The Showbizzing of America dissects how the January 6 hearings became a Democratic spectacle—packed with AOC’s satirical songs and $6B inflation ignored—to distract from economic collapse, while Fox News’ refusal to air them exposed media’s partisan divide. Andrew Clavin frames it as "showbizzing" politics, where narratives like McConaughey’s gun-control activism overshadow reality, mirroring Hollywood’s financial pragmatism over woke ideology, as seen in Top Gun: Maverick’s reinstated Taiwan patches amid U.S.-China tensions. Former WSJ editor Gerard Baker argues media bias—from loaded terms like "gender-affirming care" to Ivy League-driven agendas—fueled Trump’s rise and predicts midterm losses for Democrats due to voter backlash against progressive extremes, though Trump’s shadow may cap GOP gains. Meanwhile, Andrew Klavan grapples with God’s role in suffering post-Uvalde, rejecting easy justifications while insisting faith endures beyond evil’s reach. [Automatically generated summary]
The House Select Committee investigating January 6, which includes a bipartisan group of Democrats and Democrats pretending to be Republicans, has begun a series of hearings, which will be produced by former ABC News president James Goldston.
According to congressional insiders, the TV veteran was brought on by the committee to make the hearings appear to be, quote, a blockbuster investigative special that no one watches instead of a mere cynical political poy that no one watches and then makes fun of afterward, unquote.
The spectacularly produced committee hearings will be given full-time coverage by every network except Fox News, continuing a tradition that includes the Russian collusion hoax, the good people on both sides lie, the slander against Brett Kavanaugh, the crap about the Covington Catholic boys, the mostly peaceful lie about the George Floyd riots, the deep states attempt to bury the Hunter-Biden scandal, and other falsehoods given full-time coverage by the networks and not by Fox.
CNN's Brian Stelter, who once missed a deadline during the pandemic in order to go to bed early and have a good cry, thus answering Matt Walsh's question, what is a woman, says he's furious with Fox News for not giving live coverage to this important attempt to distract people from the Democrats' incompetence and corruption.
In a statement given to his dolly, Princess Sparkle, Ms. Stelter said, quote, Fox News continues to spread misinformation, by which I mean information we miss.
Their so-called journalists repeatedly refuse to fulfill their responsibility to create a narrative that will guide the people to right action and instead waste time talking about interesting things that happen and issues that concern voters.
If Fox News won't come down off its high horse and descend to our shabby and dishonest standards, I will hold my breath until I turn blue, then go to bed and cry sad tears as I share my troubles with Burpee, the rubber-nosed teddy bear who makes comforting burping noises when I squeeze his face.
Whereas when I do that to Jim Acosta, he just gets annoyed.
Unquote.
During an interview with committee member and proven liar Adam Schiff, the congressman and proven liar was asked, why should Americans watch Democrats make a big deal about the January 6 disturbance when those same Democrats celebrated and supported the George Floyd riots that left at least 25 people dead and touched off a crime wave that saw murders of black Americans rise by over 40%?
Congress liar Schiff replied, quote, the two situations are completely different.
With the death of George Floyd, America lost one of its finest violent drug addicts, so it was important for us to encourage the lawless rampages that utterly destroyed neighborhoods we don't give a damn about.
But the January 6th kerfuffle frightened Congresspeople, who may be total wastes of space and money, but happen to be ourselves and are therefore very important to us.
Wait, did I say that out loud?
Unquote.
With its glitzy Hollywood production values, the J6 hearings include some showbiz-style innovations, like musical numbers, including the large opening extravaganza with Alexandria Ecazio-Cortez joining a chorus line of other shapely dumbbells to perform a high-kicking dance while singing the lyrics, Inflation is wild, crime is erupting, we're teaching kids to dress and drag, which is morally corrupting.
Our policies suck, our philosophies twaddle, your baby is starving because you can't find a bottle.
Our leader has dementia, his son is on a bender, we totally screwed up the Afghanistan surrender, our borders have vanished, the pandemic we can't fix, so let's hold a hearing about January 6th.
The hearings then began by discussing events that happened a year and a half ago at such length that gasoline prices rose 40 cents a gallon before the first recess, during which 72 people were shot in Chicago.
Sensing the public would have been losing interest if they'd been paying any attention at all, the committee hurried the rest of the day's session along so that only 10,000 illegal immigrants crossed the border during the second half.
Nonetheless, Democrats continue to insist they have a sacred duty to get to the bottom of the January 6th event, just as they've gotten to the bottom of other things, like the opinion polls, the human capacity for moral degradation, and the barrel.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hip-sy-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, all right, all right.
The vast right-wing conspiracy known as Clavinon continues.
We're going to talk about Matthew McConaughey, charming conservatives out of their Second Amendment rights.
A little bit about this stupid J6 hearing.
And we'll talk about the real story behind Top Gun 2 Maverick, which I finally got to see.
This is a good time to subscribe to the Daily Wire because we need your support.
Data Brokers and Online Privacy00:03:25
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David Barrett says, end the argument about weak women in sword fighting by getting them to wear chainmail armor and then asking them to stand up.
All right, stop picking on the women.
You know, see, this is what's going to happen.
Because of that, some woman with a sword is going to attack me and kill me.
But you want to get this guy instead.
So you probably know this.
There are these guys called data brokers.
They're the middlemen collecting and selling digital footprints, the digital footprints that you leave online.
And they can stitch together detailed profiles.
They include your browsing history, online searches, location data, and then they sell your profile off to a company who delivers you a targeted ad.
Well, you think, okay, I don't mind a targeted ad, but you might be surprised to learn that these same data brokers are also selling your information to the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS.
And I know how much you love those guys.
I don't want the tax man showing up at my door because of some search I did on my phone.
So to mask my digital footprints, I protect myself with ExpressVPN.
One of the easiest ways for brokers to aggregate data and tie it back to you is through your device's unique IP address, which also reveals information about your location.
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Visit expressvpn.com slash clavin right now and get three extra months free through my special link.
To learn more, you're saying to yourself, okay, I know how to spell express, but how do you spell clavin?
It is K-L-A.
A-N.
So if you're wondering why I don't, I'm not going to give full coverage to the January 6 hearings that have started in the House in prime time, produced by a former TV guy.
It's for the same reason I didn't give full coverage to the Ukraine phone call impeachment and could only be dragged reluctantly into giving full coverage to the Brett Kavanaugh sex hearings because I don't see why just because these clowns own the news media and the news media is utterly corrupt, I don't see why the Democrats should be allowed to set the topic of conversation by what essentially is pure showbiz.
Need to Restore Truth00:15:22
You know, when they speak under cover of a non-anonymity, even the committee members admit what's going on.
They told the Washington Post, a committee lawmaker, spoke on the condition of anonymity so he could speak candidly.
And this is what he said to the Washington Post.
He said that even some of their Democratic constituents have lost interest in the committee's work because of more pressing issues like inflation and coronavirus pandemic.
So it's key to tell the best story possible, he said, especially with the report that's ultimately issued by the committee so that it actually breaks through.
They're trying to distract you from the fact that they can't do anything right.
So they're talking about the January 6th committee.
And, you know, the pure dishonesty of this thing was brought home by the fact that when the Republicans, Kevin McCarthy, appointed his Republicans to be on the committee, which is his basically prerogative, Nancy Pelosi, and I do believe this was the first time this had ever happened.
If not, it's extremely rare, but I think it was unprecedented.
Nancy Pelosi said, no, you can't put them on because they don't agree with the narrative.
So we don't want anybody getting in the way of the narrative.
And who they put on, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, have both gone nuts about Trump.
And Kinzinger, I think, is resigned.
He's not resigned.
He's not running again.
And then on the Democrat side, they had Adam Schiff, Adam Schiff, who was basically the reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy, except without the actual communists.
At least McCarthy had actual communists.
He lied repeatedly during the Russian collusion hoax.
There's simply no reason.
And this, remember, I thought J6 was a disgrace.
I thought it was, I thought Trump acted badly.
I think he, as I said at the time, he screwed the pooch.
He put a stain on his presidency.
We get it.
We get it.
But this is basically like the Reichstag fire where some random socialists set fire to the Reichstag and Hitler used that to seize dictatorial powers.
These guys have drummed this thing into the ground.
Same guys who encouraged the George Floyd riots.
But, but, so to me, it's all showbiz.
It's all showbiz.
But in the interest of fairness, I will let someone who disagrees with me have a word.
This is your favorite congresswoman, Alexandria Occasional Cortex.
This is Cut 32.
People think that just because this man was on reality TV, that this wasn't real, that this is entertainment.
This is not entertainment.
It's real, effing life.
It's effing life, effing real life.
So just to be fair to Alexandria, because we want to date her, let's at least listen to a little bit of Liz Cheney's opening statement at the J6 hearings.
The Inquisition want to show the Inquisition.
Here we go.
We know you're wishing that we'd go away.
But the Inquisition's here and it's here to stay.
She's right.
That was more like real life than a show.
You know, the underlying issue here is the showbizzing of everything, the turning of everything into narrative, into imaginary tales that are supposed to take over your imagination and make you forget the real things that are happening.
I mean, you will notice that the Democrats are constantly saying inflation skyrockets.
Crime is skyrocketing.
People are pouring across the border.
All of this stuff is going wrong.
And they keep saying, well, it's our messaging.
It's our messaging, right?
I talk a lot about the information crisis, which is the fact that the internet has swamped us with information from everybody.
There's no way to tell who's lying, who's telling the truth.
You have to go through it yourself.
It takes twice as much time, five times as much time as it used to take just to put this show together, just to make sure I'm giving you the facts and not made-up stuff.
And the establishment gatekeepers, left-wingers, all of them left-wingers, have panicked because now you're getting information that they don't want you to have, where they were dedicated to feeding us narratives.
So now they have just completely corrupted every business, Hollywood, academia, the news media, to try and take back control of the narrative, to try and force people to hear only what they want to hear.
And it always takes the same shape.
First, they ask for compassion for a theoretically oppressed group.
Then they link that compassion to a series of policies meant to expand their power.
And then if you don't like the policies, they tell you you don't have compassion.
You're bigoted or you're phobic because you oppose their policies.
So the truth is, the truth is, you know, it's all narrative now.
It's all narrative because they think they can sell everything through narrative techniques.
And they think they destroy our cities with crime.
They destroy our lives with inflation.
They destroy our borders, swarms of illegal.
And they keep saying the problem is messaging, which means they have to use their considerable power, and it really is considerable power, to keep anyone else from getting another message out.
And that's why they wanted to form that, remember that disinformation committee, Homeland Security, was going to decide for us what was and what wasn't disinformation.
And then when people objected and said this is 1984, they said, oh, it's the message.
We didn't get the message outright.
We didn't announce it right.
So it's true, their announcement was a little bit clumsy.
Here's their announcement about forming the disinformation committee.
This is cut 30.
The Inquisition wants to show the Inquisition.
Here we go.
We know you're wishing that we'd go away.
But the Inquisition's here and it's here to stay.
I'm only half kidding about the Inquisition because what has happened here, and I've said this before, I think it was my son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, who made this point first, that this is a lot like the invention of the internet is a lot like the invention of the printing press, which fueled the Reformation, right?
It fueled the breaking away from the Catholic Church, which led to hundreds of years of religious wars and persecutions, people being set on fire by both sides, Protestants and Catholics.
What they were fighting over, what were they fighting over?
They were fighting over the human imagination.
They were trying to decide who was going to colonize the human imagination.
Was it going to be Catholics?
Was it going to be Protestants, all the various sects of Protestants?
And that battle is going on today, but in a much, much bigger and different way, because now we have science and now we have the internet that shows us the entire world.
And so people who are ambitious think that they can now change not only what people think, they can change people's natures, they can change the cosmos, they can change the weather, they can eliminate bad genes, they can spread wealth where they think it should go.
All this stuff you hear from Davos is part of this internet crisis, this informational crisis that makes people feel that they can change not just the world, not just change the world, but change the very nature of the world.
And as Thomas Sowell, one of the great thinkers of our time, has repeatedly pointed out, the things that they imagine doing, it doesn't matter whether they work or not, as long as they make the people who imagine these things feel good about themselves, because they are living in their imaginations too.
Here's the thing about the show business of America is it is bad.
It's unhealthy for all of us.
whole secret to a full and healthy life, the whole secret to a full and healthy nation is not not having an imagination, not having new ideas, not having visions.
It's aligning those visions, your imagination, with reality, collaborating with creation so that you don't confuse what you want to be true with what is true.
You don't confuse your desire for justice with cosmic justice, with the idea that the world can somehow be made just.
Your plans have to change when there are real results and your idea that you're somehow morally superior and should be imposing your ideas on others has to be put away because it was never ever true.
That's why you have to take extra care when talking with people who have big ideas but don't live in a world where they feel like they suffer the consequences.
Billionaires who don't suffer the consequences for their ideas, guys like George Soros, academics who can sit around and say anything they want to their students and never have their ideas tested.
And artists.
Remember, the whole thing about being an artist is you are given the talent to invite other people into your imagination.
And if you're good, you can do that very well, but you have to hope that that imagination is an honest imagination that is really giving you a true vision of the world formed in collaboration with reality.
That's not happening.
And I want to show you the effects of that because they were all over the place this week, starting with Matthew McConaughey.
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And I know you're asking, how do you spell AK-67?
Because that's my rap name.
aka 67.
So Matthew McConaughey, this is not an attack on Matthew McConaughey, but he makes a surprise visit at the White House press room because he was born and a little bit raised in Uvalde, Texas.
where the terrible shootings took place.
And these shootings have become a big, this scandal about the police not going in to save these kids is a big scandal.
We'll have to talk about that another day because this, I think, is something we should really talk about.
So I'm not attacking Matthew McConaughey.
He is welcome to have opinions about politics.
He is welcome to have heartfelt opinions about his hometown.
He's welcome to have any damned opinions he wants, right?
He's an individual.
Why shouldn't he say anything?
The problem is not Matthew McConaughey talking.
The problem is not any of these celebrities talking.
It's us listening.
It is us conferring upon them more power than they ought to have because it's very difficult not to.
That's their superpower.
Their superpower is inviting, is colonizing our imaginations.
It's my superpower.
When I write a book, I'm colonizing a reader's imagination.
Hopefully I'm doing it honestly.
Hopefully I'm doing it in some kind of collaboration with reality.
So I'm not poisoning your mind.
But when a guy starts talking about politics, he still is talking with the power of his movie stardom.
And he's not just a movie star.
He's a cool dude.
He has a cool aspect.
We make fun of kind of how hippie is.
They are all right, all right, all right.
But still, he's a cool dude.
You want to know him.
You want to like him.
And he comes on and this is what he says about what we're going to do.
And this is the other thing.
He has, because he's from Texas, he has a kind of middle American aspect to him that, and some kind of libertarian leanings, so he can appeal to the right, even when he's trying to take away your gun rights, which should not be infringed on even a little bit.
Here is what he says.
Listen carefully.
We need to invest in mental health care.
We need safer schools.
We need to restrain sensationalized media coverage.
We need to restore our family values.
We need to restore our American values.
And we need responsible gun ownership, responsible gun ownership.
We need background checks.
We need to raise the minimum age to purchase an AR-15 rifle to 21.
We need a waiting period for those rifles.
We need red flag laws and consequences for those who abuse them.
These are reasonable, practical, tactical regulations to our nation, states, communities, schools, and homes.
Responsible gun owners are fed up with the Second Amendment being abused and hijacked by some deranged individuals.
So I'm in my car and I'm listening to Fox News.
I'm listening to the Fox News, the five, right?
And I want to mention them specifically because I happen to really like them.
They give really good commentary.
Greg Gutfeld, love the guy.
He's one of my favorites on Fox.
Dana Prino, one of the nicest human beings I've ever met in my life.
And they are just in love with them.
And this is what we need.
This is the middle-of-the-road voice who can talk to both sides.
This is the person, Jordan Peterson, a very, very smart guy.
He tweets, you know, McConaughey, he nails it.
Wouldn't you like to see a major politician talk like this?
I don't want to pick on Jordan because Jordan's Canadian.
What does he know about guns, right?
So he's not from around here.
And I've talked about why we have guns in this country and why it's specific to this country and why it has to do with our unique federal system.
This is the final defense of our federal system.
It's one we never want to use.
It's one we hope we never use, but it's a deterrent to know that we can use it if we had to, if the federal government essentially attacked us and tried to take our state's rights away.
This is the last defense.
That's what it was intended for.
I know it sounds savage, but that's what they are there for.
And when we look at the federal government today, obvious that nothing has changed in terms of that.
Let's listen carefully to what McConaughey said.
We need to invest in mental health care.
Absolutely.
But we have no idea what to do with mental health care.
Our mental health care is terrible.
We need to restrain people.
We need to put people who are dangerous or going to live in the street.
We need to take people off the street.
Is anyone going to do that?
Is anyone on the left going to take people off the street?
Is anyone on the left going to say, yes, we're just going to sweep these people up and put them in some kind of housing?
I don't see any sign of it.
It's in blue cities where these people are living on the streets so much.
We need safer schools.
Is any Democrat going to support that?
Is any Democrat going to support arming people or having more guards?
We need to restrain sensationalized media coverage.
You can't.
The First Amendment protects them.
There's nothing anybody in government can do about this.
We need to restore our family values.
Now think about that for a minute.
All right.
Think about our family values.
They're bringing drag queens to dance for children.
They're having little boys in drag dancing for grown men.
And the left-wing media is saying, isn't that cute?
I mean, if it was a little girl dancing for grown men, they would see exactly the wickedness that they are supporting.
So when he says that, all the right goes, yeah, we need family values.
But the left is in power.
And the left is in power.
And this issue is a leftist issue.
This wouldn't be an issue because none of these rules are going to stop any school shootings.
So it doesn't matter.
But this is not what we would be dealing with.
Family Values Debate00:07:40
So he's saying these things, but do they have any real resonance at all?
And again, that's not attacking McConaughey.
It's just saying the fact that he's a movie star makes you think like that he said something new.
We know these things.
When he says you meet American values, they hate America.
The left hates America.
They talk racism is in our DNA.
The New York Times puts out this 1619 project and nobody says, hey, you can't give a Pulitzer Prize.
So that is full of lies.
It's a distortion.
Nobody says it except on the right.
So who is he talking to, right?
They knelt in Congress.
Democrats knelt down to pay tribute to this drug-infested guy, George Floyd, while people were burning down American cities.
And he's talking about American values.
Again, not an attack on him, but who's he talking to?
Who is he talking to?
The only thing, you know, a gunman, a guy with a gun, was caught trying, you know, planning to kill Justice Kavanaugh, I assume, over a Roe v. Wade decision, which hasn't even been released yet.
They didn't even put it on the front page in the New York Times.
I'm not sure they covered it in the New York Times at all.
Most of the left-wing media hardly covered it.
It's a Supreme Court justice who's had people protesting outside his house while the media cheered him on.
I mean, this is what basically, you know, you want to talk about people calling for violence against our justices?
Here's a lunatic calling for justice.
Here's this left-wing assassin basically threatening Brett Kavanaugh's Cut 17.
I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.
You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.
Okay, maybe that was Chuck Schumer and not the actual assassin.
But, you know, come on, who are you talking to when you're saying these things?
So January 6th is a big deal.
We have to have days and days and days and days of primetime hearing covered by everybody except Fox News, who's holding out to be a little bit honest.
But when it's a left-wing gunman, nothing, nothing.
So he's out to kill a Supreme Court justice, absolutely nothing.
Even Nancy Pelosi won't call a vote on a bill they've already got to give extra protection and security to our Supreme Court justices.
Not going to do it.
So no matter what Matthew McConaughey is saying, the only actionable thing he said is gun control.
And while, you know, again, he has the right to his opinion, but this is what he said.
You know, he knows what he's doing.
He knows his power.
He knows what he can convince people of.
So the only really actionable thing he said is let's get rid of AR-15s and so on.
Back in 2018, he was at a march, an anti-gun march, and this is what he said, cut three.
Now, again, as stated in the March for our Lives Mission statement, how do we do this?
They've got three hallmarks here.
One, let's ban the assault weapons for civilians.
And to my friends out there that are responsible.
Owners of these recreational or these assault weapons that they use for recreation, please, man.
Let us take one for the team here and set it down.
Number two, let's restrict the capacity on the magazines.
I mean, look here.
In the state of Texas, we have a three-shell limit to hunt migratory birds.
Do the math.
You get my point.
The third one.
Let's better regulate the background checks that are already in place.
You clone with the loopholes that exist in those background checks.
Now, those are the three main stipulations.
And for those three, I can say it.
You can say it with me.
All right, I'll ride.
So I didn't hear anything about American values there, about family values there, about mental health care there, which makes me feel that he's using his celebrity, his power as an actor to throw out these SOPs to the right, and the right is falling for it.
While really what he's saying is take away the AR-15s.
And when he says that, he says, oh, that you have these things for recreational purposes.
Just lay them down, lay them down.
They're not for recreational purposes.
That's not why we have gun rights.
You may use them for recreational purposes, but that's not what we're fighting for.
We're not fighting for the recreation of these weapons.
We are fighting for the essential freedom of states' rights of keeping the federal system in place from a federal government that has been taking it away for years.
They've been taking it away by saying, oh, it's interstate trade.
You know, you grow a vegetable in your backyard.
That's interstate trade.
We can regulate that.
They do it all the time.
They've done it with the EPA.
Oh, that, you know, your bathtub, well, that's a waterway.
That's a public, we've decreed that's a public waterway.
We can regulate your bathtub.
They do it all the time.
They do it by giving money to the states.
Now the states have to meet certain requirements to get the money they get from the federal government instead of just saying, well, wait, how about we tax people less so the federal government has less money and the states can raise their own taxes and then therefore pay for what they want to pay for without giving away their rights and their essential powers.
The federal government has been encroaching on states' rights for at least 50, 60 years.
You know, now this push every time there's a shooting to get rid of guns, not a shooting in Chicago, mind you, not a shooting in Chicago, just a shooting where people, they think they can make people panicked enough and emotional enough to give this up and give up the federal system.
So it's not about that.
So he's not being straight when he says lay down these automatic weapons you're using for recreation, and really a semi-automatic, but still, you know, he's not being straight about that.
And people are just falling for it because he's who he is.
So it's not him talking.
He has the right to say what he wants.
He has the right to put his case any way he wants.
It's us listening and being sucked into this imaginary movie star world where this is a good guy who's going to appeal to us all.
He's not appealing to us all.
He's appealing for one thing, which is an end to the Second Amendment.
And, you know, like all of these guys, and I've said this before, I used to live next to a big movie star who was a big anti-gun advocate.
More guns went in and out of that house as her security people showed up and left.
Every single day, the security people called my wife up and said, don't worry, we're watching your house too, and we're strapped.
And, you know, McConaughey, we have a picture of it.
He's strapped.
He's followed around by these guards.
That's not what the rest of our lives are like, right?
I get my life threatened.
And people, I don't have, I can't afford to have guards following me around everywhere.
So I own a gun.
That's one of the reasons people own guns.
But the thing is, he sequestered, like all movie stars, like all billionaires, like all academics, they're sequestered from, and all these people in New York and LA, they're sequestered from the way most of us live.
They are living.
His talent, McConaughey's talent, is drawing you into a world of his imagination, but it is not this world.
And that's what we're going to talk about next.
Summer is coming.
I have finally planned my vacation.
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Crime in San Francisco00:12:00
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And people will just show up going, K-L-A-V-A-N.
So let's talk a little bit about the real world, where crime is getting out of control in many of these cities.
When it was in control, it was in control for a long time, 20 years.
We had some of that, we still have low murder rates, but they're just climbing at a rapid rate.
You've probably heard that Chase of Boudin, this George Soros liberal prosecutor in San Francisco, was recalled.
He was thrown out of office by a vote, I think, of 60%.
It was 60% when I last looked at it.
They were still counting the vote, 60% in favor of recall.
So even in the most left-wing place, this happens a lot.
You know, the old saying that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality.
Well, they were mugged by reality.
San Francisco is a hellhole.
It used to be the most beautiful city in the country.
I lived there briefly.
It was a beautiful place.
It's now unlivable.
And, you know, this was happening before Chase Aboudeen got there because I researched my Weiss Bishop detective novels in San Francisco and I sat with the police all day long.
And this is in the early 2000s, very early 2000s.
And they said they won't let us enforce the law.
And the street, we're losing the streets.
And the streets are going to, they just won't let us bring people in or chase people off.
They won't let us do anything.
They're protecting the rights of the outsiders, but not the rights of the normal people.
And we're going to lose control of the city.
They were complaining about it then.
So it's not his fault, but he raised it a level by bringing in this George Soros, right, sitting inside his imagination because he's so rich he doesn't have to deal with anything but his own imagination with that wonderful sense of moral superiority where he is going to descend upon us and tell us how we should live.
And it doesn't matter that San Francisco falls apart because in George Soros' imagination, it's going great because he's wonderful.
What a wonderful, compassionate guy he is.
So let's talk about Chesu Boudin.
I want to talk about how the story, how Chase Boudin was created in the first place, okay?
He's on a Vox special.
Now, Chase Boudin is the son of Kathy Boudin, who was arrested in the 19, who in the 1960s and 70s, who was heavily involved with the terrorist group, The Weather Underground.
And in 1970, she and Kathy Wilkerson became fugitives from justice following an explosion of a bomb in Greenwich Village.
I remember this.
There was a picture of Dustin Hoffman, a young actor at the time, carrying his artwork out of the neighboring brownstone because it almost blew him to Kingdom Come.
1981, Boudin and several former members of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army robbed a Brinks armored car at the Nanuet Mall in Nanuet, New York.
Boudin was the driver of the getaway vehicle, but she acted as a decoy, causing the security guards and a cop to put down their weapons, to put their weapons aside.
And then her accomplices killed them.
Three people were killed.
Edward O'Grady, an officer, and Waverly Brown were killed.
And there was also a guard, a security guard was wounded, Joseph Trombino, and his partner, Peter Page, was also killed.
Peter Page was also killed.
All right, so that's his mother.
And then he was raised, he was raised by Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dorn.
Bernadine Dorn, you remember them from the Obama years.
They were also weather underground terrorists who set off bombs, although I don't think their bombs killed anybody, but they, you know, they set them off in the Pentagon and other places.
And so that's who this guy is, okay?
So there's a special about him on Vox.
And Vox interviews him and says, look, San Francisco is falling apart.
And I want you to, you got to listen really carefully to his answer here.
You know, what do you say to people who say you're letting the quality of life go downhill?
This is cut five.
So how do you respond to community members who say the quality of life in the city is going down?
The reality is that many of the problems we talk about when we talk about quality of life, problems of addiction, problems of mental health, problems of homelessness, are not problems the criminal justice system can solve.
Putting people in and out of jail will not give them housing.
It will not restore their mental health.
It will not break their drug addiction.
And so to the extent I have a voice in this system, I'm going to be demanding that we get at the root causes of crime.
It's vice.
It's vice, not Vox.
Okay, one or the other.
He's asked about the quality of life.
And he says, well, you know, the legal system can't handle drug addiction and homelessness and mental illness.
But she wasn't asking about the quality of life of the people living on the streets.
She was asking about the quality of life of the ordinary majority citizen in San Francisco.
She's asking about one thing, and he's answering about another thing.
His mind goes immediately to these people.
These are the people he thinks he's there to defend, which simply isn't true.
A prosecutor is there to uphold the law, but he's there to enforce the law so that ordinary people can go about their lives because, and this is the question leftists never ask, the money, the support for the city, the city is there because of the people who work for a living, because of the people who pay taxes.
All of those people have a right to live a life without being subjected to people crapping on the streets, which they're doing, without having their kids see naked people wandering around, which they see, without seeing people inject themselves in the foot with heroin.
All of that stuff is happening.
He's not talking about those people.
So maybe you say, well, listen, he's being Jesus-like.
He's worried about the least of us.
He's not worried about the ordinary people because this is the way the left thinks.
They think, oh, we're worried about the poor and the dispossessed.
But, but the poor and the dispossessed, you know, are only part of the picture.
The people who run the city, who pay for the city, who work and live and die in the city, those are the people that the city is there for first.
If you don't have a city that people want to live in, there's not going to be any taxes paid.
There's not going to be any tax base.
And then you're not going to have any social services at all.
Okay.
So his mind immediately goes to that.
Why?
He talks about how his childhood was shaped by having his mother and father put in prison.
This is cut six.
It meant for me that my earliest memories are going through steel gates, getting searched by prison guards, just to be able to give my parents a hug.
And it also meant that I saw firsthand the horrific failures of this country's addiction to punishment and incarceration.
Okay, so he didn't like punishment and incarceration because his mom and dad were behind bars.
Very understandable.
But now listen to what he says about his philosophy, cut seven.
I have something in common with the majority of Americans, and that is that I grew up with family members incarcerated because I've been thinking about the ways in which the state responded to what my parents did, the ways in which that response failed to meet the real needs of the people who were harmed and in turn harmed me and others.
We can do better.
And I ran for district attorney because I want to build a model that does better.
Okay.
So it didn't serve the needs of the people who were harmed.
I assume he means the victims of his mother's crime.
Three people who were killed, one who was seriously injured.
They never interview the victims.
They only live in Chasey Boudin's imagination, which is what he's doing.
He's drawing you into his world that was affected by the fact that his mother was a terrorist and a criminal, and he was then raised by terrorists and criminals.
And this is who he identifies with.
When he's asked about quality of life, he immediately goes to the quality of life of the criminals instead of the ordinary people.
George Soros, too, because he's living in his imagination without any consequences for what happens when you stop paying attention to the norms, to the fact that people have to work and pay taxes and build a city and have a place where they can live and take their kids, or they're not going to live in that city anymore.
And it's not going to matter what you want to do because you're not going to have the money to do it.
You're not going to have the reason to do it.
The city is just going to become a hellhole as San Francisco has become.
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You know, I thought, well, how did the victims feel about these crimes?
Did, were they served by incarceration?
Because he's saying that didn't, because he didn't like it.
He's saying it didn't serve the people who were harmed.
It was hard.
It took me hours to track down quotes from the victims.
I was thinking of calling them.
I didn't want to bother them at this point, you know, and I'm not that sort of journalist anymore, but still, I was thinking, maybe I'm going to have to call them.
But finally, I found some stuff in the New York Post, right?
I talked about the fact that officers Edward O'Grady and Waverly Brown were killed.
Joseph Trombino was wounded.
Peter Page was killed.
Nine children were orphaned by what this guy's mother did, right?
Nine children were orphaned.
At one point, Kathy Boudin, who ultimately did get parole because she made a plea deal, so she got parole in 2003, but at one point she was denied parole when she tried to get it early.
This is what O'Grady's widow, Diane, said when she failed, when Kathy Boudin failed to get parole.
She said, I was scared, but justice prevailed.
She played a very pivotal part in that crime.
Nine children were left without their fathers.
We want her to serve life.
Okay.
We want her to serve life.
So incarceration, in fact, did serve the people who were harmed.
Michael Page, an attorney whose father, Peter, was killed protecting the Brinks armored car during the robbery.
He was 16 at the time.
He said, the pain and emotion never go away.
October 20th is the hardest day of the year for my family.
Coming here lets us know we're not alone and the three men's sacrifices were not in vain.
And by the way, Andrew Cuomo, before leaving office, helped Kathy Boudin's husband, David Gilbert, get out of prison.
Okay.
It seems to me that imprisonment did serve the people who were harmed.
It did help these people, you know, heal and it gave them some sense that there was justice.
Remember, the very first responsibility of government is doing justice so that we don't have to do justice, right?
Simon's Critique of War on Drugs00:06:35
If somebody harms me, I can go to the law and say, I want punishment for this person, not rehabilitation.
I want punishment for this person.
I want justice.
And if the law doesn't give me justice, I am then moved to get justice myself.
And that's why you have vigilantes when things start to fall apart, because we've made a deal with the government.
That is the deal we make with the government.
It's in ancient Greek writings.
I mean, from the minute the government is formed in Athens, it is imagined as saying, I am now going to take, the government is saying, I am now going to take over the act of vengeance.
So that's what the courts are there for.
And if they're not doing that, they're not being merciful.
They are failing to do their first thing.
You know, this week, David Simon was celebrated because it was 20 years since The Wire, which was based on his excellent, excellent work of journalism, Homicide a Year on the Killing Streets.
And I love The Wire or some of the seasons of The Wire.
And I was watching it.
And during The Wire, it had this crazy thing where he kept blaming Democrats.
I'm sorry, he kept blaming Republicans for what was going on in Baltimore, a city where there hasn't been a Republican since 1934, right?
He kept blaming the Republicans.
Well, where are the Republicans?
Danced straight where are the Republicans because they're not in Baltimore.
So why was it the fault of Republicans what Democrats had done to this city?
Democrats let this city become what it is, Baltimore, a crime-ridden city where people can't get out of the ghetto, where people can't rise up because it's so full of crime, so full of drugs.
So I just thought, you know, David Simon is like a really talented guy.
The wire is a wonderful act of the imagination based on wonderful journalism, but it is informed by his imagination that somehow this is the fault of Republicans.
And what it is is they don't care.
That's what they always say about Republicans.
But the answer to that is, who cares if they care?
Do they do the job or not?
Do they do the job?
Do they keep crime low?
Do they let people live?
Do they create neighborhoods that little kids can grow up in instead of getting shot in like they're shot in Chicago and Baltimore?
Do they create a place where people can move up into the American system?
So now, David Simon and George Pellicano are doing a series that's kind of like a wire-like series for HBO called We Own the City.
Now, I read the book.
They adapted this from a book.
It's a true story about extraordinary police corruption in Baltimore, right?
And it's got, what's his name?
John Barenthal, just doing this, Barenthal.
He's turning in this fantastic performance as this bent cop.
And it's a really good story about bent cops.
But, but, we see the police corruption, but we don't really see the, and they keep talking about the fact that they're dealing with a high crime neighborhood, but we don't see that.
We see the cops beating up innocent black people.
We see them harassing people.
We see them stealing from people, all of which they did.
I'm not saying he's not honest.
But then we have these scenes where the federal government comes in and they are going to fix everything.
And the wonderful federal government is going to get a consent decree.
And that is going to be the beginning of where, in fact, when the federal government has moved in on places, like I believe Seattle was one of the places, crime goes up because they restrain the police from doing their job because they're so busy taking care of the criminal civil rights that they forget the people's civil rights and they don't let the people do live the lives that they have to live.
So they have this really fascinating scene.
They bring in Treat Williams and he plays the honest old cop who hates to see what's gone wrong with the police department.
And that's very funny because Treat Williams became a star briefly when he was in a famous movie called Prince of the City where he played the bent cop.
So that was about another true story.
So they're bringing him in.
It's a kind of reference back to that.
And he says, what has gone wrong with the police department?
Everything changed when I came up with that expression, the war on drugs.
What an idiotic f ⁇ ing thing to say.
What the hell is a war on drugs?
What does that mean?
Waging a war against citizens.
By definition, it's separating us into two opposing camps.
The colonizer and the colonized.
Ah, Albert Memi, very good, yes.
And with the war comes police militarization, SWAT teams, tactical squads, stop and frisk, strip searches, a complete gutting of the Fourth Amendment.
It was like we're fighting terrorists on foreign soil.
And you can't just blame the cops.
We serve the politicians who thrive on being tough on crime.
Zero tolerance.
Zero tolerance.
Quality of life arrest.
Having a beer on your own stoop.
Loitering, spitting on the sidewalk, existing.
So that was a very clever little move.
Because, you know, he has a point about the war on drugs.
The war on drugs, I think, was a terrible, terrible mistake.
You know, first of all, you never want to have a war on anything that's not an actual war.
They write about the police getting too tactical, getting all this tactical war equipment that makes them overreact and all this stuff.
But that's only looking at things from one side.
And then he starts in talking about quality of life crimes, zero tolerance, broken windows policing.
Now let's talk about broken windows policing.
That really came in with Rudy Giuliani and William Bratton in New York.
It brought serious crime down 65%.
The idea was that if your neighborhood is falling apart, you are going to act like it doesn't matter because you're not going to have any respect for a neighborhood that has no law in it, right?
So basically they said, no, we are going to enforce even small crimes, no graffiti, no littering, no jaywalking.
And people, you know, people, rich people in New York, rich white people in New York were complaining to me that they were being given tickets for jaywalking.
And I said, hey, they're getting tickets in uptown for graffiti.
You should get tickets for jaywalking.
He's right.
All the quality of life things should be enforced.
That transformed the city.
They did it again in L.A. Once again, Bratton went to L.A. and became the police chief.
That brought crime down 32%.
Bringing down crime brought New York back to life.
It is falling apart now because they've abandoned this.
But, you know, they stuck with it.
They stuck with it.
Bloomberg stuck with it after Giuliani was gone.
And it kept the crime down and it brought the city back to life.
And it renewed it because people could live again.
And once people can live, they will pour into the city.
The city will get tax receipts.
The city can give public services to people who need them because we should take care of our poor and our damaged and all that stuff.
Why Comfort Matters00:02:32
But this is the thing.
David Simon is living in his imagination and sucking you into his imagination, but the facts are all against him.
So he feels great about himself.
He feels great about what a good job he's doing.
George Pellicano, a terrific crime writer, writes this stuff for him.
You know, he feels great about it, but it's all bad news.
And you have to look at the truth, whether you're Chesa Boudin and you're sad about mommy, or whether you're David Simon and you hate the Republicans, you got to look at the truth and the facts and stop feeling so good about yourself and do what's right for the people.
You know, recently a far-left friend of mine was teasing me.
She said, you know, you always complain about the Democrats, but you always move to blue cities.
I said, yeah, the restaurants are better and theater.
Theater is better.
You guys should stay and work in the imagination and let hard-boiled conservatives who care about the facts and who will enforce the law let us run the government.
You take the restaurants, you take the theater, we'll take the government because you do not know what you're doing.
You've got to live in the real world.
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So I finally got to see Top Gun 2 and I went to the theaters, which I do not do.
I've been to the theater during the pandemic.
I didn't completely stay down.
Woke Cinema Controversy00:16:16
As soon as it was open, I went back.
But I just hated wearing a mask in the theater.
It was just awful.
And so I basically stay home.
My screen is bigger than the one in the theater.
But I thought, well, you got to see Top Gun in the theater.
So I went and some good things, some good things about the experience.
It was cheap.
The prices seem to have dropped.
I get, at this point, I not only get a senior discount, they give me an extra discount if I agree not to die during the course of the movie.
So it was inexpensive.
There were about, I like to go to the movies in the middle of the day when there's no crowd.
So there were only about eight or nine people.
All of them except me were wearing a mask, which I thought was kind of disturbing.
But I noticed that they go through a lot of trouble to sort of bring you back.
I mean, they have Nicole Kidman.
This is an AMC theater.
They have Nicole Kidman doing an ad for AMC.
And then before the movie begins, they have Tom Cruise himself coming on and sitting there in a movie theater seat saying, we're so glad you came back into the theater to see this because we created this immersive experience just for you.
And that's kind of what the movie is about almost more than anything is giving you the feeling of being in these wonderful jets that are Air Force, or this is the Navy, that the Navy flies.
So, you know, so the movie, just to give a review of it, I thought it was lots and lots of fun.
By the end of it, the last 30 minutes could not have been any more fun.
Just really, really exciting.
I won't lie, I lost a couple of IQ points watching the film.
It's not exactly a brainy, you know, it's not a brain challenging, it's not a brain twisting film.
But the thing that struck me about it more than anything, except for the Jets, which was so much fun because I'm a flying fan.
But the thing that struck me more than anything was that Tom Cruise shows up.
It's a film full of cliches.
I mean, it's just one cliché after another, really, but he shows up and he plays them like they matter.
He plays them like he cares and he makes the audience cares.
And it really is impressive.
It's obviously he's this very impressive guy.
You know, he does all his stunts.
And, you know, I've worked with people who've worked with him and they say he's just laser focused on the project and he really pays attention to this.
I know a lot of people have worked with him and they all say the same thing that he just is absolutely tunnel vision of making this a great movie, making a terrific movie for the public.
But he just shows up as an actor, which really impresses me.
There's a scene with Val Kilmer, who is now very ill.
I think he's had throat cancer.
He can't speak anymore.
They used, even for that, they used special effects, I think, with his son to get his voice in it.
And so there's this scene that basically Cruz is playing by himself with Valk Kilmer just sitting there.
And it's like one of those scenes that actors win Oscars for because they're talking on the phone and there's somebody else on the other side of the phone.
And again, Cruz does a great job with that.
Jennifer Connolly is in it, one of the most beautiful women who has ever been on the screen and is just as beautiful now, if not more beautiful than she was when she was young.
You know, so many of these, I mentioned Nicole Kidman, so many of these actresses get so much plastic surgery.
It's like a devil's bargain for about 10 years.
You think, wow, she really looks good.
And then they just become these plastic Barbie Dell dolls.
I mean, Nicole Kidman can barely move her mouth at this point.
But Jennifer Connolly is just absolutely gorgeous.
The tech in the film is really the star of the movie.
They put what you have, obviously, Cruz can't fly these jets.
These are top-of-the-line jets.
So what they do is they put him in the back.
He's in the back seat.
But he's really taking the Gs.
And the gravity forces that happen when a plane goes straight up.
All your blood is pulled out of your brain.
Your face looks weird because of the pressure on it.
And he's really taking that.
So that was very impressive.
Not just him, but all the actors were put into these things and taught how to fly, not how to fly, but how to be in these things.
And they make you tremendously ill.
I don't know anybody who's ever been in one of them who didn't throw up while he was in them.
They don't talk about that in the how this was made thing.
But because he wanted it to be an IMAX, they had to put, they invented IMAX cameras that could be run in the jets.
But because the jets are moving the way they move and the altitudes they move it, they couldn't run the IMAX cameras from the ground.
So the actors had to actually, while flying around, they had to work their own IMAX cameras.
So there's a lot of, you know, this is Tom Cruise energy that he brings to these films where he makes it about, let's do this job and let's make something that people are going to want to really love to see.
And it's going to have that sense of reality to it because we're really doing it.
And he really pulls you into that and it's absolutely fun.
I have one cavil, just one little complaint is that, you know, the original film basically was a Cold War film.
It was made at the peak of the Reagan years.
I think it was 1986.
And so it was really America, yay.
And I don't think you, even then, I don't think you knew who they were fighting.
But in this, the mission, which is introduced, I'm not giving anything away.
It's introduced very early on, is that secret nuclear plants are being built in this impossible place to reach.
So it's kind of got a video game kind of aspect in it.
You have to somehow get these planes into this impossible place and destroy these nuclear plants that the enemy, the enemy, is allowing to be built, the enemy is having built.
And they never name the enemy.
And it's very difficult to see where they are because you think of that and you think it's Iran, but the landscape doesn't look like Iran.
It looks more like maybe it's Russia or something like this.
And I thought they should have just come out and said right away, it's the Democrats, right?
Because who else has allowed Iran to build these stupid things while they're going to use, obviously, to kill our friends with.
The box office in this thing is tremendous.
I think Danny, one of our producers, was just saying that he thinks it's Tom Cruise's biggest opening ever, which is amazing.
And a lot of people on the right are saying this is great because it shows you that woke films bomb, but films that are not woke succeed.
And John Nolte, who always loves rubbing it in, he put out a list.
He said, woke, Westside Story, flop, woke Eternals flop, woke in the Heights flop, woke Wonder Woman, 1984, flop, woke Charlie's Angels, flop, woke men in black international flop, woke Birds of Lake flop, woke Ghostbusters 3 flop, on and on, woke Star Wars Doornell Dead is a film franchise.
Nalty never loves to drive it home.
But the film is not woke.
It does have a girl among the top guns.
I'm not saying anything because I know there are women fighter pilots.
And by the way, anybody who flies one of these things is a hero in my book, male or female.
But I was looking at this girl.
She's just this sweet little creature that I didn't think was going to be flying.
But that's okay.
All right.
A little fantasy for everybody.
That's fine.
It is studiously apolitical, but inherently macho and inherently pro-American, big American flags.
And it doesn't really face any political issues.
So what Nolte was saying basically is, yes, it's not woke.
That's all.
That's why it's a hit.
And it's got the gay beach football scene.
The original Top Gun was railed against endlessly for being gay.
And somebody put out this, I remember this famous article where he traces a gay relationship, I think, between Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise.
It was a very funny article at the time.
But there's a lot of, you know, women and intellectuals pick on men on very macho scenes as being gay all the time.
It's kind of this Freudian afterburner thing, after trace thing.
But it's really ridiculous.
You know, men do play games and do, you know, push each other around, put their hands on one another without being gay.
And it's just really ridiculous.
Whenever a film is very macho, they accuse it of being gay.
So I don't go for any of that.
I don't think any of that is really true.
And I also think that if they want women to come in, a couple of scenes of guys running around in bathing suits is not so bad for that.
But the big thing, and you know, I've been talking about this during some interviews is does this mean that woke is collapsing?
That doesn't mean that Hollywood will stop being woke.
And the thing about Hollywood is they may stop doing things that don't make them money.
If woke doesn't make them money, they may stop doing it.
But it's not going to change what they're selling us.
They're selling us leftism.
They're selling us wokeism.
They're not going to change unless we change them, unless we become a force to compete with them.
And that's going to bring them back to the center.
But that's the only thing that's going to do it.
It's not because of money.
People who tell you that Hollywood is only about money don't know Hollywood because the money system is so complicated now.
So what is it about this film that we can cheer about?
And one of the things, of course, is that it is a slap in the face to China.
The Chinese are unhappy about it.
The famous patches, the Taiwan and Japan patch that was on the original trailers for it were taken off when China complained because they, of course, don't want Taiwan to be recognized as an independent nation and they're not friendly with Japan.
So they were taken off and they are back on.
And a lot of people have celebrated that.
But Eric Schwarzel, who used to be the Wall Street Journal, and maybe still, he was the Wall Street Journal's Hollywood reporter.
I'm not sure if he still is.
He wrote a piece on Barry Weiss's substack talking about this.
And he says they took them off because of China and they put them back on because during the pandemic, you know, our relationships with China soured.
They soured during the Trump administration and the investors, I think 12.5% of the money for the movie came in from China and China, the Chinese company, I think it was called Tencent or something like that, withdrew the money.
So there wasn't, there was now the idea that, uh-oh, not only is China not going to give us big support for this film, but America will get angry at us for taking the patches off.
So they put the patches back on.
They're not going to make the kind of money from China they wanted to.
The Chinese are getting, feeling their oats.
They're kind of building their own movie industry.
And so Hollywood is thinking maybe we should make sure that Americans like our films, which would be a real change of pace.
Hollywood, by the way, has always been like this.
Don't think this is anything new.
When Hitler was on the rise, Joseph Goebbels started a bunch of demonstrations against the film.
This is a 1930 film, All Quiet on the Western Front.
And Carl Lemeli, who was running Universal at the time, he said, you know, I'm afraid Hitler is going to start killing Jews.
And Lemeli was responsible for getting Jews.
He got like 300 Jews out of the country.
But at the same time, they edited a scene that what they were protesting, what the Nazis were angry about, was there's a scene in All Quiet on the Western Front, which was about World War I of the Nazis running away from the French.
And they wanted the scene out.
And it was cut out in all the editions.
So they were serving Hitler and making sure they didn't lose that German market, even if it meant pleasing Hitler.
So Hollywood has always been like this.
Hollywood became patriotic in World War II when Roosevelt essentially went and said, hey, guys, let's be patriotic.
Woodrow Wilson said it to him during World War I.
But still, they scrubbed scenes.
They scrubbed scenes for Hitler.
They scrubbed scenes for the Chinese.
Anything that had anything about Tibet or Tiananmen Square or Taiwan has been taken off.
According to Eric Schweitzel, they took out anything that had ghosts in it because that was too spiritual for the communists.
Anything that had time travel that was too ahistoric.
Anything with homosexuality because that was immoral.
There were behind-the-scenes changes in Red Dawn, which was only released after editing out a Chinese antagonist.
World War Z was revised to cut implications that the zombie pandemic started in China.
Bohemian Rhapsody about Queen was edited so that Freddie Mercury wasn't gay.
I don't know why they called it that.
So you're not really seeing the death of Woke.
What you're seeing is an estrangement between the Chinese and Hollywood markets.
That's what you are really seeing.
And, you know, this is not a criticism of the film at all, because the film is just tons of fun.
It really is tons of fun.
I enjoyed every minute of it.
It's corny.
It's silly at times.
You know, the action doesn't make any sense in a lot of ways, but it is just exciting.
It's thrilling.
It's fun to watch Cruz be a movie star.
He does it really well.
As I say, he shows up and does his job.
But without it being criticism of the film, I just want to reiterate this one thing, that we have to stop eating the scraps from under the left's table on this.
I've been talking today about the show businessing of America.
I've been talking about the fact that the left is just really good at this.
They're really good at colonizing the imagination, and we are really good at doing realistic stuff.
But we've got to start including the arts in our brief.
I've been talking about this forever.
I'm thrilled the Daily Wire is doing it.
I'm hearing from people who say they're going to do it.
I think the more, the merrier, but we have to do it boldly, and we have to do it without apology to, because they're not apologizing to us, so we shouldn't be apologizing to them.
We should be putting forward our conservative principles in art.
We shouldn't be making propaganda.
We should be making art, but there's no reason we can't have, it's all about assumptions.
You know, they assume that women need feminism.
They assume that blacks are oppressed.
They assume that gays are oppressed and that conservatives hate them and all this stuff.
We have to make our own assumptions that freedom is better than slavery, that people have the rights to stand up against the government, that the government isn't going to bring the solutions.
We have to do it.
Anyway, this film, excellent film.
A lot of politics went into making it as good as it is.
A lot of market ideas went into making it as good as it is.
But it is not.
It is not the dawn of an unwoke era in Hollywood.
That is only going to come when they have to compete with us and they have to change and reach the people that they now consider deplorable.
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Words Over Facts00:15:14
Say Clavin, K-L-A-V-A-N.
What is a Woman is a huge success.
I don't know if you've been watching it.
It's been trending on Twitter constantly.
Matt Walsh is trending on Twitter.
And thank you for supporting this film and supporting all our efforts here.
This weekend, this is the Pride Parade in Washington and we will be there.
We have skyrockets.
We have Skyriders at the Women's March writing What is a Woman and we'll have a mobile truck, several mobile trucks showing clips from What is a Woman at the Pride Parade.
This is changing the gender ideology conversation.
It's fighting back in the culture.
It's never been more important and relevant.
Celebrate Pride Month and the Pride Parade by watching What is a Woman?
If you've already seen it, tell a friend to watch it.
Help us strengthen our stand against the radical trans agenda, all the radical agendas by sharing your support of the film on social and encouraging others to watch at whatisawoman.com.
Go to whatisawoman.com to become a member and watch the film today.
So I am absolutely delighted to have one of my favorite columnists on, Jared Baker, Jerry Baker, formerly the editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal.
is now the editor-at-large and writes a weekly column for the best editorial page in the country.
It's called Free Expression.
It is just absolutely terrific.
I read it every week, word for word.
Jerry, I'm so happy you could come on.
Thanks for being here.
No, it's my pleasure, Andrew.
Thank you.
Thanks for those very kind words.
I'm a fan of yours, too.
Oh, thank you.
So mostly what I want to talk about is the press.
Back in, I think it was 2017, the New York Times, was it, exposed the terrible scandal of your telling, you were editor-in-chief and you told your reporters to stop putting opinions into the news, especially anti-Trump opinions, but just opinions in general.
And this was kind of reported as if it were some terrible scandal.
First of all, I can't help but ask this.
I've always been curious.
Is that why you are no longer editor-in-chief?
I mean, did that have anything to do with your not being editor-in-chief anymore?
No, no, no, not at all.
But you're right.
It was a strategy.
There were lots of moments like that.
Look, I should say that the Wall Street Journal newsroom is terrific.
And what we tried to do and what they still do, and they do very well under my successor, is try to be perhaps the last holdout in the news business where we keep opinion and news separate.
And that's what I was trying to do.
There was a bit of a temptation by some people who subsequently left the Wall Street Journal to change that.
Actually, Andrew, you're right.
I remember that New York Times article.
I remember another one.
I can't remember which news organization it was, that picked up on something I'd said at an editorial, a news meeting where I'd said it was very important that we aim to be fair to Donald Trump, as we did to everybody.
This apparently was also scandalous.
Apparently, the idea that we should treat subjects of our reporting with fairness when some people don't like them is apparently a scandal.
But yeah, no, it had nothing to do with my, no, again, the newsroom was terrific.
People did come together.
There were a few dissenting voices, but it was a turbulent couple of years.
But after I'd been doing the job for about six years, and I decided it was time to go and do what I really love doing, which is writing.
Yeah, no, and you are terrific.
It is a great column.
But, you know, I can't help know.
I read the journal every day, and I still think it's a terrific paper.
It is now the newspaper of record.
We have no other one.
But still, even in the journal, but all throughout the news industry, I see words creeping in that are inherently editorial.
Words like gender-affirming care or saying something is transphobic or phobic of something else.
All of those words seem to me to be created to create opinions rather than report facts.
Is that something that anybody is ever going to turn on?
Is that something anybody ever talks about?
Yeah, it is.
You raise a good point because there's all kinds of bias in the news, and we can talk about some of it.
But word selection is obviously very important.
And, you know, words obviously, you and I are in the words business, but words have obvious, I mean, words can be, you know, they should be, they should be simple devices to convey meaning, right?
And however, as you say, there are certain words that have become kind of buzzwords or almost actually, I would say, almost signifiers of something.
I think this is what you're getting at, what I completely agree with, as signifiers of a kind of an ideological perspective.
You know, we all quote George Orwell all the time in this business.
Perhaps we overquote him, but he was, you know, he was perhaps one of the, he was a genius in recognizing how words can, you know, which the way in which we use language and the types of words we use can, beyond just the meanings of the dictionary meanings of the words themselves, can convey a real ideological message.
And it's words, exactly words like that, they do creep in.
And I think more than creep in, they're actually deliberately introduced increasingly.
You know, again, one of the things I did as editor was to try to avoid, look, language should be, language is wonderful.
The English language is absolutely wonderful.
It can be colorful, vivid, incredibly descriptive.
But it does also have to be, you know, we have to be very careful about using words in ways that our readers understand where we're coming from, that they trust us.
I'll give you a really good example, Andrew.
One of the things I did have a lot of trouble with some people at the journal, and indeed some people outside, which was this idea about using the word lie.
A lot of people wanted us to use, to say in our reporting that Donald Trump lied.
And I resisted this.
I wasn't flat against it.
If we have the evidence to suggest, to support the proposition that Donald Trump lied about something, then of course we could do it.
Lying is a word, you know, there's a tremendous burden of proof involved in using the term lie.
You have to know the person's mindset.
You have to know that the person who used whatever word, whatever he or she was saying, actually knew that it was false and intended to deceive.
That's actually quite a high burden.
Again, a high bar.
Now, again, it can happen.
We can do it in time.
Some people perjure themselves.
We know that that's, you know, that's clear, clear lie.
But I was conscious that that's, you know, that, that, and then it's very interesting, Andrew.
That then became, other newspapers then started to say it all the time.
They put it in their headlines, you know, Donald Trump lies about the election.
Donald Trump lies about this, whatever.
By the way, as a matter of opinion, I think Donald Trump does lie quite a lot.
I mean, you know, a lot of politicians do.
He probably more than most.
But this became a kind of, it was less about the word itself or the meaning or trying to convey the story and more about the signal that they were kind of part of, that it was a sort of, they were demonstrating their membership in the resistance, I think is what it was.
That's what people wanted to do.
And so those words, you know, I was very careful to avoid using words like that.
You know, it does seem to me, I've been a news junkie my whole life.
And it seems to me, I was a small town newsman with Adam Nogurney, who went on to be one of the top reporters at the New York Times.
I remember Nogurney lecturing me on being, on my liberal bias.
But once he went to the New York Times, it became all liberal bias.
It seems to me that things have gotten much, much worse.
Do you agree with that?
And if you do, why has it happened like that?
I do completely agree.
I mean, I think it is now, it's gone.
Look, as you say, the New York Times, I've been reading the New York Times for 34 years.
It's got a terrific staff.
There's talented people.
They do a lot of very good reporting.
It's always kind of lent to the left without any question in its reporting.
But in the last few years, I think particularly since Donald Trump, it has become, I mean, it's news reporting is invested with an ideological agenda.
I mean, almost relentlessly, almost all of its reporting.
Again, there are some good exceptions.
There are some glaring exceptions.
But it's the same with the Washington Post.
It's the same with major television networks.
They've always lent that in that direction, but they've always had sort of guardrails or they've had a kind of a break on them where they actually understood the importance of at least maintaining some trust with viewers or readers to maintain some semblance of objectivity.
That has gone, I think, in the last five years.
Why has it happened?
A number of reasons.
I think the most important, I think the reaction to Donald Trump is part of it.
But I think the reasons go deeper than that.
I think a lot of it is to do with the types of people who now work in journalism.
You know, when journalism, when I started out in journalism in the 1980s, it was becoming true then, but it wasn't as true.
It wasn't as clear as it is now.
But, you know, journalism used to be a craft, really.
It used to be done by people who weren't particularly, they hadn't necessarily been to Ivy League or best universities.
They were talented, intelligent people who really, whose only desire was to find out information, to get facts, to report it, to reveal it to an audience.
I think beginning in about the 1670s, probably accelerated by Watergate, and then certainly through the 80s and 90s, journalism became a job that is done by highly educated, expensively educated Ivy League types.
And those people, they don't want to just find out.
They think it's kind of beneath them just to sort of find out the story.
They want to tell people how to think.
They are thought leaders.
They are intellectuals.
They're people who want to drive an agenda and drive forward a particular view of the world.
And I think that's really part of the problem here.
And then if you couple that with the way in which our universities have gone in the last 20 years or so, Andrew, which is this monolithic left-wing progressive ideology, they're coming out of these universities steeped in that, absolutely sort of marinated in this left-wing progressive ideology.
And they go straight into newspapers and television companies and social media companies and everywhere else now, and they bring that agenda with them.
And I think that's become really an almost terminal challenge for the news business.
Yeah, you wrote a column very recently.
What was it called?
It was called Political Narratives are the Media's Default in Times of Tragedy.
I remember as a newswriter back in the 80s, the idea of issues.
Everything was an issue.
And usually I thought it was just a cover-up because they wanted to write about sex so they would find an issue that would give them a chance to write about sex or violence, whatever they thought was going to bring in.
But now you write your lead on this is a crippling fallacy that characterizes our modern media is the idea that every event that rises to the level of news must connote some wider societal or political crisis that can only be remedied by government intervention.
First of all, could you give a couple of examples or at least a specific example of that and talk about whether there's any way of curing that mindset?
Because it's a very subtle point, but it's also a subtle point that's obvious once you see it.
Well, the obvious examples, and I was writing that right in the wake of the, I think, both the Buffalo shooting, the white supremacists who shot those black people in Buffalo, and then after the Uvalde school shooting in Texas.
And look, I'm not suggesting those terrible events don't raise serious questions about the society we've become and what we need to do to remedy it.
But there is just this, but there's a whole complex of factors that go into something, some terrible event like that, a combination of whether it's mental illness, whether it is gun, you know, the availability of guns, whether it is political ideology in the case of the white supremacist.
There's a whole range of things.
And I think the media just seize on these issues to promote one particular narrative, to protect one particular idea.
And I said in that opening paragraph, it's always about there's always a problem that government needs to fix.
It's always something that requires government action.
And again, I think that oversimplifies the world, the world of news in a way that I think is extremely unhelpful because it's not providing the reader or the viewer with actual information, with reporting on the story.
It is immediately leaping to a set of essentially ideological conclusions, ideological prescriptions that the reader is supposed to listen to.
And again, I really think, Andrew, that the loser here is ultimately other news organizations themselves because people cease to trust them.
If they think that they are the New York Times or CNN or the Washington Post, whatever it is, every time there's a news story, they're going to promote, they're going to use it to promote a particular view.
People aren't stupid.
They can see that.
They can see that this is an agenda that's being promoted.
And they think, I don't really need to read this anymore.
I don't need to, I don't have to read what these people are telling me because I know exactly what their message is.
And instead of, and the ability to actually find out the information, find out the news, is being attenuated by this desire to make sure that everybody understands the larger political message.
If you step back from just the news business for a minute and look This increasing left-wing bias, which I guess is the best way to put it.
What do you think the larger effects are?
I mean, it seems to me that all these people were so upset about Donald Trump, but the minute I saw Trump, I thought the news media is jet fuel to this guy.
I mean, he would never have gotten anywhere near the White House if it weren't for the news media.
Is that blowing this out of proportion or is that pretty close?
No, no, I think that's right.
Look, I do think, I think the failure of the media, Donald Trump, the rise of Donald Trump himself, and the success of his 2016 campaign itself, is itself an enormous rebuke to the media because they didn't, and by the way, to some extent include myself in this because when he came along in 2015, I think I didn't think he was going to win the Republican nomination.
Because I think it's a reflection of how out of tune the mainstream media, sorry to use that phrase, I do hate it, but it does it means something, people understand it.
How out of tune the most of the media have got with a large proportion of a large portion of the American people.
It is, you know, I was genuinely amused, I think, a few years ago.
I think it was maybe after George W. Bush was elected in maybe 2000 or maybe the 2004 election.
I remember the New York Times, one of the major newspapers I may have, it may have not have been the Times, one of the major newspapers saying they were going to send reporters out to the Midwest and to the South to try and understand what was going on.
It was kind of like an anthropological expedition into darkest Africa to see who are these strange tribes who have different views from the ones we have on the coasts.
I think that's the problem that they got so out of touch with voters, with Americans that they, and I think that's the other thing.
So, and again, this is another feature of the media is that they then tend to characterize those people as kind of, well, in the famous word of Hillary Clinton, deplorable, right?
Voters' Hunger for Truth00:07:25
Because they don't understand it, because they literally, you know, I always love those people ask questions, you know, in a newsroom, you know, put your hand up, how many people voted for Donald Trump?
And, you know, like maybe one hand will go up.
And how many people know somebody voted for Donald Trump?
And maybe one other hand will go up.
You know what I mean?
They don't, they don't, they, they are so out of touch.
They live in these bubbles.
Again, mostly on the coasts.
They live in these bubbles that are so out of touch that their reaction to something they don't understand and certainly that they don't agree with is to deride it and to say what a terrible thing it is.
And most Donald Trump supporters were not deplorable.
The vast majority of them are not terrible.
They're not racist, bigots or anything like that.
They were just people who were fed up with the way things were going.
And part of it was because of the media.
So I think, again, this is a self-perpetuating process.
The more the media is out of touch with so many people because of this left-wing bias, the more they tend to characterize other people's views as kind of Neanderthal or extreme or unacceptable in some way.
And the more and more, so it is, it's kind of like a vicious circle, the more they then become out of touch with most people, most Americans.
We're talking to Jerry Baker of the Wall Street Journal, your columns on Tuesday, right?
Because that Tuesday page, Toronto, James Toronto, who runs, he still runs the op-ed page, he deserves a Pulitzer for that Tuesday page alone.
It is a terrific, it's an excellent, excellent op-ed page.
I know that nobody, obviously no one knows the future, but when you look at this and put it in the context of the internet, which has now given this flood of information to people, so people can actually see that the press is lying sometimes.
It's exposed in real time very quickly.
And the answer has largely been, how can we silence those voices that are exposing us instead of how can we reform?
Do you see any hope of reform?
Do you see any chance that these guys are going to wake up and say, well, maybe this is not the way to report the news?
I mean, I think my impression is that there's a lot of interest from interestingly from from investors, actually, in there's a lot of there's a lot of frustration with with with the media, perhaps in quite some surprising quarters.
And I think there is a hunger, which I think is reflected in some of the again, some of the some of the views of some some wealthy investors, people to actually to take the news back to what it should be, which is reporting what happened.
And I'm just interesting.
I mean, I've just there are various there are various people, various people have plans to do this.
You know.
There are various projects that are being launched.
I don't know whether they'll, I suspect that, you know, some version of, you know, some version of predictable law will operate where they'll all become, you know, I think my friend John O'Sullivan, who's a terrific writer and used to work for National Review, I think O'Sullivan's law is that, you know, and I think it's his law anyway, that unless any organization is explicitly, explicitly not left-wing and explicitly has as its objective not to be left-wing, it will become left-wing.
So, you know, and that's any cultural institution that's truthful.
So I think the risk is that some of these new projects will go in the same direction.
But I think there is, look, Andrew, this problem is so widely recognized now.
And the number of people, and again, it's not just people like you and me, you know, or, you know, conservative-minded people who say, I can't stand the New York Times, you know, or we've thought that for a long time.
It's lots of people who, you know, who I think, you know, are certainly not conservatives, who would count themselves as sort of progressive, but have just want information.
The number of people who say to me, I don't share your views, I don't agree with you on a lot of things, but I do really like the Wall Street Journal because I think you try in your news pages to play it to get the story straight.
And I do, you know, I don't agree with the opinion pages, but I do at least I know where they're coming from.
I know that is opinion.
So I think, I mean, I am optimistic.
I'm very cautiously optimistic that there is a hunger out there for, there is, at least this, Andrew, there is a recognition by many, many people, including some very influential people, of how bad it's gotten.
And I think a hunger and a desire to do something about it.
Whether they'll succeed is another question.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I was kind of hopeful.
I wasn't aware of that.
So I've only got a couple of minutes left.
I'd just like to ask about politics for a couple of minutes.
Like, what do you see coming down the pike?
Everybody's saying that the midterms are going to be a wipeout.
I always think of Glenn Reynolds as an instapundit.
He always says, don't get cocky.
What do you think is coming?
It does look like that, doesn't it?
Again, I'm no expert.
I read the polls the same as everybody else, talk to people.
My sense from talking to Democrats is that they are very nervous about it.
Look, the economy, I'm sorry, the economy is deteriorating.
This inflation picture is terrible.
That's really eroding people's living standards.
People are really nervous about that.
And it's going to require higher interest rates.
I don't know if there's going to be a recession, but it would not surprise me if we did have a recession later this year.
That's got to be terrible.
That's got to be even worse for the Democrats than the current situation.
So you've got to think they're going to do badly.
Look, they are trying to latch on to, you know, but we're going to get this Supreme Court decision on abortion very shortly.
I think there is maybe some, you know, I think they're possibly, there are some, the Democrats may have some reason, some justified reason to think that that might help shore up their vote a little bit if indeed Roe v. Wade is struck down as it looks likely to be.
I don't think it's going to be a game changer, but it might help them a little bit.
They're clearly trying to use the January the 6th thing, the big hearing we had on Thursday night.
They're trying to use that to gin up support.
But it looks, yeah, I mean, look, look, we know the history, right?
First year, sorry, the first midterms of a first term of a president nearly always go extremely badly.
I think the average loss of seats in the House of the last four or five cycles is 30 or 40, something like that.
And it would be very surprising in the circumstances if that didn't happen.
And that's, of course, all exacerbated by the, as I say, the pretty bleak economic picture we have at the moment.
So, yeah, I would think that's, you know, that's likely.
The Senate is a bit different, as we know, because the Republicans are defending a lot more seats and some quite difficult seats.
But even there, I suspect, you know, the probability is only, obviously, they only need to get in net one to take control of the Senate, and they're probably going to be able to do that.
I think the larger question, though, Andrew, and this is what I'm really interested in, is that I think there is an opportunity here, and I've written about this in my column for Republicans.
You know, we've had, if you go back to, go back to actually back to the 1988 election when George H.W. Bush was elected.
Since then, the elections have been kind of a knife edge either way.
You know, Barack Obama won by seven or eight percentage points in 2008, which was kind of a landslide.
But even then, he only got 50, 51, 52% of the vote.
We're a sort of 50-50 nation.
We've been, I do think there's an opportunity.
I think people are so tired of what's going on in the country.
I think they're so tired of this Democrat of this extreme progressive movement in the Democratic Party that they are, there is an opportunity here for Republicans actually maybe to sort of break that deadlock in quite a serious way.
I do think a lot of people are worried about Donald Trump.
I think that could restrain a lot of the potential support that Republicans could get.
But I sense in the broader political climate here that there is a kind of, I don't think it's quite 1980 with Ronald Reagan, but I do think there is a sense that things are badly off track and there is a big opportunity there for conservatives.
I think for Republicans to really sort of maybe break this deadlock.
I hope so.
That's great to hear.
Gerard Baker, the Wall Street Journal, the column is on Tuesdays in the op-eds page.
It's just terrific.
Jerry, thank you so much for coming on.
It's great to talk to you.
I hope we can do it again.
Why Suffering Increases Faith00:09:21
Andrew, thanks.
Really, thanks very much for having me.
I really enjoyed it.
Thanks a lot.
So we've been talking all day about the imagination, and I'm sure in your imagination, you're now seeing a kind of dark cloud, a sort of black-blue cloud coming over the horizon, filled with like, you know, demons and winged creatures that are coming to devour all your happiness.
That is, in fact, the Clavenless Week coming towards you.
And it is just as bad as you imagine it to be.
Whether you will survive or not is an open question, but the answer is no.
However, before you enter that black cloud, I would like to solve all your problems for you.
So at least you go happy.
So here is the mailbag.
All right, This is from Don.
Hi, Claven.
This question, I wanted to ask you, after reading your books, I feel your response may offer some guidance to me and many others whom I know have this question.
Where was God during these school shootings?
I know this has been asked as much as there are stars in the sky, but I will not lie, the faith of my wife and I was shaken by the Uvalde tragedy.
We have an eight-year-old son, and all I could think when driving home was how could a loving God allow children to be gunned down?
I look in the mirror and see someone completely unworthy of the grace and mercy provided through Christ, which leads me to question why them, the innocent, and not me.
Well, first of all, let me congratulate you on understanding that the problem is not solved by bad things not happening to you.
It always bothers me when people say, well, you know, a plane crashed and I lost my loved one and I therefore lost my faith.
And I always think, well, why didn't you lose your faith when somebody else lost his loved one?
You know, I mean, why couldn't you extrapolate from that to feel that there was no God?
So I think it is, I congratulate you on understanding that, you know, your good fortune is just your good fortune, right?
Because these things do happen.
We live in a world that is free, so people can commit evil actions.
And we live in a world that is broken so that things happen that should not happen.
And that's not to dismiss your concerns at all, because the question of how a good God can let children suffer specifically, I mean, people ask, how can a good God allow evil?
How can a good God allow suffering?
But the question of children specifically is one which, you know, even the Talmudic rabbis who wrestle with every problem down to its smallest detail have sometimes just said, we just don't understand this, because how can a child learn anything from suffering or from an early death?
And, you know, in the brothers Karamazov, there's a famous horrible description where of the atheist brother, it's about these four brothers, yeah.
Three brothers, four brothers, slips my mind now, but one of them is an atheist, one of them is religious, and the atheist says, tells a long story about a child's suffering and says no thing that can happen after that will justify God.
God cannot be justified after this terrible thing happens.
It is, as you say, unlikely that I'm going to give you a definitive answer, but I am going to give you my answer.
I'm going to give you the way that I think about this.
In order for suffering and evil to be justifiable, it can't just be justified by the fact that we deserve our freedom, that God thinks our freedom is so important that he is willing to allow evil to be done.
I mean, I think that is true.
I think God thinks freedom is so important because we can't become virtuous people.
We can't become good people.
We can't become God-loving people unless we're absolutely free to hate God and to be evil.
Unless we're free to hate God and be evil, what good is it if we then, when we love God, if we love God by force?
That's not true love, right?
And so that is important to the system.
But I think we have to go beyond that and say that God wants the good for everybody because he loves people.
He loves us for some reason and wants our good and therefore is constantly, and you'll find this in your own life, he's constantly turning evil to good.
But how can the evil of somebody being killed be turned to good for that person?
It can't.
So, you know, it's one thing to say, oh, good came out of the Holocaust because it helped for the formation of Israel.
You know, I've heard people say that, but that no way erases the horrible suffering and deaths of all the people who died in the Holocaust.
That tragedy remains there indelible, and it is not erased by any good that may have come out of it.
And here is the only answer I can give you, and it is speculative, but of course.
But you do know that when you look at your own life, that the suffering that you've gone through, you would never go through it willingly, but the suffering that you've gone through has, in fact, made you a deeper, richer person.
It has made you more compassionate.
It has given you more insight into the ways of the world.
It has brought you closer to God.
If you play your suffering right, your suffering ultimately brings you closer to God.
You know, if you look at the suffering, for instance, in the Bible of Abraham, by the end of all the suffering that he goes through, he is willing to sacrifice his son Isaac, not because he thinks God wants me to kill this child, but because he thinks that if God says it, it will be to the good.
Even in the New Testament, they speculate that he was thinking God will overcome death.
He will not let this happen.
He will not let the bad stand.
That's how deep his faith is.
Suffering does increase your faith.
But then you ask, well, how can people die?
Well, as a Christian, I believe that we live not just in this moment of life from birth to death, which is very brief, but we live in eternity.
And so I can imagine, I can imagine that the suffering of even a child in eternity can be turned to the good.
It can't be turned to the good in this, our life.
So we have to rely on our faith that we live in eternity.
And over eternity, yes, I can imagine, I disagree with the brother and the brothers Karamazov, that nothing could redeem that suffering.
Obviously, if that child is alive in eternity, at some point the child may look back and say, that suffering was terrible, but it has formed me into this person.
I don't believe in an afterlife that's stagnant, where you just sit around singing hymns and worshiping God.
I believe in an afterlife in which you continue to grow, but you grow without evil.
In our life, you can only grow through suffering to some degree and through evil.
But in the afterlife, I believe that you grow closer and closer to God eternally because God is eternal, so that that is an eternal enterprise.
And the joy of life is growth.
And so why shouldn't that be the joy of eternity?
So what I believe is that this suffering is justified in eternity because it's certainly not justified in real life.
And if I'm wrong, you know, we may never find out, but I think that's the only way I can explain it to myself.
From Dalton Heydrew, a couple months ago in All Access, you suggested that love was not an action, but it was adding someone into your ego.
That statement has completely changed my view of love.
I kind of just felt that love was just strong feelings.
You've caused me to rethink all the women I thought I had loved, and it leads me to this question.
Can I truly love a woman and be jealous if they are dating someone other than me?
Or do I have to be happy for them regardless to love them?
I hope this question finds you well and you continue to change my life.
And I'm trying to write you a letter to tell you the ways you've made my life better.
Oh, thank you.
I will look forward to receiving that.
Well, I think you're confusing a couple of things.
What I said was that part of love is including somebody in your ego, but also part of love is wanting the good for someone.
And also part of love is wanting to be united with someone, is wanting to be one with someone.
And so if someone is dating someone else, if someone goes off, leaves you for someone else, you're going to feel bad about that.
There's nothing I can say that's not going to make you feel bad about that because your love wants to unite you to that person.
If that is over, if that relationship is over, yeah, you know, obviously you should teach yourself to feel happy for someone going off and having another life.
But I know I met a girl that I had loved and she was pregnant and I couldn't somehow, by another guy, by her husband, and I couldn't somehow get it into my head that the child wasn't mine because I was so still so connected to her.
So those are tricks that the mind plays on you, but ultimately, yes, you should be happy for someone if the relationship is over.
But if the relationship ends and she goes off with someone else, even if you love that person because of that powerful desire that love is to be one with a person, it's going to be extraordinarily painful.
And there's nothing you can do about that but wait until time gets you past it.
With that, I plunge you into the darkness.
That darkness is now overwhelming you.
The creatures that are inside the darkness are coming to get you.
It's a disaster.
It is the Clavenless Week.
I can't help you any longer because I'm gone.
But I'll be back next Friday for those of you who survive and any new people who join the crowd.
What the Democratic Telethon Accomplished00:01:12
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I'm Andrew Klavan.
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Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, the January 6th Committee rolls out its primetime special with Liz Cheney taking the starring role.
And we examine what the Democratic Telethon did and didn't accomplish.
One thing it didn't accomplish, lowering that inflation rate.