness.
And I told them that leftism has failed everywhere and the only thing they have left to support their ideas were lies.
And political correctness, which is now essentially wokeism, is a system of lying and then shutting people up, condemning people when they expose your lies so that your lies don't get exposed.
And the problem, of course, my problem with lies is not necessarily a moral one.
I'm not saying, you know, oh, you should never lie or, you know, somebody's hiding Jews under his floorboards when the Nazis come shouldn't lie about it.
You know, I'm not one of those purists and it's not ascetic or anything like that.
It is that lies are like cancer.
They destroy a civilization.
They destroy the trust between people.
They destroy the trust in married couples.
They destroy the trust between people and their governments.
And all of that is what we're seeing right now.
And especially in this moment when an evil person, Putin, is invading a country.
And I'm going to talk about that.
And people are talking about this and saying a lot of stupid stuff, including people on the right.
They're saying things that simply are wrong.
They're morally wrong.
Some of them are logistically and factually wrong.
And it's hard to get through to the truth because we don't trust any of the people who are assigned, you know, the press, the government, people who've been lying to us now for years.
They have destroyed our trust in them and rightly so.
And so how do we find out what's true?
And what every novelist knows, every artist actually knows this, is that the best way to understand other people's lies is to understand how and why we lie to ourselves.
For instance, this week, in an unbelievable act of evil, the Russians shelled a maternity hospital in one of their cities.
Last I heard, there were three dead and 17 wounded.
These were women about to give birth, little children.
One of the people who was killed was a child.
This is in the city of Maripol.
And the thing about this, the important thing to remember about this is this was not an accident.
The Russians are saying it was a military facility.
It's obviously not.
We can see it's not.
But the important thing to remember about this is this is what Putin does.
He does this all the time.
He did it in Syria.
He did it in, you know, in every, every, all of the territories, Crimea, all the territories he's conquered.
If he thinks that his military cannot win a military victory, he pounds civilian targets into submission.
They're now surrounding Kiev, as we call it now, ready to move in there.
It's freezing in Ukraine.
So when the shells fall, the heat goes off and you can't get water, you can't get food.
It is genuinely, genuinely a terrible thing.
And it's hard to look at.
And one of the things that happens, I told you before that this is a tragedy.
And one of the things that happens when people are in tragedy, and just to restate what I said before, a tragedy is not something that's very sad.
A tragedy is like checkmate, where you can, wherever you move, something bad is going to happen.
And when you've reached the point where you're in a tragedy, you've already made so many mistakes that you really can't stop it from being a tragedy.
It's going to have tragic outcomes.
And the terrible thing that we're facing right now is if we go in and we fight with the Russians, or we establish a no-fly zone, for instance, and we get into a direct fight with the Russians, we risk nuclear war.
If we don't fight with them, we risk nuclear war, because ultimately the Iranians are going to see this and attack Israel.
The Chinese are going to see it, and they're going to attack Taiwan, and Putin's going to see it.
And do not think for a minute that he won't go into Poland, he won't go into Finland, any of that.
And when, what happens, and Putin is not crazy, he's not dying.
You know, some people, the best people, the best commentators are saying, we need to give him an off-ramp.
He doesn't want an off-ramp.
This is what he wants to be doing.
He is doing exactly what he wants to be doing.
And he is a thug.
And as I said before, he's not Hitler because he's not crazy, but he is evil.
And he's in a situation that is very, very akin, very like the situation Hitler was in, where his country had lost a war, had been humiliated to see what they thought was the great new thing, the great thing that was going to run Europe.
The Russians thought socialism, Soviet socialism was going to change the world, and instead it collapsed in misery, and they were humiliated in front of the whole world.
And he, like Hitler, finds that when he goes back and says, I'm going to win the war we lost, the Cold War we lost, people love him for it.
And so it's a way to strengthen his regime, even though he's not doing anything for the people.
He has done a miserable job of broadening their economy.
It's still just a petro-economy, which is not such a good thing if we were to take advantage of that.
And of course, that doesn't mean just because he's evil doesn't mean Joe Biden is not a weak, stupid, foolish man, okay?
But the thing is, and the reason I'm talking about this again, the reason I wanted to repeat all that is because when people are faced with tragedy, they turn away.
They start to lie.
Even good people do this.
All people do this.
And what artists understand is that by studying your own brain, by studying the way your mind tries to get out of this tragedy, you start to see how other people are lying to you, and that helps.
I mean, there's nothing more painful.
Here's Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, who has just made himself a hero by fighting back, by pledging that he won't surrender, by standing up.
The people of Ukraine are fighting incredibly bravely.
Ordinary people, they're shelling Russian tanks, they're using the weapons that the West has sent them to stop Russian tanks, to bring down some of their planes.
It is amazing stuff.
The math is against them.
The Russian war machine is big.
It may not be well kept.
I think that Putin's oligarch friends were telling him, yes, give us their money.
We'll make the military better.
And then going off and doing what they do, put their kids in Western private schools and sleep around and do all those things.
And the military looks like it's in bad shape.
But ultimately, ultimately, Ukraine is in trouble, and they're just going to have to keep fighting.
When we watch Zelensky and he's crying out for a no-fly zone, it's painful.
This is cut five.
Direct strike of Russian troops at the maternity hospital.
People, children are under the wreckage.
Atrocity.
How much longer will the world be an accomplice?
Ignoring terror.
Close the sky right now.
Stop the killings.
You have power, but you seem to be losing humanity.
We're not losing humanity.
We're afraid.
We're afraid of getting into a direct fight with Putin because he's unreliable.
And who knows?
If he loses this, if he is completely humiliated, he will probably be killed.
And so he's fighting for his regime.
He's fighting for the things that he needs.
And so we turn away.
When we realize we're helpless, we turn away.
We start blaming people.
And this is like the stupid novelist trick is to watch how your own mind tries to get out of this.
And then you see the things, the strategies that people are using.
So you look at these things that people are saying, let me give you some of the bad takes I'm hearing.
And they really are bad takes.
One bad take is it's America's fault.
It's NATO's fault.
This is ridiculous.
Okay.
This is what I call the narcissism of helplessness.
When you feel helpless, it's very easy to say, oh, if only I change, then they will change.
So you say, well, we can stop the Islamists from killing people if we just were nicer to them.
If we just let criminals out of prison, they won't be criminals anymore because they'll see how fairly we're treating them.
If we make a deal with Iran, Iran won't develop a nuclear weapon and attack Israel.
None of those things is true.
We do not have that power.
Our only power is to put criminals in prison.
Our only power is to kill terrorists.
Our only power is to destroy the regime in Iran.
That's the only thing we can do.
As Alfred the Butler told the Batman, you know, there are some people who just want to watch the world burn.
And so this idea that NATO, we shouldn't have tried to expand NATO, that NATO is the cause of this.
Think of it this way.
Think of it this way.
There are plenty of good reasons why we should invade Mexico.
Mexico is corrupt.
Mexico is run by cartels, drug cartels.
They're bringing those drugs into the country.
They're running over our borders.
They don't listen to us when they tell them to respect our borders.
We could invade Mexico.
If we did, the very same people who are telling us, well, it's our fault, it's NATO's fault that Putin invaded Ukraine would be telling us that we were evil and all these neocons who want war all the time just invaded Mexico.
Now we're in a war with Mexico.
Same people would be saying the same thing.
No, this is the culture.
This is the narcissism of helplessness.
Basically, we let Putin accrue this power by our stupid energy policy, our stupidly letting our military lapse.
We did the right thing in offering to protect Ukraine with NATO.
What we didn't do is actually let them join NATO and we didn't make sure we were powerful enough to stop Putin and to starve him out.
Another bad take is I'm above it all.
I'm not going to choose between Ukraine and Putin.
Klavan, you're a smart guy.
How can you fall for all this, you know, Putin is evil, Ukraine is good.
Ukraine, it's not a question of whether Ukraine is good.
It's not a question of whether Zelensky has always been right.
It's not a question of whether they live according to the way we want to live.
It's a question of invading a country that has deemed itself its own country.
That is wrong.
And then when you start to shell their civilian outlets, that is wrong.
You know, this idea that I'm above it all, you know, I can't see what's the difference between Russia and Ukraine.
Well, the difference is Russia is doing evil and Ukraine is being persecuted by that evil.
And you, to not take a side, to not take a side is again, pretending that somehow you are not being affected by this tragedy.
This is a dangerous situation.
It is a dangerous situation that could threaten you, could threaten your children, could threaten the world.
It really could.
And just saying I'm above it all is ridiculous to be above it all when somebody is doing evil is to be in support of evil.
And a third thing, and I see this all over the place, and especially on the right, it's very annoying, is everyone is lying.
You know, everyone is lying.
So since everyone is lying, but I know, you know, the real thing, once the real thing comes out, once the real truth comes out, then we'll, then we'll see, you know, that I was right all along with whatever the hell it is I'm saying, right?
Now, the thing is, and what bothers me about this is I hear it from a lot of people who are telling me that Putin was okay, Putin was okay, you know, and now suddenly Putin is literally killing children to get what he wants out of a country that is not his country.
And I'm hearing the same people say, you know, all the, all the people I hate like Nancy Pelosi are on Ukraine's side.
Shouldn't I be suspicious when these people who lied to me?
And the answer is no, he's being so evil that even Nancy Pelosi knows it's evil.
Even Nancy Pelosi knows it's evil.
Everyone who can think is against him.
And the thing about it is, is that people have lied and people in power have lied.
Our press lied.
They lied about Russian collusion.
They lied that you can transition, that we can transition to clean energy without first using up the energy that we have while we're making that transition.
They lied about masks.
They lied about where COVID came from.
They lied about Donald Trump again and again and again.
They lied when they said that there was no shenanigans in the election.
And that has made us weaker.
It makes, lies are cancer.
They make us weaker.
However, however, not everybody lies.
Not everybody lies.
You know, the loss of the New York Times is a big deal.
That was a real blow.
There were a good paper, a great paper once.
And to lose them is to lose an authoritative source.
And we have lost them.
They are now full of lies.
You know, Project Veritas caught one of their reporters, Matthew Rosenberg, on tape, one of their secret tapes.
And Rosenberg just admitting that leftist forces, including himself, were distorting the news.
Here's just a little bit of that cut.
I think there's like a real internal tug of war between like the reasonable people on some of the crazier leftist s**t that's worked its way in there in ways that we're deeply unhappy about.
How does that influence you guys up in New York Times?
Oh, you've read the paper lately?
Have you read the paper lately?
Right.
So the thing is, we are being lied to a lot, but not everybody lies.
Not everybody lies.
Brett Baer has a show, special report on Fox.
He, you know, he's a, he's a TV newsman.
So they make mistakes because they're getting the news as it happens.
But he's obviously not trying to lie.
You know, Ben Shapiro, Ben and I disagree a lot on a lot of things.
We disagree on values, but I've never heard the guy just try to deceive people on, on the air.
I'm not trying to deceive you.
There are people who are trying to bring you the truth.
You don't have to agree with them, but you have to acknowledge this is not a fake thing that's happening.
It's nothing is being hidden from you.
I mean, things may be being hidden from you, but you can get at least the general information that you need.
This is bad.
This is a bad situation.
And we have to start to think about what we can do in the future, because once you're in a tragic situation, you're not going to be able to do anything good about that.
But you have to start to think about what you're going to do with the future.
And I'm going to talk about that and more of the lies that are making us weak so that it's very, very hard for us to stand up against a guy like Vladimir Putin.
So the other day, Jen Psaki said again that inflation is transitory.
It's not.
It's out of control.
It's not going to get better anytime soon.
That's why it's never been more important to rethink how you shop and choose brands that are effective, safe, and in it for the long haul.
Our partner Naturally It's Clean can help.
Naturally It's Clean is dedicated to providing the most effective cleaning products for your home while reducing your cost, reducing your waste, and reducing other harmful chemicals in your home.
Their safer chemistry solutions utilize nature's powerful plant-based enzymes to clean every area of your home, from the bathroom to your hardwood floors to your kitchen.
You might be wondering, what does this have to do with inflation?
Naturally It's Clean is here to help you save big on the cleaning solutions you use every day by offering many of their top cleaning solutions as a concentrate formula.
Many of their concentrate solutions will yield 12 bottles, driving down the cost per bottle, and allow you to save big, giving your budget the break it deserves.
Try them for yourself right now.
My listeners can get their hands on the Naturally It's Clean Daily Wire Essential Kit stocked with four great products for 15% off.
Visit naturallyitsclean.com slash Andrew.
Use promo code Andrew to save an additional 15% off your order.
Don't delay.
A break from Bidenflation is here.
Try out these incredible cleaning products in your home today by visiting naturallyitsclean.com slash Andrew for more information.
Now the other thing that you'll notice if you look into your own heart, and this is this trick that all artists use, is they learn what they understand is if everyone is doing it, they also are doing it.
And if they're doing it, probably everyone else is doing it.
So if other people are lying, you're probably lying to yourself.
If you're lying to yourself, other people are probably lying to themselves.
Lies That Weaken Us00:15:11
And one of the other things that has given Putin cover on the right is the culture war, this idea that, well, at least Putin promotes religion.
And as I said, that's like saying Michael Corleone promotes religion because he went to a baptism, that Putin will say whatever he has to say to control the people and to get what he wants.
But we've heard guys, I heard Steve Bannon say, well, at least Putin isn't woke.
And then what's infuriating is that the left comes after Steve Bannon and comes after Tucker Carlson and says, oh, you know, you're just being blinded by the culture war with you right wingers.
Everything is the culture war.
Now, one of the things you notice is it's only a culture war when we fight it.
When they fight it, it's just them doing the right thing.
It's just the wonderful thing.
But, you know, it's easy to become furious with the West.
The West is in a very, very bad place right now.
I think that that is clearly obvious.
It's in a really bad place.
And it's lies that have made it like this.
Jussie Smollett just got sentenced.
You all remember Jussie Smollett, the actor who pretended that he got attacked by Trump-loving MAGA hat-wearing people in the great red state of Chicago, which was insane.
And he was convicted of fooling the police, wasting the police's time.
And he was just sentenced to five months behind bars.
I think it's part of his 30 months of probation, but he has to go to jail for five months, which, you know, a lot of people say, well, it should have been worse and all that.
But that's really bad.
It's bad to be sent to jail for five months.
The guy's an actor.
He didn't kill anybody.
He didn't do anything absolutely terrible.
But, you know, that's, but the judge just ripped into him.
Here's just a little bit of what the judge said.
Let me tell you, Mr. Smollett, I know that there is nothing that I will do here today that can come close to the damage you've already done to your own life.
You've turned your life upside down by your misconduct and shenanigans.
You've destroyed your life as you knew it.
And there's nothing that any sentencing judge could do to you that can compare to the damage you've already caused yourself.
So what's fascinating about this is every one of these fake hate crimes, because they said he attacked him for being gay and being black.
Well, every one of these fake hate crimes is a statement that everything we've been told about this country is a lie.
If there, if this country were really as systemically racist, as thoroughly racist, if it were, as the New York Times tells us, if it had racism in its DNA, you wouldn't have to make this stuff up, right?
There's so many frauds because there's not enough racism to go around.
This is one of, this may be the least racist country on earth.
And that's a lie that weakens us.
And all the people who are pushing it and are now trying to be tough, especially on the left, are now trying to talk tough about Putin.
They weakened this country by telling that lie.
They weakened the, uh, you know, the devotion that people feel toward the country, the willingness to stand up for its values, the willingness to compromise with people they disagree with to preserve its values.
And what's infuriating is this is Smollett's reaction.
Smollett starts yelling after the judge sentences him.
This is what he says.
Suicide.
I am innocent.
If I did this, then I stuck my fist in the fears of black Americans in this country for over 400 years and the fears of the LGBTQ community.
Your Honor, I respect you and I respect the jury, but I did not do this.
And I am not suicidal.
And if anything happens to me when I go in there, I did not do it to myself.
And you must all know that.
I respect you, Your Honor.
I respect your decision.
Jail time.
I am not suicidal.
And I am innocent.
I could have said that I was guilty a long time ago.
This is like, who is going to bother to kill him?
You know, he thinks he's going to kill him to silence him, to show that he, whatever he was saying, the, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You know, what is he, what is he talking about?
The self-aggrandizing?
Well, he's an actor, so we shouldn't be surprised that he's self-aggrandizing.
But, you know, it's, it's not only does he get caught pretending that this country is more racist than it is and trying to make himself the star of that show.
But he's now going to tell us that he's in some kind of danger.
I'm not suicidal.
Who cares?
Who cares about this guy?
You know, he's like an actor.
You know, it's sad because he actually is a talented guy.
But still, still, this is the, this is what we're dealing with.
People who are so immersed in this lie, so immersed in this lie that they act, he actually can't get out of it.
He probably believes now that he's innocent in some level.
And this is the thing.
This is the thing.
This, all of these lies, all of these lies weaken our country.
All of these lies make us a weak opponent to a guy like Vladimir Putin.
Transgenderism.
Excellent, excellent point.
I, I'm sympathetic to individuals who feel out of keeping with their body, whether they're, you know, they think they're too thin or too fat, or they think they're the wrong sex in some way.
You know, it's not that I hate people like that.
I really reject the left's dichotomy that if I don't accept their philosophy, I'm hateful, that if I don't say that they are actually women when they put on a dress and a string of pearls, that I'm somehow hateful toward them.
That's, that's absurd.
That is absurd.
However, transgenderism can also be an induced psychosis, especially among children and especially among young girls, because young girls are very, very impressionable, more than young boys, or at least in different ways than young boys.
And, you know, when you lie about these things, you damage the country because you are basically insisting that we all join the lie with you.
The New York Times ran a piece, unbelievable.
Who shall be allowed to transition?
This, this butchering of children, this butchering of children is an atrocity.
And so when people say, oh, well, at least Putin isn't doing that, you know, it doesn't change Putin from being evil.
It doesn't change him from being the dictator that he is.
It doesn't change him from being the dangerous felon that he is on the world stage, but it does kind of give these people some kind of credence.
So here's this New York Times piece.
Gender affirming health care, which is their word for gender denying procedures.
Gender affirming health care saves lives.
It's clear.
A 2018 literature review by Cornell University conducted, concluded that 93% of studies found that transition improved transgender people's health outcomes, while the remaining 7% found mixed or null results.
Not a single study in the review concluded negative impact.
That's just a, you know, that Cornell University, Nathaniel Blake of the Federalist answers, he says like this, this seems dispositive, but I took a closer look at the studies and found a methodological mess.
Many of the studies had serious flaws beginning with small sample sizes.
Of the 50 relevant papers identified by the project, only five studies, 10% had more than 300 subjects, while 26 studies had fewer than 100.
17 studies had 50 or fewer subjects.
And of course, the place that put out the study was an LGB, was run by an LGBT scholar who cited it in his own New York Times piece on transgenderism a few years ago.
It was, it was a lie.
What the guy was writing was absolutely ridiculous.
So now in Florida, they want to pass a bill and the bill, they have passed a bill that says classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade three or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.
And basically he's, it goes on to say that they have to encourage children who are troubled to talk to their parents.
Now, let me be absolutely clear about this.
There is no reason on this earth for you to talk to a child who is not yours about his sexuality when he is in third grade or she is in third grade.
There's absolutely no reason.
If you're doing that, you're a creep that you should, that's another thing you should know about yourself.
If you were talking to a child about their sexuality when they're in third grade and you are not their parent and you have not consulted with their parent, you are a creep.
So the left with their incredible talent with language, they do have a real talent for this.
They call it the don't say gay bill, right?
And then the reporters echo that.
So here's DeSantis in conflict with a reporter who calls it the don't say gay bill is cut 17.
Does it say that in the bill?
Does it say that in the bill?
I'm asking you to tell me what's in the bill because you are pushing false narratives.
It doesn't matter what critics say.
For who?
For grades pre-K through three, six-year-olds, seven-year-olds.
And the idea that you wouldn't be honest about that and tell people what it actually says, it's why people don't trust people like you because you peddle false narratives.
And so we disabuse you of those narratives.
And we're going to make sure that parents are able to send their kid to kindergarten without having some of this stuff injected into their school curriculum.
You know, and what I'm saying about this is obviously we all know this.
How long have we been talking about narrative and how long have we been talking about our corrupt press?
But it weakens the country.
It means when the same people come on and say Putin is evil, you know, people go like, oh yeah, well he's, I don't trust you.
You're the same guy who told me that this is a don't say gay bill.
It completely weakens the country.
Just tell the story.
Just tell the truth.
It is so important.
This is the thing that if we come out of this COVID thing with nothing else, with nothing else, it should be to elect people who tell the truth and to fire people who don't tell the truth.
And I'm not talking about political lies.
I understand politicians lie and they, you know, say things that they make them try and make themselves look better than they are.
I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about essential information.
When you have a guy like Tony Fauci, basically lying about where the pandemic came from, you know, that he should be gone.
He should be gone.
We have to do this, whether we're on the right or left.
The problem with the left is that their ideas have failed.
The Soviet Union fell because leftism failed.
Socialism fails everywhere they try it.
They have to lie.
They have to lie.
And they have to shut you up for telling the truth.
That weakens the country.
And voters on the left have got to understand this.
They have got to start to come back into the mainstream.
I'm not afraid of an argument between liberals and, uh, between conservatives and liberals.
I'm not afraid of that argument.
Sometimes I may even side with the liberals from time to time.
That's not what I'm afraid of.
What I'm afraid of is this empire of lies that is weakening us in the face of genuine evil out in the world.
It makes the West weak.
And I reject this idea that you're hateful if you reject it.
You know, I believe that the men and women's marriages, the father, mother and father, uh, come first.
I believe that's the center of human civilization.
I don't have to hate people who don't live that way.
I don't have to hate people who are troubled.
I don't have to hate people who are, uh, think they're in the wrong body.
I'm just not going to lie about their situation.
I don't care how many social media platforms they knock me off.
I'm not going to do it.
And social media platforms should not be doing it because that also makes the country weaker.
Right.
You know, it's, it's really interesting to me that I get these letters from women who say, I took your advice and now I'm happier.
And then I pick up the New York Times almost every day.
And there's an editorial, an op-ed in there by a woman who says, I'm living a terrible life and it's your fault.
My life sucks.
And it's because you don't accept me as I am.
You know, it's like, maybe you should be listening to my show.
Maybe you should, maybe it's your fault.
Your life sucks.
Maybe it's because you listened to the New York Times.
Listen, we need good values here and all this stuff.
And we need to fight this fight here.
But in fighting that fight, we cannot give up on this idea of freedom.
And the reason we can't give up on this idea of freedom is because there's nothing else.
We can't give up on this idea of morality because if we do, we will find ourselves in bed with guys like Putin.
I'm really upset about the right in this case.
I'm really upset about conservatives basically covering up for this guy and saying, oh, you know, this kind of appeal of the strong man.
I don't want any strong men.
I want like little guys, executives.
I want executives running my country.
Every now and again, maybe God throws up a judge, you know, like an Abraham Lincoln or George Washington.
But mostly I just want executives managing the country and making sure that individuals can remain free and do the things that we've done.
The left has undermined our country at every turn with their lies.
And it is those lies.
It is those lies that gives Putin strength on the world stage and in the media with those people who have been alienated, who have been alienated from the simple truth by all of the empire, the avalanche of lies.
I know a lot of people have been hiding away from the world these last couple of years, but if you're a Daily Wire subscriber, you're ready to get out, right?
Since 1998, Priceline has been the best way for travelers to book the trip they want at the price they can afford.
Priceline saves consumers more than $1 billion every year so that their customers never have to miss the moments that matter.
With Priceline, you can save up to 60% on your favorite hotels, and you can also get exclusive deals on rental cars and flights.
And when you save more, you can do more.
More walks on the beach, more talking to strangers, more fun in the sun.
No matter where you travel, still less being in the office.
There are a few good things that feel as good as knowing you save money.
With the discounts Priceline offers, you get that feeling a lot because when you save more, you can enjoy more and do more.
At Priceline, every trip is a big deal.
So when you're ready to book your next one, visit Priceline.com for the best deals that will help you get more out of your money.
I want to return for a minute to this idea of abandoning the idea of freedom, this attraction to authoritarianism.
Obviously, on the left, the left is completely authoritarian at this point.
They really want to get rid of the democratic process and just have the rule by climate enthusiasts.
But it's happening on the right, too.
And I'm told a lot of times by younger people that, you know, we hate you boomers, they say to me.
And they're talking to the wrong guy because I hate the boomers, too.
I just wish they would all die without taking me with them.
But, you know, they say you guys grew up in an America that worked, that was still America, but we didn't.
And so we're so tired of your talking about the Constitution and of the values of liberty.
You know, we're looking for something new.
We want to do something new.
And you've got guys like, you know, Patrick Dineen and Yoram Hazoni, who were basically saying that the idea was flawed to begin with.
The idea of liberalism was flawed to begin with because it allows people to do whatever they want.
And people are evil and broken and sinful.
And they're going to, the whole idea of liberalism was always going to lead us to societal decay.
And my answer to that is this.
Everything decays.
Everything decays.
And everything decays according to its own logic, right?
Each form of government eventually collapses.
You know, they've been writing about this since ancient Greece, the cycle of regimes.
The Phase We're At Now00:10:19
And one of the things that happens in a free country is that it becomes chaotic and ultimately people start yearning for a strongman.
And that's the phase we're at now.
That doesn't mean it won't pass.
It doesn't mean we won't have another, you know, a rebirth of freedom.
We had it with Reagan.
We could have it again.
I hope we have it again.
But meanwhile, we have to start thinking about, you know, who we are and what we support and what we really want and what we think that would really look like.
Because it's not a lot of fun to be told what you can think and what you can say.
It's not a lot of fun.
You always kind of in your dreams, you always think that you're going to be one of the powerful people.
You're not.
You know, and even in one of the things about authoritarian regimes is that even the powerful people aren't that powerful because if they go against the party line, they get thrown out.
You know, there was a Quinnipiac poll that asked Americans what we would do in Ukraine's situation because we're watching these people fight for their country.
You know, I saw a video yesterday of guys dismantling a bomb, an unexploded bomb, you know, a UXB.
They're dismantling it with their hands while the guy is pouring water on the fuse so it doesn't go off.
I mean, I'm sorry, but that takes a lot of courage.
That's incredible courage.
They're fighting these tanks, these Russian tanks on the ground.
And so they asked Americans, what would you do?
And most Democrats, most Democrats said they would leave, rather leave America than defend it.
60% of the Democrats said they would leave America.
They would basically go off to Poland like many of the Ukrainians rather than stay and defend it.
And this is not women and children who have an argument that women and children should get out of the country.
This is men saying this as well as 40% said they would stick around.
60% say they would go.
Republicans did better.
68% said they would stand their ground.
And so, you know, when I see the way that Biden is operating, I think he's actually representing the public to some degree.
He's been incredibly, incredibly weak.
I mean, we had this thing with these Polish planes, the Polish, the Poland poles were going to send.
Now remember, the poles were right on the border of Ukraine.
You have to remember that.
It's not like we're safe here.
You know, we're sitting around to saying, yeah, they should do this.
They should do that.
No, they're right on the border of Ukraine.
They know they're under threat from Putin.
They said, we're going to send them some MiG fighters so they can fight the Russian air force.
Apparently, the Ukrainian air force is still intact.
They still have their own planes, but they wanted these MiGs and the poles were going to send them over.
And then the pole said, you know, we're right on the border here.
What we're going to do is we're going to send them to Germany and then to an American base in Germany.
And then the Americans can send them over.
And the Americans suddenly said, no, we can't do that because then we might be risking an escalation toward nuclear war.
And, you know, this is stuff during World War II, before America got into the war, we had these neutrality acts that Congress had passed and we weren't allowed to sell weapons to warring countries.
And so Roosevelt sent fighter planes up to the Canadian border.
This is true.
It happened in 1940.
And the British snuck over the border with tractors and pulled the planes over the border and took the planes.
And that was how he got around the neutrality act.
You have to start to do these things.
Biden is not doing them.
He's pretending that he's being tough.
He's not being tough.
His sanctions aren't tough enough.
He is he is still provided loopholes where banks can do business with Putin's energy sector, which is what's funding his war machine.
You know, he's not he is not doing enough.
The sanctions are still weak.
And I understand being I think we should be wary of escalating.
I don't think we should have a no fly zone.
I don't think we should go in there and get into hot fights with Putin.
But I do think we have to do what we're doing, which is more of what we're doing, which is isolating him, making his economy bad.
I know it hurts innocent people, but this is war and that's going to happen.
And I don't say that lightly.
I understand that.
But when you see maternity hospitals being shelled, you know, you have to act, you have to do stuff.
And, you know, these guys, this thing with the oil, the fuel, we have to talk about this for a minute.
Here's another clip.
This is a different one.
Cut three.
We're already seeing climate refugees around the world.
If you think migration has been a problem in Europe from the Syrian war, or even from what we see now, where do you see 100 million people for whom the entire food production capacity has collapsed?
So if you think, if you think this is bad, oh my gosh, we really have to pay attention to the climate.
You know, Stephen Koonin was on the show and he wrote, he's written op-eds for the Wall Street Journal as well as his book about this.
He was in the Obama administration.
He's not a conservative.
He's not a climate denier, as they say, that foul phrase is another phrase they use to shut people up.
He believes that there's been warming.
Here's how he summarizes the actual reports.
Because one of the things that happens is the UN puts out reports and then people summarize the reports and the press reads the summaries and the summaries do not say what is in the report.
So here's Stephen Koonin summarizing, I'm getting this from Claremont Review of Books.
Here's Koonin summarizing the reports.
He says, the earth is warm during the past century, partly because of natural phenomena.
Unfortunately, our limited observations and understanding are insufficient to usefully quantify either how the climate will respond to human influences or how it varies naturally.
However, even as human influences have increased almost five-fold since 1950 and the globe has warmed modestly, most severe weather phenomena remain within past, still within the past parameters.
Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.
In other words, we don't know.
We don't know what's happening.
We do not know.
This is from the science.
This is not just this guy's opinion.
This is him distilling the reports that the UN is putting out and that the summaries are lying to the press about and then the press is getting hysterical about.
This means, right, that we are being governed by little girls.
We're being governed by AOC and Greta Thunberg instead of men who say, you know what, the climate is bad, but we still have to have oil.
We still have to have energy.
We still have to cut off Russian energy.
You know, another liberal, author Michael Schellenberger, he's also a progressive, or he was.
He's been kind of red-pilled.
But he said, people think Europe depends on Russia for energy because it lacks its own.
But 15 years ago, Europe exported more natural gas than Russia does today.
Now, Russia exports three times more gas than Europe produces.
Why?
Because climate activists, partly funded by Russia, blocked fracking.
In 2014, NATO Secretary General revealed Russia was funding climate activists, saying Russia engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organizations working against shale gas to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas.
That, I mean, do you understand this now?
Like, that Russia is actually supporting people like Greta Thunberg, organizations that basically have convinced Europe and the United States that we all have to panic, we all have to go to renewables, which at this point, seriously, is absurd.
We don't have the renewables.
It's great to study how to get cleaner energy.
I'm all for it.
It's great to study how we can have renewable energy.
I'm all for it.
But meanwhile, you cannot just stand there and blow and hope it's going to turn a fan somewhere that's going to produce enough energy to power the modern world.
These are the things that weaken us, and it's accepting the lies that are being sold to us by our enemies and being propagated by little girls, hysterical little girls, some of whom are grown men, and then buying into that and setting a policy by that.
And then you make our country weak, and you make it so we look, people look at Putin and think, I'd rather have that.
They look at China and think, well, at least China is efficient, right?
And then you have Biden, you know, everything that's happening now, the incredible, I think inflation is now at a 40-year high.
And so every communication Biden puts out has hashtag Putin's inflation.
It's Putin's fault that gas is $122 a gallon.
Yeah, this invasion is making gas go up, but food has been going up, and it's been going up for months.
It's been going up since they started, and they're still telling us it's going to go away.
And then you have our culture, which is the thing that always bugs me most.
You have Stephen Colbert saying something like this.
This cuts seven.
Since the invasion, oil prices have skyrocketed.
Today, the average gas price in America hit an all-time record high of over $4 per gallon.
Okay, that stings, but a clean conscience is worth a buck or two.
I'm willing to pay.
It's important.
It's important.
I'm willing to pay $4 a gallon.
Hell, I'll pay $15 a gallon because I drive a Tesla.
So, geez, Louise, you know, I would like to respond in a calm manner like, up yours, you supercilious piece of garbage.
You know, when people talk about income inequality, which is a problem in this country, it actually is a problem when income inequality becomes too great.
It inspires socialists to give socialists, you know, cover for their crappy ideas and their lack of attacks on freedom.
But when you talk about income inequality, you usually think about the plight of the people on the bottom.
Okay, but nobody goes to hell for being poor.
In fact, it may be the opposite, right?
But you do go to hell for becoming a super silly idiot who no longer cares about the people who can't afford a freaking Tesla.
You know, you're sitting there in your Hollywood studio making millions of dollars a year and telling people, oh, a clean conscious is worth at least $15 a gallon when another guy is out there driving his truck, which is his mode of making a living, of feeding his children, of putting food in his mouth, and he can't afford that gas.
And that, that is at the heart of our weakness.
At the heart of our weakness is people who have become so rich, so powerful, so isolated that they no longer think of the individuals and their freedom and they no longer think of individuals and their dignity.
They think of their theories and they want to impose those theories on that kind of mass of ants crawling around down there below them.
Stephen Colbert is in danger of his very soul.
And I say this as somebody who doesn't get a vote on his very soul.
But when you talk like that, when you say, oh, I want a clean conscience and it costs me $15 a gallon.
I drive a Tesla.
I'm in Hollywood.
Hollywood's Isolated Vision00:18:00
What do I care what's happening to you?
You know, that, that is a serious problem in this country.
It is the problem of a leadership that is completely isolated from the rest of us.
And it's completely isolated from people, you know, who just want to do what they want to do.
They want to say what they want to say.
And the guys, and guys who are thinking, well, I run this social media platform so I can tell you to be quiet.
I can shut up your opinion.
I can, I can shut you off.
I can shut you up.
I can shut you off.
I can condemn you.
I can get rid of your job.
I can take you off that television show.
I can take you out of your, your job of work because you said something I don't like.
I can do all these things to you.
We have lost the plot of what we're supposed to be doing here, which is supposed to be elevating individuals in freedom.
When we do that, when we face a Putin doing that, there'll be no weakness.
When we face a Putin doing that, not lying and telling the truth about the world as it is and what America is all about, guys like Putin will fall before us like dominoes.
Until we do it, we're giving them strength.
We're giving, we're strengthening evil by being weak.
We are not evil yet, but we are strengthening evil by being weak.
And we are weak because we are lying.
I love the Ring video doorbell.
When people come to the door, no matter where you are, you can see them and talk to them on your phone.
But you may not know that Ring makes an alarm.
Ring makes an alarm that is an award-winning home security system with available professional monitoring.
Best of all, you can easily install it yourself.
All their stuff is really easy to install.
Get all of the sensors for motion doors and windows that will work on any house or apartment.
You'll get notified right on your phone whenever anything is detected.
With Ring alarm, you and your loved ones can rest easy knowing that Ring is helping to protect your home.
And it's more than just security.
You can add sensors that help protect your home from flood, freeze, and fire too.
And here's my favorite part.
Professional monitoring gives the ultimate peace of mind.
It's part of a Ring Protect subscription.
And there are no long-term commitments.
If anything happens, professional monitoring will call you and can request emergency services.
Ring has an award-winning alarm.
So go to ring.com forward slash Clavin to get a great deal on a Ring alarm home security kit today.
That's ring.com forward slash Clavin.
Anyone comes to your door and knows how to spell Clavin, set off the alarm.
So we're talking about Western weakness in the face of the evil of Vladimir Putin.
And I want to talk about this from a cultural point of view, which is a point of view that I find particularly painful.
But at the same time, just because a country is going into a period of decline does not mean it's finished.
That doesn't mean the culture has come to an end.
This is going to happen again and again.
Somebody once said there's a lot of ruin in a nation, meaning that you go into these troughs, but that doesn't mean you won't come out.
It's a dangerous period.
The great Christian existentialist, Soren Kierkegaard, if you've never read him, really excellent philosopher, very readable.
But he said the most common form of despair is not knowing you're in despair.
And one of the things that happens when culture is degraded is not only do people not know it, but they actually cheer it on.
They have reasons for believing that the thing they're doing is right and better than what came before.
And if you object, you're just an old person or an out-of-touch person being an old crank.
You're just not going with the times.
And so I want to look at that a little bit more.
I mean, a good example of this is the sculpture of the ancient world, the classical world.
Here's the Venus de Milo, one of the most beautiful nudes you've ever seen.
Just an absolute, absolutely gorgeous statue.
This is from 125 years before the birth of Christ.
A thousand years later, right, 1,100 years later, here is a virgin and child.
And you can just see that a lot of skill has gone out of it.
But also there is this reaction against nudity, against representing classical gods because they're not the real god.
And so they're idolatry.
And so there's a rejection of the classical world that allows the falling off of the arts to be cheered, basically, to be supported on philosophical grounds.
It's not until people start to rediscover the classical world that they start to imitate the classical world and the arts return.
And that's the Renaissance.
Renaissance means rebirth.
What was being reborn were the classical values and the skill that it took to basically create lifelike statues and the beautiful nudes that then came into being beautiful figures and faces.
Now, it's really important to understand.
This is not a question of talent, okay?
There's usually, there's going to be the same amount of talent at any given moment.
I mean, obviously, it's going to pool and it's going to thin out.
But basically, the same amount of talent is going to be there.
But it has to do with the culture that's being represented because the arts represent the inner life of a culture.
And if that culture, for some reason, has become pinched or primitive or small or degraded, then the arts will reflect that.
And people will use their talents for that end, thinking that they're doing the wrong thing.
You know, if I often talk about the fact, thinking that they're doing the right thing, sorry.
I often talk about the fact that Fred Astaire, if he were born today, when there's no such thing essentially as a movie musical, when it's not the height of the movie musical, Fred Astaire would be running a dancing school in upstate New York, you know.
He came along at a moment.
And this is really important that in these moments of transition, if the arts come back, they come back with a vengeance.
So you have, for instance, people like Shakespeare who come up after the tumult or in the midst of the tumult of the Reformation when a new world is coming into being because of the Reformation.
And you get this genius Shakespeare, if Shakespeare had been born a hundred years earlier, he would not have created the insanely brilliant body of work that he did.
You get actors like Marlon Brando who come along in the beginning of the sort of postmodern world and they revolutionize acting.
In my book, The Truth and Beauty, I talk about the romantic poets who came along at just such a hinge of history, this moment when there was revolution in the air, not just the American revolution, but then the French revolution, there was a revolution.
And these guys had to reinvent some of the ideas that had gone by the boards, including the idea of faith.
And that's why I turned to them in looking at how we can reinvent faith.
So I'm not talking about the talent.
I'm talking about whether the culture is producing an atmosphere that is degraded or whether it's in ascent or decline.
And right this minute in our culture, we don't know.
We know we're in decline, but we don't know whether we're about to turn things around.
And this is something I'm going to come back to.
I'm not going to come back to it next week because we have other things planned, but we're going to bring back Megan Basham for her cultural segment.
But I'm going to return to what, how we can rebuild this culture in order to not be degraded anymore.
You know, I'll give you another example though of how decline is cheered on.
I make fun of rock and roll music and I make fun of rap because I think rap is just garbage.
But, you know, you look at the lyrics of the great days of American music, which was the 30s, 40s, and 50s.
And you get these lyrics, these incredible, simple, straightforward lyrics that are yet very condensed and beautiful.
I just picked one out that I happen to like, a lyric called Autumn in New York.
You've probably heard this song by a guy named Vernon Duke written in 1934.
And he's describing, basically it's just a description of Autumn in New York.
And you have lines like glittering crowds and shimmering clouds in canyons of steel.
Very simple, very direct.
You have the great line, dreamers with empty hands sigh for exotic lands.
It's Autumn in New York.
And you can just see those people who've come to New York to have their dreams come true and they, and their dreams have not come true and they're thinking of someplace that they want to be in their mind.
Then you get a lyric, for instance, when you have this turnaround that rock and roll comes along and you have Lennon and McCartney, two extraordinarily talented men who write a lyric that goes like this.
You think you've lost your love.
Well, I saw her yesterday, yay.
If you she's thinking of and she told me what to say, yay.
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's degraded.
It is degraded from the skill that it took to write Autumn in New York to this.
And you say, well, the Beatles, the Beatles are great.
The Beatles are great, but they're representing a moment when things are turning around, I think, in a bad direction.
And, and when you say that, when you say, oh, you know, actually music lyrics were better in the 1940s, people think like, oh my gosh, this guy is so out of touch.
He's so old and all this stuff.
But no, it actually is what was happening to our culture.
It's not the question of the talent.
Now, one of the things that happens to arts when they start to decline is that they turn in on themselves and they become about themselves.
And often at the moment that that happens, just like with the Beatles, at the moment that happens, you have a fantastically talented artist who begins it.
And this is what happened with the Beatles.
You have, they're incredibly talented.
They did incredible work.
They wrote some very beautiful songs that even I like who hate rock and rolls, but they led into a time of decline when music got worse and worse and worse.
The same thing is true in the novel with James Joyce, who essentially writes Ulysses, which is a brilliant novel, but it's the beginning of novels that are about novels.
And ultimately what happens with that is they become abstract, they become obtuse.
They separate, a dying art form separates into two things.
One is the popular trash that people like, and the other is thoughtful, solipsistic, meaning self-referential art that intellectuals like.
An art, when it is lively, when it's vibrant, when it's at the top of its form, appeal, its best stuff appeals to the most people.
So that's why I always say the peak of the movie industry was 1939, when the greatest films that were being made were also the films being nominated for Oscars, were also the films that were beating up the box office, that were winning in the box office.
Now that some of the COVID restrictions are coming off, what you want to do is you want to go out and sit in your broken car and pretend to drive to the auto parts store where you can't get parts because they're not real.
And if you could, they wouldn't know any more about it than you do anyway.
That's not what you want to do.
What you want to do is you want to say rockauto.com.
Because first of all, it sounds so cool.
Women love it.
They'll just show up around, even around your broken car.
They'll come flocking around when you say rockauto.com because they'll know that you know that rockauto.com is the best place for you to go and get car parts right on your computer.
Go to rockauto.com to shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.
Their catalog is unique.
It's incredibly easy to navigate, but most importantly, the prices are terrific.
So go to rockauto.com right now and see all the parts available for your car or truck and write Clavin, Clavin.
Yeah, Clavin.
And how did you hear about us?
Box.
I sent you rockauto.com.
It's the coolest way to get parts for your car.
What happens to what's happened to movies is really indicative of this decline.
So you have movies now.
You started out with movies that were basically by people who had written plays.
So they were about life.
They were about the situation in the country.
They were remakes of other movies.
They're just people reacting to movies.
Now, all artists look to older artists for inspiration.
That is absolutely universal.
Nobody works.
Nobody creates a tradition on his own.
They always go back to traditions.
But when art becomes completely self-referential, it is on the verge of dying.
One of the backstage, backstage at backstage, you know, Candace Owens, love her to death, but I very rarely agree with anything she's saying politically.
But she shocked Ben by saying, I saw Star Wars, and it's not a very good movie.
Star Wars is not a very good movie.
It is a movie that was made as an imitation of other films.
You know, the famous crawl.
Do we have that crawl that begins it, you know, in a galaxy far, far away?
And it rolls up.
It's just an imitation of Flash Gordon, the silent serials that would be shown before other movies.
So you have, they openly were imitating these other movies as a kind of a joke, but people were so starved for heroism.
They were so starved for big budget entertainment to overcome television.
You can now see this is the Flash Gordon one.
This is from the old days, and this is what they were imitating, that people took it seriously.
And people wonder why none of the Star Wars films are any good anymore.
It's because the originals were really actually not that good.
You know, this whole generation of artists came along in the second, the second wave of great filmmakers, like in the 70s, you've got guys like Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Scorsese, a lot of them who were imitating other films.
Brian De Palma is a great example.
He made one great film, which was The Untouchables by David Mamet.
And the reason that's a great film is because it's by David Mamet, and the script is absolutely spectacular.
He made Scarface, which is a fun film.
But again, that's a remake or a takeoff of old gangster films.
Most of what he did was this very, very intense imitation of Hitchcock.
So if you see Obsession, here's a trailer of Obsession that, well, play the trailer.
That eerie sensation that you've seen a stranger before, everyone's experienced it.
Call it deja vu.
This man calls it terror.
Master filmmaker Brian De Palma now creates Obsession.
So if you hear that music and you know anything about Hitchcock, that's Bernard Herrmann.
He did most of Hitchcock's great films.
And the Obsession is essentially Vertigo.
It's the same film made over and over again.
And yet here you hear Quentin Tarantino, who is of the next generation and a guy who knows nothing except movies.
He doesn't know anything about life at all.
Very talented man, very talented man.
But his movies are all about movies.
They're all about movies.
Listen to him talk about why he liked Brian De Palma, a rank imitator of Alfred Hitchcock, who, in my opinion, never made a great film except The Untouchables, why he likes him better.
This is Tarantino talking about Brian De Palma.
Hitchcock really couldn't do what he, what left to his own devices, I think he would have wanted to do.
By the time he could do it in the late 60s and the early 70s, he was just a little too old.
But if he could have gone where he wanted to go in the early 60s and through the 50s, he would have been a different filmmaker.
Well, by that token, Brian De Palma was able to go where he wanted to go.
He was able to explore the, frankly, the artistic minutiae of the set pieces, of the violence.
The fact that, you know, Pauline Kael, amongst others, said that the X-rated version of Dressed to Kill was better than the R-rated version, even though it was only a couple of frames and a couple of seconds from the elevator scene in particular.
But those few seconds made all the difference in the world.
You didn't see him cut her up the middle.
Right, which you do in the X-rated version.
Which you do in the X-rated version.
And, well, that's an important stroke.
He's talking about the murder of somebody and you didn't see the grotesque violence that Brian De Palma used a lot of nudity when he started out.
And that, Tarantino thinks that's better because he thinks that's what Hitchcock is trying to say.
And that's the kind of thing that happens when you are just making movies about movies because you lose the human touch.
Everybody talks about the amazing shots and sequences in Vertigo.
But what people don't talk about, or sometimes they do, and people like me do, certainly, they don't talk about the humanity of it.
Here, Vertigo, of course, is about a man trying to transform a woman who looks like the lover who died.
He wants to transform her into that lover.
And here is just a moment between Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak as he tries to turn her into a dead woman that he loved.
Judy, I tell you this, these past few days have been the first happy days I've known in a year.
I know, I know, because, because I remind you of her, and not even that very much.
No, no, Judy, Judy, it's you too.
There's something in you that...
You don't even want to touch me.
Yes, yes, I do.
Couldn't you like me, just me the way I am?
When we first started out, it was so good.
We had fun.
And then you started in on the clothes.
Well, I'll wear the darn clothes if you want me to, if, if you'll just, just like me.
And that's a heartbreaking scene.
I mean, just like me.
Why can't you like me for who I am?
That's the thing that Hitchcock knew.
He used all this technique and all his genius to produce something that showed the twisted timbers of the human heart.
Tarantino, basically, in each one of his films is trying to save history from itself.
He's living in a kind of childlike imagination where he invents Jews who take revenge on Nazis, blacks who take revenge on slavers.
Challenges in Modern Education00:16:11
He's trying to rewrite history.
When he made it in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which is really his best film, I think, it's because he's making fun of himself.
He's making fun of that impulse, but still has never, ever achieved the humanity of that scene in Hitchcock, as most filmmakers, of course, never do.
I want to talk more about this in terms of Steven Spielberg, who I think is a really interesting character because nobody has more talent than he does, but nobody has made films that are as silly and stupid as he has, as well as the films that he has made that are actual classics.
And I will come back to that when we come back to this subject, the subject being cultural decline, how we don't see that it's a decline, how we cheer that decline on, and what are we going to do to turn that around?
What kind of new art are we going to invent now?
You know, they say that time is money, but time is life.
So don't waste time.
Don't waste money.
Don't waste your life with repeated trips to the post office.
With Stamps.com, you can skip the trip and focus on how to take your small business to the next level.
Stamps.com lets you print official postage right from your computer, saves you money in the process so you can spend less time at the post office and more time making your customers happy.
Whether you're an office sending invoices, a side hustle, Etsy shop, or a full-blown warehouse shipping out orders, Stamps.com will make your life easier.
All you need is a computer, a standard printer, no special supplies or equipment.
You're up and running in minutes printing official postage for any letter, any package, anywhere you want to send.
Stop overpaying for shipping with Stamps.com.
Sign up with promo code CLAVEN for a special offer that includes a four-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale.
No long-term commitments or contracts.
Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the page, and enter code CLAVEN.
And you may be wondering, how do I spell CLAVEN?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no E's in CLAVEN.
I just make it look this easy.
So that was the gay men's chorus singing, Your Children Are Not Your Children, which is actually a philosophical comment.
But there are those on the left who seriously believe this.
I think a lot of us remember Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC with this little diatribe.
We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we've always had kind of a private notion of children.
Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility.
We haven't had a very collective notion of these are our children.
So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.
Once it's everybody's responsibility and not just the households, then we start making better investments.
So we're seeing more of this play out in our schools.
And our own investigative reporter, the Daily Wire's investigative reporter, Luke Rosiak, has helped expose this.
He's the guy who broke the Loudoun County bathroom rape story that helped swing the Virginia gubernatorial election.
A lot of other stories that have been coming out.
He has now written a book called Race to the Bottom, Uncovering the Secret Forces, Destroying American Public Education.
The other day at a Fairfax County School board meeting where they were shouting at the board, the board was actually chased out of the room by people shouting that you're racist.
A woman was there, we have this clip, a woman was there basically handing out copies of Race to the Bottom by Luke Rosiak.
Do we have that clip?
Luke Rosiak, you are a troublemaking individual.
Thank you.
Thank you for coming on.
You're doing great work, buddy.
Really, you have elevated the entire site and it's really terrific.
Your book, Race to the Bottom, you know, on the ad for Race to the Bottom, the log line, it says, everyone wants high schoolers to graduate well-prepared for jobs, improve STEM literacy, greater achievement for inner city children, happiness for all children.
So why are liberals spending billions of dollars working against those goals?
Why are they working against those goals?
Well, it's really a couple different things.
You've got the true believers that are pushing the CRT to basically tear down anything that works just because it works.
And then from the ashes, they can take power.
It's really a virus that spreads in order simply to take control for the sake of it.
But the real question that interests me is why would the schools allow this kind of rhetoric in?
So what you saw in that clip, the reason those Asian parents are so mad is because the school board was actually against children being really good at math because there was too many Asians in the magnet school, Thomas Jefferson Science and Math School, which had the top test scores in the country.
What is going on when teachers and educators are against children being high performing?
And so the issue is basically I argue in this book that CRT is used, is just the latest technique used by teachers to conceal test scores and take the focus off of things that are objective.
Because when you look at the objective data, they are failing our kids.
We spend $17,000 a year per student.
We've got 36% literacy rate.
And so if they can get rid of standardized testing, which is what they did in the magnet school, there's no entrance exam anymore.
Suddenly we can't really evaluate the job performance.
So I think some of this racial stuff is really just a cynical ploy by administrators for their own selfish reasons.
So it almost sounds like there's a kind of a league.
On one hand, you have teachers who are not doing their job and can cover it up by getting rid of these tests.
But on the other hand, clearly you have a group of people who believe that just having tests is somehow bad because it's unequal.
I mean, you know, the Asian kid might do better at math than the black kid, not necessarily for racial reasons, but simply because of the difference in their home lives or the difference in their culture.
I mean, are these people knowingly working together?
Is this just a conspiracy of interest?
I think it's a transactional alliance.
They don't actually necessarily agree on everything.
They just agree on tearing down the status quo.
And that's what you really see when you look into all the acronyms that you hear in the education world.
I spent two years writing this book.
I know what all the acronyms mean, the SEL and the CSRE and all this stuff that they use to confuse parents and kind of keep them out because this is our turf and we've got education degrees.
Basically, all that stuff is just trying to move things from the subjective away from the objective measures to the subjective.
And so basically, they're willing to inflict sexual, emotional, and physical harm on children to get their way.
I mean, you've got the teachers unions shutting down schools for two years.
There's children committing suicide.
There's children who are going to be illiterate for, you know, basically, if you want to help kids, if you want to help minorities and poor kids, what's the best way to get rid of those unequal stats?
It's just to help kids learn, give them the skills they need to have high paid jobs like math.
And so it's hard to believe they actually want to reduce racial inequality when keeping minority kids from learning math at a rigorous level is kind of the surest way to propagate it.
Where does the money come from for this?
When you say they're spending billions, where do those billions of dollars come from?
It's really the philanthropic foundations.
You know, to answer the question, who is behind CRT?
One of the interesting ways to explain or answer that question is it's the Gates Foundation, it's the Carnegie Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
And so if you remember about 10 years ago with Common Core, it was kind of widely acknowledged that the Gates Foundation architected this whole thing.
You have to be pretty powerful to influence a $1 trillion industry like K-12, which is run by 13,000 different school districts.
And there's very few people powerful enough to do it.
These billion dollar foundations are pretty much the only people that can.
The Gates, the Kellogg Foundation in particular, and the Ford Foundation are super, super radical and obsessed with race.
And there's a really creepy story here, because going back 100 years, the foundations have always been obsessed with race.
They were behind eugenics in the early 1910s.
Around 1940, the Ford Foundation was running a massive warehouse on Long Island, keeping track of every family's genetics, so they could see which kind of genes America would be better off not having.
You know, and more recently, the foundations have focused on basically getting rid of minorities by aborting them.
And so now when you have these foundations pushing ideas like showing up on time and working hard are attributes of a white culture, you know, they position themselves now as very left-leaning social justice foundations, but that's a profoundly racist idea.
And it's actually very much in keeping with what they've been pushing for the last 100 years.
Why is it that, you know, we now see, in part because of your reporting, Luke, we now see the parents stepping up and turning up in these, at these school board meetings and protesting.
Where, where are the teachers?
Why haven't any teachers, I mean, surely not all teachers are crazy people.
I mean, why haven't any of the teachers objected to this?
You know, they've been, um, remarkably quiet and they say there's ways that, you know, they can make it, the activists will make it very uncomfortable for them in these schools.
But I'm kind of, I know that's true, but if the activists were such a tiny minority, I think that would be hard to actually happen.
So I think, uh, we have to give, we have to hold teachers to account here.
Um, and the truth of the matter is if you look at, um, teachers are not particularly well qualified.
They enter college with the lowest SATs of any major, lower than gender studies.
I think the guys that go to college to study like gym class actually have higher SATs than teachers.
And yet they graduate college with the highest GPAs.
So essentially anyone can become a teacher.
You can get straight A's in education school just by, you know, having a, having a pulse.
Um, and so I don't think we have to just like honor teachers as these on quick, you know, experts who, who we can't question.
The truth is these are people that have, um, presided over the state of our public schools that have really maintained whatever racial inequalities there are for decades.
And so I think teachers and a, and a large number of teachers to tell the truth do bear some responsibility here.
You know, this is, this seems to me a part of the story that doesn't get told.
I mean, uh, you know, you and, uh, Chris Ruffo have done a lot of great work exposing the kind of bizarre racial theories that these guys put forward, but not enough people talk about the fact that our children really don't do very well in school and our teachers aren't really very qualified.
Uh, that seems to be something that, that people don't, don't actually know.
I mean, our, our literary, our literacy rates in the world are high in the, in the sense that most Americans can read, but are, are, is our, is American reading, um, capability?
Is it lower than it is elsewhere?
Um, so most American youth essentially can't read.
We have 36% proficiency in reading among 12th graders.
We have 11% proficiency in, in history among 12th graders, um, 24% proficiency in math.
Uh, and so, you know, these are 12th graders.
There are sometimes adults, they're going to be voting the next year.
They're going to be, um, we're holding jobs ideally.
Um, and yet America is 30th out of 36 developed nations in math.
So other countries are doing this better than us.
Um, but the mentality that they've taken has basically been, it's equivalent to, if you have a fever and you go to the doctor and he takes your temperature and he looks at the thermometer and you've got a 104 temperature and he just breaks the thermometer in half and says, well, now you're cured.
That's pretty much what, that's pretty much what the educators do.
They just say, well, let's stop measuring.
And what happens is when you, uh, hide a problem, it gets worse.
And so, um, you know, I think it's really important that people read this book because it situates all of what we've been seeing for the last two years in the broader context that CRT and the school closures are symptoms of these underlying problems that you can see in a very dramatic fashion over the last two decades where these schools are just vehicles to be used for a variety of special interests, whether it's teachers and administrators or ideological activists, and they're willing to really harm children to get their way.
So I think, um, academics, your question is exactly right.
This is all about academics.
It's about the school's failure to actually do their only job.
And when they want to talk about race all the time, it's just a way to keep you from realizing that, uh, these people are the people who have managed to, uh, get a 36% literacy rate, which is, um, you know, pathetic.
And it really, it's a, that's a national scandal.
I mean, I didn't, I didn't actually realize that the numbers were that bad.
That is a genuine scandal.
The book is Race to the Bottom by Luke, uh, Rosiak.
You know, we, it's in the news right now because of Florida, uh, this bill, uh, to stop teachers from, uh, basically grooming children for sexual dysfunction, uh, at least through the third grade.
Uh, you know, I can't see any excuse to talk to somebody else's child about sexuality.
I mean, I would, that's not something I would ever do.
I would expect to be arrested if I did that.
You know, it's just not none of your business.
Um, is this, is this a, is this also to, to cover up school dysfunction or is there something really sick going on?
I mean, if this were happening in a Catholic church, people would be up in arms.
People would be going insane.
If, if Catholic priests were saying to children, you know, you may not actually be a girl, you might be a boy.
Everybody would see what it is when teachers do it.
Uh, somehow the left thinks they can, it's defensible.
It seems to me something genuinely wicked is going on or am I missing something here?
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I don't see how this is covering up, you know, academic lack of academic learning.
I think it's, um, basically the, um, it is the desperate reaction of an industry that is finally getting the scrutiny that it's deserved for decades.
And so for the longest time, they just were able to tell a few easy lies like schools are underfunded and parents would just accept it.
Now that parents are showing up to school board meetings, they are flipping out because informed parents would not accept the status quo when it comes to education in America.
So they're just saying almost viscerally, like, get out parents.
These are our children, not yours.
We are literally going to take it to such an extreme that we're going to talk about gay sex to kindergartners and there's nothing you can do about it.
Um, I know, I think it, what exposes here is this is not actually Democrat versus Republican education is so personal that it can really alter the traditional partisan alignment.
We saw that in Virginia with democratic voters moving over to the right.
We see it with Asian parents waking up because of the assault on merit.
Um, you know, you're going to see it with Hispanics who are religious and they don't like this sexual stuff.
But I would also say that traditional democratic voters who are white middle-class people, they don't actually want kids talking about sex.
Education's Personal Battle00:04:33
It's absurd.
It's a, it's a total, it exposes that, um, basically the education industry is, it's not democratic.
It's controlled by a particular strain of radical ideologues who don't actually even represent, um, the base of their party.
You know, uh, one of the things that, uh, Ben Shapiro says, it's very funny as he says, only, uh, you know, a genius like Joe Biden and the Democrat party would make an enemy out of parents because there's an awful lot of them.
It's not a good, it's not a good, uh, political look.
What parents have obviously not been paying attention or these people would not be on school boards to begin with.
Uh, now that they're paying attention, do you think that that's going to change?
Do you think that these school boards, you know, we saw that in San Francisco where three, uh, woke board members and after all, San Francisco, not the most conservative place in the country, three woke school board members were chased off the board.
We were called, do you think we're going to see more of that?
Or do you think that somehow the, the unions and the school boards are going to be able to, uh, hunker down and resist this wave?
I think what we're seeing is a transformative sort of upheaval in American politics.
That's going to last for decades.
Um, you know, it's going to be hard because the other side is essentially paid to work in these schools and they have their whole language that they've created this alphabet soup of different acronyms and jargon.
And they use that to keep parents away, but parents are mad.
Um, you know, what parents need to do is keep showing up to these school board meetings with courage and confidence.
And you get the courage because, you know, if you don't get involved, bad people are filling that vacuum and you get the confidence by being informed.
You can do that by reading my book and understanding these acronyms.
So when they talk at you, you can explain to them, you can understand why you're being lied to and just shove it down their throat.
Um, you can get informed by doing your research on these school board members because a lot of people just vote for them based on party without even knowing who these people are.
Um, but the school board races are so important.
I started this book back in 2019 before coronavirus, before CRT really became a big thing.
When I realized that out of the 10 Democrats on my local county school board, none of them had kids in the school system.
And when I learned that I was just blown away.
I said, something is going on here.
And so what I do in this book is what we did in Loudoun with the Daily Wire.
Um, I want people to understand that was just a case study.
Those same dynamics are present everywhere.
Even if you're in Wichita or Des Moines or, uh, you know, wherever.
Um, and so I do 61 case studies with different school districts across the country.
So you can identify those dynamics.
Um, but I do think that if parents are committed and motivated and informed and they don't give up, absolutely.
We can take back these schools because this isn't Democrat versus Republican.
It's about 1% of the population that is basically employed by these schools or has some other vested interest in it versus parents and children.
And that, that's, I mean, it's a very hopeful idea.
Do you think that the homeschooling movement and private schools, I mean, I always joke that I have, I actually wrote a movie that is perennially on the list of the worst movies ever made, but it put my kid through private school.
So I didn't have problems like this.
Uh, I wonder, uh, is homeschooling and private school, I know it's expensive, but is that, uh, an option for parents?
I think it's honestly, it's worth doing though.
The problems in the schools are so severe.
I think we need to take back those school boards.
Even if your kids are not in public schools, you are a voter, you are a taxpayer.
You have every right to those school systems to be voting in those elections.
Um, but you can do both.
If you can get your kids out, that's going to put some fiscal pain on these school districts and maybe it'll make them reform in the longterm, but it's a real uphill battle because even if you get a conservative school board or a sane school board, there's essentially this deep state, the superintendents and all the people that work in the schools.
So they, yeah, that's kind of my advice is get your kids out, do the homeschooling, do the pods if you can, um, private school, whatever you can do, even if you have to get a second job to pay for it, it'll be worth it.
But you know what Republicans, they made a big mistake for decades by just talking about school choices as if it absolved them from having to care about the public schools at all.
And I think that really was a tremendous error because it allowed the Democrats to not only the Democrats, but the, this fringe ideology to completely colonize them.
And even if your kids go to private school, they're going to have to live in a country that's populated largely by public school graduates.
Great.
Luke Grosiak, the author of Race to the Bottom.
Luke, you're doing a great job.
Thanks for coming on.
We'll talk again.
Understanding Biblical Relationships00:10:42
Thank you, Andrew.
All right.
We are winding our way into the Klaven-less week and just what a disaster that's going to be.
But before we get there, this is the reason to cling to these next moments with everything you have, these last moments of Klaven-y goodness that will take you through it, but not only will take you into that abyss that you're headed for, but also will solve all your problems before you get there because it's time now for the mailbag.
I am not suicidal!
Yeah!
You got to admit, maybe we should just pay Jussie Smollett for the entertainment.
All right, from Brandon.
And here, this is an interesting letter because I get this letter a lot, a letter just like it a lot.
It says, I'm Mr. Klaven, knower of all correct answers, good or bad they may be.
I am a 20-year-old male who's never been in a relationship, and I'd like your advice.
I've never been very sociable and therefore have had a lot of time to myself to think about what I want out of life.
I know that I want to get married and start a family, but I don't know where to begin.
Should I actively seek out a partner or should I keep living and hope the right one crosses my path?
I can feel a hole in my heart when I think that I might never find someone to share my life with.
It makes it difficult to find a reason to keep working when I feel that I'm only surviving, that I won't truly be living until I find someone.
I don't have any serious career ambitions, only that I'm able to provide for my wife and family.
You know, the problem I have with all these letters that I get that are in this genre, if you will, is that they seem to expect a woman to come along.
I guess it's from women sometimes, but it's more from men.
They seem to expect a woman to come along who will give them their life.
And really, a man specifically needs to have a life.
And that is what he brings in some ways to the relationship.
When you say you don't have any serious career ambitions, my question is why?
Were you given no nothing?
Is there nothing that you love, nothing that you want to commit yourself to?
Is there nothing that you can do?
Have you no talent?
And when I say talent, it doesn't have to be artistic talent.
I mean, just an ability.
Is there nothing that interests you in the world?
Is there no subject that interests you or even just being outdoors or, you know, or doing things that give you exercise or whatever?
Who are you?
Who are you?
And what is there for a woman to love?
You know, and a lot of times, one of the things that defines a marriage and a relationship is the husband's work because most men are very in, express themselves through work.
I think men express themselves through work more than women do.
And when I say work, I mean financial, you know, the thing that you do that makes you money.
And, and so my question is really one step back from where this woman is going to come from.
I have no problem with looking for a girl.
I have no problem with using computers to do that.
I have no problem with going to church or socials or whatever, whatever system you find that will help you meet a woman, but who is she going to meet?
And that seems to me, that seems to me to be in a lot of these letters.
And certainly in this, when you say you don't have any serious career ambitions, I just question that.
I question why there's not, why is there nothing that you're interested in besides finding somebody to love you?
You know, we all want to find somebody to love us, but also there has to be somebody there for them to love.
And so what I would do is I'd start to think about that first.
And I would start to find out who I am, what I want to do, who I want to be.
And when you find that person, when you are interested in life and when you're interested in what you're doing and what your hands are doing and what you create, then you're going to be appealing to somebody who wants a man in her life.
From Philip, hopefully I've survived the Clavenless week and can hear your response to this.
I was raised as a Christian and believe since I was a child, still some things in the Bible don't mesh so well or make sense to me.
Until my uncle showed me Les Feldick, a rancher, lay preacher.
Les, if you don't know, is a dispensationalist teaching everything in the Bible needs to be looked at in regards of who's saying what to whom.
Somehow this clicked more than the 40 plus years of lessons seminary taught preachers preach.
I would love to get your thoughts on dispensation and whether you think the Bible should be viewed through the lens of dispensation.
Thank you for what you do.
I recently joined the Daily Wire after listening, years of listening for free.
Keep doing what you do.
Well, thank you and welcome.
We need your support.
You know, I have, first of all, this is a good reason why you should pre-order The Truth and Beauty because it is about the way that I read the Bible.
Dispensationalism is a little bit programmatic for me.
It's basically the idea that there are different dispensations, that God is speaking differently to people at different times.
Now, I believe some version of that.
I do believe that the Bible is written by people.
I believe that it is inspired by God and it is also the book that God wants us to have about himself, but it's written by people.
And that means that at each stage, you have people who are understanding the world differently and understanding what God is doing differently.
God doesn't necessarily change what people can accept from God changes.
And Jesus says this.
He says, you know, Moses taught you that because of the hardness of your heart, but now I'm going to teach you not to get divorced.
You know, Moses gave you a way to get divorced because of the hardness of your heart.
So now I'm giving you something new because now you have had time to learn the law and it has changed you into people who can understand what I'm going to say.
And so I do believe that.
And I certainly believe that each person in the Bible has a different amount of authority.
I bristle a little bit when I hear people say, well, you know, God said this, and then they quote St. Paul.
Well, God is not, St. Paul is not God.
And the reason we know that is because God actually appears in the Bible and actually says things.
Oftentimes they're written in red, so you can pick them right out.
So I think that the thing that I don't believe about the Bible is I don't believe it's magic.
I don't believe that, you know, I believe, for instance, that the four gospels are seen from different points of view and different points of view are going to be different.
People see different things.
People get things wrong.
People see things that don't necessarily jive, but it wouldn't be real if they didn't do that.
That wouldn't be the real thing.
So I don't really worry.
One of the things that happens to me is I don't really worry if there is a line that seems in conflict with another line.
I would think that anything where different people are reporting on something is going to have conflicts in it.
What I do believe, though, what I do believe is that the things that Jesus said mean something.
And that's what the truth of beauty is about, is finding out why some of the things that Jesus said are mysterious and why they don't seem to make sense and why sometimes we say things like, well, you should turn the other cheek.
But do we believe it?
We say, yes, love your enemy.
Jesus said, love your enemy.
Do we believe that we should love your enemy?
And when I say love, love is not like burning a guy at the stake because it'll get him to heaven.
You know, that's not love.
It's like, you know, when I say love, it means actually supporting that person and being who he is.
Do we love our enemy?
Do we think we should love our enemies?
And that's why I think it's important to turn to the Bible and say, look, this is the book God wants us to have.
What is he telling us?
And that is why from the very beginning, St. Augustine, at least, people said we also have to read the book of nature at the same time because that also was created by God and is also what God wants us to know.
And it speaks to the glory of God.
From Jamie, do you have any book recommendations, particularly novels for teenage girls that are Christian in theme, but not explicit Christian books?
I'm looking for some books for my daughter that will reinforce ideas about faith, but still be enjoyable.
If you have a similar recommendation for an adolescent boy, something easier to read than Crime and Punishment, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
I've noticed the books we read during these years are especially influential.
A group of my friends obsessed over Richard Dawkins in high school and have struggled with depression and angst ever since.
I'm not surprised.
She says, myself and other friends were reading Carl Morlantis and ended up in the Marines.
Yeah, no, it's really important what they consume.
Well, you know, you should turn to some of the classics that are not that hard to read.
For instance, I think a teenage girl might really like Jane Eyre.
It's a wonderful book and it is a book filled with Christian values without being a preachy or Christian at all.
And I think maybe even Bleak House by Charles Dickens.
These are long books, but they're very readable and deeply entertaining and have a very respectful and elevated idea of womanhood that is also a very real one.
For boys, Shane is a great Western novel, which is, I think, deeply Christian.
I think Shane is a Christian character.
You want to look at my books, The Homelanders.
Those are big adventure stories with a Christian hero who speaks about his Christian values.
They're not preachy, but they're really shoot-em-ups.
But they are books that they might like.
There are books out there, but remember that librarians are working against you in this.
Librarians, like everybody else, are woke and they keep books out of libraries, so you have to go and look for them.
But those are some, especially for girls, Jane Eyre, I think, is a book that every girl I ever knew who read it has loved it.
And it's a wonderful, wonderful book.
I think one of the great novels of all time and definitely has Christian values.
So hopefully that's helpful.
But it doesn't matter because the Klavenless week is upon us.
You know, if we don't get to World War III by the time I come back, it's still going to be terrible because you're going to be Klavenless.
And you'll be wandering through the dark.
It's like crawling over broken glass while there are flames and demons poking at you with pitchforks.
But for those few of you, those chosen few, those happy few who survive into next week, I will be back.
This is the Andrew Klaven Show, and I am Andrew Klaven.
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 Klaven 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 Wadosky, 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 Heart.
Kaepernick's NFL Comparison00:01:03
Our production coordinator is McKenna Waters, and our production assistant is Jacob Falash.
The Andrew Klaven Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2022.
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, Jussie Smollett's attacker has been sentenced to jail time, but the sentence was still too light, I think, as Smollett's insane behavior in the courtroom demonstrated.
We'll talk about that also.
Our big tech overlords have gotten together and decided that it's actually okay for you to call for the murder of certain people, depending on their nationality and ethnicity.
Nothing troubling about that at all.
Plus, Kaepernick compared the NFL to slavery a few months ago, and now he says he still wants to play in the NFL.
He wants to be a slave, I guess.
And Rihanna is pregnant and speaking eloquently about the beauty of pregnancy and the preciousness of her unborn life, which seems to contradict her previous pro-abortion activism.
It's a pretty common thing with pro-abortion celebrities.
We'll talk about that.
And a new poll says that Americans are under an unprecedented level of stress.