Andrew Clavin and Jim Jordan dissect the left’s cultural unraveling—from Fauci’s COVID mismanagement (Wuhan lab ties, $6T economic damage) to Sri Lanka’s Green New Deal collapse under organic farming mandates, which triggered riots. They expose Uvalde’s 376-officer failure, Cuomo’s lockdown hypocrisy ("illness is death"), and trans policies in schools, citing LAUSD’s gender-neutral curricula as scientifically baseless. Jordan’s book Do What You Said You Would Do demands Republican accountability, while a Dracula deep-dive with Eleanor Berg Nicholson contrasts Stoker’s Catholic moral clarity to modern vampire romanticization. The episode ends with an atheist’s existential crisis resolved by Dostoevsky’s "If God does not exist, everything is permitted"—urging faith over nihilism. [Automatically generated summary]
This week saw a major announcement from Dr. Anthony Fauqi, or as the Chinese call him, Faoqi, which is Chinese for corrupt and incompetent little man who may serve as a useful idiot in our plans to destroy the West, even as he's idolized by American journalists, or as we call them in Chinese, Faoqi.
Speaking from amid the dust and debris of the wonderful economy he helped to utterly destroy, Dr. Faoqi said he would retire at the end of the Biden administration.
Apparently unaware of the fact that the Biden administration ended several months ago and is now simply the real-life version of weekended Bernie's, a corpse being held more or less erect by Democrats, or as the Chinese call them, Faoqi.
Dr. Faoqi's announcement that he plans to finally stop wrecking everything he touches provided a chance to take a fond or at least horrified look back at Dr. Faoqi's rise to prominence and power through a remarkably consistent string of absolute failures and betrayals of national interest, not to mention the sort of atrocious violations of the moral order that would get you fired or even arrested if you were anything other than a government bureaucrat, or as the Chinese call them, Faoqi.
Dr. Faoqi made his bones, or at least made thousands of other people into bones, during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
After taking the reins at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Faoqi funneled bazillions of dollars into useless vaccine research while directing money away from the anti-retroviral drugs that were ultimately developed by private industries to tame the disease.
Dr. Faoqi also famously spread panic by telling people they might be able to catch AIDS simply through close contact to an infected person, which to be fair was true if that close contact included sodomy.
At the time, AIDS activist Larry Kramer called Faoqi, quote, an incompetent idiot who had spent the hundreds of millions of dollars allocated for AIDS research to, quote, establish only a system of waste, chaos, and uselessness, or what the Chinese call a Faoqi.
Dr. Faoqi's NIADE went on to funnel American research money into experiments on animals, though Dr. Faoqi denied he approved the mindlessly cruel torture of puppies in order to study parasites.
He said he did it just because he liked mindlessly torturing puppies.
Dr. Faoqi then directed gazillions into helping the Chinese perform gain of function research at their lab in Wuhan so they could develop stronger infectious diseases to unleash on the West in the form of the COVID pandemic, also known as the Wuhu Flu, the Chinese flu, the Kung Flu, the Flu Manchu, or simply Faoqi.
Once the pandemic began, however, Dr. Faoqi rushed into the fray with his usual competence and sagacity, which is weirdly indistinguishable from criminally dishonest stupidity.
Dr. Fauqi dealt with the crisis by issuing instructions to the public, like, don't wear masks, wear masks, don't wear bad masks because they don't work.
Wear good masks, which don't work either.
Wear masks while on camera, but then take them off when you think no one's looking.
Wear masks on the 31st of October and go door to door asking for candy and spreading COVID.
Or wear surgical masks and pretend you're a doctor, because after all, that always worked for Fauqi.
Dr. Fauqi also advised political leaders to shut down the entire economy to ensure that all of Western civilization would be destroyed in order to save the life of one 90-year-old fat man.
Bringing People Back to the Table00:05:37
This would allow the fat man to continue praying for death because he no longer wanted to live in a world where incompetent bureaucrats torture puppies and destroy Western civilization.
And so, as we crawl desperately to the end of Dr. Anthony Fauci's distinguished career, it only makes sense that his unbroken history of error and failure has made him a darling of the left, putting him alongside men like Karl Marx, Michelle Foucault, and Barack Obama in the pantheon of leftist gods who are wrong about everything and turn everything they touch into crap.
Or as the Chinese call it, Fauqi.
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-dunky-diggy.
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, I'm back from vacation.
I had a great time.
I'm sorry so many of you had to die through the Clavenless Fortnite for me to get away, but I needed the break.
We're back laughing our way through the fall of the Republic.
We're going to talk about how the left has gone beyond bad ideas and now has gone completely insane and what we are supposed to do about it.
I'm going to talk to Congressman Jim Jordan, a right-wing maniac.
He must be because I almost always agree with him, but really an intelligent guy.
This is the time to subscribe on Apple, wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a five-star review.
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And if you leave a comment and the comment is excruciatingly, unbearably cruel and bigoted and sexist and everything else, we'll include it in the show as fitting neatly in with our content.
Tanner Poor has the comment.
He says, or maybe she, I don't know, Tanner Poor, I received When Christmas Comes this past Christmas and finally got around to reading it today.
I read the entire thing today and then Clavin announces the sequel is coming out.
I go to Amazon to pre-order and find out it's coming out on my birthday.
If this isn't Divine Providence helping to spur me through the Clavenless weekend, I don't know what it is.
It is in fact Divine Providence.
It would also be Divine Providence if you yourself, the rest of you, would please go and pre-order A Strange Habit of Mind, the new Cameron Winter mystery.
It's the sequel to When Christmas Comes.
I know it's early.
It doesn't come out until October, but it means so much if it has great pre-orders because it means the company, the publishers, will order more copies and we have a chance of getting on the bestseller list.
If we get on the bestseller list, it's a series.
It will then be a series and I'll write as many of them as I possibly can before heading off, shuffling off to Buffalo.
So please go on and pre-order A Strange Habit of Mine.
So given recent SCOTUS wins, it feels like the pendulum may be swinging back to a time when the nuclear family was situated at the center of American life, where real conversation, learning, and growth began at home with your family gathered around the table.
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It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no easy claims.
So, one of the things we're going to talk about later on today is the novel Dracula.
I've invited a lady named Eleanor Berg-Nicholson, a very smart lady who's written about the book.
I've been studying Dracula as research for a new book I'm writing that's kind of a sequel to The Truth and Beauty, a nonfiction book.
And it's an amazing novel, and I'll talk about it with Eleanor, who's written some very intelligent stuff about it.
But the other day, as part of my research, I re-watched the movie with Bella Lugosi, 1931 movie.
It's not based on the book, but it's based on a play, a 1924 stage play that's based on the book.
And so it's different, and it develops the character of the madman Renfield, who's Dracula's slave.
And he's introduced as a madman when he arrives on a ship with Dracula from England.
And they hear his crazy laughter in the hold of the ship, and they open up the door, and there he is.
It's Dwight Fry, a brilliant character actor.
He played the assistant in Frankenstein as well.
But here is his trademark crazy laugh of Renfield in Dracula in the movie.
That's great.
Why A Person's Capacity Matters00:10:56
Now, because the movie is based on a play, right, it almost all takes place in, a lot of it takes place in the drawing room of the house of the guy, the doctor, who runs the insane asylum in which Renfield is ultimately placed.
And you can picture it as a play.
Every now and again, because they want to bring Renfield on, they'll be sitting in the drawing room, and all the good people will be talking and making plans and all that stuff.
And all of a sudden, Renfield will come on and he'll be offstage.
Before he comes on, you'll just hear that laughter.
So I'm watching this film, and I thought to myself, this is the left.
This is who they are.
This is what they sound like.
That's the left.
The rest of us are trying to take care of business.
We're trying to take care of inflation.
We're running our businesses.
We're raising our family.
And then this lunatic comes off stage and you start to hear these lunatic lefties come on and start saying all these crazy things.
While I was gone, there was this Senate hearing on the Dobbs decision about abortion and all this stuff.
And they bring on this Berkeley law professor, Kiara Bridges.
This is really interesting because it's not just her.
She keeps using, she's talking to Senator John Cornyn, and she keeps using these euphemisms for women.
It's Cut 28.
Do you think that a baby that is not yet born has value?
I believe that a person with a capacity for pregnancy has value.
They have intelligence.
They have agency.
I'm talking about the baby.
And I'm talking about the person with a capacity for pregnancy.
And you're not answering the question.
I'm asking you.
I'm answering a more interesting question to me because I'm not in the same world you're in.
I'm a lunatic.
I'm a lunatic where I'm in crazy land.
So I answered a question.
So finally, Josh Hawley of Missouri, right, the Center for Missouri, he says, well, when you talk about people with the capacity to have a baby, are you talking about women?
I mean, is this a women's rights issue we're talking about?
And here's part of that exchange.
There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy as well as non-binary people who are capable of pregnancy.
So this isn't really a women's rights issue.
We can recognize that this impacts women while also recognizing that it impacts other groups.
Those things are not mutually exclusive, Senator Hawley.
Oh, so your view is that the core of this right then is about what?
So I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic and it opens up trans people to violence by not recognizing that.
Wow, you're saying that I'm opening up people to violence by asking whether or not women are the folks who can have pregnancies?
So I want to note that one out of five transgender persons have attempted suicide.
So I think it's important to have a lot of people.
Because of my line of questioning?
Because we can't talk about it.
Because denying that trans people exist and pretending not to know that they exist.
I'm denying that trans people exist by asking you if you're talking about women having pregnancies.
Do you believe that men can get pregnant?
No, I don't think so.
But you are denying that trans people exist.
It's amazing, it's amazing to me, ladies and gentlemen.
If you look at the woman's eyes, I mean, you just think like, oh, you know, like doctor put her in the room in the back of the drawing room.
You know, it's amazing to me that wokeness, gay people used to be fabulous and witty.
You'd kind of say, let's go over and visit Randall.
You know, he tells such wonderful, gossipy stories.
He's gay, you know, he's everybody, wonderful guy.
Now they've just made them the most boring, crazy, uninteresting, small-minded people.
You know, she's just like, oh, here comes Randall.
He's gay.
Pretend you're not home.
And maybe he'll go away.
So what's fascinating about this is you only have to look at her, in my humble opinion.
It's obvious she's suffering from induced madness when you believe things that aren't true.
After a while, you become detached from reality.
But what's fascinating about this was that the left thought, oh, wow, she really owned, oh, man, she owned John Corner.
Oh, man, she really took them down by the left.
The left is so nuts.
The left is so nuts.
They don't realize what this looks like to sane people.
They do not realize it.
There was an article in The Spectator by a guy named Michael Locasano, I think I'm pronouncing it right.
Nervous media warns the wokesters.
He cites, in the Washington Post, Megan McCartney, I think she's kind of a middle-of-the-road kind of libertarian writer, but she says a Berkeley, the headline is a Berkeley professor's senate testimony didn't go how the left thinks it did.
He says the whole thing became a Rorschach test.
Many progressives cheered to see Professor Bridges school a reactionary Republican, but conservatives also cheered because they see a gift to Republican election campaigns.
And McArdle says, unlike a Rorschach test, however, this one has a right answer, and the progressives have it wrong.
Moreover, the fact that they can't see just how badly this exchange went for their side shows what a big mistake it was to let academia and media institutions turn into left-wing monocultures.
And Locasano in the spectator goes on, he says, CNN host and analyst Fareed Zakaria warned at the Washington Post that the Democratic Party was heading for ruin by obsessing over things like pronouns.
But when the Twitter people went after him, the post changed the headline because they're catering to this crazy left.
So here's the thing.
You can't argue with crazy people, right?
There's no point.
They dress like us.
There's a tendency to argue with them because they look like us, they dress like us, they speak English and all this stuff.
But they're not responsible to logic or reality.
So there's no point trying to disprove what they're saying to them.
you get what you got from that lady.
You get like, well, you're killing people by saying men.
You know, that's what you get.
And the problem we have, and it is a problem, is that in politics, you have to stand up to them.
You have to confront them because they come after your children.
They come after your laws.
And that's why, you know, you have to say the truth.
You have to say that only women have babies.
That's part of the definition of women.
And that's why Twitter silences you and calls you hateful when you say the most obvious things because it's so obvious to everybody.
Once you say it, once you say it out loud, the emperor is naked, then everybody sees it.
I mean, when, you know, I don't hate Will Thomas.
They call you hateful, but I don't hate Will Thomas.
He's a guy who calls himself Leah Thomas and steals women's swimming titles.
But when the NCAA says they name him woman of the year, you have to say something.
You have to say something.
And that takes time away from what we really should be doing and need to be doing, which is developing a positive conservative philosophy for this new technological internet age.
That is the task we are given right now to do that.
And these guys just destroy the conversation.
And it's just like the play Dracula, where we're sitting around talking about, well, how much welfare is too much welfare?
Do we need welfare at all?
Are programs hurting people?
Are they helping people?
Should we spend money on this and spend money on that?
And while we're talking about that, their response is this.
And you've got to do something because the CDC is pushing this gender stuff.
Chris Ruffo at City Journal writes about the LA school district.
He says, Los Angeles Unified School District has adopted a radical gender theory curriculum, encouraging teachers to work toward the breakdown of the gender binary, to experiment with gender pronouns such as they, Z, and tree, and to adopt trans-affirming programming to make their classrooms queer all school year.
And here's Richard Levine, the admiral of the ocean waves.
This is Rachel Levine, he calls himself now.
And they want to do this to children.
Remember, there's no science behind this.
There's only science that you can damage children forever, forever by doing this.
Here's what Rachel Levine says, cut 11.
Trans youth are vulnerable, and they suffer significant harassment and bullying sometimes in schools or in their community.
They have more mental health issues, but there's nothing inherent with being transgender or gender diverse, which would predispose youth to depression or anxiety.
It is that harassment and bullying.
Now they're suffering politically motivated attacks through state actions against these vulnerable transgender youth.
This is not based upon data.
These actions are politically motivated.
And so we really want to base our treatment and to affirm and to support and empower these youth, not to limit their participation in activities in sports and even limit their ability to get gender affirmation treatment in their state.
So the task before us is clearly to relentlessly expose the crazy because it's everywhere.
It's at the highest level of governments, of academia, of the movie industry, of everywhere.
We've got to expose it everywhere we see it.
But we can't let that distract us from developing a true, honest, conservative plan for going forward in a new age.
It's not 1800 anymore.
It's a new age that we need to have a conservatism for that, a positive, a positive vision, because otherwise, if we don't stand up to them and if we don't deliver an alternative positive vision, the entire world becomes this.
I just got back from my vacation.
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So it's summer, obviously, or as the left calls it, a climate emergency.
And, you know, this is another place where the crazy has gotten out of control, where the Ren-filled laughter is everywhere.
But it's a story that's not being entirely told.
If you're watching the mainstream media, you're not seeing it at all.
And I don't even think right-wing media is covering it enough.
You know, this is a hot summer.
It is very, very hot.
And in fact, the climate of the Earth has warmed about two degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, which is when the industrial era kind of gets into full full-blown strength.
The question of whether it is the industrial era, it's industry that has warmed the Earth is still an open question.
We don't know that for sure.
We can't prove that's the reason, but it kind of makes sense that it might be.
So it might be part of why the Earth is warming, but it could be other things as well.
The Earth has gotten warm and cold before.
Remember, the Great Lakes used to be glaciers.
I mean, the climate of the Earth changes.
But you know what else has happened since 1880?
Here's another thing that's happened.
The climate has gone up a couple of degrees, but the life expectancy, at least in the U.S., has doubled.
From 1880, when the climate started to make this current climb, life expectancy has gone from 39 to 78.
So Bjorn Lumborg writes this.
He says, across the world, low temperatures are much more dangerous than high ones.
It's more dangerous to get cold than it is to get hot.
Half a million people die each year from heat, but more than 4.5 million die from cold.
While rising temperatures will increase heat deaths, they will also decrease cold deaths.
A recent Lance's study found that rising temperatures since 2000 have on net reduced the number of temperature-related deaths.
Researchers concluded that by the end of the 2010s, rising temperatures globally were causing 116,000 more heat deaths annually, but leading to 283,000 fewer cold deaths a year.
So it's a nuanced situation, right?
And we don't know exactly why it's happening.
We're not sure at all whether we can control it and whether anything we do has anything to do with it.
But all in all, it is when it comes to how many lives have been lost.
It's been a net positive for life.
It has been a good thing for life.
So, but it's an emergency.
It's an emergency.
Whenever the Democrats don't get what they want, it's an emergency.
They believe in democracy until they lose the election.
Then it's an emergency.
And they keep pressing Biden, this poor guy, now he has COVID.
Before he barely knew where he was.
They want him to declare an emergency because mostly because Joe Manchin is not going to go along with their climate Green New Deal craziness because he comes from a coal state because he doesn't want to shut down coal, especially when they have nothing to replace it for it.
But when the left doesn't get their way, the worst thing about democracy to the left is democracy.
Whenever there's democracy, they say this democracy is terrible for democracy.
So Biden is being urged to declare that he has emergency powers because then he would have special superpowers that he could stop.
He'd be able, if he has emergency powers, he is then legally able to fly into the sky and dump water on the sun to cool it down.
And this is Biden being pushed by the left.
It's Cut 18.
Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world.
So my message today is this.
Since Congress is not acting as it should, and these guys here are, but we're not getting many Republican votes, this is an emergency.
An emergency.
And I will.
I will look at it that way.
I said last week, and I'll say it again loud and clear.
As president, I'll use my executive powers to combat the climate crisis in the absence of congressional actions, notwithstanding their incredible action.
They're applauding, yeah, we didn't want, we didn't like the voting in this voting thing.
We don't like the democracy republic.
We don't want that anyway.
Stop the sun from shining.
It's like this lunacy.
It's absolute lunacy.
I don't think he's going to get away with it.
I think the courts are going to stop him if he goes too far.
But still, this is what they want to hear.
So he's doing it for the base.
The base wants to hear that democracy is over because the sun is hot.
And of course, he went on in very touching ways to talk about the terrible toll that pollution is taking on him personally.
This Cut 19.
And just up the road, a little school I went to, Holy Rosary Grade School.
And because it was a four-lane highway that was accessible, my mother drove us rather than us be able to walk.
And guess what?
The first frost, you know what was happening.
They had to put on their windshield wipers to get literally the oil slick off the window.
That's why I and so damn many other people I grew up have cancer and why can't for the longest time Delaware had the highest cancer rate in the nation.
People were like, wait, what?
The president has cancer.
The president has cancer?
Luckily, the White House instantly issued a correction.
They said, no, no, he doesn't have cancer.
He has dementia.
You already know what he's talking about.
It's funny because this is a story he used to tell that he had asthma.
In the original story he had asthma, so it's gotten much, much worse, much worse.
This has been a worldwide, but certainly Western-wide, it's not bothering China because they're not doing anything about it, but it has been a Westwide disaster.
The green agenda has been a disaster.
Here's a list.
I took this from the Wall Street Journal, but I could have gotten it anywhere.
Soaring oil and natural gas prices, obviously.
Electricity grids on the brink of failure.
Energy shortages in Europe with worse to come.
The free world's growing strategic vulnerability to Vladimir Putin and other dictators.
These are some of the unfolding results in the last year caused by the West's utopian dream to punish fossil fuels and sprint to a world driven solely by renewable energy.
And so all of this stuff is affecting real people, right?
We have supply shortages.
We have the grids going down.
This is all because of the Green New Deal.
It's all because they don't have the power to replace fossil fuels.
It doesn't exist.
And what's their response?
Here's Pete Buttigig.
He's going to tell you how to handle this.
Cut seven.
The more pain we are all experiencing from the high price of gas, the more benefit there is for those who can access electric vehicles.
That's why we're hoping you and your colleagues might reconsider opposing the reduction of EV upfront prices with tax credits.
Sleep Quiz: Comfort Matters00:02:28
So you're saying the more pain we have, the more benefit we're going to get.
I think that's what I heard you say.
The more pain that we have.
No, that's what you heard me say.
That's what I heard you say.
I know you want me to say it so bad, but honestly, sir, what we're saying is that we could have no pain at all by making EVs cheaper for everybody, and we'd love to have your support on that.
So we just got to buy everybody a Tesla.
It's just 40, 50 grand.
And of course, if the battery goes bad, it's another 14,000.
You know, Pete can afford this.
Pete can afford a Tesla.
Why?
Because we're paying his salary.
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No Ease.
I just make it look this easy.
You know, they're all flying private jets around.
They're all, you know, obviously, obviously, not one of them believes that this is the emergency they say it is or they wouldn't be behaving the way they are.
They wouldn't, you know, there was all this stuff, a big chart of how the short flights that celebrities take, nine minutes, 10 minutes, they get in their jet to get over LA traffic, I guess.
Everyone's yelling at Kylie Jenner because she took a 17-minute flight.
I'm not yelling at Kylie Jenner because I have no idea who Kylie Jenner is.
So I'm not yelling at her because I don't know where she is.
Sri Lanka's Crop Crisis00:07:58
But here's the story.
Here is the story that nobody is reporting.
I'm taking this from the Federalist, Beth Whitehead.
If you skim the front pages of major corporate news outlets, you'll find no mention of the economic protests raging in Spain, Morocco, Greece, and the United Kingdom.
On the Washington Post homepage these days, you'll find headlines such as how to deal with a chatty co-worker who won't get out of your office.
You'll find the story of a gay union entitled, There's Two Yentas Plus One Senator, a Lifetime Together.
Corporate media has largely glossed over the tens of thousands of farmers, maybe as much as 40,000 people in the Netherlands, which only has 40,000 people, who clogged up roadways and distribution centers by holding Canadian trucker convoy style demonstrations.
According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which records protests worldwide, recorded protests of more than 120,000 people in France, 100,000 in Spain, 10,000 in Greece, 10,000 in Kazakhstan, 10,000 in Sri Lanka, 10,000 in India, Sri Lanka.
You know, they keep calling that a protest.
That was a revolution.
Sri Lanka, a country where they can't even afford to buy a vowel, but put between the S and the R, right?
It's just Sri Lanka.
You know, Pat Sajak keeps saying, no, buying a vowel is a good deal.
But they're like, I know, but we got to eat.
They finally threw their dictator.
He's not really a dictator technically, I guess, but he was basically a dictator.
They threw him out because he's telling people that they've got to do organic farming and their food is disappearing.
They're hungry.
They're hungry because of the Green New Deal.
And this is a place, you know, they mentioned this, Tunku Baradar Darajan mentioned this.
Norman Borlach, one of the people the Green.
Greens hate.
This is the guy who did more to feed the world than any man before or since.
He built chemical fertilizers and crops bred to be disease resistant.
And this is what made Sri Lanka, without the A between the S and the R, is Sri Lanka.
It put them on the path to agricultural abundance.
And now the president, the former president now, Gadabaya Rajapaksa, said, no, we've got to do without that.
We've got to do organic farming.
And of course, it doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
And so Gadabaya was his name, got to say goodbye, because suddenly people stormed his palace and tossed him out.
You know, if you watch what's happening, and all of this isn't directly related to the Green New Deal, I'm not saying it is.
But if you watch, you know, the prime minister of the UK just resigned.
Italy just resigned.
A lot of people leave in town, blowing town, especially in some of these smaller countries, because things are going badly.
And not all of that is related to the Green New Deal, but all of it is related to bad governance, which is made worse by the Green New Deal, making prices go up, making it impossible to face down a bum like Putin, you know, just a nasty dictator.
We can't face him down because Europe is buying their energy from him instead of from us.
We could be producing it, but we're not.
And the thing is, you know, I'm for cleaner energy.
I'm sure you are too, but we can't do it yet.
This is the thing.
Here's Bjorn Lumborg again.
He says the world gets almost 80% of its energy from fossil fuels.
And even if all current climate policies were fully implemented by mid-century, fossil fuels would still provide more than half of all energy used worldwide, according to the International Energy Agency, and prices would skyrocket.
This is Maoism, okay?
Chairman Mao, late 50s, early 60s, basically would declare how much the farmers were going to make, how many crops the farmers were going to grow, what degree they were going to.
And he just said, just do it.
You're just going to do it.
This is it.
And they had one of those stupid Soviet theories where the science is supposed to be in line with their stupid Soviet communist socialist ideas.
And they said to the farmers, look, this is how much you have to produce.
And if you didn't produce for Mao, it wasn't a good thing.
You know, you wound up dead.
So people were literally sending in pictures saying, here, Chairman Mao, here is my land with all the crops.
And they were piling crops on.
And then the next peasant would take it down the line and he'd pile the same crops because they couldn't produce them.
They couldn't produce them.
It was called the illusion of super abundance because the Communist Party kept lying to both the people and to itself that the food was being produced.
Up to 50 million people died in the famine that was produced by that, okay, because they didn't have the ability to grow what communism, what the people at the top, told them they were supposed to grow.
And now we've got Klaus von Nazi in Davos flying his private jet over to Al Gore's mansion and saying, oh, the people, the people have to stop driving the Volkswagens.
But let me get in my private jet and fly around and tell them to stop driving the Volkswagen so we have a green world.
You know, it can't be done.
We don't have the technology.
Simple, simple answer.
Simple answer.
Put some money into research and let the people have their energy so they can live.
Let us live in abundance, not in non-abundance.
Let us have no pain, Pete Burujez.
Let us have no pain.
Let us have abundance and wealth and air conditions that work and electronic grids that don't collapse and gas we can afford.
It was $2.50 just when Donald Trump, the evil Donald Trump left.
He left us with gas we could afford.
Now it's twice that.
It has doubled under Biden and some of it is from the Putin war.
But we wouldn't even be fighting the Putin war if we stood up to Putin and we'd be able to stand up to Putin if we had the gas that he is selling us.
All of it, again, It always depends on science, on silence.
It always depends on silence.
Just like transgenderism, it depends on shutting people down because the truth is so damned obvious.
The truth is obvious.
Every sane person can see the truth.
If we don't show you the protests, they're not happening.
It's not until you look out the door and you see the crowds out there that they're happening.
But if we don't show them to you, maybe nobody will notice that everybody is hurting because of the stupidity of the people in power.
The COVID lockdowns and now the Green New Deal.
The Green New Deal is one of the stupidest things that has ever been done.
And it is ruining, it's ruining our countries.
It is ruining our country.
It's sending people into debt.
They don't know whether to pay for gas or pay for food.
In places around the world, it's bringing people out into the streets and they're covering it up.
So you have to talk.
We have to, you know, it's just like in Dracula.
We're sitting around going, well, you know, can we afford gas or can we afford food?
How are we going to build our businesses?
How are we going to do things in real life?
Are we going to be able to take a vacation?
And meanwhile, offstage, there are the Greens, and this is what they're saying.
So when you go on vacation, you really got to appreciate all the people around you who make the world run so smoothly, as opposed to being here at The Daily Wire.
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Why Would You Risk It?00:12:45
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So just to show you a little bit of how this craziness, and it is craziness, and how bad ideas, bad ideas, you know, really do affect everything.
They just bleed into everything.
They drive people more and more crazy.
You get people like that Berkeley professor with the big eyes, you know, laughing at every oh, you're killing people because you deny that men can't have babies.
You know, I want to talk a little bit about Evaldi, obviously the place in Texas where the nutbag killed 19 kids that went into the school and shot 19 children.
375 police from state, local, federal level were all there and no one went in.
And I was very slow, very slow to criticize this because I didn't have all the facts.
I wanted more information.
I know that even heroes can get pinned down by gunfire.
Even brave men can fail at something.
And also, I'm not the one running in to confront a guy with a gun, so I'm very slow to call anybody cowardly.
I think that that's absurd.
It's so easy to pound your fist and say, oh, those cowards, but you're not the guy facing the right hole.
But this is extraordinary.
This was a truly extraordinary failure at every single possible level.
No one took charge.
No one went in.
19 children killed.
Children calling for help.
CNN got this exclusive video.
This shows, this is the terror.
This is the part of the worst part of this video to me.
It just goes on and on and on as these cops stand around.
They're looking at their phones.
They're sitting there doing nothing.
They're, you know, obviously have no one to lead them.
And there are gunshots coming from the, it's just, I'm not laughing.
I'm just laughing at the horror of it.
There's a call at one point from Dispatch, and she's got a child on the line telling them that this is an ongoing situation.
This is not, at one point they thought, well, it's a hostage situation, but it's not.
This is cut eight from this CNN video.
You have a child on the line.
Hey, what was that?
And they're still out there, even after this.
They do nothing.
They do nothing.
And this guy, Aradondo, who's the local guy, and they've been blaming him for everything, but it's not all his fault.
I mean, it's his fault, but it's not all his fault.
He's still negotiating with the shooter after hearing about this.
This is cut nine.
Sir, if you can hear me, please put your firearm down, sir.
We don't want anybody else hurt.
We got kids in the middle of the house.
I know, I know.
Trying to get him out.
We're trying to get them out.
It's unbelievable.
This is a report from the newspaper reporting on an investigation by the Texas House.
In total, 376 law enforcement officers, a force larger than the garrison that defended the Alamo, descended upon the school in a chaotic, uncoordinated scene that lasted for more than an hour.
The group was devoid of clear leadership, basic communications, and sufficient urgency to take down the gunman, the report says.
The report also reveals for the first time that the overwhelming majority of responders were federal and state law enforcement.
149 were U.S. Border Patrol, 91 were state police, whose responsibilities include responding to mass attacks on public places.
It's extraordinary, and it is cowardly, and it is incompetent.
I'm not saying that we're all cowards.
I think people need leadership.
But this, too, is part of the madness that we're seeing in our society, a madness that comes from the top.
It comes from the top down.
The people aren't crazy.
The people are not crazy.
You talk, you know, travel around.
I travel around.
I talk to people all the time.
The people are perfectly sane.
Not all of them are educated.
Not all of them have all the details or all the facts, but they're not nuts.
The people who are nuts are the people in control.
Think about this.
George Floyd was killed by a cop, and I think it was sloppy policeman.
Every cop I've talked to, sloppy policing.
Every cop I've talked to says that was sloppy policing.
But there's no evidence whatsoever, not one iota of evidence that it was a racial incident.
And consider the speed with which that was turned into a racial issue.
Not one iota.
He wasn't charged.
The cop, Derek Chauvin, wasn't charged with any kind of racial hatred or anything like that.
The district attorney, the prosecutor, said they didn't have the evidence for that.
And you look how every time the police try to do their job, they come under the gun, right?
I mean, there's this one in Minneapolis, Techley Sundberg.
The police say Sundberg shot into the apartment of Arabella Yarborough, leading to calls for police that resulted in a standoff.
And then Techley Sundberg was killed.
And immediately the people are demonstrating outside the house of this woman who was pinned down by Sundberg's gunfire with her two children.
She finally stands up to them.
Here's a cut four.
You guys are celebrating his life.
It was a terror.
I'm sure it was a terror.
It's not okay.
Not okay.
You're alive.
It's not okay.
You're not here.
Just let it go.
Grief and silence.
It's not okay.
It's not okay.
This is not a George Floyd situation.
George Floyd was unarmed.
He was unarmed.
You're alive.
Sorry.
This is not okay.
My kids have to deal with this.
They probably have a mental illness now because they almost lost their life.
There's bullet holes in my kitchen because he sat in the fing hallway watching my move.
Unbelievable.
You're lying.
She was pinned down with her two children.
You're lying.
How do you know?
How do you obviously, obviously, this is something they do.
It's coordinated for the entire country to have caught fire after George Floyd, this violent criminal, this drug addict, was killed, I think, by sloppy policing, but not racially.
There was no indication that this was a racial thing, that this could turn everything on this year.
They are ready, they're prepared, and they are selling their insanity.
And of course, so you have these police, they're standing outside.
Why do they need a leader to stop a guy from shooting kids, right?
I mean, people have stopped shooters without any leadership whatsoever.
But each one of them is on the dime.
Each one of them is on the dime waiting, knowing if he does the wrong thing, knowing if he steps out of line, knowing if he shoots somebody.
Even when you have a woman there with kids in danger, if you shoot somebody, they're going to show up.
They're going to call you names.
They're going to say it's racial.
They're going to do all the things that they're afraid are going to happen.
So they're frozen.
And there's something even more than that.
You know, the president of the United States has COVID.
Joe Biden has COVID.
And I wish him well and I hope he gets better.
And, you know, but that's not how the press treated Trump when he had COVID right.
When Trump finished, and I know I've talked about this before, but it's so important and it's so much a part of this.
When Trump came back, remember, and he kind of came back and he said, I'm better.
And he stood on the balcony, pulled off his mask, the press went nuts.
He sent out a tweet saying, don't be afraid, don't let this govern your life.
And the press went nuts.
Here's a montage, cut five.
President Trump wrote on Twitter, don't be afraid of COVID.
Don't let it dominate your life.
Almost 210,000 Americans are dead.
Speaking of outrageous, this outrageous tweet.
Oh my goodness, Nicole.
When I saw that, Trump, I mean, I literally was overwhelmed.
And now we see this tweet, which is heartless.
It is cruel.
Jake, this is so disrespectful.
I'm not even sure I can speak about this.
It's incredibly, incredibly disrespectful.
What does that mean, don't be afraid of it?
I mean, first of all, it's a contagious disease that kills people.
There's nowhere to even begin.
It's gross.
Don't tell your supporters, don't be afraid of COVID.
Everyone should be afraid of COVID.
It's okay to be afraid of COVID, and it's okay that it's dominating your life because it has dominated your life.
Is that amazing?
Is that amazing?
Be afraid.
You could die.
And now we learn about death from the guy.
Remember when Andrew Cuomo, before we found out he pinched a girl's butt or whatever he did?
I mean, he killed a lot of old people.
That didn't matter.
It was when he pinched the girl.
Remember, Andrew Cuomo was held up as the anti-Trump.
He was the man.
He, oh my goodness, he was the latest idol.
Anthony Fauci, the latest idol.
You know, whoever, whatever lowlife was standing up to Trump as the latest guy who's going to be the next president.
Now, I told you, you heard on this show first, you heard that he was never going to be president because he was corrupt.
He had this moment when there were protests because they were locking down everything, and he was challenged by a reporter saying, these people can't eat, they can't make a living, they can't keep their businesses going.
They're protesting.
What do you have to say to them?
And this is the exchange, cut six.
I don't know if you can hear, but there are protesters outside right now honking their horns and raising signs and they're saying that they don't have time to wait for all of this testing and they need to get back to work in order to feed their families.
Their savings is running out.
They don't have another week.
They're not getting answers.
So their point is, the cure can't be worse than the illness itself.
What is your response to them?
The illness is death.
What is worse than death?
What if somebody commits suicide because they can't pay their bills?
Yeah, but the illnesses may be my death as opposed to your death, you said.
They said the cure is worse than the illness.
The illness is death.
How can the cure be worse than the illness if the illness is potential death?
Now, this is.
You know.
They put this up on youtube as a an example of Andrew Cuomo's brilliance as a genius of taking down this idea, because what could be worse than death?
What could be?
Is slavery worse than death?
No, nothing is worse than death.
Is is dishonor worse than death?
Is uh, your family's life worse than your death?
I mean, what?
What you know?
You're destroying people's dreams, you're destroying the economy, you're destroying uh, people's means of making a living, you're making people poor, you're making them dependent.
But at least it's not death.
It's not death right, it's not death.
And it all, it all always always always, comes back to this materialist idea.
It is all about this materialist idea.
No god, you're just a piece of meat.
You're just a piece of meat with a chemical set inside, a chemistry set inside.
The one thing you don't want no no no, you don't want to die, because if you die, what is there?
There's nothing.
There's nothing worth dying for, there's nothing worth dying for.
And i'm obviously, obviously not saying that that directly feeds in uh to Yivaldi, that it directly means um, you know that they were sitting there going.
Well, Andrew Cuomo says there's nothing worse than death.
But yeah ultimately ultimately, if you have a world in which there is nothing worth dying for, it's not worth dying for your dreams, it's not worth dying to feed your family.
It's not worth dying to keep the economy going for everybody else.
Uh, you know it, because it might cause Andrew Cuomo's death.
So you don't want to do that, because there's nothing worse than death.
Why would you charge into a room full of children?
Why would you choose Char?
Uh, charge into a room with a rifleman in there who might cause death, as Andrew Cuomo would say, what is worse than death?
Why would you charge in there and risk your life?
That all the only thing you've got, because you got nothing else.
Why would you do it?
You know this.
These ideas, these ideas, they make everything worse.
They've made all our life worse.
Look around is because of uh, you know, critical race theories.
Are life better or is it worse?
Transgenderism life better or worse?
Children better or worse?
Are they?
They're crazy, they're sick.
Lies lies, false ideas, they lead to madness and only the truth can set us free and otherwise Otherwise, Everyone becomes Renfield.
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Well, I'm delighted to be here talking to Congressman Jim Jordan.
He is the founder of the Freedom Caucus and the author of the new book, Do What You Said You Would Do, Fighting for Freedom in the Swamp.
And he must be a right-wing lunatic because I almost always agree with him.
It's frightening we let people like that into government.
Congressman, it's great to meet you.
Good to be with you.
And I think it's the other way around.
I almost always agree with you.
I appreciate what you do.
That's just frightening.
People like me shouldn't have any power.
You know, I'm watching everything that's happening in Congress.
And you have been fighting.
The Freedom Caucus really has been a solid right-wing voice for, I don't know, it's been a long time now, at least 10 years, something like that.
Yeah.
What I see in Congress is almost a circus.
I mean, before we went on the air, we were talking about the fact that I was at some of Trump's prayer breakfasts, and there was a sign at the prayer breakfast of people getting along.
See, people saying we pray together.
I'm a Democrat, he's a Republican.
We pray together so we don't stab each other in the back.
Is it still like that?
No, I think it's very divided.
You know, remember on Inauguration Day, Joe Biden says he wants to unify the country.
And then about an hour and a half after his speech, he goes to the Oval Office and signs like 20, 21 different executive orders that divide the country.
So it's very, very divided.
I think a lot of it is today's left is different than the left of 10, maybe even five years ago.
Today's left doesn't believe in, they don't believe in the First Amendment.
I mean, they don't believe in free speech.
Today's left says, if you don't agree with them, you're not allowed to talk.
And if you try, they're going to call you a racist and they're going to try to cancel you.
And the left of five, 10 years ago, I think we were talking before that Dennis Kucinich is a friend of mine.
And Dennis is a left.
I mean, he's like, he's like way over here and he thinks I'm a crazy conservative over here.
But we're friends, literally.
And we used to be on the committee together, Oversight Committee.
And we could agree on privacy issues and First Amendment issues and liberty interests.
But today's left is not that way.
And that's problematic.
And frankly, you mentioned the Freedom Caucus.
I tell folks all the time, there's a reason we called it the Freedom Caucus.
We could have said the Conservative Caucus.
We could have come up with some other catchy name.
But we said, no, let's focus in on what matters.
What makes America this special place where if you have a goal, you have a dream, you're willing to work hard, you can accomplish that.
And you can accomplish that because we have freedom.
And that's what's under attack by today's left.
And that's why it's so important that we fight them every step of the way.
Whenever they try to cancel one of us, whenever they try to cancel a constituent who shows up at a school board meeting, you got to defend them.
You got to defend the truth.
You got to defend freedom because that's what really is at the heart of it all.
Does this affect your, you were talking about being friends with Dennis Kucinich, which is a hard image to get in my head, but still.
But no, that is the America I remember, actually.
So does this affect your personal relations in the because being a congressman, you have to be able to negotiate and talk and hang out.
Well, it's been tough of late because, and I don't think it's, you know, again, we all have biases, I guess, but I don't think it's coming from the Republican side so much.
But you have Democrats who they, like, particularly during COVID, I think COVID exacerbated all this that was happening.
But, you know, people wouldn't get on their elevator with you if you didn't have a mask on or something.
People would yell at me.
It's like, it's a different, it just seems different than, like I said, five, ten years ago.
So you try to, I try to be polite to people.
I mean, that's what we're supposed to be as good manners, good people.
But yeah, they get, now in committee, that's a different animal.
When we're fighting about policy and it's an investigation, we're trying to get to the truth.
I'm going to be as tough as I can be within the rules, within the Constitution, make the arguments, do the cross-examinations that need, you know, in the way they need to be done.
But outside of committee, sometimes they, well, maybe this is the best one.
This was a year and a half ago.
So it was after the 2020 election, about a week before Christmas.
I was in the Capitol.
We were finishing up the business before we went home for the holidays.
And I was up at the Conservative Partnership Institute.
I had to meet Jim DeMin up there for something.
And they're right on Independence Avenue, up down about three blocks from the Capitol.
And so I had, and I step out and they're right on the corner of the street.
And I step out.
And it's a sunny day.
There's the Capitol.
The sun's hitting the Capitol dome.
It's a week before Christmas in America.
And as I step out, coming down the sidewalk is this guy pushing a double stroller with two little kids in the stroller.
And I'm like, this is his apple pies again.
This is a week before Christmas, the sun on the Capitol.
Nice day.
Two kids in a stroller.
The dad pushed.
And I did what any American, I smiled at the guy who's pushing the stroller.
And he was like, just like, gave me this look like, Jim Jordan, that no-good conservative.
And I'm like, dude, lighten up.
It's America.
You're still bad at Trump voters or whatever, but come on.
And that's not healthy.
And I think it mostly comes from the left because I was willing to smile at him and he had a mask on outside.
I figured he's probably liberal.
But that doesn't change that it's a week before Christmas in America in the Capitol Dome with the sun on it.
I mean, so I don't get them.
I don't get them, but let's hope it's stopping.
I feel the same.
And I've lost friends and relatives, and I don't even believe it can happen.
When you look at Congress, as we're sitting here right now, what's the most dangerous thing you see going on?
The attack on your liberties.
First Amendment, Second Amendment, Fourth Amendment due process, this red flag law, crazy.
Someone doesn't like you.
They go to the law enforcement, they go to a judge, say, Andrew's crazy, take his guns away from him.
There's a hearing within 24 hours.
You can't be at it.
Your lawyer can't be present.
You've not been charged with the crime, but they can take your property in America.
And then you have to petition the government.
The initiative then goes, the burden then goes to you to go get your Second Amendment rights back and get your firearm back, for goodness sake, or firearms.
Who knows?
So somehow that's America.
Like, you've got to be kidding me.
And then not to mention what's happened to your right.
I mean, think about it.
I said this in speeches.
Every right we enjoy under the First Amendment has been assaulted over the last year and a half by the left, by government.
Right to practice your faith, right to assemble, right to petition, freedom, press, freedom of speech, everyone.
So until a few months ago, there were still some states where their Democrat leaders wouldn't let a full congregation meet on a Sunday morning in church, like in America.
About a year and a half ago, I spoke to the New Mexico Republican Party in Amarillo, Texas, because they had to go to Texas to get the freedom to assemble in the size crowd they wanted to.
Until a couple months ago, you couldn't go to your capital to petition your member of Congress to redress your grievances because Pelosi wouldn't let you in your capital that you pay for.
It's your capital.
It's American people's capital.
And you just go to, we know what's happened to speech, the disinformation governance board that they tried.
You got to be kidding me.
Here's the best one.
Jin Saki stood in the White House press room.
The White House press room.
So think about it.
The White House is the center of freedom, considered the center of freedom on the planet.
In the press room, the press secretary at the podium says these two sentences.
Most Americans now get their news from social media platforms.
We, the Biden administration, are working with those platforms to limit the disinformation American.
And I'm like looking around like the press person just talked about limiting the press from the press room in the White House in America.
And they don't object.
No, it's like they're cheering it.
That's the most dangerous thing happening.
So you see people, Republicans, feeling confident about the midterms coming up.
Are you confident?
Yeah, but I mean, my background's in wrestling.
I never want to be overconfident.
So I don't want to get overconfident, but I am confident because we go all over Ohio, all over the country, and you can feel it.
And people sense what we just talked about, what's happening to their liberties.
But if you could sum it up, they got less money in their wallet, less gas in their car, and less freedom.
That's probably not a good message to run on, and that's what the Democrats have done.
So you look at every policy area, it's been bad.
And maybe most telling, I've been around politics a little while now.
Whenever you see wrong track polling numbers, where they're at, almost nine out of 10 of our fellow citizens think the country's headed in the wrong direction.
They think that because it is.
And American people are smart.
They got common sense.
They get it.
So I do feel good about our chances on November 8th.
I think the country is about ready to send a message to the hard left and to the Biden administration.
Time out.
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So your book is called Do What You Said You Would Do.
One of the complaints that Republicans and especially conservative Republicans have is that the Republicans were always saying, well, if we had the House, we could do something.
And when they have the House, they say, well, if we had the Senate, we could do something.
And then they get the presidency, too, and nothing happens.
I mean, they can't overturn Obamacare.
They can't build a wall.
They can't do the things that you would think they would be able to do.
They're not just funding the government.
Let's say you take the House.
That's the easy one.
The easier one this time.
I shouldn't say easy, but it's easier.
What will we get from that?
We in the House will pass what important legislation that the country needs now.
Will it get through the Senate?
Probably not.
Well, if it does get to the Senate, will Joe Biden sign it?
Almost definitely not.
But it's still, we still need to pass it.
Something on the censorship kind of concept that's happening with big tech limiting and going after conservatives.
It's definitely something on the border, too.
We no longer have a border.
We need to, I think, things we can do on the regulatory environment, on the tax policy.
There's lots of things we can pass that are consistent with Republican principles, what we campaigned on.
But what we can also do, part of our constitutional responsibility as members of the legislative branch is to do oversight, to do the investigations that should be done so the nation, so the people, so we the people, have the facts and the truth.
The country needs to fully understand where this virus started, as an example.
The country needs to understand why there's such a mess on our border.
We think that's intentionally done by the Biden administration.
The country needs to understand about the political nature of the Justice Department, specifically the targeting of moms and dads who are showing up at school board meetings.
The country needs to know how in the world did thousands of Americans' tax returns get public?
It's not supposed to happen in this country.
So do those investigate.
I asked on the virus issue.
I asked Dr. Burks, this is like four weeks ago.
I'm on this select committee on coronavirus, this committee.
She was the witness, and I asked her four weeks ago in a hearing, I said, Dr. Burks, when the government, the Biden administration, when the government told the American people that the vaccinated couldn't get the virus, were they guessing or lying?
And her response was, I don't know.
Think about that.
Like, you're the big shot on the task force, and not during the Biden administration, where Walinski told us, CDC director told us this, and Joe Biden told us this, for goodness sake.
And you don't know.
And so I followed up.
I said, so our government was lying to us?
She goes, I like to think not.
I like to think they were hoping, but that's scary.
So the country needs to, it's frankly why there's this, I think, this uneasiness and this lack of confidence so many Americans now have in our government, because how many times have they told us things that weren't true?
They always talk about misinformation that you and I would convey.
No, the misinformation comes from, most of it comes from the government.
Yeah.
You know, going back a minute to talking about laws you would pass in the House that wouldn't make it through the Senate.
I mean, obviously, the left is doing that now, and they're passing laws about marriage and about contraception, things that I don't think are really under threat.
They're kind of, I guess they're pretending.
Aside from political theater, what is the point of passing those laws?
It's political theater.
They think it's going to help them somehow in the election.
I don't think it's going to.
And frankly, what else are they going to talk about?
But when you said that if the Republicans took back the House, you would also pass laws that the Senate wouldn't pass.
Well, I do think what you campaign on, this gets back to the do what you said to you.
That's why I made the title of the book.
And frankly, I would argue no one has done that better, did more of what they said they would do than President Trump.
And I think it also underscores this.
Effort to Pass Immigration Bill00:07:40
To really get things done, you need the executive branch.
And in modern American government and politics, to effect real change, you almost have to have the executive branch.
And we saw this when President Trump was in there, when we were able to reduce regulations, cut taxes, build the wall, do things that Republicans campaigned on.
President Trump, like I said, I think he kept more of his promises, did more of what he said he would do than any president we've ever had.
Early in the administration, I remember going to the West Wing there.
It was with Congressman Meadows.
This was earlier, so before he was chief of staff, and we were there in one of the offices in the West Wing.
And literally in the office, they had a big whiteboard.
And they had written every single promise President Trump had made to the country in the 2016 campaign, everyone.
And they were just checking him off.
Yeah.
As they were like, reduce regulation, cut taxes, build the wall, get out of the Iran deal, get out of the Paris Climate Embassy in Jerusalem, conservatives on the court.
I mean, just like, and it was a just that's how you're supposed to govern.
And we need to do that.
We've promised the American people we're concerned about the border, we're concerned about energy policy, the inflation.
We need to pass an energy package, but Joe Biden's not going to sign it.
And frankly, even if he wanted to, and knowing that would help the country, the left that controls his party won't let it.
So, but you frame up, by doing that, you help frame up the 2024 race, and you have a presidential contest, and whoever the American people decide, if they put in President Trump, who I think is going to run, then we can really get those things done.
But you have to help frame it up.
I mean, that's just how American politics works.
Do you think that President Trump has been damaged by the January 6th committee?
I really don't.
Because I do think the American people have common sense and they have seen from day one the left has been out to get this guy.
They started investigating before he was in office, the whole Russia, Comey, McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page effort.
They impeached him twice while he was in office.
And they're trying to impeach him now and go after him that he's out of office because they don't want him to run again.
And they don't want him to run again because he proved you can actually go in and disrupt the swamp and put America first.
And they can't stand it.
They cannot stay.
And here's the interesting thing: it's not just Democrats who can't stand it.
Some Republicans.
And it's most, maybe the scariest of all, it's all the bureaucracy.
And I always tell people, he got more done than any other president we've ever seen, and everyone was against him.
Everyone in the media, everyone in the Democrat Party, a bunch of Republicans, and all the bureaucracy, and still got more done than any president, certainly in our lifetimes.
So that's why they don't want him to run.
But all that, that's why I do want him to run and I want him to be president again.
And what would you think he should do differently if he gets back in?
I mean, it was a chaotic presidency.
I mean, he was a guy who I love the fact that he went after the press.
I think the press deserves everything he gave him.
Every single word he said I thought was true about the press.
But it did create this kind of atmosphere of chaos around him that I do think it alienated a lot of people.
Well, I think it's his style to be aggressive.
The one thing I love about the guy is he, and you've spent some time around him too, I know, but I feel fortunate.
I've got to spend a lot of time around him.
You can't help but like him.
He's like, if he was here right now, he'd make everyone feel at home.
He just, he's just, our family's been around him.
He makes everyone feel special.
He's just that kind of, he's got this charisma and energy about him that's special.
He loves the country.
He loves our law enforcement.
Maybe you see law enforcement guys, they'll come up to me all the time, like, keep fighting for the president.
So he loves our veterans, our military.
He loves the country.
And the other thing that's so special about him is he hates to lose.
He hates.
He's made that apparent.
Yeah, it's like winning.
But that's an American, that's an American.
We're Americans.
We like winning because Americans are winners.
We came here because we want to have a goal and a dream.
And they told us in Europe, oh, you can't do that.
We'll show you, right?
That's the American attitude.
So he's got just that sort of fundamental basic American attitude that I do think, you know, make America great again is one of the greatest political slogans in history.
And it's truly what he, it's not fake.
It is as genuine as it gets.
And that's what the country, I don't think, gets to see because the press is always attacking him so much.
But if he sat right here, he'd be saying that it's the same kind of things.
And you would love the guy.
Going back to the border for a minute.
You know, when they were discussing the border, and when you did, in fact, have most of the government, you were a voice that was, I don't want to say necessarily negatively, but you were making it difficult to get reached to a compromise.
You guys in the Freedom Caucus in general were very intransigent on this.
On passing an immigration bill?
Yeah.
Well, I'll give you a quick story.
It's actually I write about in the book.
There were two bills that we had a chance to pass in 18.
One was the one that was consistent with the election of 2016, that was the kind of Trump message type of bill, built the wall, did what we needed to do on asylum, on border security, on border Betroit, did the right things.
The other one was the Chamber of Commerce bill that Paul Ryan wanted.
And we had this struggle within our conference, and we kept saying, bring up the Trump-focused bill, not the one you guys, not the one the Chamber wants.
And we could never get off the dime.
And finally, we said, if you don't bring up the immigration bill, this is the games that get played.
And I thought the smart game that we played as a Freedom Caucus, we said, if you don't bring it up, we're not going to pass the Farm Bill.
And Farm Bill is a big piece of ledge.
It's pretty good for Freedom Caucus.
Guys, we all represent, many of us represent rural agriculture districts.
And we said, we'll hold up that.
And I remember Paul Ryan looking at Meadows and me and they said, you're going to vote against the farm bill?
Like, you know, you're crazy?
And I said, well, we don't really want to, because there was actually some welfare reform in the farm bill and the food stamps program bill.
And we said, well, we don't really want to, but we will if you don't bring up the immigration bill.
He didn't believe this.
I'm like, all right.
So he brings up the farm bill.
Farm bill went down.
And they were so mad at us.
And we said, bring up the immigration bill.
And then what they did is they brought up both of them.
The chamber bill got 123 votes.
The bill we wanted got 193 votes.
And they didn't whip it.
And we went to Paul afterwards and we said, Paul, we got 193 votes.
We told you all along that was the right bill.
Not enough to get over the finish line, but close.
Your bill, no one wants your bill.
And I said, and you guys didn't even whip the one.
Like, you know, you put the whip effort behind it and the leadership effort behind it.
That's how you get votes.
And I said, go whip that vote.
Let's pass that and do what we're supposed to do.
Wouldn't do it.
But we kept our word.
About a week after the vote on those two immigration bills, they brought the farm bill up and it passed by one vote and we provided the votes for it.
So we tried.
That's sort of what the Freedom Caucus kind of effort is supposed to do.
But we were actually for doing what was consistent with the message of the 2016 election.
Our leadership wanted what the chamber wanted, which is not what President Trump campaigned on and not what the American people elected us to do.
You know, I could talk politics with you a long time, but I got to stop.
It was really great talking to you.
I hope you will come back and talk about it.
Thanks for that.
It's really interesting hearing.
Thanks a lot.
Congressman Jim Jordan, the book is Do What You Said You Would Do, Fighting for Freedom in the Swamp.
Thanks a lot.
You bet.
Thank you.
So it's so hot that you're sitting in your car with the air conditioning on, but you can't go anywhere because the car's not running because you're missing a part.
No wonder you're lonely.
No wonder girls don't date you, right?
Dracula's Feast and Communion00:15:28
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So earlier in the show, I was talking about Dracula, and recently I was reading a very entertaining novel called A Bloody Habit, which is about vampires in the Victorian era as well.
It's by Eleanor Borg Nicholson.
And I realized that the book was a commentary on Dracula.
And when I looked Eleanor up, it turned out she is an award-winning novelist, a Victorian scholar, teacher with a deep love of Gothic fiction.
And she has written a lot about Dracula.
She's also a homeschooling mother of five.
So she's a very impressive person altogether.
Eleanor, thank you so much for coming on.
It's really nice to meet you.
Oh, thank you for having me.
So before there was Dracula, I've been reading your columns about vampires and Dracula, and I'm really interested in this subject right now.
There was a vampire scare in Eastern Europe in the centuries before Dracula was written, the 17th and 18th century.
And that's just when science was kind of on the rise.
Where did that come from?
Well, there was a big march against so-called superstition, and they were throwing out a lot of the tools and the language of the church.
So everything was supposed to be very rational.
Everything was supposed to be explicable by the scientific method.
And it sort of begot the monster, in fact.
This is where the Gothic genre arose.
It was a reaction to this idea that all of our experience can be calculated in a scientific way.
And by science, I should say, by 17th century science, we're not talking about ancient science.
We're not talking about the medievals, none of that.
Just a very specific enlightenment idea of what that would look like.
So as a way of sort of restoring the idea of the spiritual in the world.
Exactly, exactly.
Even in Dracula itself, I'm sure you've seen the moments when Van Helsing says, in this century, when everyone is so scientific and so skeptical, this is Dracula's chance.
This is why London is the place of great promise for him, because most people walking around in London don't know how to deal with a vampire because they don't believe in vampires.
You know, I just reread this book for the, I think it's the third time.
And this time, it's, it's, I mean, it has all the flaws of melodrama.
I mean, when you write a melodramatic story, it's going to have some silliness in it.
But it's a novel of genius.
I mean, it really is a brilliant Victorian novel in a lot of ways.
Brom Stoker never wrote anything else of that level.
Nothing that I've read comes up to that level.
Where did this book come from?
Well, I agree.
Most of his other books are highly melodramatic, and you can see the marks of that in Dracula.
It's a wonderful novel, but it is a bit of a train wreck.
But He spent a lot of time on it, actually.
There was a theory for many years that he did no research, and then we found his notes.
They were up, I think, someplace in New England.
Anyway, fabulous, detailed.
I think he spent seven or eight years on it researching and preparing for it.
And in it, he was drawing on melodrama on his experience of the stage because he was actually stage manager for possibly the greatest actor in the Victorian period, Henry Irving.
Although George Bernard Shaw said that Henry Irving's performances of Shakespeare should be called bardicide.
They were so bad.
But so he had a sense of staging and he had a sense of the dramatic.
And he also had the Irishman's gift of a good yarn.
So he's telling an outrageous story.
Irish folklore was very influential for him as a child.
And I think, too, in terms of the spiritual weight of this novel, it's owing to the fact that he was a Protestant Irishman who wasn't freaked out by the Catholics like the English were.
So he draws on a lot of his familiarity with higher church understanding of exorcism and the liturgical ritual that would be more familiar in a higher church tradition.
Plus, I mean, it was in his house.
His wife converted to Catholicism shortly after the publication of Dracula.
So he had that familiarity in that language and he brought it to bear.
And it's what gives it so much of its weight versus some of his less cohesive and more outrageous.
Well, they aren't as outrageous, actually.
They're not even as weird.
They're just not as well done as other novels.
This is the thing that struck me as I'm reading the book.
You know, it's England.
It's 1897, I think it's published in.
It's a Protestant country.
It's kind of a fiercely Protestant country.
They've only recently, I think, given the Catholics the vote, I think.
It's in the 19th century they do that, right?
So here's this vampire comes to England, and suddenly Van Helsing is running around with the, I mean, we're all used to seeing it, so you don't think about it.
But when I'm reading the novel, I thought, why is he holding up a crucifix?
Why are all these Englishmen standing around while he's putting holy wafers in the tomb to lock the vampires in?
Leaving Stoker out of it for a minute.
What do you take from that when you read the novel?
That here's this ancient evil that has to be fought with Catholic, specifically Catholic iconographic.
Well, it's partly because that's how the demonic works, right?
So it's using the tools that demons require authority.
So also what has consequence according to folklore, a lot of those Catholic items, the reason that they are used is because of an association specifically with Jesus Christ.
So they have to combat evil, you bring in God in this heavily sacramental way.
But something else to note when you're describing all these Protestant Englishmen seeing the gear of Catholicism come in, they are freaking out.
So notice, what do they do?
There were, for the record, Catholic priests in Catholic churches in England, but Van Helsing imports the host from Amsterdam.
So there's this idea of it's not English.
And early on, when Jonathan Harker receives the rosary, or maybe it's a crucifix, or maybe he's not sure, whatever it is from the peasant woman in Transylvania, he has that wonderful moment where he says, but it's consoling me.
I feel so uncomfortable with it.
But maybe there's something in it.
I'll think about it later.
And then he actually never does because you don't need it.
When the vampire is dead, you don't need that stuff anymore.
You can just sort of push it back, go back into our Protestant English comfort zone.
But then you have Dracula, a vampire who's drinking blood, which is, after all, what Catholics do.
I mean, it's what I do when I go to church and drink the blood.
Is that, I mean, does that come?
I don't want to talk about Brom Stoker's purposes necessarily, but when you're reading the book, there is a relationship, right, between Dracula, what Dracula's feast and the feast of the communion.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And this is something you see in the Victorian period, mostly in the Gothic, but in many other novels, there's this sort of attraction-repulsion.
So on the one hand, they're saying, oh, the Catholics.
But then, for example, if you're Charlotte Bronte, you really want to marry the Catholic.
So how can you possibly make this work?
So they want the smells and bells and whistles and some of the aesthetic connotations and appropriate that Catholic aesthetic and use it to represent something.
I mean, you see it now in movies today.
If you want to show spiritual depth, God bless Pastor Bob, but you don't have him walk through your movie.
You have a Catholic priest or a nun.
And then it's got this highly suggestive and maybe, you know, you're just really, really pushing some boundaries here, what that means for people visually and aesthetically in books and film.
Now, there's always, with Dracula, there's this sexual element to it that obviously became more, after Freud became more and more central to the idea.
There's one strain of thinking that Stoker had a homosexual component to his personality.
He was fascinated by Walt Whitman.
I think the actor you were talking about may have been gay.
He married a woman.
I always love this.
He married a woman who was previously engaged to Oscar Wilde, so I don't know what she was thinking.
But there was kind of this strain of thinking.
I remember back in the 1990s that maybe he was horrified by women's sexuality.
The staking of Lucy is this very horrific, weirdly sexual scene.
I've always thought that was unfair.
Do you think that there's something to it or are they missing?
I agree that it's unfair.
And I think it's sort of missing the point of, because there is, there's a serious sexual threat in this novel.
And his name is Dracula.
Notice, how is he going to destroy English civilization?
He goes after the virtuous women.
There's the scene where he assaults Mina Harker in her bed with her husband knocked out.
So what do we have?
We have the virtuous woman assailed and we have her husband emasculated and knocked out and not able to defend her.
And what does Dracula say in those scenes?
He appropriates the language of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Genesis in Eden.
And when he says, Adam says, this last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.
Well, Dracula twists that and says, you are bone of my bone.
You are my blood.
I am appropriating you and I'm going to use you to destroy the men you love.
So I think that the sexual assault, which is happening and is very real and is a terror, is that you will undermine the entire civilization by preying on women in this way and women not being defended.
What's the end of the book?
Not to give this away, everyone pause and go read it.
But there is a baby.
Someone has a baby.
That means fruitfulness and we have withstood the threat.
So I think that when people read it that way, they're taking the Victorian period out of its proper context.
It would be speaking, I'm not saying that they were, they would not have recognized Oscar Wilde for his own struggles, but seeing not the emphasis on the homosexuality or whatever sexual tendencies are going on, but the counterpoint.
Now, that's really insightful because the novel begins with one of the scariest scenes in all of literature with three women devouring a baby and ends with the baby being produced.
It's really a good point.
I remember way back, I think it was in the 1970s, there was a play, the play version was put on, the play that is based on the novel, was put on with Franklin Gella.
And it emphasized Dracula's sexual attractiveness, which I thought was a really change of the way he was looked at.
From that point, we've come to Twilight.
Now, you wrote a column.
It was called something like, Mama, Don't Let Your Daughters Date Vampires.
Something's wrong with this, right?
There's something wrong with this progression.
Well, it's also, that's part of the tradition.
It's just one that's gone all wonky in the wrong direction.
So there are two threads.
On the one hand, Bram Stoker was reaching back into folklore, but the literary tradition of the vampire does have this extremely suave, sexually attractive, aristocratic vampire.
And that is actually, we can look back to the origins of Gothic with the high romantic.
So when Mary Shelley was with her husband at Lake Geneva and she wrote Frankenstein, Lord Byron was also there.
And what they did was they had a competition, who could write the scariest story.
And Byron's personal physician, Lord Polidori, who I think he later sacked, maybe he was.
Yeah, they were breaking up right at that time.
It was pretty bad.
It was pretty bad.
But he wrote The Vampire, which has a count who is slightly Byronic but hypersexual, and he preys on women and triumphs, actually.
It's a horrible, wonderful, dreadful thing.
It's so badly written.
But so there is this idea of the seductive bad boy and the seductive bad boy who's going to lure young women.
Well, that sort of permeates the Dracula tradition in a weird way because as you note, if you read the book, he's got hairy palms and moustaches and bad breath.
I mean, that's how he's described.
You don't walk in and say, oh, he's so suave.
But I think that's also because people have taken the seductive side, which is partly the, oh, I can save the bad boy impulse, but it's also the desire to normalize fallenness in man generally.
Instead of saying, oh, a hero requires virtue, it's justifying bad behavior and sin in essence.
Yeah, when you're living in a society that basically says if it feels good, do it, not to be clichéd, but Dracula doesn't fit.
There's no place to put him.
And if you don't believe in the soul, then you have a soulless monster.
It's not as scary as it would be.
It's not.
And you also want, you don't want him to be the bad guy anymore.
Belief and Its Ramifications00:12:36
Right.
You can have a cautionary tale where you see the evil villain's backstory, but it usually becomes just a justification.
Yeah, and it kind of explains true blood.
Alan Ball, one of my least favorite writers, I'm afraid to say, turns everything into a gay story.
He's basically made the vampire the freed homosexual, who's kind of also attractive.
When you wrote A Bloody Habit, I mean, which is, and it has a sequel, Brother Wolf, right?
You seem to have been commenting on this.
You edited and annotated Dracula.
What do you want people to see in A Bloody Habit and in Dracula that they don't see?
Several things.
One, and this is something we haven't mentioned, although you sort of touched on it when you talked about it being a bit of a disaster, but such a masterpiece, is it's allowed to be entertaining.
And so many books now aren't entertaining anymore.
The Gothic, it can be fun.
It can be funny.
And I think it can be permeated by hope.
So in encountering evil, the takeaway message in a proper Christian tradition of the Gothic or Christianized tradition of the Gothic ends with hope or at least has the possibility of hope.
It's not nihilistic.
It's not horror film slasher films where there's no escape and it's going to end horribly and there was no escape.
There is a sense that even if a protagonist is not redeemed, protagonist could have been redeemed.
So to see that in Dracula, that strain of hope and its articulation of goodness, which is really strong, I think is super compelling and hard to do.
I know, I don't know if you agree, as a writer, it's hard to write goodness without it being cloying and obnoxious or preachy.
Preachy goodness is just, oh, it makes your skin crawl.
But just displaying goodness so that it can be attractive as it is, but isn't also has depth, that's challenging.
I think even go ahead, go ahead.
Well, I think it's what our culture is stuck on right now is how to create, especially with men, how to create a good man that's interesting.
Eleanor, I have to stop you there, but this is absolutely fascinating.
Really, really excellent comments on Dracula.
It was really nice talking to you.
Eleanor Berg Nicholson, her novel that I read is A Bloody Habit.
It's followed by Brother Wolf.
Thank you very much.
I hope to talk to you again.
Okay, thank you so much.
So I know it's impossible that many of you survived the clavenless fortnight, but those of you who did may have survived carrying your problems with you.
We will take care of that right now with the mailbag.
I love it, AOC.
Hot, hot, hot, like a tabe.
Yeah!
Somebody online said they thought that was me in disguise, but it was not.
I'm a gentleman always from Jeremy.
Thank you for taking the time to read my question.
I'm an avid conservative with almost all the boxes checked.
I'm in my mid-30s, a happily married man with two sons and my first daughter on the way.
I love my life and feel very comfortable with the way I conduct myself, but there is one exception for my entire adult life.
I've been an atheist and I detest that about myself.
I've tried to find and understand God, but my brain won't seem to allow me to.
My atheism used to be a point of pride.
Now it's one thing I wish I could change about myself.
Living life as an atheist terrifies me.
The thought of this life on earth being our sole existence and then nothingness keeps me awake at night.
I live my life every day as if there is a God.
So why is it I can't seem to find him?
You know, that's a really interesting question.
It kind of I feel this way about the mailbag often, not all the time, but often, that people are asking me, asking me to make something happen to them that only they can make happen to them.
The question is, do you believe in God?
And that's a rational question.
That's not a feeling.
That's not something you think about.
The question is, do you think everything just kind of appeared out of nowhere and that your moral sense is simply random, that you just happen to think it's bad to axe murder a child?
But if you lived in axe murder land and everybody axe murdered children, then it would be fine.
It would just be fine.
It's just relative.
It's all relative.
If you don't believe that it's all relative, then of course there must be an absolute good somewhere toward which all good trends.
And that would mean that you would have to believe in God.
If there are some things that are actually good and not just randomly good, then you would have to believe in God.
I have followed that logic out over 35 years of thought.
You can read my memoir, The Great Good Thing, if you'd like to.
And that's true.
So now you've got the thing where you believe in God.
You know there's a God.
If you don't feel that way, if you feel the Marquis de Saud was right and we can behave any way we want, if there is no God, as Dostoevsky said, everything is allowed.
But if you don't believe that, if you believe there's a God, then the question is not whether you feel there's a God.
It is simply setting your will in the direction of God.
And this is a really important thing.
People write to me a lot.
I get the letter a lot.
How can I get over my ex-girlfriend?
And the answer is you get over, or my ex-boyfriend, you get over.
You set your will in the direction of tomorrow and in the direction of finding somebody new, and that's the way you go.
You're still going to feel bad.
You're still going to miss her.
You're still going to have nights where you wake up at night and you think, oh, you know, I miss my ex.
But you're going to set your will against your emotions, against your feelings.
So if what you're doing is lying around going, I don't feel gan.
I don't feel gan.
Who cares?
Who cares?
Seriously, who cares?
Go before God and set your will before him.
You know, I do this all the time.
There are times when I feel something or want something that is bad, and I know it's wrong, but I want it because it would be fun to have, right?
And I can't not want it.
I can't just say, you know, I don't sit around and go, oh, you're wrong for wanting it.
I can't help it.
That's what my flesh is doing.
But it's easy for me to set my will before it and bring it to God and say, look, I set my will against this, and this is the direction I'm going, and God will help you.
I mean, incredibly powerful forces will pick you up under the arms and carry you to your goal if that's where you set your will and if you openly set your will that way.
So if philosophically you don't believe in God, I have nothing to say.
You know, that's your choice.
You should live with the ramifications of that.
You should work it out to its extreme because that's what would be true.
But still, I think you're wrong, but if that's what you think, that's one thing.
But if you think there is a God, if philosophically you think there must be a God, but you just don't feel him there, so what?
So what?
Then set your will in the direction of what you know to be true.
I mean, I don't know how many examples to use, but I mean, you meet a pretty girl in a bar and she says, in a hotel, and she says, come up to my room.
You know, we've had experiences like that where suddenly your entire moral world changes.
You think, well, what is it so bad?
You know, is that I really like my marriage?
You know, would it make a difference?
You know, I could explain it.
You know, you set your will against that.
And you say, no, I'm not going to do that.
You can't not feel it.
You just say, I'm not going to do it.
So that's my answer to you.
My answer to you is if you believe, and if you know it's true, then believe.
Will yourself to believe.
Will believe.
And the belief will come to you.
Bring it to God.
Bring the issue to God.
Set your will toward God and you will find it.
He says so, by the way.
He says, knock and the door will be open to you.
You're just not knocking.
From Father Bill, I'm a young Catholic priest and a fairly longtime listener.
Among some friends, there's a tradition of wishing each other happy Glafin Day on Friday mornings.
I find your reflections on faith and in particular on the scripture to be deeply enlightening.
I've stolen your thoughts for sermons in the past to great effect.
Apologies if I fail to cite sources.
Always cite your sources.
I may be quite wrong, but it seems your Christian affiliation has moved more towards the traditional bent emphasis on structured liturgical worship, reception of communion.
At the same time, I know you have previously spoken fondly of the Protestant Reformation.
Why aren't you Catholic and how much can we bribe you to convert a few indulgences, a papal tiara, a skip the line pass at St. Peter's Basilica during peak tourist season?
I might take that big pop hat.
I like that big pop hat.
But no, you're right.
It's not that my Christian affiliation has moved toward the traditional bent.
First of all, I am an Anglican Catholic.
That is what I, you know, I started out as an Episcopalian.
The Episcopal Church left me.
I was lost for a while, not knowing where else to go.
I've now become an Anglican Catholic, which means that I am theologically a Catholic, but I am not entirely chained to the Pope in Rome.
If the Pope says something I feel is deeply wrong, deeply misguided, if the Roman Church says something, I feel free to move away from that after thought and reflection.
So that is what Anglican Catholic means to me.
And the reason for that, the reason for that is I am an American and I believe power comes from the ground up.
So that's just so instinctive to me and so deeply embedded in me that I can't get over that.
If the Pope, even if the church says something that I know to be wrong and I pray on it and I read about it and I think it through and I read scripture and I'm right, I will stand with that.
I will stand with that.
And I think that that is one of the reasons I have not been able to become a Roman Catholic.
And there are other, there are disagreements.
And one of the key disagreements I have, you know, It's not so much, you know, I disagree with my Catholic friends about the perpetual virginity of Mary, but I don't really care.
You know, Mary's life was Mary's life.
She could run it any way she pleases, and I'm sure she did a better job of running it than I would.
You know, I'm governed by script, what I read in scripture, but there are many thoughts that come after scripture that deduce her perpetual virginity.
But what I don't like about that is the theology that grows out of it that elevates virginity.
The church has moved away from that to some degree.
John Paul II's theology of the body was much more nuanced than old medieval Christianity that elevated virginity too high for me, but that bothers me.
But anyway, those are my reasons, but it is true.
It is true that the Mass has become the center of my worship.
That's the big change.
That is why I had to find a church that did the Mass.
It has become the center of my worship.
My relationship to the bread and wine, my relationship to that rite has become the center of my worship and to the other sacraments.
And, you know, for instance, I love the priests in my church and they preach really well, but I don't care if a visiting preacher came in and gave a bad sermon.
That's not my problem.
My problem is getting my mind into the right place for communion.
And so that is where I've moved, and why I haven't moved all the way, as they say, swum the Tiber.
One more, I guess.
Samuel de Lore Clavin, you've spoken numerous times about Christian art.
This may be too big for a short period.
What is it that makes art Christian or secular?
Presumably, it's not determined by characters turning the camera and preaching the gospel.
Also, do you have other recommendations for movie shows besides the Sopranos I mentioned?
Yeah, I think, you know, for me, the ultimate Christian artist is Shakespeare.
And the reason is people always say, oh, he's not.
He's a secular artist because he's not constantly preaching the gospel.
He's not constantly talking about God and many of his priests and preachers are corrupt and bad, and he's not supporting the church.
But what Shakespeare did was he took the ramifications of Christian thought and he wrote the world as if they were real.
People, when they commit crimes, those crimes come back and haunt them.
They may get away with them, but they bend the fabric of the moral world because there is a moral world, and I think that's what Macbeth is about.
So he's not about writing, oh, you naughty Macbeth, what a mean man you are.
God is unhappy with you.
What he is is showing you that when you bend the moral universe, there are ramifications in the actual physical world.
And so that's what I'm looking for.
That's why I love the Sopranos.
The Sopranos does have a few episodes that hint at real Christianity, but still, it's about bad people doing bad things, and that happens in this world.
That didn't stop happening when Jesus was born, didn't stop happening when he died, didn't stop happening when he came back.
It is still happening just as it always was, and it makes good drama, and it makes interesting drama, and it's part of the human spectacle, but it's all about the world in which it takes place.
That, for me, is what makes art Christian art.
If it takes place in a world of Christian ramifications, namely that there is a moral order, there is a God, and even if you don't believe in it, even if the characters don't believe in it, even if he's never mentioned, you can feel him there in absentia as you can in the Sopranos.
Why The Sopranos Resonates00:01:44
I got to stop there.
The Clavenless Week is now upon you.
Any survivors from the Clavenless Fortnite are now plunged back.
But I hope this has been like a kind of oasis before I set you into that desert of broken glass, heat, empty sands, no water, screaming, gnashing of teeth.
It sounds awful.
I'm glad it's not happening to me.
But if you make it to next Friday, I will be back with the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm Andrew Klavan.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, basically wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, remember to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thank you for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Lisa Bacon, Executive Producer Jeremy Boring, our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, production manager Pavel Wadowski, editor and associate producer Danny D'Amico.
Our audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2022.
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