Andrew Klavan at YAF’s 2024 conference contrasts the 1960s’ moral clarity with today’s fractured culture, blaming institutions for abandoning tradition—from churches embracing BLM to academia suppressing classical literature. He dismisses transgender ideology as scientifically flawed and George Floyd riots as Maoist-driven lies, urging conservatives to reclaim art and religion rooted in human dignity over materialism. In Q&A, he rejects worker-owned corporations as Marxist, praises DeSantis over Trump, and argues conservative revival hinges on realistic storytelling, not ideological purity, while advocating outreach to minorities through freedom-focused messaging. [Automatically generated summary]
It has been a long, long time since I've spoken to Yaff.
I'd forgotten what it's like to look out at your bright, shiny young faces and realize how incredibly old I am.
I'm not as old as Ben Shapiro says.
I just want you to know I just look like this from working with Ben Shapiro.
But I really did give a lot of thought about what I could say to a group of whippersnappers like yourself.
I sometimes feel nowadays like the guy in the Shelley poem, Ozzy Mandius, who's a traveler from an antique land.
The antique land I'm traveling from is the America of the 1960s, where I grew up, the early 1960s, which was a good place, by the way.
We were proud, I think rightly and justly proud, of not just our political greatness, but of our moral goodness.
Despite what they tell you, we were deeply aware of our shortcomings, but we had this kind of faith that our philosophy and our traditions would make us better, and therefore they were worth sharing with the rest of the world.
That America, you may have noticed, is gone.
And it's not coming back, at least not in the form it had.
I know this for a fact because that's an iron rule of life.
Nothing comes back in the form that it had.
Whenever you hear somebody say something like a singer is the new Elvis, ask yourself, who was the old Elvis?
There wasn't one.
The good things in life are unique and fleeting, and once you lose them, they're gone forever.
So as much as I would enjoy it, I am not going to stand here and tell you, when I was a boy, the world was a better place.
I would really enjoy that.
But that's not even the point.
It wasn't better.
It was just good and bad in different ways.
But the country's mentality was healthier.
It was more realistic.
It was more sane than it is today.
And that's something that can't be recovered.
It has to be rebuilt in a new way for a new time.
So I'm not going to talk to you about the past, and I think it would be useless for me to talk to you about much of the future because you're going to face challenges that I don't know anything about.
Machines may soon develop almost human levels of intelligence, so they'll be qualified to run for Congress.
Humans may have their intelligence enhanced by implanted devices so that our greatest intellectuals will finally be intelligent enough to understand what everybody else already knows.
But most consequentially, I think there'll soon be incubators that perform the functions now performed by the human womb, and you guys will at last be free, as free of gender responsibilities as the damned are in hell.
So I've been asking myself, if there's no point in talking about the past because it's unrecoverable, and no point in talking about the future because it's unknowable, how can I make the next 20 minutes worth your time?
And I think the best thing I can do is to use my Methuselah-like decrepitude to give you a bit of context about your present moment.
I used to do this at the Daily Wire when we were just starting out.
You know, when we were just starting out, it was just me and Ben Shapiro and the God King Jeremy Boring, a young man, a young producer named Jonathan Hay, and then later, For Our Sins, we added Michael Knowles.
And it was just us in Jeremy's pool house, the changing house by his pool in California, and we had a little card table with a microphone on it, and we do these 20-minute podcasts.
This is only seven years ago, and then when we were done, we just screamed at each other.
We did this constantly.
We just constantly yelled at each other and argued in a friendly way, but in an intense way, trying to figure out what we all thought.
And then every now and again, one of the younger guys, and they were all younger guys, would say something like, this is the most divided era in American history.
And I would say, you know, from the age of 10 to 14, I saw the president of the United States murdered by a communist.
I saw his brother, a senator, murdered by a Palestinian.
I saw the greatest civil rights leader of the age murdered by a racist pornographer.
To me, things look pretty chill right now, you know.
And that actually helped.
It actually helped bring our rhetoric and our perspective into tune with reality.
So today I want to tell you something I see happening in your moment.
But it's something that has never happened in my experience before, and it has very serious ramifications.
It's happened several times in the course of history, but this is something new in my lifetime.
And that is this.
The establishment has collapsed.
The old men, the political, intellectual, and cultural leaders who are responsible for passing on to you the wisdom of the ages and the traditions of the West, have utterly abandoned their posts, and in their stead, there's gathered the greatest collection of liars, frauds, and clowns it's ever been my pleasure to make fun of.
Your professors are buffoons.
Your cultural critics are vulgarians.
Your priests are cowards.
And your journalists aren't fit to unlace the sandals of your professors, critics, and priests.
I'm talking about the people who are supposed to be the grown-ups, the parent class.
Their job is to be a little fusty, a little old-fashioned, a little slow to accept the latest fad.
They're supposed to have read at least some of the great books and teach you what's in them.
And while they're at it, they might also teach you how a gentleman ties his tie and how a lady behaves in company and how to say the Pledge of Allegiance in the Lord's Prayer.
The establishment, the parent class, has to be willing to be made fun of by young people like you.
They have to be willing to be scorned as being irrelevant and out of date.
The wise old men and women know that the young are natural revolutionaries, but they also know that great revolutions don't come from revolutionaries.
They grow out of great traditions.
They come from guys like the American founders, who as young as some of them were, as young as you, were deeply imbued with British and Western traditions and wanted to take those traditions to the next level.
Great revolutions do not come from guys like Robespierre and the other French revolutionaries and the revolutionaries we have now who think they can reinvent the moral universe.
They always end up knee-deep in blood.
Now I say that the complete collapse of the establishment is new in my lifetime, but that doesn't mean it just happened overnight.
It's like Ernest Hemingway said of a man who went bankrupt, it happened gradually, then suddenly.
The bankruptcy of Western culture and ideas happened the same way.
T.S. Eliot saw it happening a full century ago and wrote a very famous poem about it called The Waste Land.
And in 1940, as the twin horrors of fascism and communism threatened to engulf the West, a thoughtful journalist named Walter Lippmann gave a speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and this is what he said.
Those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum of studies the Western culture which produced the modern democratic state.
The schools and colleges have therefore been sending out into the world men who no longer understand the creative principle of the society in which they live.
Deprived of their cultural tradition, the newly educated Western men no longer possess in the form and substance of their own minds and spirits the ideas, the premises, the rationale, the logic, the method, the values of the deposited wisdom which are the genius of the development of Western civilization.
That prevailing education is destined if it continues to destroy Western civilization.
And what I'm saying is that it has continued, and that destiny of destruction is now nearing fruition.
The generation who was trained up to be ignorant of why the West was great trained the generation of ignoramuses who trained the complete morons who are training you.
The effects are obvious everywhere.
Christian churches hang Black Lives Matter and gay pride banners as if they've forgotten that there are no black and white lives in Christ and pride is not a realistic emotion for any human being to feel.
It's as if they worship Karl Marx who thought mankind could perfect the world instead of Christ who understood the world is the kingdom of our enemy.
It's no wonder that during the pandemic these priests curled up like dead weasels when they were ordered to shut their doors by bureaucrats who believe there's nothing worse than death.
Secretly the priests agreed with them.
You have academics who either won't teach the great books or silence those books by smothering them under their own banal and unfounded critical theories.
Even worse, and I know this because many of you tell it to me, they threaten you with bad grades if you don't lie and pretend to believe what they're saying.
That is a sin, by the way.
It's a sin for an old person in authority to coerce a young person into compromising his integrity.
Sin of Coercion00:07:02
It's a double sin, and I'm the only person who'll tell you this, it's a double sin to do that to a young man because integrity is important to both sexes, but it's the essence of being a man.
You cannot be a man.
In order to be a man, you have to be who you say you are and do what you say you will do.
And of course, I don't have to tell you there are the morally stunted perverts at the highest level of education and government who want to butcher and drug children out of their God-given sex in order to bolster a theory of transgenderism that has zero scientific basis and so little logic that it can only be defended by silencing and deplatforming anyone who dares to speak the obvious truth.
So I'm not going to go on with this list forever, but I do want to go into detail on one subject, which is the subject of race, because I want to be very clear about what I'm saying and what I'm not saying.
When the criminal drug addict George Floyd was killed by an act of sloppy policing in the spring of 2020, there was not then, and there is not now, one iota of evidence that racism had anything to do with it.
Nonetheless, Maoist anti-American revolutionaries were able to spread that narrative to incite riots that destroyed black neighborhoods and businesses, to scuttle police techniques that had saved thousands of black lives over the last two decades, and to tear down the statues of the men who made this country great.
That's not my complaint.
There are always sad, smarmy, violent little thugs who tear down what they don't know how to build.
But where were the old men?
Where was the establishment to say, hey, punks, you, who have accomplished nothing, will not tear down the statues of men who gave you every good thing that you have?
The establishment joined the mob.
The journalists covered up their barbarism by calling their violence mostly peaceful, which at least gave me a laugh.
City leaders agreed to remove statues of men like Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt at the behest of men like Beavis and Butthead.
None of them had the knowledge or the spine to stand up and defend the glorious history of this unique nation that is the political fruition of high European culture, the greatest culture that has ever existed on the face of the earth.
Ibram X. Kendi is the author of the hugely best-selling book, How to Be an Anti-Racist.
The book is hilarious nonsense.
I read it so you don't have to.
In its first chapter, it gives a definition of racism.
Quote, racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.
Now, obviously, that's meaningless Argyll Bargle because it defines a word by using the word it's trying to define.
It's like saying a dog is a dog-like creature who does the things that dogs do.
But there's more.
Kendi has been repeatedly quoted as saying, when I see racial disparities, I see racism.
Anyone who disagrees, he says, must believe that blacks are inferior.
In his brilliant book, Discrimination and Disparities, Thomas Soule, one of our wisest intellectuals, calls this assertion, oh, he's the greatest, by right.
Calls this very assertion the seemingly invincible fallacy.
He then proceeds to eviscerate it, and with unassailable logic and rigorous statistical analysis, demonstrates that the cause of disparities in everything from culture to the weather are so complex that to reduce them to a single cause like race is an act of childish simplicity.
Kendi's book quotes Soul out of context once, but he's obviously never read the man who is the top thinker in his own field.
Something else Kendi doesn't seem to have read is the Orastia by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus.
The Orastia is a foundational document of the West.
It's a trilogy of plays that tells how a seemingly endless chain of vengeance is finally brought to a halt by the goddess of wisdom, Athena.
Athena establishes the Greek justice system with equal justice for all, and that ends the endless chain of vengeance.
But Kendi kind of likes his endless chains of vengeance.
In How to Be an Anti-Racist, he writes, the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.
The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination, unquote.
This is a recipe for a society like the one they have in Afghanistan, where medieval tribes make infinite war on one another over an offense that may or may not have happened hundreds of years ago.
Kendi is a nitwit.
But again, that's not what bothers me.
There are always nitwits making a bundle, selling their snake oil ideas.
But Kendi has a national book award for non-fiction.
He has a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur grant.
Businesses and colleges create policies on his say-so.
Where are the old men?
Where's the intellectual establishment that possesses the basic education and moral courage to dump his silly garbage in the circular file where it belongs?
The establishment has collapsed.
And look, you may say to me, so what?
Who needs an establishment?
They're what the poet Yeats called old, learned, respectable, bald heads who all think what other people think.
Western culture began when the establishments in Athens and Jerusalem executed Socrates and Jesus for failing to toe the traditional line.
Why shouldn't a revolutionary country like ours have an establishment that calls itself the resistance, even if what they resist is free speech and equality under the law?
There's actually some truth to this.
Priests and scholars and political leaders who become too wedded to the way things used to be sometimes fail to recognize legitimate innovation when it comes along.
But without an establishment dedicated to the preservation of our traditions, there can be no real innovation, because to innovate comes from a word meaning to renew.
And if you don't know where your greatness comes from, you don't know what to renew.
Socrates and Jesus, who knew everything there was to know about Greece and Jerusalem, not to mention Martin Luther King, by the way, weren't trying to destroy their traditions.
They were looking to fulfill them, to make them live out the meanings of their creeds.
But more than this, without knowing your traditions, you do not know who you are.
None of us, not one of us, is self-made.
We're each born with our own nature, but we're shaped by our traditions and our culture.
When your elders fail to teach you that culture honestly, it's not that you're set free to be whoever you want, that's what they tell you, but instead it's that you're so ignorant, you're ultimately doomed to become whoever the ignorant, arrogant, perverse, and ill-mannered people in charge at the moment tell you to be.
Shaping Our Nature00:14:57
This more than anything is what I want to bring to your attention.
Who is it?
Who is the person the resistance establishment is telling you to be?
Well, if you want to know the answer to that question, you have to turn to my field, which is the arts.
It's the arts, as James Joyce wrote, that forge the uncreated conscience of the race.
If I wanted to discuss who you were in Elizabethan England, I might talk about the hot new play Hamlet.
If this were the Enlightenment, I might discuss lyrical ballads by Coleridge and Wordsworth.
But today, since I started out by joking about my friend Ben Shapiro, let me make reference to Ben's greatest work, The Rap Song Wap.
Cardi B did it first, but Ben did it better, I think.
Now, I can't quote the rap song Whap because I'm so incredibly old, I actually find it difficult to use foul language when there are ladies present.
I assume you've all heard the song at some point, but if not, I will summarize the story very briefly.
Cardi B and her friend, Megan the Stallion, declare that they are like unto prostitutes.
And then proudly and repeatedly, not to say incessantly and monotonously, boast about the copious lubrication of their genitalia and invite any and all nearby men to make use of said genitalia in various creative and vigorous ways.
Now, once again, don't mistake me, it doesn't bother me that people write obscene ditties.
I travel a lot, I've had ample opportunity to read the walls of many public restrooms.
I am not shocked or offended in the least.
But where are the old men?
Where are the cultural critics who aren't afraid to distinguish quality and wisdom from adolescent tripe?
Here are some examples of the critical reactions.
I cull these from Wikipedia.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, called WAP an event record that transcends the event itself.
The LA Times called it a savage, nasty, sex-positive triumph with, and I love this, a perfectly rendered lyric.
And NPR called it an iconic song about women's sexuality.
Now for context, okay, I'm a fan of what's called the American Songbook.
This is the popular music from the 30s, 40s, and 50s when African, European, and Jewish musical traditions came together to create what I think were the best pop songs since the days of the Elizabethan ballad.
Let me read you a small portion of the lyric from a song I've always liked.
It's called My One and Only Love.
It's been recorded by everyone from Sinatra to John Coltrane to Paul McCartney to Bob Dylan.
Now I chose these lyrics because like WAP, they're a description of sexual intercourse.
Every adult who heard this song at the time in the 1950s knew it was a description of two people having sex.
Here's the lyric.
This is the second verse of the song.
The shadows fall and spread their mystic charms in the hush of night when you're in my arms.
I feel your lips, so warm and tender, my one and only love.
Now these two songs, WAP and My One and Only Love, represent not only two very different descriptions of the act of sex, but two very different concepts of what it means to be a human being.
The WAP concept of what it means to be a human being is the one the resistance establishment is selling you relentlessly every day.
They're teaching it in schools, they make it cool in movies and music, they turn it into policy through politics, and they enforce it through the HR department of every corporation that fires you and every social media platform that bans you for speaking such obvious truths as men can't become women and race should not be used to determine outcomes.
The effort is so pervasive to sell you this idea that if you yourselves have not yet bought into the WAP idea of who you are, your children will buy into it because there will be no one left who remembers any other.
You will not be surprised to learn that this WAP idea of your humanity did not spring full-blown from the intellectual depths of Cardi B.
It's an idea that was handed down to Cardi B from serious thinkers like the Marquis de Sade, Schopenhauer, Freud.
It's the idea that you are nothing more than meat with a chemistry set inside.
All your ideals and hopes and dreams are emanations of your physical drives, primary among them the sexual drive, which Schopenhauer called the goal of all human effort and the Lord of the world.
You are a random being created by a random process and therefore can be recreated by your own will or by the will of society's benevolent engineers into anything that will give you more pleasure and less shame, more economic equity and less conflict.
Since you're only meat and chemicals, you can change the shape of the meat and the mix of the chemicals and you'll be made a different sex, or you'll be made happier or you'll be made more mystically wise.
You can tear meat and chemicals out of a woman's womb in pieces and nothing of true value has been lost.
And since you're just meat and chemicals, what you perceive as moral and immoral are simply evolutionary constructs of the brain with no reference to outer reality, so morality can be redesigned at will.
And of course, if your genitalia happen to be really well lubricated, tell the boys to come and get some, because that's what it's really all about.
Now, the idea of your humanity that rises from My One and Only Love is different and comes from another strain of the Western tradition that includes thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Samuel Coleridge, C.S. Lewis, and Joseph Ratzinger, the former Pope.
The first lines of the song are, the very thought of you makes my heart sing like an April breeze on the wings of spring.
Obviously, these are words that are not spoken by meat and chemicals, but by a person with a mind that has thoughts and a heart that can sing with joy.
The love the speaker feels connects him not just to his lover, but to all of nature.
His love transforms nature into poetry, which justifies the poetic language of the song.
When he's with his lover, the night has mystic charms.
The very thought of her makes the April breeze seem to travel on the wings of spring.
Now, just to be clear about this, I'm not talking about morality.
This is not a moral vision.
For all we know, the lovers in My One and Only Love may not be married.
They may be married to other people.
They might be gay, as far as the lyrics tell us.
All we know is that they're human beings with hearts and minds whose deepest thoughts and emotions are interwoven with the whole of creation.
So, while they may not know God, they have the capacity to know God.
They may not love their neighbors as themselves, but they have selves, so they have something to work from.
And because they're not just meat puppets, but human beings, their primary foundational pleasure is not sex, but the love that sex was designed to express.
Now, this vision of humanity has an authority that Cardi B doesn't know about because there was no old man there to teach it to her.
But I'm an old man, and I'm here, so I'm going to teach it to you now.
As Michael Knowles likes to say, I have read all the books.
There is nothing in science, nothing in philosophy, nothing in politics, and nothing in the nature of the world that demands you regard yourself as meat and chemicals.
It's exactly the opposite.
All of heaven and earth declare you are exactly what you know yourself deep down to be, human beings, fearfully and wonderfully made, male and female, in the image of God.
This vision has ramifications for how you live your life.
I hope you all have very pleasurable sex lives.
But all the true joy of creatures such as yourself is going to come not from sex, but from love.
Schopenhauer was wrong.
The old folk hymn, How Can I Keep From Singing, got it right.
Love is Lord of Heaven and Earth.
The greater the things you love in your life, the more joy you will have.
Iron rule.
Love small things like clothes and video games and money, and you'll have a little joy.
Love great things like your family and your friends and the work of your hands, and you will have a lot of joy.
And if ever you should learn to love the God who made you, bing, bing, bing, you will hit the jackpot.
And even in your inevitable griefs and sorrows, you will know the true joy of living that leads to a greater joy still.
The primacy of love, the practice of love, the philosophy of love, the God of love are not things humanity learned in an instant.
They were wrenched by human hearts and minds out of the fabric of reality and passed down over slow history by priests and teachers and artists who learned them from the priests and teachers and artists who went before.
In your unlucky generation, that establishment, those keepers of the flame of Western wisdom, have deserted their posts and abandoned their responsibilities and left you to rediscover the central truth for yourselves.
From their cowardly surrenders to their idiot theories, from their abuse of drugs to their abuse of politics, the parent class has failed you.
But the good news is this.
The priests and teachers and artists of all the generations past are still right here walking by your sides.
For thousands of years, the best of them have been working in the midst of life's suffering and evil to write books and compose music and develop religion that are still lying at your feet like a bright trail through this present darkness.
It is up to you to do what the old men have not done for you.
Read those books.
Listen to that music.
Practice that religion.
Follow that trail.
It will lead you home to who you really are.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
They said I was going to be asked some questions, which is unfortunate because I know answer.
As many questions as we can get through, please keep it short.
Thank you, Claven, for coming out.
I'm Hunter Oswald from Grove City College.
So I love reading.
And one of the things I've noticed in a lot of today's literature by the left is it really pushes a environmental determinism narrative.
So what advice would you give to young writers who want to write great literature but also want to overcome the environmental determinism that is not making literature any more pleasurable?
Well, can you give me just a little bit of an idea of what you mean by environmental determinism, that where you're from determines who you are, what you're going to do?
Yeah, so a lot of left-wing people say that your environment or whomever you are, like critical race theory determines your behavior.
It's total nonsense.
I mean, what you are equipped with, what made you a writer to begin with, is your imagination.
And your imagination is essentially your ability to put yourself into the souls of other people.
You know, they say that a white man can't write a black person, but a white man can write a white woman, which believe me is far, far harder to do.
There's a lot more difference between a white man and a white woman than there is between a white man and a black man.
It is all a lie, and you simply have to declare it a lie and move forward.
I will tell you, in the publishing industry today, you're going to have a hard time.
But the good news is that you can publish yourself quite effectively, A, and B, new venues like the Daily Wire publishers and others are growing up.
So just ignore them.
You cannot fight with crazy people.
Just ignore them.
Thank you.
Howdy, Mr. Klavan.
My name is Rachel Sweeney and I go to Texas A ⁇ M University.
All right, all right.
So secularization is such a huge issue in our country and it's growing much more of a problem.
You used to be agnostic and you became Anglican.
I was baptized Anglican earlier this year.
So my question to you is, I've seen a lot of people who are coming back to Christianity and from people spreading the gospel and there kind of seems to be two kind of extremes of ways people like to practice Christianity, being new Christians, being in a more classic liturgical tradition Catholicism Anglicanism Lutheranism, and also more of a contemporary Christian practice.
Can you kind of comment which one you think is like I don't want to say more true, but which one might be more practical, might lead people to to come to love Christ in the long run?
That's a great question.
I mean, I'm a Christ guy all the way, so whatever takes you to the station, get on that train.
You know and I'm not knocking anybody else's tradition, I can only speak personally that over a long period of time when I was very reluctant to join any church, really I have found myself also an Anglican Catholic which is really a Catholic, without being wedded to the church in Rome, and the reason for this is I have found that the sacraments are, all in all, I don't really care what the priest tells me.
I mean, I love my priest and they make great, give great sermons, but if a guy should come in and give a bad sermon.
That's not the point.
This, the act of taking communion, the act of taking Christ into your body and I don't care whether you think it's imaginative or some kind of other sort of process is the act that brings you closer, that brings me closer to God, and so that's become the center of my worship.
But, that said, the other part of my worship Worship, is always prayer, and if you're not talking to God, God can't hear you, can't answer you, you know.
So, again, I'm very open-minded about it, but for me, that partly through writing the book, The Truth and Beauty, which is about our relationship to the world and symbolism, that has become the center for me.
So, that's all I can tell you.
Hi, my name is Eric, and I'm attending Liberty School of Law.
And my question is: you know, we have a terrible culture and we have terrible art.
Why Culture Needs Conservative Art00:07:37
Do you think that our terrible culture is driving our terrible art, or do you think that the terrible art is making a terrible culture?
And if both, how do we escape the loop?
Well, I think it's this terrible idea, which has been, I mean, Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, talked about this all the time, materialism, the idea that you're nothing but material.
And again, this idea has a good pedigree.
It has a real pedigree and philosophy.
It just happens to be incorrect.
And as the science unfolds, it's becoming more obvious that it's incorrect.
Bad ideas create bad art.
Bad ideas create bad art because they create bad imaginations.
They poison the imagination.
Right now, we're in a terrible artistic slump.
I mean, I've never seen anything like it.
We had a kind of moment where television had a golden age.
But even that golden age was about bad men.
It was about the sopranos.
It was about breaking bad.
It was about corrupt cops.
And what we're looking for now, and to my absolute shock, the New York Times wrote an article about this.
We're looking for what a good man looks like.
That's what the culture is looking for.
Under the bounds of leftist, within the bounds of leftist philosophy, there is no way to answer that question.
I can tell you, I'm giving you a spoiler alert.
They're going to look for it.
They're going to decide they can't do it.
They're going to tell you it doesn't matter.
This is a perfect opening for people like us to create a vision of what a good man looks like.
And if it looks like, you know, some square-jawed, perfect hero, we're going to fail.
But if it looks like a real person doing great things, then we're going to renew, the renewal of art is going to come from the conservative side.
And that's what I'm looking for, hoping for, and I actually believe will happen.
Thank you.
Howdy, Mr. Klavan.
How you doing?
I'm a big fan of yours on the Daily Wire.
My name is Connor Brown.
I'm from the University of Missouri, incoming freshman.
And I have a leftist friend who's near and dear to me, and he stands for democracy as his big thing.
He's under the false illusion that the United States is a democracy.
But he wants to cross-apply that value to economics.
And so his philosophy is that we should have economic democracy and where the workers should have basically equal say as say corporate executives and corporate managers in how the company operates, what products it makes, things like that.
And I wanted to hear about maybe your biggest critique of that philosophy and really your opinion on that.
Also, if there's any writing internships at the Daily Wire and how can I get involved in that?
You were going to ask that question.
You know, my central objection to this is a fallacy in Marx.
Marx had a lot of, was a smart guy.
He said a lot of smart, terrible person, but a smart guy.
But he makes, there's a central fallacy in Marx that if you have material and it gains value, the value must have come from the workers.
So if you have a bunch of scrap metal and it's turned into a car, clearly to Marx, it's the workers who put that car together and that's where the value comes from.
So the workers should own the means of production.
It's just not true.
The value comes, of course, from the idea of the car without which the workers just stand around and have a bunch of scrap metal.
And so ideas and investment kind of rule the day.
And it's where wealth comes from.
If there were some way where everybody could be perfectly happy and have the same amount of money and live in peace, I'd be for it.
There just isn't.
It's not human nature.
It's not the way that actual profit is made.
So we're kind of stuck with what we have.
And I understand the desire to make things fairer.
I think that's something we can sometimes do.
But you simply can't make the system work in a way it doesn't work.
This is the whole problem with leftism.
Actually, it's the blessing of leftism.
I mean, if leftism worked, we'd all be slaves.
But luckily, it never works.
Everything it touches turns to crap.
And the reason is because they don't understand how the machine of economics works.
And that's it.
Thank you.
Hi, my name is Thomas Chilin.
I go to Marshall.
First off, I want to say that you're my favorite person to listen to on the Daily Wire.
Thank you.
That shows excellent taste.
So my question is: do you think it's a good idea for Trump to run again in 2024?
Do you think the GOP would be better off running someone like Ron DeSantis?
It's a great question, and my personal feeling about it is that they should come up.
I like DeSantis.
He's new.
He's younger.
It's time for a younger guy.
I mean, come on, these guys, you know, Trump is great, but I know he doesn't know this, but somebody's got to explain to him.
Everybody dies, you know.
I just think DeSantis is more statesmanlike, which I think was one of Trump's flaws.
Listen, Trump was a godsend.
He did so much, and he broke the mold that was pressing us down in this gradual way.
It was that pot that was boiling the frog, and he tossed the water out.
And we owe him a great debt of thanks.
But what he did was open the field for guys who are politicians, because politics is a profession, and some people know how to do it.
And he was not very good at actual politics, that is, the wrangling of people to come to an agreement.
So I'm hoping for DeSantis, but believe me, if Trump is the guy I have to vote for, I'll vote for him twice, you know, once as myself and once as an illegal immigrant.
Mr. Klavan.
My name is Isabella Dini.
I'm from the University of Alabama.
I was earlier, I was going to ask what drew you to the Protestant wing of Christianity as opposed to the apostolic wing, but I think I kind of got an answer earlier.
But based off of your answer, now I'm curious: what are your thoughts on the Eucharist and transubstantiation?
Do you separate from the Protestant church there, and do you agree with the Apostolic Church there?
Just what are your thoughts?
Yes, my thoughts on this make everybody angry.
So, like, I always love explaining.
As an artist, the idea that something is a symbol and the idea that it transubstantiates are the same idea.
The experience, you know, I use this metaphor all the time, but it's the best one for it.
The rainbow is an objective phenomenon, but it's only a rainbow when we see it.
Transubstantiation is an objective phenomenon, but it's only a phenomenon when we experience, when we follow the right and take the bread and wine.
I see no difference between the idea of true symbolism, truly acquired through right and practice, and transubstantiation.
So we've been killing each other for centuries for nothing.
And I think that all artists understand this.
You know, all artists understand that symbolism and transubstantiation are exactly the same thing.
But religious people fight about these things.
And I think that we actually don't need to.
I actually think the divisions of the church are God's way of teaching us that things that seem irreconcilable can be reconciled.
And when we stop killing each other over them, we'll figure it out.
Thank you.
Nobody likes that answer.
Educating Across Divides00:07:42
Hello, Mr. Clavin.
My name is Stephen.
I'm from Liberty University.
I just want to say I liked your opener there, describing us as the shiny ones.
My question, anyways, is, what is your favorite way to help people of the Jewish faith, Ben Shapiro, come to understand that Jesus is the Messiah?
I missed, what is my favorite way to help people, what was the rest of it?
People?
Come to know that Jesus is the Jewish faith.
Well, I'll tell you what I tried on Ben.
We were doing one of those backstages, you know, and Ben likes to eat popcorn during the backstages, and he has a special kosher popcorn.
So he said to his assistant, you know, is this bowl, is this the kosher popcorn?
And the guy said, yeah.
And so Ben took a handful and he ate it.
And the assistant came running back in and said, I just checked, and I was wrong.
It's not the kosher popcorn.
So I said to him, well, now that you're not a Jew anymore, this might be a good time to accept Jesus as your question.
Nothing, nothing like that.
I got nowhere with that, but I'll keep trying.
Greetings, great Clavin on Master of the Multiverse.
I'm Daniel.
I'm going to Yeshiva University.
And you used to be a writer in Hollywood for Hollywood movies.
So now the Daily Wire is going to the film industry.
Are you planning to write a movie for the Daily Wire?
And also, how do you spell Clavin?
I can't remember suddenly.
But yeah, eventually.
I've been working.
I have a lot of stuff on my plate.
And what I'm hoping to do is develop some material for them that can be developed into movies.
Dallas Sonnier is doing a great job.
It's hard.
It's hard to make movies, you know, and there's so many moving parts, so many people that you can start with great stuff and end up with not great stuff.
So they're really working hard to get this right.
And yes, I would like to participate in this.
I've been pounding this drum for 20 years.
For 15 of those years, nobody was listening to me.
To see it come to fruition in the very place where I'm working is very moving to me, and I hope to continue to be a part of it.
Right now, I'm writing this series of mystery stories, which is selling really well, and I want to sort of do that because I think it's important.
But I also want to do some more film.
all right thank you first off I just want to say listen to your show religiously every week Definitely makes my week.
But my name is Anne-Marie.
I attend the University of Miami.
And so I wanted to ask you a question related, because I know you're probably, you and Michael Knowles probably are the ones that focus on, you know, the arts and the culture the most.
Matt Walsh tried with What is a Woman, but like he's getting into that field now more recently.
But I feel like the conservative movement is always so focused, at least nowadays, I see a lot of like, you know, the libertarian influence from the 80s influencing the way that we think now about conservatism, especially on college campuses.
It's really difficult to get, you know, young conservatives like myself to care about the culture, to care about social conservatism in particular.
So what's your best piece of advice to first get them to care, but also to speak to them charitably and to kind of, you know, hook them into coming into this kind of world of conservatism, of social conservatism a little bit more?
It's a good question because it's an open question.
You know, you remember the old movie, Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come.
It's an open question whether if we build a great culture that conservatives can like, they will come.
A lot of conservatives feel that if you vary from them on one point or disagree on one point, you know, you're out.
You're done.
And the thing about the arts is the arts are not, conservative arts don't look like conservative life, right?
The founding fathers were not watching Doris Day movies.
They were watching, you know, they were watching Shakespeare tragedies and Greek tragedies filled with blood and sex and gore because the arts are about life.
And that's the stuff of life.
That is the stuff of life.
So we have to educate, and you're right, we have to educate in a way that accepts people for who they are.
But we also have to make stuff.
The arts will only be saved by people who love them.
And it's no good going into the arts to preach.
It's no good going to the arts to propagandize.
You have to go into the arts to create and to make life, make beauty out of the ugly stuff of life.
And if we can do that, and if we can get people with money to pay for it and bring it in and see if they can enjoy it and maybe relax a little bit while you're reading things and watching stuff, we can win.
I'm optimistic, but I'm not absolutely certain that we can do this.
We have time for one last question.
Okay, no pressure.
Yeah, this is the big one.
Yeah.
So my name is Joseph Ramirez.
I am from Cal Poly in California.
So it was really surreal going on the night tour that we had a few days ago to the Lincoln Memorial and standing at the plaque that Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous I Have a Dream speech.
And to think about, because the Kendi book you mentioned was actually the introduction of that was part of our reading list in one of our college classes.
And the whole, it was sombering to stand there where a man said, I have a dream that my children will not be judged by the content, by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
To now hear the biggest voice and race say, the only solution to present discrimination is future discrimination and so on and so forth.
What is something that, and as I thought there and stood there, I thought, what are some ways that we as conservatives can reach out to more minority communities where a lot of the stuff we talk about is an agreement, hard work ethic.
The issue of abortion is a big one.
What's something that we as conservatives can do more to reach out to cultures that already agree with us?
And what is the Daily Wire doing?
Well, you know, one thing we might do is reach out.
I mean, this is the thing that drives me crazy, because this is really a political question in some ways, as opposed to a cultural question.
I've never seen Republicans give up instantly when they feel that they haven't got a foothold anywhere.
They don't run candidates in New York, though New York is falling apart.
They don't run candidates in LA and LA is falling apart.
They do not go to where black people are because they're afraid of the press.
When Mitt Romney went and gave a speech to the NAACP, he was flogged.
I mean, it was just a terrible thing.
You have to brave that.
You are absolutely right.
People like Black Lives Matter and the radical left do not represent our fellow Americans who are black.
They just don't.
And all the polls show this.
So it just seems to me, you know, we don't reach out at all.
It seems to me we don't talk at all.
We let the activists make us so angry that we say things that are legitimately insulting to other people.
You know, we get so angry at the madness of the left that we become a little insane ourselves.
That's why I constantly preach that our message has to be a positive message.
What are we doing?
What are we building?
And in fact, one of the problems with being a conservative is we're not giving any race anything.
We're not giving them anything.
We're just giving them America, freedom, prosperity, peace.
That's what we're giving them.
And that is the same for every person of every color.
It has worked for every person of every color.
I love living.
I love living in a multi-ethnic country, but it's multi-ethnic because it has one idea, which is that people should be free.
And so we should preach that.
We preach it in their faces, in their places, which we just don't do now.