Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 1082 skewers Biden’s "Biden Doctrine" as a dystopian "crap storm"—rising crime, border chaos, and energy failures rebranded as progress—while contrasting elite hubris with small-town resilience like Dublin, Ohio. He ties COVID-19 lockdowns to government overreach, mocks media exploitation of tragedies (e.g., Uvalde), and warns that gun control and socialism erode federalism, citing Australia’s post-lockdown authoritarianism. The episode pivots to cultural decay: Hollywood’s shift from universal stories (Fiddler on the Roof) to nihilistic multiverse narratives (Everything Everywhere All at Once), framing Christianity as the only coherent moral framework against pagan cyclicalism. Clavin argues modern masculinity lacks redemptive models, blaming 1960s counterculture for glorifying antiheroes like Walter White while ignoring virtuous alternatives—culminating in a cultural "slump" where shared purpose collapses under relativism. [Automatically generated summary]
President and venal houseplant Joe Biden says the skyrocketing price of gasoline is part of, quote, an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it's over, will be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over.
Unquote.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, oh, Clavin, you zany chukalapagus, how do you invent these absurd and uproarious Joe Biden statements that seem to float from your brain like laugh bubbles?
From one of those electronic teddy bears who repeatedly lift the bubble wand to their mechanical lips while puffing a pink fantasia of hilarity over the streets of the city?
Until it turns out he's a sex offender in a furry suit and so is arrested and released for the third time because the judge secretly thinks the idea of a teddy bear pinching women's backsides as they walk by, looking at bubbles is actually kind of a turn-on.
Frankly, I don't know where you came up with such a sick scenario, but no, I'm not making this quote up.
Our corrupt presidential rhododendron, who has presided over a doubling in gas prices in the year and a half since Donald Trump left office, says, never mind, comrade, you should be proud as punch to be part of this incredible transition from being able to drive to work where you can earn your own living to a world in which, God willing, you'll have the privilege of selling your car for food money in the joyful knowledge that while having no fossil fuels may destroy Western civilization, it will at least bring global temperatures down 0%.
The incredible transition has now become part of what's known as the Biden Doctrine, or the crap storm, which reframes the disasters caused by Biden's leftist policies as the dawn of a glorious new age in which, God willing, Earth's inequalities will slowly vanish as our country achieves equality with Burundi.
For instance, from now on, we'll be able to look at the soaring crime rate in Democrat cities as part of an incredible transition from the racist imprisonment of young men for the crime of driving while black and firing a machine gun out the car window to a shining new world where, God willing, we can all share the streets of the city with gangsters whose demonic laughter echoes in their wake as they speed away from the bullet-riddled scene of the crime.
Likewise, the destruction of our nation's borders in order to allow a ceaseless flood of illegal aliens to swarm American communities, devouring the social services funded by the taxes our citizens used to pay before they lost their jobs to illegal aliens, will be seen as part of the incredible transition from an unjust world where people are denied the blessings of living in America simply because they don't live in America to a wonderful new day where, God willing, the blessings of living in America will disappear completely.
And of course, allowing sexually abnormal teachers to parade their fetishes, perversions, and delusions in front of elementary school kids will be part of the incredible transition from schools that fail to teach rudimentary skills like math and reading to schools that, God willing, fail to teach math and reading while also becoming cesspits of unholy evil and corruption.
The Biden doctrine of incredible transition can also be applied to other fields, such as literature, for instance, where the characters in the novel Dracula can now be seen as experiencing an incredible transition from the oppressive constraints of Victorian morality to a soulless eternity as undead creatures of darkness who, God willing, feed on the blood of the living in order to enlist them in their legion of satanic predators.
Or we can have the Biden incredible transition doctrine in the field of sports, where men can declare themselves women and compete in women's events to bring on the incredible transition from a mean world in which effeminate men are bullied and despised to a world in which, God willing, effeminate men can bully and despise everyone else while also giving us the creeps.
Because, yuck.
In general, I think we can all look forward to Biden's policies bringing about an incredible transition from a world where leftists celebrate turning everything they touch to crap to a time when nothing, even vaguely resembling a Democrat, will ever be elected to anything anywhere, ever again.
God willing.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Shipshape, 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.
All right, we are back laughing our way through the imminent fall of the Republic.
It's falling around us while we're laughing our way through it.
We're going to have a different conversation today about guns, not what you usually hear.
Plus, my son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, will join us to talk about how much what's new in our culture is really a throwback to old-style paganism.
This is a good time to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.
Leave us a five-star review.
Very helpful to us.
Also, the mailbag, I keep telling you that if you want to be in the mailbag, you subscribe and then you hit the watch button and then you go to my web, my podcast page, and there's a little paper airplane.
So I tried that this morning and it doesn't work.
We found out, I hope, hopefully they're working on this, but what we found out is that if you use a computer, it doesn't work on an iOS device, but you go to that page and you see where it says latest episode, the airplane is either near that or your press latest episode, and then it'll be on that page.
And what they're trying to do is make sure your problems that you're sending into the mailbag are so you have to be life-threatening before you'll take the time to find out how to send it in.
Also, YouTube, you want to subscribe to my personal channel there, the Andrew Clavin channel on YouTube, and I will send you exclusive content.
If you ring that bell, someone you don't know will die, but you will get exclusive content.
And also, if you leave a content and the comment and the comment is absolutely morally disgusting, we will include it here as fitting right in with the rest of our content.
Today, it comes from Loco White Boy.
I'm not sure how good a name that is, Logo White Boy, talking about our intro last week, said that was the best intro in the show's history.
To say all that with the Pisaki slur was so good and so funny, people on the left can't be this funny.
Well, that, of course, goes without saying, but people on the right can't be that funny.
I read that because it was a very popular opening, so I thought I'd just include that in there.
If you're anything like me, you hate the grocery store, broken bags, bare shelves, it's all such a chore.
So I go online to goodranchers.com.
It makes meat buying easy, and their steaks are the bomb.
The best part is, it's all American meat.
It's shipped straight to your door.
The service can't be beat.
You can buy a single box, but I think you should subscribe because their meat really rocks and store-bought meat isn't the vibe.
They never add hormones or antibiotics.
Lock in your price with a subscription.
It's perfect economics.
Their beef is delicious, chicken better than organic.
Grocery store sourcing is suspicious and they're starting to panic.
You see, 85% of meat is shipped from overseas.
American farmland is being bought up by the Chinese.
Shop at goodranchers.com if you want American meat.
Getting that box straight to my door is my favorite treat.
Use code Clavin for two free pounds of ground wagyu beef with your order.
Go buy some meat from Good Ranchers.
They're my show's tastiest supporter.
I need a rap name at this point.
So I had this wonderful, kind of an amazing experience over the weekend, last weekend, where I went to Ohio to see the play The Uncanny in Dublin, Ohio.
It was put on my play, was put on at a small theater, StageWrite.
You can get there.
It's going to be on again this weekend, Friday, Saturday, and Sundays live streaming.
So you have to watch it while it's on.
But you can get it for 15 bucks.
It's StageWrite Theatrics.
Well, just look up Stage Right Theatrics and you'll find it.
And the play is called The Uncanny.
And they just, Robert Cooperman runs the place.
He was on the show.
He assembled a great cast.
It was a beautiful set.
It was really well done.
And it was gratifying to me to watch the play.
The play really worked.
You know, I was worried about it when it started.
It started a little slowly, but then once it got going, it was a really good play.
But one of the great surprises was the town of Dublin, Ohio.
As a kind of an coastal elite jerk myself, I tend to make fun of these places out in the middle of the country, but I know Ohio well.
I love Ohio.
My brother went to Kenyon College, and I had a girlfriend when I was very young out in Indiana, and I lived there with her for a few months.
And I love it, right on the border of Ohio.
And I really do love that area.
But I get there, and Dublin, Ohio is a particularly beautiful and lively city.
And young people, lots of families, just a really nice town.
And it's right near Columbus.
And they have built this beautiful bridge.
They call it the Dublin Link.
It's just a footbridge, but it's absolutely lovely piece of work.
And the minute we get there, of course, my wife and I are both very eager to see this production.
The play means a lot to both of us.
My wife gets COVID.
Ordinary People's Resolve00:06:10
And I'm negative.
I tested negative the whole way.
And so far, I don't know how.
I mean, my wife and I are very fond of one another.
Usually whatever we get, we share it.
But this time, somehow, you know, God willing, I've just been okay.
So she was sequestered in the hotel room, and I went for a walk on this bridge.
And I'm looking around.
And like I said, it's just a lovely community.
People living life, getting together.
You know, it's a largely white community, but there were black people, there were Muslim people, there were Asian people.
And, you know, I was just looking at all these people and thinking, you know, America is fine at the individual level, at the town level, where people are dealing with each other.
People deal with all this stuff and they deal with their lives and they know how to, you know, the young people are getting together and the girls are flirting with the boys and the boys are flirting.
You know, it's just, it's like, it's life.
It's life.
They're doing great.
It's the elites who have just made an utter mess of everything.
It is the people in charge who are to blame for every bad thing that is happening.
Inflation is out of control.
The supply chains are disrupted.
Our mamas can't feed their babies because they can't get the formula.
Stock market is crashing.
And all of this stuff is because, I mean, you think I made this quote up, this Biden quote, here, just so you can hear, he's actually said this about skyrocketing gas prices.
It's cut nine.
We're going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it's over, we'll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over.
You twit.
You know, really, really.
People can't afford to get to work and to fill their cars and to go on vacation and all this.
It's an incredible transition because he's got this great idea.
You know, ordinary people are doing fine.
Ordinary people know how to live, while our elites can't find their buttocks with two hands and a flashlight.
And they're ruining people's lives with all the things we're doing.
And, you know, we've got parents doing their best to raise their children, then they send them to school, and people are, teachers are trying to spread their sexual deviations to them and trying to teach them to hate whiteness because they've invented this new kind of racism.
It's so much better than the old racism.
Their white sheets are better than maybe they have black sheets.
So that's a really, you know, wow, your head explodes at their new innovation, their new racism.
You know, the totally messed up reaction to COVID, perfect example.
I'm not, you know, selling like the plandemic conspiracy.
It was a real disease, real suffering, real deaths.
This is not an anti-government screed.
We need government, but we have a bad government.
We have a government who does not know how to do things.
85% of the misery of this experience was caused by the government, the useless lockdown, closing the booming economy.
Fauci lying repeatedly.
If Fauci had just given people information, honest, true information, the best information he had, and let them make their own decisions, the numbers wouldn't have been any worse, and we wouldn't be in the mess that we're in.
You know, it's really the elites.
They blew it.
They blew it.
And so they should really take a look and be a little bit more humble.
But this is exactly the point.
I was thinking, this is what I was thinking about.
I was thinking, you know, if they had given people information and let people make their own decisions, it would have gone much better.
And that's the difference between ordinary people and elites.
Every week, because ordinary people ask themselves a certain question.
I ask myself this question every, at least once a week, sometimes once a day.
I ask myself the question, what problem am I trying to solve, right?
Whether I'm writing a scene or planning a book or discussing some family thing with my wife, what problem am I trying to solve?
And when you ask that question, what problem are you trying to solve?
A lot of other questions come up.
Should I solve the problem?
Can I solve the problem?
What will it cost to solve the problem?
Am I willing to pay the price to solve the problem?
Can I pay the price to solve the problem?
And you step back and you think, well, you know, what am I trying to do?
And what are the consequences going to be?
Because each decision has consequences.
The world is a certain way and I'm a certain way and you're a certain way and those things don't change.
So you choose what price you're willing to pay for what rewards.
Ordinary people, with our limited resources and our human nature and our knowledge of the world, ask those questions all the time.
What problem?
What do I want?
Is it good?
What's it going to cost?
Because we have to face the consequences of our actions.
If we run out of money, for instance, we can't go next door with a gun and say, sorry, neighbor, I'm raising your taxes for living next to me to pay for a new car.
We can't do that, but governments can.
Billionaires, second-rate screenwriters, movie stars, they think they're wise because they are personally sheltered from the consequences of their decisions.
So they become big thinkers.
They're going to solve all the problems.
They're going to make.
They start to ask themselves, not like, you know, can I pay for lunch?
Not, you know, what do I want to do with this amount of money I have?
They start to say, can I make the world just?
Can I change the climate to make it what I want it to be?
Can I end inequality?
And the answer is, no, you can't do those things.
You cannot do them.
They're not possible to do.
The world is unjust.
So when you fix one part of it, another part of it goes wonky.
And that means you have to decide, well, when I make this fix, is the cost too much?
Is the opposite reaction going to hurt too many people?
Instead, they don't think about it like that.
They think, well, you know, in the old days, blacks were mistreated.
So now we'll mistreat whites and that'll make everything fair.
I mean, it's literally what Ibram Kendi says.
He says from his book, he says, the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.
The only remedy, present discrimination, is future discrimination.
Those are the words of a fool.
I mean, those are what a fool says because you're not fixing anything.
If you take away, you know why they're always calling us racist and sexist and all that stuff?
If you take away racist, sexist, homophobic, trans, whatever phobic you come up with, if you assume the person who disagrees with you is a person of goodwill, instead you have to ask yourself, what problem are they trying to solve?
What consequences are they facing?
What costs are they facing?
Are they willing to pay those costs?
With all their sins and flaws, individuals can make those decisions better than governments because they live with the consequences of their actions.
What Problems Are They Solving?00:10:44
And the rich and powerful lose their way because they lay aside their humility and make themselves into our saviors and they ruin everything.
The people of this country are fine.
The elites have lost their way because they think they're going to do big things that can't be done instead of the small things that can be done.
And it is time for them to go.
So as you know, I stay awake all night, so I can't tell you what it's like to sleep on a Helix sleep mattress, but I can tell you it's incredibly comfortable if you're lying awake all night.
They have a quiz.
Helix Sleep has a quiz.
Takes just two minutes to complete, matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you.
Why would you buy a mattress made for someone else?
With Helix, you're getting a mattress that you know will be perfect for the way you sleep, or in my case, stay awake.
Everybody's unique, and Helix knows that, so they have several different mattress models to choose from.
Soft, medium, firm mattresses.
Mattress is great for cooling you down if you sleep hot.
Mattress is great for spinal alignment to prevent morning aches and pains.
And even a Helix Plus mattress for plus size sleepers.
So if you're looking for a mattress, you take the quiz, you order the mattress that you've matched to, and the mattress comes right to your door for free.
You don't ever need to go to a mattress store again.
Go to helixsleep.com slash Clavin.
Take the two-minute sleep quiz.
They will match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life.
10-year warranty.
You'll get to try it out for 100 nights, risk-free.
They'll even pick it up for you if you don't love it, but you will.
For a limited time, Helix is offering up to $350 off all mattress orders and two free pillows for our listeners.
This is their best offer yet, so hurry over to helixsleep.com slash Clavin.
As you lie awake at night, you can ask yourself, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No ease in Clavin.
just make it look this easy.
So this horrible shooting in Texas, in Evaldi, Texas, just incredibly, I mean, more tragedy than the human heart can hold.
Children wiped out by this demon infested guy.
And right now, as I go on the air, people are arguing about the police.
Did the police go in?
Were they, you know, were they cowardly?
Did they hold back?
You know, should they have acted in a different way?
And I'm not going to talk too much about that because the answer is we don't know yet.
We do not know yet.
And I find it very dispiriting to see the rapidity with which even good people react to information coming in from a chaotic news scene because I've covered chaotic news scenes and I know that information changes over time.
I'm not defending the police.
I'm not attacking the police.
I do not know yet.
And I've read all the stuff that's coming in, obviously, but I do not know yet whether or not they acted badly or acted well or acted as well as they could or what the situation was.
All I'm saying is when I see people on Twitter going, I'd take a bullet for those kids any day.
And if you're a cop, you have to, you know what?
Even heroes get pinned down by gunfire.
I mean, so we don't know.
Maybe they acted badly.
Maybe they did all the wrong things.
Maybe not.
But, you know, at least let's try and wait until the information, all of this stuff is dispiriting.
It's dispiriting to me that we can't.
I mean, this is such a tragic, terrible thing, a complicated thing.
We can't even wait an hour, you know, a day to have mourning to say we are sad.
We are sad about this.
They make fun of the right-wingers for saying thoughts and prayers, but that's the first 24 hours as far as the public is concerned because there's nothing.
I mean, if we who don't know these children are grieving, imagine what is going on in this town.
I mean, like I said, it is more sorrow than the human heart can hold to see these children shot down in their schools.
So the right thing to do is to ask questions and seek info and have some kind of patience, some kind of patience with our emotions and our sorrow.
And instead, what scumbags do, what dirtbags do, what lowlifes do is they ride the emotion, because that's what all this is about.
All the anger at the police, uninformed anger so far, all the screaming and all this.
It's all about the fact that we feel helpless and we feel sad and we feel angry and we want to take it out on somebody, and so we do.
And that's what dirtbags do.
What dirtbags do, lowlifes, they ride the emotion to get the things that they want.
Like this guy, this is cut 31.
The idea that an 18-year-old kid can walk into a gun store and buy two assault weapons is just wrong.
What in God's name do you need a solve it for except to kill someone?
Durant running through the forest with Kevlar vests on, for God's sake, is just sick.
You know, I mean, they want our guns.
We get it.
We get it.
We've heard this a million, a million times.
Can you not wait?
Can you not wait a few hours, a few hours before you make your political play?
Because we know this is an issue that we're going to, and I'm going to talk about the issue.
I'm going to talk about that specific issue.
But still, can you not wait a little bit?
You know, this idiot, Beto O'Rourke, somebody, I think it was Politico, I accidentally called him Beta, and they said, no, no, we're issuing a correction.
It's Beto, not Beta.
And I thought, are you sure?
Because this guy, he's running for governor against Greg Abbott in Texas, and he needs some camera time.
It's not going well.
So there's an informational meeting where Abbott and a couple of other officials are giving information about this horrible tragedy.
And Beto, unbelievably to me, he pulls a campaign stunt.
This is cut number six.
Excuse me.
He's after the Santa Fe.
Sit down.
You're out of line and an embarrassment.
Sit down.
You're doing nothing.
No, Raw.
Please get his ass out of here.
This isn't the place to talk to him so.
This is totally predictable.
Sir, you're out of line.
Sir, you're out of line.
Sir, you are out of line.
Please leave this auditorium.
I can't believe you're a sick son of a bitch that would come to a deal like this to make a political issue.
It's like, it's unbelievable.
It is unbelievable.
But that's because he's not really thinking about what the situation is.
He's thinking about himself.
And, you know, I think all our politicians are thinking about themselves.
And, you know, just a little bit of feeling, a little bit of human feeling, a little bit of nonpartisan human feeling.
They keep saying, oh, you know, Joe Biden, he's worried he can't unite the country.
You're damn straight he can't unite the country because he's a dirtbag.
He's a terrible person.
He's always been a venal, unprincipled, terrible person.
And now he's an unprincipled, terrible, venal person who's the president of the United States.
So in all the emotion, what I'm talking about is losing the facts, right?
You know, Greg Abbott talked about this.
This is cut number five.
I know people like to try to oversimplify this.
Let's talk about some real facts.
And that is there are, quote, real gun laws in Chicago.
There are, quote, real gun laws in New York.
There are real gun laws in California.
I hate to say this, but there are more people who were shot every weekend in Chicago than there are in schools in Texas.
Well, that's exactly right.
I mean, that is just a fact.
That has nothing to do with the argument over guns, but it's just the actual situation.
I believe the numbers, 275 children, 275 children have been murdered, slaughtered, killed in Chicago this year.
And this is Chicago has some of the tightest gun laws in the country.
Black kids, mostly killed by black gangsters.
And that, you know, obviously that narrative doesn't work for the press.
So those kids don't exist.
Those kids are just erased from the national consciousness.
Whereas this horror in Avaldi is going is a good narrative for them because they can go after guns and nobody really is going to care about whether this guy is mentally ill or whether we need mental illness services.
Nothing about that.
Just saying it's complicated.
That's all.
Just saying that like, you know, these things are emotionally charged, but you've got to get past those emotions to deal with the real problems.
Plus, you know, we've had these big guns, these automatic weapons.
We've had them for decades, for decades, and we haven't had these kinds of shooting.
And what has changed?
I mean, it's a good question.
What has changed?
You know, I'm always telling you the future is male, that when you see a profession being taken over by women, that profession is about to become obsolete.
It's not a hit on women.
It's not because women are no good.
It's because the men have moved on to the next thing.
When women become film directors, you know that the movie industry is basically dead, right?
Because it's because boys have moved on to playing video games.
When women become news anchors, you know, the TV news has become irrelevant.
And again, it's not because the women are not competent and can't do it.
It is because, you know, if you hear a child say, you know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to take this cardboard box.
I'm going to line up 15 cardboard boxes.
I'm going to make a ramp.
I'm going to take my skateboard and I'm going to take that ramp and see if I can reach Mars.
That's a little boy.
Now, I know you're going to say, oh, but my daughter would say that.
I'm just talking about the odds.
I'm talking about the bell curve.
That's a little boy.
It's going to say that.
Little boys are like that.
They take risks.
They're crazy.
They come dream up with these stupid things.
And that's where the future comes from.
So when you tell boys that masculinity is toxic and maybe we can cut off your jiggly bits and make you a girl, and porn is great, and a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, and children don't need fathers.
What are you?
Some kind of sexist, and there's no God, and you can't have Boy Scouts, you can only have Girl Scouts, and boys, you know, become enraged and alienated.
That's what the future is going to look like.
We've had 60 years of this kind of feminism and the fact that men are angry, and I know men are angry because I talk to young men all the time who are not crazy, who are not demon-ridden, who are not going to shoot anybody, but they're all angry.
And all the women are miserable.
I mean, I see this all the time with young people.
And it's like that is a problem in the culture.
But, but still, all of that.
What about the guns?
So this is what I mean.
What problem are we trying to solve?
Summer's coming.
It's always busy.
And if you're like me, you're going to be away from home quite a bit.
Protecting Sovereignty00:16:09
I am.
I'm going to be traveling, but you can rest easy with the protection of Ring Alarm.
And you're thinking, Ring, you've got an alarm.
It's a video doorbell company.
And it is.
They make that great video doorbell where you can talk to anyone who comes to the door no matter where you are, but they make an alarm.
Ring Alarm is an award-winning home security system with available professional monitoring when you subscribe.
You can easily install it yourself.
And Ring didn't stop there.
They've gone pro with Ring Alarm Pro.
Ring Alarm Pro is a new level of security system.
CNET calls Ring Alarm Pro a giant leap for home security.
Ring combined a home security system and a Wi-Fi router, so it helps protect your home and secure your network.
With a Ring Protect Pro subscription, which is an amazing deal, you can get professional monitoring for the ultimate peace of mind.
If anything happens, professional monitoring will call you and can request emergency services.
You may not know it, but it's true.
Ring has an award-winning alarm this busy summer season to protect your home.
Go pro with Ring Alarm Pro.
To learn more, go to ring.com forward slash clavin.
That's ring.com forward slash clavin.
When anybody enters your home and they shouldn't, the alarm goes off and tells you how to spell clavin.
Very important.
K-O-A-V-A-N.
That doesn't really happen.
You know, there's a guy named Robert Kelly, Robert E. Kelly, I think it is.
He has a blog, and he teaches overseas, and he says, no matter how he explains gun laws to foreigners, they think we're nuts.
They think we're crazy, and none of them wants to have guns the way we have guns.
So I had this experience the other day.
I was called up by a new British Conservative TV station, GB News, and they had me on their show.
This presenter, the anchor man, is named Colin Brazer.
Very smart guy, very decent guy, a concerned guy, a real person, and I really like him.
And so I thought, I'm going to really explain this to him.
And I explained it to him, and he could not hear it.
And this is what I said to him, all right?
I said, Great Britain, wonderful country.
I lived there 70 years, wonderful country.
It's the size of Minnesota.
Its population is maybe twice the size of California.
So we have 25 Great Britons in this country.
And they're not 25 Great Britons filled with British people.
They're 25 Great Britains filled with people from all over the world, all of whom would happily kill each other if they had a chance.
All of them would happily enslave their neighbors if they had a chance.
No matter what color they are, it doesn't matter.
When this country was founded, when this country was founded, people said, rightly, no republic of that size has ever survived.
Look at Rome.
Once it grew to a certain size, the republic fell and it became an empire.
It became run by an emperor.
The idea of a federation of states was supposed to guarantee the freedom of individuals by protecting the republic, by protecting the power of local government against the federal government.
That was Madison's insight.
He said, you know, a big republic doesn't have to collapse if there are smaller republics, you know, 50 smaller republics or however many there were at the time, you know, with competing interests, that will keep us free, right?
That's what is going to keep us free.
So when they decided that the U.S. had to have an army, that the federal government had to have an army, people reasonably said, well, then if they have an army, how are we going to defend our states?
How are our states going to have any power?
And the idea they came up with is the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
That's why it's about militias, right?
It is about the fact that if the people have guns, the states can form militias in this terrible, disastrous situation to fight the federal government.
People are talking about it all the time, not just on the right, on the left, everyone saying, wow, we're so divided.
Are we going to have a civil war?
Well, if we're going to have a civil war, we don't want only one side to be armed.
If we're going to have a civil war, that's the way it's going to happen.
God forbid that should ever happen.
But that's what it's for.
So when Joe Biden gets up and says, deers aren't wearing Kevlar vests, for God's sake, he's not talking about anything.
He's not talking about the problem we're trying to solve.
We're trying to solve the problem that our boys are alienated by 60 years of feminism and guns are available because these guns are not incidental to our system and our freedom.
They are central, essential to our freedom.
And this is what the fellow Colin on this British show couldn't understand.
He kept saying to me, you know, I understand why you have a shotgun for pests and a pistol for self-defense, but why do you need these automatic weapons?
They are in case.
They are so we can form a militia in our states.
Now, here's the thing.
It is okay to say, I don't like American freedom, the idea that the little guy is sovereign.
I said to Colin, you know, your queen is your sovereign.
You're looking at our sovereign.
I am our sovereign.
The people, the person is sovereign in America.
You may not like that system.
You may not like federalism.
The left doesn't like federalism.
The left wants all the power accumulated in Washington, D.C., so they can bring on the great socialist paradise that they're going to bring on.
The right doesn't want that.
We want the system that was formed to keep the individual free, which is the federal system.
You can say you don't want the federal system and therefore we should get rid of the guns.
What you can't say, right?
What you can't say is we love America.
We love the American system.
All these people complaining about the America, all these people who think that the American system stinks, they're based on America.
Their country is based on America.
Their country is as Republican as it is, as democratic as it is because of America.
When America was formed, there were no other constitutional republics in the world.
Now everybody, including people that aren't republics, call themselves a republic because our system was so successful.
You can't say, I want that system, but I want to get rid of the guns.
You can't do it.
Same with the Electoral College.
You can't say, I want the federal system, but I want to get rid of the guns.
So the problem we're trying to solve is how to keep people safe and preserve our system.
The left does not want that system.
So they're lying about what problem we want to solve, whether we can solve it, what the costs are, and whether we want to pay those costs.
The cost for getting rid of guns, which I'm not a big gun guy.
I'm fine getting rid of guns, in a general principle.
But the cost of getting rid of guns is losing our federal system.
And if we lose our federal system, we lose the sovereign people.
Then we have the people in Washington, D.C. doing what they want to do, which is making the rules for all of us.
The disease comes through.
They're going to close everything down because they know they don't have to deal with the consequences.
We have to deal with the consequences.
It's an incredible transition to a bright new world of shiny socialist perfection.
They've got it all figured out.
That's what they want.
That's not what I want.
I'm for the guns.
I want to keep the guns.
And that means people are going to get killed.
This is a violent country.
That means people are going to get killed.
And no, do I think, you know, you want to say to me, well, even one child's life is more important than the Republic.
And I would say to you, you know what?
I want to protect those children any way possible.
Let us find a way to protect them and preserve our federal system, which preserves in turn the freedom of the individual, this unique thing that has never existed on the face of the earth.
The only new political idea that has been ever had in human history, this idea of Republican government keeping the individual free with the sovereign individual.
It's the guns that keep it.
You can get rid of the guns and American-style freedom and the federalism that protects it will be gone in 10 minutes.
One of the biggest things about being a small business, and I am a small business, I'm actually a little shop.
I just look like a human being.
But I know it's important to have an effective marketing strategy.
Constant Contact is a digital marketing platform that helps small businesses and nonprofits of all sizes build, grow, and succeed.
With email marketing, contact management, industry-leading list growth tools, social media ads, and more, Constant Contact helps small businesses connect with customers, find new customers, and sell online all from one easy-to-use platform.
They've been trusted by millions of businesses to help improve their marketing with a 97% deliverability rate.
You can rest assured that your customers and potential customers are getting the right message at the right time.
A simple interface, constant contacts, easy-to-use platform makes contact management easier than ever.
Their list growth tools help you find a bigger audience fast.
Lead generation landing pages, text to join, and social media ads are proven to grow your list and drive engagement with your brand.
Thousands of integrations.
You can sync constant contacts tools with the tools you're already using.
Powerful automation tools help you send the right message to the right person at the right time every time.
To start your free digital marketing trial today, visit ConstantContact.com.
So, the pernicious argument, and this is the argument of socialism, this is why I say socialism is inherently evil.
You know, I know that people who want to be socialists, their motives are good very often.
They want things to be more fair.
They don't want there to be poor people.
I mean, we all want, this is the thing.
When you stop calling people names, when you stop calling people names, you have to realize that most people are trying to achieve good things, but but they aren't always asking themselves what the cost is.
And once you understand that life is unfair, that doesn't mean you don't want to try to have more justice.
It simply means that you understand that because life is unfair, every reaction, every action you take is going to have a reaction somewhere else.
Every inequality you solve here is going to have another inequality there, and you have to balance those costs.
It's kind of the hard work of governing instead of these declarations that it's an incredible transition to a brave new world.
That's the difference, right?
The pernicious argument, though, is that people are now nice.
Government is now nice.
Look how nice our government is.
We want to give the means of production to the government because the government is nice and the government will make fair decisions.
All through history, all through history, all the evil of history has been done by governments, right?
When they say Robin Hood, Steve Crowder explained this to me once, when they say Robin Hood robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, the rich he took with the government because they were overtaxing people.
When you talk about slavery, slavery was an act of the government, right?
That was the government that made it legal to hold slaves.
The idea that now government is nice, now government is ready to be fair, is an illusion created by the restrictions that we put on government.
Government is exactly the same as it always has been.
Power is exactly the same drug that it always has been, and people react the same way on that drug that they always do.
You know, the New York Times, a former newspaper reacting to the Texas shooting, they wrote a story with the headline, Other countries had mass shootings, then they changed their gun laws.
And they have, in Australia, a 1996 massacre prompted mandatory gun buybacks that saw, according to some estimates, as many as 1 million firearms melted into slag.
The rate of mass shootings plummeted from once every 18 months to so far only one in the 26 years since.
Yeah, but when COVID hit, they were locked down like they were in red China.
Old people were walking, wandering out in the street, and the police were beating them to the ground because the people had no defense against the police.
This is why we don't live like that.
We live differently.
We are a different country.
And it always cracks me up that these people who are yelling white supremacy want us to be more like Europe, the whitest place that ever existed on earth.
I mean, this country is not a white supremacist country.
This country has everybody in it.
We all look crazy different.
We all are crazy different.
We're all trying to live together.
And as people, we work it out.
It's the government that puts us at each other because they like to have us hating each other.
They want us hating each other.
That means that they can do what they want because we're distracted by worrying about the other, the guy next door instead of worrying about the people we should be worrying about, the guys in Washington, D.C.
This meeting in Davos, what is it called?
The World Economic Fund.
If you think government has changed, I got to show you these people.
These are these billionaires and these powerful people who get together, I think it's once a year, maybe more, and they're the ones with the great reset, right?
They're going to bring the great reset in there.
And they're the people who are pushing the stakeholder capitalism where guys buy up a lot of shares or basically the people who run your retirement funds use their proxy power to go in and demand that some company that makes widgets should not go to Georgia because Georgia doesn't have good bathroom laws.
I mean, that's the stuff that these guys believe in.
These guys believe that capitalism can be used to accomplish their purposes, which can't be accomplished through people voting, right?
They can't be.
And so Davos man is this guy, Klaus Schwab.
He is something else.
This is number 11, his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, 11.
The future is not just happening.
The future is built by us, by a powerful community, as you here in this room.
We have the means to improve the state of the world.
You know, it's a good thing that Sebastian Gorka is one of the good guys because I mean, why should the bad guys have all the bond villains, right?
We have Gorka.
We have at least one bond villain on the good guy side.
And what we should do is we put Gorka and Schwab in a room together, lock them in a room together.
And like Schwab can be like, I will radiate a gold supply at Fort Knox and then gold medals of the transvestite athletes will be worth billions and there will be no women to stand in my way.
And Gorkin can be like, I expect you to die, Mr. Schwab.
I'm sorry.
But the good bond versus the bad bond villain.
It's like the battle of the bond villains.
Hollywood lost such an artist when they blacklisted me.
But listen, these are these clowns.
They have this theory.
You know, I have this theory.
Steve Meyer, the science writer, the guy who wrote the Return of the God hypothesis, he's been on the show.
He has this theory that Judeo-Christian society was perfect for creating science, for inventing science, because we knew that God both had reason and also total freedom.
So he was going to invent a reasonable world, but we had to look at what world he chose to invent.
So we had to study it ourselves, and that's how we got science.
But the other thing about Judeo-Christian society is we have respect for the little guy.
So all these nerds who in another society would be put on an ice flow and sent out to sea were allowed to thrive and invent science.
And so now we've got these nerdy, spurgy kings, you know, these autistic guys who can solve computer problems and then think they can solve all the world, but they have no idea that other people have human lives.
This guy, Juval Harari, I swear, if this guy, I've read two of his books, very entertaining writer.
I swear, if he's not autistic, I don't know who he is.
Here he is talking, somebody put danger music behind this, but it's worth hearing what he has to say, why he loves COVID.
COVID is so important.
Here's Yuval Harari, cut number four.
COVID is critical because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimize total biometric surveillance.
If we want to stop this epidemic, we need not just to monitor people, we need to monitor what's happening under their skin.
He thinks that's a great idea.
We need total biological surveillance.
And you don't think they're serious about this.
At Davos, Pfizer's CEO, Albert Burla, his name is, he says that Pfizer is getting this done.
This is cut three.
It is basically biological chip that it is in the tablet.
And once you take the tablet and dissolves into your stomach, sends a signal that you took the tablet.
So imagine the applications of that, compliance.
The insurance companies to know that the medicines that patients should take, they do take them.
It is fascinating what happens in this field.
Biological Surveillance Tablets00:09:26
Imagine the compliance if they can just spy.
You know, they make fun of right-wingers because right-wingers come up with these conspiracy theories.
And they say, you know, we don't take the vaccine because they've got little things in it that they're going to track you in it.
And guys like me, who come from another, you know, we're visitors from the past who don't believe in that stuff are going like, what are you nuts?
They're not going, it's a vaccine.
It's like the polio vaccine.
They're not going to track you.
And there's this guy from Pfizer going, yeah, no, we're going to do that.
We actually want to do that.
And Yuval Hararari thinks it's wonderful.
He thinks it's wonderful because he doesn't know that other people exist.
That's the other thing about power.
You know, you stop when you're looking from a height, all those people look like ants.
You know, it's like Orson Welles and the third man.
Look down there.
If one of those ants stops moving, what difference does it make to me?
That's the way they are.
So we're going to spy the imagine the compliance.
And then we have this guy from the Alibaba group.
This is the guy, these are the guys who are trying to globalize the economy.
They want to globalize.
It's Michael Evans.
He's the head of the Alibaba group.
And this is his take, this is cut 12.
We're developing, through technology, an ability for consumers to measure their own carbon footprint.
What does that mean?
That's where are they traveling?
How are they traveling?
What are they eating?
What are they consuming on the platform?
So individual carbon footprint tracker.
Hooray.
Hooray.
That sounds great, doesn't it?
Keep your guns.
Keep your guns.
Listen, I am like a totally non-violent.
I do not like violence.
I haven't lifted a hand in anger since I was a teenage boy when I got into some fist fights as a kid.
I stopped after.
I thought this is ridiculous.
I hate this.
I'm not doing this anymore.
I'm not a violent person.
I think the guillotine, very uncivilized, very uncivilized to cut people's heads off.
Tar and feathers, a little messy, gets all over your clothes.
But if these guys, these guys need a good, swift kick in the ass.
These guys need to, all of them, Schwab and this guy, Evans and Berlos, they just need to, you know, after they're finished talking, we're going to inject this and then we'll be able to track you and we'll know if you took the pill and we'll know what you're eating and whether your carbon footprint is good.
It's good.
Bend over because now we're going to kick you in the buttocks.
We're going to plant our boot so far up your ass that you're going to be eating shoe leather and then we're sending you home.
That is what these guys need.
Keep your guns.
You know the guy who actually said something that was kind of interesting?
Another bond villain.
All these guys are from Nazi Germany.
They all grew up in Nazi Germany.
I mean, Schwab's father was like an industrialist in Nazi Germany.
George Soros, actually, I know, I know he's another bond villain, but we really got to get Gorka in on this.
He's got to, you know, I'm going to take out the other villains.
We're going to be a bond villain for the right.
But Soros actually said something interesting.
He's cut 13.
The invasion of Ukraine didn't come out of blue.
Fighting pandemics and climate change, avoiding nuclear war, maintaining global institutions have had to take a back seat to that struggle.
That's why I say our civilization may not survive.
So what he's saying, and that was not the complete cut.
What he says is the open society, and George Soros is supposedly a supporter of the open society, is where the government ensures the freedom of the people.
The closed society is the one in which the people serve the rulers and the government.
And George Soros says he's in favor of the open society.
He doesn't think America supports that, but that's what he thinks.
It's the open society.
But what he's saying is that you can't pay attention to the open society when you have all these big problems to deal with, like climate change and the things that these guys in the war in Ukraine and invasions.
And you can't pay attention to the open society.
So in solving these big problems, we won't have time to create the open society.
So he feels our civilization is not going to survive.
You know, that's a little bit kooky, but it actually makes a certain amount of sense.
What he is saying is we can't solve these problems if we let individuals just go around running free because they will pollute everything.
They will invade things.
They'll go out of their way to do the wrong thing.
So we need, we're going to ultimately need this closed society where the people serve the government because the people, because the government will be tracking them and making sure that they don't get these diseases.
And my response to that is hard to, it is hard to express without a bazooka, but a sharp boot will do.
Like I said, I'm not a violent guy at all.
Sharp boot would actually express my response to that.
Is, you know, I look at the people, again, I look at the people and they solve the problems.
They solve the problems, you know.
People of different races may hate one another, but suddenly you get a Romeo, a white Romeo, falls in love with a black Juliet, and suddenly that problem gets solved pretty quickly.
People may pollute things, but one day they look around and they say, you know what, this stinks, let's clean this stuff up.
Let's clean this stuff up.
And they enlist the government to do it.
They elect people who will do it.
It's these guys in Davos who suffer no consequences.
And that's why Klaus Schwab is saying, it is V who will light the future, the powerful people, because he suffers no consequences.
He doesn't know the first thing about how to do anything.
You want a pencil made.
You got to go to the rubber maker.
You got to go to the wood maker.
You got to go to the graphite maker.
And you got to let each guy do the thing that he does because each guy knows the price of what he does and knows the consequences of what he does.
When you get to Davos, those guys are completely disconnected, and that makes them think they're wise.
Keep your guns.
Keep your guns.
These people have never changed.
They haven't changed since Pharaoh.
The only thing that has changed is the ideas.
Those are the things that keep us going.
That's why we believe, that's why we are taking the chance that people of different races, people of different colors, people with different backgrounds and different customs can come together and become Americans because we believe we have this great idea.
And what is that great idea?
The great idea is that the people can solve the problems because they get it, because they're on the ground.
Because a person who runs a store knows how to run a store better than Joe Biden knows how to run a store.
The guy who makes a car knows how to make a car.
And the fact is, under capitalism, they have an interest in doing a good job.
When I send you to Rock Auto, it's because Rock Auto knows that they have to do a good job for you to come back.
That's why capitalism works.
That's why individual freedom works.
That's what we're trying to defend.
That's why we have guns.
We have guns because we're a big, messy, multi-ethnic country, and we want to be able to defend the local governments that keep us free from the big governments.
And the reason we want to do that is because the big governments don't suffer the consequences of their ideas, and it makes them think they're wise and they are fools.
Keep your guns.
So when you heard me talking about my Helix mattress and how much I liked it, you were probably thinking, gee, I wish they made sofas.
Well, guess what?
They do.
They just launched a new company.
It's called All Form, and they make terrific sofas.
What makes an all-form sofa really cool is that for starters, it's the easiest way you can customize a sofa using premium materials and at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores.
Pick your fabric, the sofa color, the color of the legs, sofa size, and shape to make sure it's perfect for you and your home.
They've got armchairs and love seats all the way up to an eight-seat sectional, so there's something for everyone.
You can always start small and buy more seats later if you want your all-form sofa to grow and change with you when you move.
All-form sofas are also delivered directly to your home with fast, free shipping.
In the past, if you wanted to order a sofa, it could take weeks or even months to arrive, and you would need someone to come and assemble it in your home.
All-form takes just three to seven days to come in the mail, and you can assemble it yourself in a few minutes.
No tools needed.
To find your perfect sofa, check out all form.com slash Clavin, and All Form is offering 20% off all orders for our listeners at allform.com slash Clavin.
By the way, if you sit on this and you put your feet up, you'll probably want to say, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
K-L-A-V-A-E-N, there are no easy playbacks.
So a lot of the things I've been talking about today were inspired by this experience I had of watching my play The Uncanny go up in the novel The Uncanny, which the play is based on.
One of the characters says something like, Small minds think great thoughts, but great minds proceed in the smallest of stages.
And that's one of the things I'm talking about, that people who suffer consequences go forward slowly and in small stages because they know if they make a mistake, they're going to have to pay for it, whereas governments don't do that.
But another theme in the uncanny is a theme, it's a series of ghost stories, and it's a theme of assimilation and identity and whether we are indebted to the past, whether our past and our bloodlines should have a hold on us, or whether each, as one character says, each of us, God gives each of us a soul of his own to start the world again with.
Jews and Assimilation00:14:26
And that's one of the themes that I feel is central to America because in America we have this unique thing where we expect people to come from all over the world and assimilate and become Americans.
And yeah, you can be a Chinese American, you can be an African American, you can be an Italian American, but in the end, we're supposed to all come together and be American.
What does that cost?
What is the cost of giving up your cultural heritage to embrace this new identity as an American?
Obviously, there are advantages to it, but never before has a country, I mean, I could have lived in, I said I lived in Britain for seven years, I could have lived there 100 years, I never would have been British, but here you're here and 20 minutes later, you're an American and we all accept it and we all believe this.
It's kind of part of our belief.
And that's never happened before.
And you want to think about what it means and what it costs.
And of course, the people who have done that almost more than anybody are the eternal vagabonds, the Jews.
You know, the Jews have become essential parts of nations and then the nations have chased them out.
Again and again, they've been chased out of countries.
And a lot of times the countries that chased them out didn't do so well after they chased them out.
Now the Jews started pouring into this country from Europe really around the turn of the last century and most of them loved it.
They had seen what Europe was.
They had seen what prejudice was.
They had seen the horrible bigotry that they had suffered.
Jews especially suffered in Christendom because of this kind of replacement theology and this idea that the Jews had killed God, which is, I have spoken about this a lot, which is ridiculous.
But they had seen this, okay, and now a lot of them started moving into the culture.
And Jews are very cultural people.
They're the people of the book.
They started writing books.
They started writing things.
The movie industry was the creation, to a large part, of the Jews.
I always hear people say, well, Hollywood is run by Jews.
And I always say, yeah, well, when you invent the greatest industry in American history, you can run it.
I mean, that's the way that worked.
And these Jewish guys came over, they loved America, and they were businessmen.
And so they wanted to serve.
They wanted to do good business.
They wanted to serve the public and give the public what they wanted.
So they made stories about America with good priests like Bing Crosby and cowboys like Gary Cooper and these Christian epics, but also, you know, the Ten Commandments telling the story.
And in these things, they wrapped this message.
We love America, but we want to be part of America too.
We want America to include the Jews.
So you go back to a film like Manhattan Melodrama, 1934.
This is before the Hays Code.
Clark Gable and William Powell play two children who grow up almost as brothers, and one becomes governor and one becomes a mobster.
This is the movie that John Dillinger was watching when he walked out and the feds killed him.
But the way the two kids become friends, become brothers, is the General Slocum disaster, a very famous disaster.
A steamboat, kind of paddlewheel boat, sank in the East River.
Over a thousand people died.
It was the worst disaster in New York until 9-11.
This was in 1904.
So they have a scene where the Slocum sinks and the two little boys, their parents are killed, and a Jewish man from the neighborhood comes up to them and essentially adopts them.
This is Cut 26.
What are your names?
My name's Edward Gallagher, but they call me Blackie.
And here's Jim Wade.
I knew your parents very well.
And now, Blackie.
And you, Jim.
You have no place to go, huh?
No.
We'll find some place.
They are fragile orphans.
No.
They are not homes.
How would you like to come and live with me in my home, huh?
And be my sons.
I'm not a Jew.
And neither is Jim.
Catholic, Protestant, Jew.
What does it matter now?
What does it matter now, right?
That is the thing that the Jews are selling.
Yes, we love America and we want to be part of it.
What does it matter?
Now we're all together.
What does it matter now?
And I remember watching that as a little Jewish kid and tearing up because of thinking this is what a great country, what a great country this is.
Not only were the Jews inventing the movies, which was one of the greatest PR institutions for America.
It spread American values all over the world.
It was a brilliant, brilliant thing.
But they also invented one of the greatest of American art forms, the American Musical Theater, the Broadway Theater.
There's a delightful PBS documentary.
It's a couple of political zings in it that could have lived without.
But it's about how the Jews basically invented the musical theater.
They were almost all Jewish.
And there's wonderful scenes in it.
Here's one of them where a conductor named Michael Tilson Thomas, this is Cut 22.
He explains how Jewish music became musical comedy music.
This is Cut 22.
Very often in listening to an early Broadway song, you can think that you're hearing a Jewish song.
So there's not all that much difference between a song like Greena Cuisina and the opening of Suwannee.
I've been away from you a long time.
I never thought I'd miss your song.
Somehow I feel.
Galam is real.
Near you, I want to be.
And everyone in the musical theater was Jewish, almost every, except Cole Porter.
And Cole Porter, after a couple of flops, he told Richard Rogers of Rogers and American, he said, I'm going to start writing Jewish music.
And he did.
I mean, if you've ever heard the song, what's the song?
My heart belongs to daddy, dad, You know, it's a very Jewish song.
And they served their audience, right?
They had shows like Oklahoma, We Know We Belong to the Land and the Land We Belong To is grand.
But they also dealt with this issue of bigotry.
So they wrote South Pacific, which is about racism and includes that song, You've Gotta Be Taught to Hate and Fear.
You've got to be taught from year to year.
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear.
And that was, of course, the inspiration for critical race theory.
But no, they dealt again and again with those issues.
The greatest of these guys was Irving Berlin.
Irving Berlin came over here when he was five and could actually remember a pogrom.
A pogrom was when the Cossacks came into your Russian village and raped the women and set your homes on fire because you were Jews.
That's why they did it.
It was a pogrom.
And they would come in and do this thing.
And Irving Berlin could remember hiding in a ditch and watching a pogrom.
And of course, he comes to this country and he realizes he's different and he wants to be part of this country, but he also wants to serve and celebrate this country.
Most popular Christmas song ever written, White Christmas, Irving Berlin, right?
And if you listen to it, it has this kind of wistful outsider yearning for Christmas, you know, like he's in California, but he's yearning to be up north because I'm dreaming of a white Christmas.
He wrote Easter Parade, one of the most popular Easter songs ever written.
And ultimately, he wrote a song to say thank you to this country that had given him what he had, which was God Bless America.
And here's Maury Yeston, who wrote the musical Nine, talking about God Bless America.
This is amazing.
Cut 23.
Who would think that in the most American, major sounding work that Berlin wrote, there would be in it what I hear very clearly as this, well, the Jewish word would be chazunish, but it would be a real cantorial.
La-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da Ha-el, ha-el, ha-gi-bo-r, ha-ga-dol, ha-gi-bo-r, ha-no-roar Ha-el, ha-el, yo, well, let's take that La-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da And I'll just put the fundamental bass tone under it.
It's amazing.
It's amazing.
So what happens?
What happens?
Ultimately, ultimately, they win the day.
The Jews make their case to America.
And America, with its open heart, welcomes them in.
And there's this transitional moment.
Really, they talk about it in this PBS special when they put on Fiddler on the Roof.
And as they're going around trying to raise money for Fiddler on the Roof, people are kind of going, wants to see a big play about Jews, you know, because they had been hiding themselves in American concerns.
The same way gay writers used to hide their concerns in plays about straight people.
So you had streetcar named Desire, which could easily be played with all men, but it's about a man and a woman, so men and women can understand it and everybody can enjoy it.
And actually, that's not a bad thing.
That actually helps to, it helps to see the mainstream society through the eyes of outsiders.
It actually is a helpful thing for everybody.
But when they put in Fiddler on the Roof, they had won the day.
People said, yeah, this is us.
We're all Americans are also Tevia and also these little villagers.
And we all can identify with this, as we all can identify with Italian movies and Irish movies and black movies.
You know, I've been watching all these different stories all my life.
It never occurred to me that they were anything but American stories until the Black Lives Matter people started pushing it down my throat that somehow these black stories were different than every other story.
And I thought, no, you know, we all got, all God's children got problems in this world.
So someone in Nashville, a lovely Christian lady, once said to me, why does Hollywood hate God if all the Hollywood people are Jewish?
Jews have of God.
And I said, yeah, those are not those Jews.
It's not that generation that built Hollywood.
It is a new generation that has been accepted.
And once you become accepted, then you're free.
Then all of your problems can't be blamed on the society anymore and you have to take responsibility for yourself.
That's when, that's when things start to turn.
That's when people become, that's when Jews stop being so grateful for being here and become leftist critics of our society and want to bring socialism and all the rest.
That's when you become, you suddenly have to say, oh, it's me.
My problems are now my problems.
It's almost like a function of existential fear of death that, you know, we all live and die alone in this world, and it's very terrifying.
And once you stop saying, oh, you know, all my problem, society is to blame for all my problems, you start thinking, no, it's me.
I've got a responsibility to do all these things.
And that's when you start to get films like The Godfather, where suddenly the draw of America is a fake promise, is Cut 27.
I'm looking for my father now, Kay.
He's been sick.
Very sick.
But you're not like him, Michael.
I thought you weren't going to become a man like your father.
That's what you told me.
My father's no different than any other powerful man.
Any man who's responsible for other people.
Like a senator or a president.
You know how naive you sound.
Senators and presidents don't have men killed.
Who's being naive, Kay?
And if you watch The Godfather, what happens is all the values get turned upside down when a famous scene where he becomes the godfather at a baptism of a child, but he's meanwhile murdering all his enemies, right?
The opposite of forgiving your enemies.
He's having them slaughtered.
One of the police shoots a gangster because the cop is the gangster.
All the values get turned upside down because America turns out to be a big lie.
And really the gangsters are the people.
Everybody's a gangster.
And you get this movie, Get Out, which I've talked about before.
Here's a black guy falls for a white girl, goes home to her upper-class white home, and realizes that the white people are all stealing black people's souls.
They're actually stealing their bodies and replacing their souls with white souls in their bodies.
And that's where the thing, get out, comes from, because one of them says to the guy, get out before this happens.
That movie comes after the election of Barack Obama, as Barack Obama's, you know, race peddling comes after he's elected president.
You think, well, you've been elected president, stop complaining and get on with governing the country.
But no, his ideas were wrong.
So he fell back on the old race peddling, you know, just decide, oh, my son looked like the boy who was killed.
And, you know, the police are stupid if they stop a black man and all this stuff.
All the stuff that Obama did, because his ideas didn't work.
Because once you're accepted, and nobody was ever more accepted in this country than Barack Obama, it's on you.
Once you're accepted, it's on you.
It is actually kind of a wonderful thing when outsiders pay tribute to the commonality that has accepted them, or that they're asking to accept them.
When Tennessee Williams writes about men and women, we learn something about men and women because he's kind of thinking his way into something different.
When Jews wrote about America, we learned something about America.
We saw it with a little bit of self-awareness that comes from having outsiders write your stories.
But once you become accepted, once you become part of the system, and America is very good at making people part of the system, you are responsible for yourself.
And that's when things start to turn.
And I think that that's the situation we're in now.
This country has really succeeded.
Once the Soviet Union fell, that was our moment of greatest triumph.
And the reason we're going through this horrible division now, this horrible tension and violence in our streets, all of this stuff, is because of our success.
Because now people are responsible for themselves.
And once you're in that situation, you're either going to keep on blaming the society you're in, or you're going to start to understand the world is an unfair and hard place.
Multiverse Myths and Gods00:17:16
And you have got to ask yourself the consequences of your actions and ask yourself constantly, what problem am I trying to solve?
What's it going to cost me?
And can I afford that cost?
So you're feeling blue, you're sitting in your car, it doesn't work because it needs a part and you can't get a date.
Just say rockauto.com.
When you say that, man, the girls come out of the woodwork and you can get parts for your car just by going online.
You don't have to pretend to drive your car to a make-believe shop.
You can just go online and use their terrific, easy-to-use catalog with great prices.
Rockauto.com is a family business.
They've been serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
Go to rockauto.com to shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers and also just to sound so incredibly cool, saying rockauto.com.
Their catalog, it's unique.
It's really easy to navigate.
You just look at it.
You'll see.
You can see all the parts available for your vehicle.
Choose the brand, specifications, and prices you prefer.
And the prices at rockauto.com are always reliably low and the same for professionals and do-it-yourselfers.
Go to rockauto.com right now and see all the parts available for your car or truck and watch how the women, I'm telling you, it's amazing.
Go ahead and write Clavin in there.
How did she hear about his box?
So they know I sent you, but say it the same way.
You say, Clavin, K-L-A-V-A-N.
You know, we are a fearless bunch here at the Daily Wire, and that is a good thing, that fearlessness permeates everything we do.
That means going where people don't go to pursue the truth, but it also means not being afraid to stand up for people too.
Take Gina Carano.
When Disney fired her from The Mandalorian because of wrongthink, we didn't just write a heated think piece about it.
We did something about it.
We signed her on to make our movie Terror on the Prairie.
Hollywood's Loss is our gain.
Set on the plains of Montana, this gritty thriller follows a family of pioneers as they defend themselves from a vicious gang of outlaws hell-bent on revenge.
The film premieres exclusively on the Daily Wire June 14th.
We're giving you a sneak peek next week when the trailer drops on June 1st.
And to top it all off, the official Terror on the Prairie movie poster is in our shop right now.
Buy it at dailywire.com slash shop.
From special guests on our podcast to unflinching films and documentaries that aren't afraid to confront the truth, everything we do at the Daily Wire is fearless.
And this is our invitation for you to come and be fearless with us.
Become a member at dailywire.com slash Gina.
So recently I was catching up on movies because I hadn't been to the movies in a long time.
And I saw this picture, everything, everywhere, all the time.
I think I made a bonus video about it and I also saw The Batman, both of which I kind of liked.
I like both movies, but both of them were, I thought, disturbingly pagan and disturbingly disturbed in some way by the current spiritual state of the country.
So I called the only person I know who knows anything about paganism and the ancient world, my son, Spencer Clavin, no relation.
If you're not listening to his show, these podcasts, seriously, The Young Heretics, you are really missing out.
It is a terrific podcast.
He is also an editor at the Claremont Review of Books.
We've never met, but I will bring on Spencer.
It's good to see you.
I have no idea how I got here.
I just woke up.
Somebody put a bag over my head, threw me into a van, and I woke up here.
So it's great to be here, I guess.
We do that with all of us.
Oh, that's nothing.
That's nothing special.
What is your title at Claremont Review?
Oh, it's a designated pagan enjoyer, actually.
No, no.
They'll get mad at me if I say that for real.
I'm the associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books and the features editor at the American Mind.
Even before you got there, the Claremont Review is the only magazine or journal I read from cover to cover every time I see it.
It's just terrific and it's gotten better since you've been there.
I hate to say that.
I know.
It's depressing to admit.
They are.
I also was a fan before I signed on.
And so I feel like I can say with actual sincerity and disinterest, it's one of the best magazines out there and people should read it.
It is terrific.
So you sent me, you and Josh sent me to everything everywhere all the time, which I liked.
You know, I didn't love it.
I mean, I'm kind of nuts about Michelle Yeo.
I think I told you I had lunch with her once and she just was so charming.
But it's a multiverse story.
And it doesn't really make sense.
And one of the reasons it doesn't make sense is because they're looking for a moral reason to stay in the version of the universe you're in.
And there is none.
Once you have a multiverse, it seems to me, everything, all the consequences, morality and reason for being anything disappear.
Am I alone?
Well, no, you're definitely not alone.
And it's in the title, right?
Everything everywhere all at once says exactly what the problem is, right?
That everything is always happening somewhere, which means that none of the consequences of, I mean, the whole point of human life is that it's linear.
And once you make a choice, the moral consequences of it start to unfold, right?
And this is also the inherent logic in storytelling, because storytelling exists, right, to reflect the moral universe, the human universe, back at us in artistic form.
And yeah, I feel a little bad for sending you to that movie because I did really like it.
I actually think there are good multiverse movies and bad multiverse movies, but I didn't warn you in advance of the way that I liked it.
Because what's kind of funny about that movie, and they don't really say this, but it works by admitting that the multiverse is an inherently nihilistic and depressing concept.
Because the villain is her daughter, who it's kind of a metaphor for her depression or for maybe her estrangement from her mother.
And she's just staring into this void of infinite possibility.
And she says things like, you know, each new statistical anomaly just proves that we're smaller and smaller pieces of, you know, what.
And that is actually an accurate description of what really taking the multiverse seriously as a proposition in physics and metaphysics means.
If you actually say, right, that every choice that we make, there's some other version of us where we might as well have made the other choice.
And also it's just an accident that we're here at all because statistically it happened that the universe producing machine coughed us up, right?
That's inherently a depressing and nihilistic concept.
And all the movies that do this well do it by secretly undermining the logic of the multiverse.
So usually what they do is they pick one version of you and they kind of make that the real version, right?
And this one, in the Michelle Yomo movie, Everything Everywhere, the metaphor is they say explicitly, you're like a puppet.
The other versions of you are like puppets.
And the real you or the primary you is kind of inhabiting your brain.
This happens in Doctor Strange and the multiverse of madness too, people who dreamwalk.
And so then there's actually, but that's cheating because that makes there be basically one character with a linear path whose choices matter.
And everyone else becomes kind of this automaton or this caricature.
But that's, again, that's undoing the multiverse in order to tell a good story, which you inherently have to do.
You know, you make a really good point about the connection between stories and the linear form.
In Christianity, you have this idea that the world begins, our world begins with let there be light and ends with revelation.
It ends with the apocalypse, which means that we're living in a story and you understand the world as a story.
And personally, I have found when you understand your own life as a story being written by God, it becomes much more meaningful and you kind of understand it better.
But what you're talking about, I mean, the thing that interests me about this is you're actually talking about a pre-Christian thought then, you know, and this is one of the things I keep saying.
People keep saying, oh, it's a post-Christian world.
And I think, you know, because Christianity is true, there is no post-Christian world.
There's only a pre-Christian world.
This is not the first time people have thought of a multiverse.
Right.
Well, this is, I think, such an important point that you're making about we don't actually, you know, Francis Fukuyama wrote this book, The End of History, that people kind of misinterpreted to mean like, oh, now everything's going to be fine.
But what he meant is that liberal democracy was the pinnacle of development, the pinnacle of government development.
And there was no going forward from that.
We were only going backward.
And that's Christianity.
Christianity is the apogee, I believe, of philosophy and theology in the West.
And there's only regression after that.
And yeah, like you say, people don't understand that we think of the past as this kind of superstitious, dumb time.
But in fact, ancient philosophers at the time of Paul were incredibly sophisticated.
It's not like they didn't think of materialism or scientism as like options that they could have chosen as what to believe.
And when Paul at the Areopagus in the book of Acts, when he stands up in front of the Greek philosophers, he's talking to the best and brightest minds, the Epicureans and the Stoics, who the author of Acts says, you know, they did nothing all day but sit around and talk about the next, the latest new idea, right?
Try to find some innovative thing to say and to think about.
And one of the philosophies that was available at that time was multiverse theory.
So it's not like Christianity just got this, you know, imagined, like, we have this linear path and that's the only way it could ever be.
They were choosing among a range of possible accounts of the world and saying this is the true one.
But Epicurus, who was obviously the founder of the school called Epicureanism, came of age, sort of reached the pinnacle of his career during what's called the Hellenistic era.
And this was an era a lot like ours.
It stretches from the end of Alexander the Great's empire.
So 323 BC, Alexander the Great dies, and he's amassed this enormous territorial empire, but it's based on his charisma.
So it falls apart into all these competing civilizations and states or sort of kingdoms.
And the other thing that's happening is that the tradition that Socrates kind of begins with Socrates in philosophy is splintering into all these rival schools.
And so both in the intellectual world and in the political world, you have this complete disarray of people who fundamentally disagree with one another about how we should live, about what the cosmos is, just like now, right?
Just like our political parties now can't agree on what a man and a woman is, just as we have all of these different ideas about life, the universe, and everything.
And basically, Epicurus comes into that universe, that landscape, and he proposes that the world is just atoms and void, that there's a big, infinite, empty space, and atoms bounce off of one another, and they create physical reactions, like the laws of physics.
And he says, well, there's nothing to stop you then from thinking, well, if this universe just randomly, this cosmos just randomly coughed up into being, then there's probably another one that coughed up into being where things are a little bit different somewhere else.
And this is many worlds theory or ancient multiverse theory.
And one of the most interesting things about it to me is that Lucretius, who's a sort of Roman interpreter of Epicurus, says, part of the point of this philosophy is to explain how the universe can exist without the intervention of the divine, without gods or a god planning things out.
Because that was the kind of Stoic view is that there was divine providence everywhere governing all things.
And Lucretius says, nature is free.
Divinities play no part.
And as our mutual friend Stephen Meyer has often pointed out, that's also kind of the thrust of modern multiverse theory in physics.
It's less an experimental discovery as a philosophy about what science is teaching, which kind of avoids having to say that God or some mind is involved in the creation of the universe.
These things, yeah, come back.
We've been here before, you know, and we're hitting up, as you say, against these dead ends that Christianity kind of already turned us away from.
And there's only one way forward.
The thing that gets me about this is atheists are basically always asserting that this will make you free.
This is going to set you free.
But the thing that I noticed about, I was watching the Batman.
Yeah, yeah.
And the Batman was really interesting to me because I made most of my, living most of my life as a hard-boiled mystery writer.
I grew up reading the hard-boiled detective stories, Raymond Chandler and Doshel Hammett and all this.
And essentially, the Batman is a hard-boiled detective story.
But the thing about the detective story famously is the detective story is about the individual in the corrupt world.
And in TV, you know, in Hollywood, where I have worked, they would say you have police stories, which are about the government will solve your problem.
And you have detective stories, which is about the individual is going to do it.
And they won't do detective stories anymore.
And I have gone into producers' offices and say, why won't you do a private eye story?
And they say, well, the world is too complicated now for one man to solve a problem.
We need the government to come in.
And that's why they have all these one Chicago PD and NYPD and all PD stories and no detective stories.
So now I'm watching The Batman, which is essentially a detective story, but instead of an individual, he's become like a god.
I mean, and when I talk about paganism coming back, once you have this multiverse, once you have no gods at all, you start to look for, I mean, this is what Nietzsche said, right?
It's going to be the big, strong man who determines what the new morality is.
And so I'm watching Batman, and essentially he's a detective, but at the end, you know, I don't want to get, well, it's ridiculous not to get things away because they all end the same, they all end the same way.
It's a big fight at the same time.
They end with these gigantic action scenes.
And then the Batman leads the people to safety.
And the people come crawling out of there.
And this is Gotham City, so it's New York.
And in New York, it used to be that the people didn't come crawling out of anywhere.
They would kill you if you bothered them.
But now the people are just these kind of little things who are following the great Batman to safety.
And that too is paganism.
These superheroes represent gods and everybody else in the story is nobody.
Well, this is another thing that's fascinated me for a long time.
Even before our woke revolution, before the MCU was a thing, before like, you know, X-Men, that movie came out and kind of made superhero movies so exciting.
You know, America has a tradition going back to the early 20th century of these comic book superheroes who are great.
And I'm not knocking them, but they are, they are pagan gods.
And one of the things that's true about Greek myth that maybe people don't always understand is that this is the role that they serve.
They had all these different versions.
There was fan fiction.
There were alternate timelines.
There were local versions of the story.
Theseus goes to the underworld in one version.
Helen doesn't go to Troy in another version.
All these sorts of different ways of telling these stories.
And all of them designed to kind of embody, like magnify human life and local concerns into these cosmic spheres.
And so when Superman says, as he used to say, that he represents truth, justice, and the American way, that's very recognizable to me.
When Theseus walks on stage in Oedipus at Colonus, he represents the Athenian way, right?
He's this kind of larger-than-life, semi-divine embodiment of our patriotism and our concerns and our hopes about the future.
And in that mode, as kind of mythologies that sort of embody our human life, they're great.
They're really powerful.
They're some of the best art out there.
And superhero comics are great when they work that way.
But famously, as claims about theology, as actual ideas, philosophical ideas about what the purpose of life is, they fall apart.
And this was Plato's point in the Euthyphro.
One of the earliest kind of, you know, or one of the first dialogues you read in school, right, is Socrates interrogating somebody about, well, what's the nature of justice?
If there are multiple all-powerful beings and they want different things at different times, do they want it because it's good?
Is it good because they want it?
And if so, is something good at one time and bad at another?
And again, it's kind of amazing to see as we become more and more kind of pre-Christian in our society.
You watch a movie like Eternals, which is kind of after Endgame, after they've wrapped up the big kind of climactic story in the MCU, they move on into this larger cosmic battle, where as you say, everybody else kind of shrinks to the level of ants.
And now we're talking about these fantastically long-lived beings that fight planetary battles over and over again.
And it turns out that there are multiple cosmic beings running multiple planets.
The Divide Within00:14:43
And when the eternals break in favor of one, they achieve this rousing victory on Earth that we're supposed to be so excited about.
But it seems doomed to cause the heat death of the universe.
And then at the end, the heroine says something like, I'm worried, I don't know if I did the right thing.
And it's like, well, well, you might wonder, you know, because this is the problem with paganism.
When you have multiple gods, there's really no way of saying right, true, or just, you know?
And yeah, these are very old problems, just coming right back.
And it really does come back to this idea of the proper use of narrative, the proper idea of a story.
If my life is a story, then your life is a story.
And whether you're a homemaker or a president or the guy who sweeps the streets, you are journeying somewhere that matters.
It matters what is happening to you.
But when God starts to fade, when you stop looking at yourself as a, I mean, because if there's a story, there's also an author and you're not it.
You know, I mean, like there's somebody writing that story.
But when God starts to fade, you start to have this misuse of narrative, this kind of overwhelming idea like Freud.
I mean, Freud is this perfect example where you can't even grow up to be straight or gay without there being a story that goes into it.
You're not just that thing.
But in fact, when you look at the birds and the bees, you know, they don't have a story, really.
You know, they're not people.
So they just are what they are.
And we are, to some degree, the characters that we are.
I mean, obviously the things that happen to you in life affect you, but you don't need a story.
I don't need a story to be me.
I was me when I was born.
And that thing, that journey that you take, it seems to me it's important to everybody.
And once you lose that idea, you have lost that central, the thing I call the great speculation that your inner life is as important to you as my inner life is to me, and they are both equally important to God.
That is this great speculation that means that means I have to treat you in a certain way and I have to think of your story as mattering and what I do in it mattering.
It's interesting that guy, what's his name?
David Brooks.
Is he the New York Times columnist?
He wrote something today saying, you know, life is not about the ideas in our head.
It's about the fact that we respect the inner life of other people.
And I thought, well, that is an idea that didn't come out of nowhere.
That is an idea in our head.
So here's what I want to know.
Is this idea of, I mean, what is new and what is old here?
I mean, is there, I have heard people say, I even read a book once called The Invention of the Individual.
If you go back into Athens, say, I mean, they thought of everything, but did they, in fact, think of the individual?
Did they, I mean, Plato famously writes this thing, The Republic, where he basically erases individuality in order to form this perfect government.
I mean, did they, was this something they were struggling with or did they even care?
So it's interesting, you know, over on Locals, which is the kind of VIP community of the Young Heretics show, I have been translating and commenting on the book of Romans, Paul's letter to the Romans, which is really his masterpiece, I think.
And he is writing it to the young fledgling church in Rome, which is the commercial and political center of the world, essentially, right?
We're in the imperial period now.
And these converts to Christianity, some of them were Jewish, so they were monotheists, and some of them were pagan.
And he's trying to understand how these people can all be part of the body of Christ, you know, in forming one philosophy, one theology under one God.
And one of the things that makes it a masterpiece is that he begins to examine his own upbringing as a very faithful Jewish observer of the law, a Pharisee, right?
I mean, this is Paul's story, as he persecuted the Christians, he converted.
And he's thinking about the facts that, as he sort of puts it, the law was not itself sin, but it was the occasion for sin because it taught him right from wrong.
And in doing so, taught him that he had something inside himself he didn't know before that was always pushing toward evil.
And only once he could make that realization, only once he understood how deep that evil went, how completely it had taken over the human soul, only then could he basically give his life over to Christ.
Could he give up the search for his own righteousness and ask God to forgive him?
And in the course of these reflections, he says famously, I do that which I do not want to do, and that which I want to do, I do not do.
Which everybody who has ever tried to take up a gym routine knows what that feels like, right?
But of course, every human knows what that feels like.
And again, these things, they sound now to us like commonplace observations, but only because they were so revolutionary that they remade the world.
And now we all think them.
Yeah, I do.
I have this.
I have these two parts inside me.
And Plato, you know, acknowledged, the Greeks acknowledged some of this.
The idea that you might want one thing and kind of have another part inside of you that does something else.
But the notion that there is a you that was formed uniquely by God, I think you need the image of God from Genesis to kind of make that idea complete.
The notion that although I have failed to, you know, to do what I'm called to do, nevertheless, there is something I was supposed to do.
That in other words, the whole idea of sin, missing the mark, falling short, requires there to be a consciousness, a final authoritative consciousness that holds in his mind the you that even though he does not currently exist, is meant to be, right?
The you that is in Christ, the perfected you.
And that's the story.
Either that is the real story that we're all moving toward, trying to tell, trying to understand, or, right, it's just our own story that we generate from our own.
And that's kind of, to take it back to the multiverse, that's kind of the multiverse versus not multiverse question, right?
Is it just one among a number of options that we have chosen for ourselves?
Or is there a true story that we are haltingly trying to discern as images of God?
Ha!
You know, it only just now occurred to me for the first time as you were talking that that idea in Romans of the law and how the law creates in you a sense of your own dividedness is a reiteration and kind of an answer to and solution of the fall of man, this idea that you're not supposed to eat the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And you always read that.
I think most Americans certainly read it and think, well, why shouldn't we know?
Shouldn't we know the difference between good and evil?
But basically, what God is saying to you is, no, now you are divided from the paradise I gave you, the paradise in which everything is good.
And so now you have to deal with this divided self.
And what Paul is saying is now we are being reunited in Christ to bring ourselves together.
It's always fascinating to me.
I mean, the New Testament almost always reiterates the old and sort of talks about, you know, it kind of solves a lot of the problems that the Old Testament poses.
But it had never occurred to me before that basically he is saying this is the answer to the fall.
And that is the story.
That is the story.
That story, that journey from the fall and the kind of, it's very, it's repetitive, like the way when you have a childhood trauma, you keep repeating it in your mind.
We keep repeating this fall of this kind of attempt to take over morality from God and to determine for ourselves what morality is from God.
And the limiting factor, the limiting factor of a moral universe is the opposite of the multiverse.
It is the thing that says, you know, this is the playground you're in, and there is no other one.
There is no multiverse where the Nazis were great guys.
Yeah, so this reminds me of one of the other things that this time around, you know, translating Romans has made me able to kind of like, you know, think about it more deeply.
And it's just, you could, it is one of the great works.
If it stood alone as like a work of Greek philosophy, it would say, oh, yes, one of the great works of the West.
But because it's a book of the Bible, we think, oh, it's, yeah, sure, it's Romans.
But actually, it is, it's in itself a masterful treatise on theology and philosophy.
And one of the things that I had never quite understood is this idea that in Adam's fall, we sinneth all, right?
And it's this thing, like, I wasn't there, man.
Like, I did not eat that apple, bro.
Like, and whatever fruit it was, I didn't eat it.
And so that is one of the hardest parts of what they call theodicy to me, the idea that God is just, but there is sin, right?
It's like we all suffer so terribly, and some of us suffer more terribly than others in this world, in this life.
And, you know, those people are, sometimes it seems like, you know, in the doctrine of the fall, those people are being held hostage to this mistake that was made a million years ago.
It's like being held hostage for the mistake of slavery because you're a white American, you know.
But I finally got it when I saw that Paul calls Adam the tupos, which in Greek is like where we get the idea of the archetype.
He's the sort of stand-in for all of us.
And I suddenly realized that when I do this reasoning, what I'm implicitly saying is if I had been there, I wouldn't have eaten the apple, right?
If I had been in the garden, I wouldn't have chosen.
And Paul, by calling Adam the archetype of man, is saying there is no counterfactual.
That's what happened.
And that's who Adam was.
And that's what man is, that there was essentially, you know, he had a free choice, but everybody in his position would have made the same choice.
And so you essentially are implicated in that, in this tragic history.
And there's no way out except for forward.
Just like we can't, you know, imagine our way back into the days of slavery and say, oh, we would have been so much nicer then.
We would have been the good guys.
We would have been the abolitionists.
We can't imagine ourselves back into Germany before the Holocaust and say, oh, we're so enlightened, we would have been better.
We can't imagine ourselves back into the ancient world and say, like, oh, we wouldn't have done all that nasty genocide.
Humanity goes through its story because each chapter comes after the last.
And we set ourselves up in this place of judgment because we are the product of all of the story that's gone before us.
And we do this with history and we do it with theology too.
And in fact, there is no counterfactual.
There's just the story that we are in.
And it was God had a choice to have us and to die on the cross or to not have us and not have to die on the cross.
And he decided it was worth it.
And so it's worth it for us too.
This is, you know, it's amazing.
This does to bring this back, because we're kind of running out of time, but to bring this back to the situation that we're in now in terms of our culture and in terms of the arts, which I feel are in a real slump.
I mean, the worst I've seen in my entire life where I feel like nobody's quite got the voice that they're looking for.
And it seems to me what they're looking for is the idea of the good man.
When the last time that our arts flourished was this golden age of TV that came out, and all the stories were about bad men.
But the fact is there were men.
When you go back and look at the opening of Breaking Bad, it's all about, you know, oh, sometimes his wife deigns to give him a hand job and, you know, he's just, he's beaten up by his boss at work and he's a henpeck, nobody, and nobody cares what he thinks.
And by becoming a gangster, he becomes a man.
I am the one who knocks.
I'm the guy who comes to your door.
I'm the guy you're afraid of.
And that's the only way we've been able to imagine manhood since really the 60s.
And so now we've come to the end of that rope.
And the question is, what is a good man?
And the only answer, the only answer we have, and really in some ways, the only answer that has ever been, because when we look at good men, again, looking at policemen, firemen, doctors, all the things that they make TV shows about, those are people who are standing up against evil, but they're not good.
You know, I mean, they are good men, obviously.
They're wonderful people and all that.
That's not the point.
But they're actually stopping evil.
If there's no disease, you don't need that guy.
If there's no crime, you don't need the cop.
If there's no fires, you don't need the fireman.
And the question is, what happens when all that goes away?
What happens when you are trying to find that edenic self who is in paradise?
Then what?
Then what are you creating?
And then you come to this idea of creation, which is something that men don't do alone, actually.
It's something that they do with women.
And it becomes, and now you have the question of the relationship between the sexes, which has been so disrupted in our life that we don't have a model.
We don't even have a model for what the creative life looks like if you don't happen to be an artist.
You know, what does the creative life look like?
And it's just a remarkable moment when we have to ask ourselves these really basic questions again, and nobody is asking them in terms of our Christian heritage.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, some of the great thought on manliness and manhood is kind of about this.
And actually, I think great thought on womanhood as well.
You know, there is such a thing as a man and a woman.
They're different from each other.
They have these attributes.
But many of the attributes, if not all of them, are morally neutral.
So like if you say aggression is one of the attributes of men, they tend to be more aggressive.
Or nurturing is one of the attributes of women.
They tend to be more nurturing.
You can direct and channel those attributes in morally virtuous and morally vicious ways.
You can be aggressive.
You can be a bully.
You can be a jerk.
You can do what Walter White does, right, and become a drug dealer.
And we admire the manliness of that, even though we see that it's morally vicious, right?
I think this is Machiavelli's idea of virtu, which is this kind of morally neutral but obviously admirable quality.
And then you point it in a morally virtuous direction and it becomes one of the driving forces of the universe, right?
It becomes civilization building and it becomes family building.
And similarly, women, you know, they're nurturing, they make these beautiful homes for their children, they raise, they shape souls, but they also smother people.
You know, they also overdo it.
And both of those things are inherent in the feminine quality of being nurturing.
And the question you're asking, right, is how do you find positive versions of those qualities that don't depend on living in a broken world, but actually are positive visions.
You know, this is what manhood looks like, even if nobody is beating down your door.
I mean, you know.
I have to stop you here.
I mean, because I think it's a great point where we're actually destroyed them out.
Must Plunge You Next00:01:49
Listen, check out, if you have not checked out Young Heretics podcast, Spencer Claven's podcast.
There's no relation to me, but we have the same name.
I think he spells it.
You spell it with no ease.
I just spell with no vowels at all.
Just pulls it.
But young heretics, and if you're not getting the Claremont Review book, subscribe.
You will love it.
Spence, it's great talking to you, and I thank you and I appreciate it.
I will be there soon.
We're out of time, and so I must plunge you.
Now I'm plunging you into a doubly clavinless weekend because you're without either clavin.
But if you make it through, and the chances are almost nil, but if you make it through, we will be back next Friday with the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm Andrew Klavan.
Hey, if you enjoyed this episode and want to spread the word, give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe too.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, basically wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, remember to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thank you for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Lisa Bacon, executive producer Jeremy Boring, our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, production manager Pavel Wadowski, editor and associate producer Danny D'Amico.
Our audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Hair and makeup is done by Cherokee Hart.
Our production coordinator is McKenna Waters.
And our production assistant is Jacob Falash.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2022.
John Bickley here, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief.
Wake up every morning with our show, Morningwire, where we bring you all the news that you need to know in 15 minutes or less.