Andrew Clavin dissects elite failures—from the DOJ’s weaponized "domestic violent extremist" labels (per a leaked 2023 DHS bulletin) to CDC lockdowns ignoring natural immunity, and Liz Cheney’s GOP defeat over cultural blind spots. He ties these to Marxist feminism’s societal collapse, Afghanistan’s botched withdrawal, and selective prosecutions (e.g., Trump vs. Clinton), warning that "no one is above the law" risks becoming a partisan tool. Clavin contrasts Dead Man Walking’s moral complexity with ideological rigidity, arguing elites’ detachment from reality fuels public distrust—while praising Hillsdale College as an antidote to woke media. [Automatically generated summary]
The Washington Post, where democracy dies in darkness, if they have anything to say about it, has obtained secret information from anonymous sources at the highest level of government, showing that the government is in no way a threat to our constitutional freedoms.
The shocking revelation comes after Attorney General Merrick Garland had the FBI send 30 armed men to ransack the home of his boss's political opponent, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt, says the Post, that the Department of Justice is fully dedicated to enforcing the law equally on anyone named Donald Trump, no matter which Republican Party he belongs to.
According to the Post, anonymous sources say insiders believe that sources who asked to remain anonymous are saying government officials close to the anonymous source of the anonymous sources are revealing under oath in closed-door hearings with unnamed officials that the Department of Justice is totally uncorrupt and has acted so well and wisely that their motives could only be questioned by the most extreme right-wing extremists,
extremely threatening to commit extreme right-wing violence, extremely in extreme extremities of right-wing extremeness, anonymous sources say.
The Post says they have contacted one source so close to Merrick Garland that the two are almost indistinguishable and they can now reveal that Garland acted with absolute integrity and only after thinking very carefully while stroking his chin with a totally serious expression on his face and gazing out the window at the Washington Monument to remind himself of the deep responsibility he has to uphold the law fairly until it crushes Trump for ruining his chances to be on the Supreme Court,
that lousy orange-haired son of a bitch.
The indistinguishable Garland source, appearing as a silhouette in an underground parking garage, like in that cool scene with Deep Throat and All the President's Men, told the Post, quote, As an anonymous source, I can reliably report that anonymous sources tell me Donald Trump was hiding the nuclear codes in Melania's lacy and terrific-smelling lingerie, which we never went anywhere near.
Merrick Garland, who's a wonderful person, by the way, and not me at all, has reason to believe Trump was planning to use those nuclear codes to call the White House with a disguised voice and demand the president launch an attack on himself.
And sure, that may sound ridiculously implausible to some lunatic QAnon conspiracy theorists, but if Trump isn't guilty, why did he cyber bleach all his phones and destroy them with a hammer?
Wait, maybe that's what Hillary Clinton did totally by accident.
That time, she stepped on a Lego and then hopped around until her cyber bleach just happened to fall into all her phones, and then she tried to pull it out with a hammer, but used the wrong end over and over and over again.
But if Trump had done that, it would have been on purpose, because no one could possibly do that by accident, unquote.
In proudly announcing the paper's amazing scoop, Post editor-in-chief Sally Slavish said, quote, this newspaper has a long history of fearlessly exposing the absolute integrity of federal law agencies since 2021.
And we're not going to stop until every shining example of perfect performance has been ferreted out and brought to the attention of an adoring public, or at least an adoring news media, which amounts to the same thing as far as we're concerned.
We want to ensure the rule of law is brought to bear in a fair and impartial manner until every rotten Republican who participated in January 6th or who supported January 6th or who lived through January 6th or plans to live through next January 6th has been brought to justice.
After all, if that's not what American journalism is all about, my name's not slavish, unquote.
Former Post reporter Carl This Is Worse Than Watergate Bernstein says Trump's actions have been worse than Watergate.
Speaking to MSNBC's Joy Reed through the bars of her padded cell, Bernstein said, quote, this is worse than Watergate, unquote.
Public opinion polls show that people approve Merrick Garland's actions and look forward to being entertained by them until they re-elect Trump in 2024.
Meanwhile, we can all hope for more stories of the Department of Justice's impeccable behavior from the Washington Post, where democracy dies in darkness, screaming desperately for help in the oubliette under the city room.
Critical Theory Insights00:14:42
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-hunky.
Ship-shaped, dipsy-topsy, the world is it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, the vast right-wing conspiracy known as Clavinon continues.
And I just want to say right at the top here, we are not, we are not going to revel in the misfortunes of other people, no matter what we feel about them.
I'm not going to talk about, you know, Jeffrey Toobin leaving CNN.
I'm, you know, I'm kind of glad they took the jerk off.
He says he got himself off, but I don't know the whole story.
And then Brian Stelter, of course, was fired.
And, you know, I always have a soft spot for the ladies.
So I wrote a small poem about it.
It's very short.
I'll just read it to you.
A fond farewell to Brian Stelter.
I hope you can still afford food and shelter.
And you can take some consolation from the fact that Tucker Carlson still has the number one show in the nation.
I'm still working on the scansion.
Anyway, we'll be talking about them and other failures today from the Department of Defense to the CDC to the DOJ to Liz Cheney and the medical establishment.
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Today is from PJM.
It says, I hope you don't mind that I ordered your book for my local library, just as I did for When Christmas Comes, talking about the sequel, A Strange Habit of Mind, ordered for the local library.
Looking forward to seeing it in my queue.
You know, the library is great as long as no one takes it out for free.
I want people to pay every time they buy that book.
Speaking of which, by the way, The Strange Habit of Mind, I've been begging you please to pre-order it so that we could get the attention of the publisher.
My publisher, Mysterious Press.
If Mysterious Press ever disappears and Daily Wire is not publishing books, no one will publish a book like this anymore, Strange Habit of Mind.
I've been telling you, asking you to please pre-order it so that the publisher knows there's a demand for it.
And this week, you made an impression because the company under whose aegis, the big publisher under whose aegis Mysterious Press works, sent them a note saying, gee, there's a lot of pre-orders for this.
We may have to keep an eye on this and order more books.
So please, if you haven't Haven't pre-ordered it yet, please go on Amazon and order a strange habit of mine, the sequel to When Christmas Comes.
I promise you'll like it and you will see why I'm pushing it so hard, because a book like this simply will not get published anywhere else unless you guys turn it into the seller I know it can and should be.
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No ease.
There are no easing planned ways.
I think we can all agree, among our various problems, there are two very big problems.
One is widespread pornography use, and the other is critical theory, all the critical theories, race, gender theory, all of them.
Both of these are destroying young people's sexuality and their bodies and minds.
And I want to make the argument today that theory and pornography are deeply related to one another, and both are part of a greater failure that has led to the failure of our elites in our institutions, which is, I think, what we're confronting right now.
And this is, I hope, not too much information.
I've talked about this before.
When I was researching the novel Empire of Lies, I had to research sadomasochism because the hero has wrestled with sadomasochism.
And a lot of people thought the story had to be autobiographical because it was so realistic, but I promise it was not.
It was just an idea related to the fact that the Marquis de Sade, the inventor of where we get the word sadism, reading the Marquis de Sade was one of the things that had convinced me that atheism didn't work, that atheism was not a viable way of life.
And so I wrote that into the story because this was about a man who had found religion while he was immersed in this horrible way of life.
And while I was researching that life, I looked at some S ⁇ M porn.
And I won't say that I found it addictive, but I found it disturbingly compelling, a very violent porn.
It was very compelling.
And the porn I looked at got worse and worse.
The more I would look, I would notice I was going on worse and worse sites.
By the time I finished this novel, just melding my mind with this character gutted me.
It almost ruined me.
I was a wreck when I finished this book.
And I said to my wife, I'm never going to write another novel.
And she said to me hilariously, yes, dear, sit down and eat your dinner because she knows that I'm always going to write another novel.
But I had to ask myself, why did this garbage, these pictures of women being abused, become a turn-on to me, which is basically what it was.
It's not my thing.
It's horrible stuff.
So why was I drawn to this crap as I was doing this research?
And as I examined the idea, I thought about this.
And the truth is that nature moves us by putting extremes in our minds.
If you have a moth that is attracted to slightly darker moths and you dye a moth black, blacker than appears in nature, the moth will follow the black moth.
In other words, what it's told to is go for the darkest thing there is.
It's not told to go to the dark one that you like that exists.
It's told to go just dark, just go dark, right?
And if you have a spider that likes, they've done experiments like this.
If you have a spider that likes female spiders with hairy legs and you invent to tape more hair on a spider's legs, he'll go after that spider, even though it doesn't exist in nature.
What nature does is it just says hair, hairy legs, hairy legs.
So pornography, like fantasies, like your sexual fantasies, it's just shapes.
Those are just shapes and pictures in your mind.
I know there are real women on one end of the pornographer's business, but when it comes to the audience, it's just a shape.
It's just a picture.
And men are programmed to react to shapes, right?
We're programmed to react to the shape of women.
The visual perception of women turns us on.
That's what leftists complain about when they complain about objectifying women.
We're just looking at them as shapes, as images.
And for men also, there's an element of action to having sex, right?
This is something you do.
And if you think about the language we use when we describe sex, it's the male is the active partner.
And that action, because nature moves us to extremes, that action can become aggression in our fantasies.
And that aggression can become violence in our fantasies and in our porn.
And violence against the shape of a woman becomes a turn on.
This is all happening in your mind.
It's all happening in imagery.
It's not happening in real life.
So then why, if nature pushes us to extremes, why aren't we all sadistic rapists, right?
I've never been part of that life.
I've never been part of that.
That's never been something that has actually turned me on in real life.
But the answer is obvious.
Real women aren't shapes.
That's the answer.
That's the simple answer.
They're people, right?
They're individuals.
And when you're in bed with a woman, it's probably, you know, if you live a fairly decent life, if you're not totally a wild man, it's probably because you like her.
And the last thing you want is to see her suffering, right?
If you look at these pictures, these SNM pictures, the woman's face is always contorted with agony and suffering.
And I literally cannot think of anything less sexually exciting than seeing somebody I like looking like that in agony and suffering.
When men get addicted to porn, though, they find that they can no longer, a lot of them find that they can no longer have actual relations.
They can't even have sexual relations.
They become impotent because the woman will not act like the woman in the picture.
They cannot make that leap from a shape of a woman to an actual real woman.
And because they're not having sex anymore, they double down on the porn.
They do more porn and they become more and more alienated from reality, right?
So the less this thing works in real life, the more they retreat into the porn and the less they are able to work in real life.
Which brings me to critical theory.
I am flabbergasted by how often I hear elite, theoretically intelligent, well-credentialed people saying things that are so stupid that they border on the babbling insane.
And then other people applaud what they're saying.
Let's take Kamala Harris.
Now, I know we make fun of Kamala Harris, but she's actually not a stupid woman.
She's an attorney.
She's the vice president of the United States.
She's risen through the ranks.
Here she is talking about equity, which arises out of race theory.
It's cut 15.
So when we talk about equality, well, that's a good goal.
But let us not presume that because everyone should be treated equal, that they start out on equal footing.
So equity, as a concept, says, recognize that everyone has the same capacity, but in order for them to have equal opportunity to reach that capacity, we must pay attention to this issue of equity.
If we are to expect and allow people to compete on equal footing.
So that woman just told a group of people who are now applauding after she finishes that we all have the same capacity.
Now, I would like to send her to explain to Aaron Judge or LeBron James that I have the exact same capacity to hit home runs or make baskets that they do, and they're going to have to stand down or make fewer baskets so that I can be equal to them on the court.
Nobody believes that everybody has the same capacity.
The woman said something entirely stupid.
In other words, she is doubling down on theory because her ideas simply don't work in real life.
The same way people double down on porn because the porn disables them from acting in real life.
Equity sees people, just like porn does, as objects, as things that should be equal because we want equality.
So here are some things that are less equal.
So they must have the same capacity.
All we have to do is make them equal.
It becomes, they solve their problem by committing injustice, by doing essentially violence to the normal run of things.
And, you know, if equality is the thing we're looking for, it's again, nature pushing us to extremes.
Nature pushes us to extremes.
We want these equalities of outcomes because we forget that people are individuals.
They have inner lives.
They have inner talents.
They're born with talents.
They're born with deficits.
Some people are born only with deficits.
Some people have no talent.
There's all kinds of different people.
They all have inner lives.
Once you make them objects, as if you were looking at them through porn, once you make them objects, you can start to do all kinds of violent and unjust things to them.
Let's take another example, a doctor named Jeremy Carswell, who is from Boston Children's Hospital, where we are now learning that they have repeatedly cut off the healthy breasts of little girls as young as 15.
I mean, to me, at my age, that's a little girl.
You know, this is an atrocity.
This is a satanic atrocity.
As I've said before, the evil Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele brought this gender-affirming care to Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Hitler would have said, what do you think I am?
I'm not doing that.
Here is Dr. Jeremy talking about this.
Now, just listen to how stupid the things she says are.
Cut seven.
A child will often know that they are transgender from the moment that they have any ability to express themselves.
And parents will often tell us this.
We have parents who tell us that their kids, they knew from the minute they were born, practically.
And actions like refusing to get a haircut or standing to urinate, trying to stand to urinate, refusing to stand to urinate, trying on siblings' clothing, playing with the quote, opposite gender toys, things like that.
There is more and more a group of adolescents that we are seeing that really are coming to the realization that they might be trans or gender diverse a little bit later on in their life.
So what we're seeing from them is that they always sort of knew something was maybe off and didn't have the understanding to know that they might be trans or have a different gender identity than the one they had been assigned.
So that is a growing population that we are seeing and that's being recognized as being trans and able to be treated.
Now, anybody who's ever dealt with kids knows that every toddler doesn't like getting a haircut.
All children experiment with switching clothes around and all this stuff.
They're learning to feel comfortable inside their body, inside who they are.
And so she's talking nonsense.
She's talking nonsense.
But she has a theoretical problem, which is that men and women are different.
That's not fair.
So she is saying to us, oh, well, you know, if they do these things that all children do, we can start to operate on them and butcher the bodies of perfectly healthy people who do not need surgery in any way.
It's a pornographic way of treating human beings.
Let me just compare that, okay?
It's not saying, by the way, that their feelings don't count or their feelings don't matter.
Let's just take an example of real life.
Here's a woman named Ashley Brass who was put on a TikTok, a TikTok video from Gays Against Groomers, which is a big group because these groomers are making gays look evil.
And most gays, of course, are more conservative than not.
So here's this lady, Ashley Brass, talking about her real life experience, not this pornographic theory experience where she's just a shape that has a problem that has to be solved, but what it's like to be a real person being dealt with by other people who are treating you like a real person.
Born Into a Time00:02:52
I'd like to publicly thank the universe and my parents for allowing me to be born into a time where they said, no, you can't change your gender at the right age of 14 when I asked to be a boy instead of a girl because being a girl going through puberty was hard.
I vividly remember standing in this exact living room and asking my parents, can I be a boy instead?
Because being a girl going through puberty was not fun.
Getting a period, growing boobs, shaving your legs, shaving your armpits, waxing your eyebrows, none of that was enjoyable for me.
It was awkward and uncomfortable, so I decided to do anything else, which was be a boy instead.
I wore baggy clothes and I put my hair in a ponytail and I just decided, nope, not doing it.
And my mom's response was, no, you're a girl.
You could dress however you want, but you are a girl.
That is your gender, and it is what it is.
Nothing you can do about it.
So yeah, I'm just very grateful that I wasn't born into a time period now where parents are getting brainwashed into responding with the words, okay, do you want to talk about it?
Nope, nothing to talk about.
Vagina, girl, and it is what it is.
And looking back, I'm so very grateful I didn't try to do anything to change this body because I love her and she is beautiful.
I wasn't meant to be a boy.
I just didn't like being a girl in that moment in time.
And it's that f ⁇ ing simple.
Thank you, mom and dad, and thank you, God, for allowing me to be born into a normal time period.
And to two parents who understood the concept of genders can't be chosen.
Also for giving me this body because we love her.
See, if you're just a shape, you can change the shape and you change the person.
But if you're a person, then you have to deal with all of who you are.
You know, there's a great writer, Goethe, who was a very famous writer.
We don't read him much in English-speaking countries because we don't know that much about his civilization.
I think it's probably why, because he's a wonderful, wonderful writer.
But he said, all theory is gray, but forever green is the tree of life.
The difference between that gray and that green, between theory and life, is the inner life of human beings, the inner experience of human beings in their bodies, right?
You don't have this inexperience separate from your body.
It's your inner experience in your body.
And the way we relate to that is what I call the great speculation, where we speculate that your inner life is as important and sacred to you as mine is to me, and both are as sacred and righteous to God as each other.
We are equal in that.
We have to treat each other like that.
That is where we get little phrases like, love your neighbor like yourself, because he too is living a life.
These people have fallen into a pornography of theory, a pornography of theory, which is basically materialism.
It's the idea that you're a shape.
You're the same as the idea of them of you in their heads.
You're just a shape, and they can manipulate you and do with you whatever they want.
You don't need freedom because you have what freedom is for individuals.
Freedom is for that inner person who is made happy by freedom.
A commitment to materialism is why our institutions are failing and why they're failing into this spectacular collapse brought on by theory and surrounded by theory and people drowning and saying absurd, ridiculous things that grow out of their theories and why they're doubling down on ideas that are destroying both them and us.
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Let's talk about some of these failures because the failure is all over the place.
The stench of our elite failure is all over the place.
Let's begin with Liz Cheney, who lost her primary in Wisconsin by like a record number.
She got very few votes.
She was tossed out, ending the Cheney, the history of Cheneys in politics, the Bushes in politics.
This is after she, of course, appeared in the show trial of January 6th that the Democrats were holding, which was just an embarrassment.
It was an embarrassment.
It was a trial with no defense.
That's an embarrassment per se.
That's a violation per se.
As I keep saying, you do not even report on a trial that has no defense because you start to think, well, this is some kind of information, but it's not.
If there's no defense, there's no information.
She lost by a historic margin.
The candidate Trump-backed Harriet Hagman took 66.3% of the vote to Cheney's 28.9%.
Now, talking about people who are completely detached from reality, who are doubling down on what they're doing, even as it fails, here's what Liz Cheney said.
This is Cut 17.
The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and the House before he won the most important election of all.
Lincoln ultimately prevailed.
He saved our union.
And he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.
Speaking at Gettysburg of the great task remaining before us, Lincoln said that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.
He did say that.
That's true about Abraham Lincoln.
So she got that part.
I heard this.
I tweeted, you know, I knew Abe Lincoln.
Abe Lincoln was a friend of mine, Congresswoman.
You know Abe Lincoln.
But, you know, first of all, Abraham Lincoln lost his race while winning the popular vote, and she got a historically low vote.
But he was also a great man, and Liz Cheney, not so much.
She could have opposed Trump.
She could have said that Trump was wrong about the election being stolen.
Other people have said that.
But she joined with the Democrats in waging a campaign intended to demonize all Republicans.
Now, I want to get her failure exactly right because, you know, people call her a rhino and all.
And in some way, she was a bad congresswoman in that she doesn't really care about Wyoming.
She'd rather be in the Beltway than in Wyoming.
But you can't call her a rhino.
Her votes were pretty conservative.
What she was was someone who would not acknowledge the failure of the GOP establishment, which is again a theoretical failure, not paying attention to real people in real life.
The John McCain's, the Mitt Romneys, the George Ws, they're not bad people.
You don't have to hate them.
It has nothing to do with that.
They weren't addressing the issue, which is simply this.
The culture has been battering ordinary Americans, telling them their country stinks, their country's racist, they're racist, they're homophobic, their God doesn't exist.
Everything they do, they're stupid, they're deplorable, all this stuff, while the government grows and grows and grows and does its job more and more badly and takes away more and more of our freedoms.
And basically, the Republicans just kept saying, well, we'll cut taxes.
We'll cut taxes.
Capitalism, capitalism, capitalism.
Teachers are coming into our schools and teaching our children that they're the wrong sex.
Well, capitalism, capitalism.
They just weren't listening.
When you run a John McCain, when you run a George, a Jeb Bush, you're not paying attention to what the people want, what they're thinking about.
And now Donald Trump has turned that around.
And that's what they're fighting against.
They're not fighting against Donald Trump.
They're fighting against a party that has changed because it wasn't answering the needs of its voters.
So the DOJ, this is all part of what's happening with the DOJ, right?
They're threats of violence against the FBI now because of this raid on Mar-a-Lago.
And I am deeply, deeply opposed to threatening anybody to any kind of political violence.
But they must have known, they acted recklessly.
They must have known that some of this was going to happen.
And it gets worse when the media whose job it is to question the government.
That's their job.
It is to say, well, wait a minute, this hasn't happened for 232 years.
Was it a mistake to change?
And instead, we got this.
This is cut number one.
The FBI is a conservative-leaning law enforcement organization.
And we've sort of like lost the thread on that in the past six years.
These attacks against the FBI, these attacks against the most important federal law enforcement agencies.
Less than 24 hours after a peaceful search that they gave them a heads up on.
Peaceful search.
It's all legal.
It's all lawful.
It's not a raid.
They didn't, they're not there improperly or unlawfully.
The Justice Department is returning to its historical position as a law enforcement agency above politics, trying to do the right thing.
I don't think there was any politics involved.
This appears to be a nonpartisan process.
Because anybody on this set had done the same thing, the exact same result would have occurred.
A judge would not sign off on that if there were not evidence.
Sources tell me that, you know, there's a reason.
They wouldn't go in there if it wasn't really significant.
If they weren't really concerned about the nature of the classified information that Trump had, what he might be doing with it, who he might be showing it to.
Nothing to see here.
Nothing to see here.
This is the job of journalism to tell you that your government is doing a great job and a judge would never sign off.
The DOJ, the FBI would never phony up information to get a FISA warrant to tap an American citizen.
They would never do anything like that.
They would never lie to Donald Trump and tell him he's not under investigation when he was.
They'd never brief Obama, but not brief.
You know, they've done all these things.
There's every reason to suspect them.
It's almost as if they're trying to incite violence so that they can then condemn all Republicans as terrorists.
In fact, James O'Keefe over Project Veritas says he's got a document that was sent out by the DOJ.
Well, I'll play him talking about it.
He says he's got a Homeland Security bulletin to local law enforcement that conflates people who suspect the election wasn't fair with terrorists.
This is James O'Keeffe cut three.
Breaking news, a source within the Department of Homeland Security has leaked to us an intelligence bulletin marked for official use only unclassified in light of the FBI raid on President Trump.
This document dated August 12th refers to a heightened threat from what the Department of Homeland Security calls DVEs or domestic violent extremists, quote, motivated by a range of ideologies who have grievances against a variety of targets, including law enforcement.
Domestic violent extremists are referred to in one of these paragraphs as, quote, many of these threats include references to the perception that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent and other claims of government overreach.
The 2022 midterms in this document are also highlighted as a potential, quote, flashpoint for this violent extremism.
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So this is a failure of our media, which has become a tool of the regime, a failure of the regime, a failure of the DOJ to maintain its integrity, which it has had for so long that the FBI has had respect from people for so long, but because they acted fairly honestly, they are not acting honestly anymore.
They're not acting in a straightforward way.
And if that's not true, why is Jim Jordan, Congressman Jim Jordan, why is he getting whistleblowers coming in and telling him that something has gone terribly wrong?
Here's Jordan.
The template never changes with these guys.
It's the left creates a lie.
Big media, mainstream press reports the lie.
Big tech amplifies the lie.
And then when we try to tell the truth, they call us names and try to cancel us and tell us and tell the world that, oh, we're the ones not being square with them.
So the country, though, the good news is they figured it out.
And I'll tell you who else has figured it out, Trey.
And you and John, with your background in law enforcement, appreciate this.
14 FBI agents have come to our office as whistleblowers.
And they are good people.
There are lots of good people in the FBI.
It's the top that's the problem.
But some of these good agents are coming to us telling us this is baloney what's going on.
The political nature now of the Justice Department.
God bless them for doing it.
Come and talk to us about the school board issue, about a whole host of issues.
I mean, it's becoming a well-worn trail of agents who say this has got to stop.
And thank goodness for them.
And thank goodness that the American people recognizes it.
And I believe they're going to make a big change on November 8th.
You know, the CDC, another failure, right?
They failed during the pandemic.
Rochelle Walinski, running the CDC, came out and sent a video to her employees saying, you know, we had decades, I think 75 years, to prepare for this, and then we blew it.
We did a terrible, terrible job.
So what do you think her recommendation would be?
You'd think it would be maybe we should do less.
Maybe we were overbearing.
Maybe we pretended we had information we didn't have.
No, she wants to be more active and we want to pay more attention to equity.
We want to go back into the pornography of theory because we're failing in real life.
Like the guy who can't do it with a girl because he's reading pornography, so now he's going to go back and double down on the pornography.
They're going to double down on their theoretical ideas.
Fauci, the guy who is like just like a bumbling idiot.
He's one of those wind-up toys that keeps walking to the corner, keeps lying and all this.
He said, we should have been much more stringent in our lockdowns, much more stringent in our lockdowns.
So here, let's just hear from Rand Paul because he gets it right.
Let's hear what he had to say.
It wasn't that they acted too sparingly.
The problem was that they acted too quickly and not based on science.
It wasn't that they were, oh, waiting around for science.
They were reacting every week with a new edict that contradicted the previous week's edict.
They also commissioned studies that completely dismissed the idea that you got immunity from COVID after having had it.
So how can you do a study of whether a vaccine or a booster works if an arm of the study is not people who have actually already had the disease?
If you discount having the disease, most of the studies are worthless.
So what I would suggest if they want to reorganize is humility.
I think they need to step back and get back into the advice game, not the mandate game.
Okay, humility.
Humility is what you have when you make a mistake and you admit that you made a mistake.
Here is Fauci talking about himself.
I can't remember if I played this clip before, but it's worth playing again.
His Fauci giving an interview, and he's talking about what's called the Fauci effect, which is what he says, that people are going to medical school because of him.
This is an amazing clip.
And if you're not watching this, if you're just listening to it, see if you can find it and just look at the man, this arrogant Ponce, who is the opposite of humility, Cut 31.
People go to medical school now.
People are interested in science, not because of me, because people, most people don't know me, who I am.
My friends know me, my wife knows me, but people don't know me.
It's what I symbolize.
And what I symbolize in an era of the normalization of untruths and lies and all the things you're seeing going on in society from January 6th to everything else that goes on.
People, the craving for consistency, for integrity, for truth, and for people caring about people.
What a jerk.
What an arrogant, arrogant jerk he is.
Their CDC failed, but the government is always the same way.
They do things that make things worse, and then they say, oh, what we need is more government.
That is the effect of pornographic theory.
Craving Consistency00:02:38
That's the fact that you have an idea in your head.
It makes your city worse.
Look at George Soros coming out and saying, I'm going to keep on reforming prosecution.
I'm going to keep on reforming justice.
Even us cities become just hellholes of crime.
It's in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, anywhere where a Soros DA takes control, it becomes a nightmare.
And yet George Soros is this.
We need more of that.
We need more of that.
Well, why is that?
Because Soros is sitting in his ivory tower someplace, believe me, in some tax-protected someplace, so his money isn't being taken away.
And he's coming up with these theories and these ideas, just like a guy sitting in his room looking at pornography and thinking, yeah, this is what real sex is like.
This is what real women, the way real women should be treated.
It's the same damn thing.
It is turning people into shapes and numbers and objects instead of thinking about the fact that, no, if you leave people alone, what happens?
They become creative.
They do stuff.
They compete with one another.
The system, the human system is made to work, except for the fact that people want to control it.
And once they start to control it, they ruin it.
Afghanistan, another example.
What a disaster.
What a disaster that was.
People dying.
The Taliban has now taken over after the Afghanistan.
The Taliban is back in charge.
They've taken away education from women.
They've banned music.
You have to wear beards or they come and beat the crap out of you.
All the stuff that was happening before is happening again, which means it's a staging ground for terrorism, just like it was when we went in there.
And even if you believed, and now the Republicans have put out a report saying that the military, that they lied to us.
They told us that the military was totally on board.
That's not true.
The military said we should keep a small force there.
We keep a small force almost everywhere.
Of course, we should have kept a small force, not to keep the war going, but simply to make sure to maintain control.
But no, Biden had an idea.
His idea was we should get out.
He got out and he got out in the most embarrassing, humiliating way possible.
Do you think Putin didn't see that when he decided whether he was going to go into Ukraine or not?
Of course he did.
Of course it was a complete disaster.
And Biden told us, oh, it was an extraordinary success, another extraordinary success.
One failure after another, one failure after another, all of our institutions working off theories without any regard to the lives of the human beings, those theories affect.
The more impotent they become, the more they turn to their theoretical porn.
And that's what we're seeing.
And it all goes back again, again, to this overarching idea of materialism, which is the Marxist theory.
All Marxism is materialist.
That's the Marxist theory that has failed.
Theories Without Humanity00:12:58
And they keep doubling down on it, and they're done.
They are done.
They have failed themselves into the ground.
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I'll tell you another theory that's a failure is feminism.
And people, women too, get angry at me when I say this as if I were saying, oh, women should have no rights, women should have no choices in life.
And obviously, I don't think that in the least.
What I think is that women have been talked into making choices that make most women unhappy.
Each individual woman, of course, should make whatever choice she wants.
But the fact that government, that corporations profit when women go to work, when two parents have to work, that means there's two people to be employed instead of one.
It means there are more workers.
It means they can pay them less.
That's why I believe that's one of the reasons at least why wages have not gone up in 100 years since feminism basically began.
And this is not saying to any individual woman you shouldn't be doing what you want.
That's absurd.
What I'm saying is that what feminism has done is it has adopted the theory, the values of men, and imposed them on women.
It has said what men think is important is the important thing.
And anything that women think is important, the typical feminine values, are not important.
It has said this again and again.
Homemaking, child rearing, child nurturing, having children, which is, I think, what we should all be doing in great numbers.
All of that is not as important as what men do when they go to corporations and move paper around and then suddenly they're rich.
That's the important thing.
When they hit a ball with a stick and then they're famous, that's the important thing.
You know, it's simply, they do this again and again.
When their theory fails, they adopt the ideas of the people they were trying to overturn in the first place.
They've done it with racism.
Why are they racist now?
They're racist because their plans to make everybody equal didn't work.
So now they're going to be racist against whites, as if that's any better than being racist against blacks.
It's amazing how stupid they become as they try to rescue these theories from reality, right?
Feminism.
I mean, it is just making so many young women unhappy, not because they have choices, but because they're being gulled and bullied and convinced to make choices that do not make them happy.
You know, I saw this article about something called hypothalamic amenorrhea, H-A.
I can pronounce H-A, so we'll call it H-A.
This is something that happens to women when they essentially take on the exercise programs of men.
This is like fitness, you know, women who get into fitness.
One of these things that I'm always complaining about is women saying, she's a strong woman.
She's a strong woman.
You go like, well, is that really the most important thing for a woman?
Is like tenderness not important?
Is generosity?
Not important as nurturing?
Not important as care and taking time with life and basically turning houses into homes.
Is that really not important?
Is it only being a strong woman?
Every woman in a movie has to be sitting there posed like a man with her hands on her hips and all this.
I mean, is that really what's important?
No, it's feminism telling them that male values are important.
So they are failures unless they live up to male values.
So what they have is these, they find out now that when you have these women who have six pack abs are not that healthy.
Women who have those muscles are not that healthy.
Women who do Olympic sports don't have their period, which means they're not fertile.
The stress that goes into this kind of work and working like men sometimes like to work leads to what they call a suppressed hypothalamic pituitary ovarian axis.
Undereating, excessive exercise, and psychological stress.
And undereating doesn't necessarily mean eating celery all day.
Under eating can still include breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
I'm reading this.
If too much energy has to be used for exercise, then there might not be enough energy left to accomplish critical functions such as ovulating.
So if you want to stop being a full woman, all you have to do is act like a man.
You don't have to go to Boston Children's Hospital to have your body cut to pieces.
You can just do it yourself.
But that's what they've been doing all this time.
So Boston's Children's Hospital is only jumping on the feminist wagon by eliminating the role of women.
I mean, it's almost, when you read about stuff like this, it's almost as if women's bodies were meant for something different than men's.
It's almost as if women's bodies were meant to perform a different function.
And in doing that function, that their brains are different too, that everything about them is geared toward that function of reproducing the human race, which I think, you know, call me crazy.
I think it's kind of important.
I think it's kind of important to build families, to build homes, to take the material world and make it a spiritual world, to make dinner an act of love, to make a house a home, to make a child into a human being.
Those are spiritual actions that go against the materialism that all these theories are based on.
And yet, and yet, they will not let the theory go.
And if you want to see theory pushed to the point of absolute misery, you want to see women again and again explaining why they're miserable and how you should be miserable too, all you have to do is go to the New York Times, a former newspaper, and go to their op-ed page, or as we call it, Knucklehead Row.
Here is an op-ed by Nona Willis Aronowitz.
She's the author of Bad Sex.
And she says, I still believe in the power of sexual freedom.
You want to see somebody lost in a theory that didn't work, clinging to that theory?
You want to see like porn.
She says, half a second later, we're grappling with sexuality, Generation Z, which rightly sees how women are still, after all these years, taught to prioritize men's desires over their own.
They've started to reject the concept of sex positivity and question whether casual dating is worth it, sometimes opting out of sex altogether, and question whether as the righteous energy of Me Too fades into a more ambiguous debate, we've reached a point where it's become obvious that consent and figuring out what you don't want is just not enough.
Who could...
Who could have ever thought that this would happen?
You know, she says, this is the part that gets me.
She says, at the end, tail end of 2016, I ended an eight-year relationship about six years too late.
Our marriage was modern and progressive by most standards.
We experimented with non-monogamy.
My partner did more laundry than I did.
And yet, I found myself unable to admit a simple fact.
Our sex was bad.
How can it be?
It was so progressive.
How could sex have been bad?
It was intrinsically gut-level bad.
So, of course, this marriage ended.
And meanwhile, she says, while her marriage is falling apart, a growing sect of the feminist movement, disillusioned by the results of the sexual revolution, recently veered down a protectionist path when it came to sex.
They wanted, every woman knows in her gut, wrote a writer.
And this is back in the day, back in feminism, when feminism was getting started, 1978.
Everyone knows in their gut that the emphasis on genital sexuality, objectification, promiscuity, emotional non-involvement, and coarse invulnerability was the male style that we as women place greater trust in love, sensuality, humor, tenderness, and commitment.
No, that's wrong, she says.
I would never advocate ceaseless sex as a default.
There's nothing more joyless than forced sexual exploration.
But I do believe that reaching for more sexual freedom, not less, the freedom to have whatever kind of sex we want, including, yes, casual sex and choking sex and porny sex, is still the only way we can hope to solve the problems of our current sexual landscape.
Well, you go, girl.
You go.
I was like, she's miserable.
Her relationships fall apart.
You know, the sex is lousy.
She's got a progressive thing.
But that is, it's just, we just need more of it.
We just need more of it.
It's bringing theory and pornography together.
You go to the New York Times, the fact that theory and pornography goes together.
You know, we were just joking in a break about the fact that I talk about sex a lot.
And one of the reasons I talk about sex a lot is not just because I find sex sexy, which I do, but it's not just because of that.
It's because sex, the idea that sex was the primary goal of human life, that as Schopenhauer said, it's the Lord of this world.
The sexual instinct is the Lord of this world.
And Freud, following on Schopenhauer, said, basically everything is sex.
Everything is governed by sex.
That is how we got to this weird world we're in, where people say you can cut people to pieces following that logic of sex being the center of human life.
It was wrong.
That logic was wrong.
Schopenhauer was wrong.
Freud was wrong.
It's love that is the center of human life.
It is bonding between human beings that's the center of human life.
Sex comes along later after you learn to love, after you learn to be an individual, after you begin to develop your own inner life.
You start to love the inner lives of others.
You start to love the inner lives of others.
Look, I was attracted to my wife's shape, but I fell in love with her.
I fell in love with her, and I still am in love with her because it wasn't based on just shape.
It was based on who she is.
Love is the first thing.
It's the first thing.
Sex comes after that and represents that love.
And if we don't live like that, if we don't live like that, we become as miserable as somebody on Knucklehead Row.
And believe me, you do not want that to happen to you.
one failure after another, one theory failed after another, pornography of theory, doubling down on it as human beings fall apart.
That is the left.
That is our institutions.
That is our country right at this moment.
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Art's Revelatory Truth00:14:44
You know, one of the reasons I talk about the arts all the time and about culture is because, and one of the reasons I think that art can be so revelatory is precisely because art can't live in theory.
If you create a story and the characters just represent your theories of life, people are going to go, these aren't real people.
So once you start dealing with real people, theories tend to fall apart because it's the tree of life that's evergreen and theories that remain gray.
And that's why I want to talk about what I think is one of the greatest Christian movies ever made and the fact, and this will drive you crazy because it drives me crazy, it was made by some of the biggest leftists in Hollywood.
And that's saying a lot.
I'm talking about a movie called Dead Men Walking from the 90s.
You know, I pick on religious films a lot.
And I don't really mean to pick on kind of the standard G-rated, everything turns out great religious films because I think those are good movies.
I think they're good family movies.
I think they're movies that you can watch and they sort of buck you up and all that stuff.
But the great religious stories, the great Christian stories especially, are sometimes a lot darker.
I've talked about the fact that my journey to Christ, which was a 35-year journey, really began with my reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, which is about an axe murderer and a hooker.
So it's not the kind of book that you usually find when you go into a Christian bookstore.
And so it's not that I want there to be fewer G-rated Christian movies.
It's that I want there to be movies that are more complex.
And this is one of them.
And, you know, I found this film.
The reason this film was important to me is back in the 90s, I was researching my novel True Crime, which takes place on Death Row.
A lot of it takes place on Death Row.
So I was reading a lot of books about Death Row.
And I read this book, Dead Man Walking, by Sister Helen.
I believe her last name is Préjean, Sister Helen Préjon.
And it's a true story about how she served as the spiritual counselor to two killers on death row.
And she became an anti-death penalty activist.
And she, too, I think, is kind of a leftist.
She's kind of a social justice nun, one of these social justice Catholics.
And Susan Sarandon got hold of the book, the actress, and also another leftist.
And she didn't option it, she says.
It was just a handshake deal with this nun.
And eventually she basically browbeat her then-boyfriend Tim Robbins into writing and directing the film of this, which is very different.
It's a different story than the actual true story, but it had Sarandon playing Sister Prajon and Sean Penn starring as a fictional amalgam of the two characters in the book.
There are two killers in the book that she is a spiritual counselor to, and Penn plays a sort of combination of both of those characters.
So here you have Sarandon, lapsed Catholic, total socialist, complete member of like the Democratic Socialists of America.
Tim Robbins supported Bernie Sanders, complete socialist.
Sean Penn is just a whack job communist, supported Hugo Chavez.
The only good thing I can say about Susan Sarandon is that back in the 80s, I guess, her kids went to the same fancy private school as my daughter went to, and I would see her.
I even chatted with her, my wife chatted with her too, at a parent meeting.
She always showed up for the parent meetings.
She was very nice, very nice as a person, and that impressed me.
But there's one other thing that I have to say about all of these three socialists, these leftists, is that they're terrific artists.
And you may not like that, but it's just the truth.
Sarandon and Robbins are both tremendously talented actors.
Sean Penn, at his peak, was one of the greatest actors I've seen on film.
If you've never seen the film at Close Range, a gangster movie with Christopher Walken, unbelievable performance.
And this performance is one of his best.
The performance in Dead Man Walking is one of his best.
He did not win the Oscar for it.
He should have.
I think maybe she did, but he didn't, but he should have.
It was just an amazing, amazing performance.
They made this to be an anti-death penalty film, like Sister Helen Prajon would have wanted.
And I want to say that I do not come away from it, having changed my mind.
I've seen it before, and I watched it recently again.
I do not come away from it, having changed my mind.
My feeling about the death penalty is that the death penalty in America is unjust and completely unforgivable.
No matter what a person has done, you do not put him in prison for five, ten, twenty years and then execute him for something he did all that time ago.
I think that's tormenting the victim's family.
I think it's tormenting him.
I think it's cruel and unusual punishment.
But I can imagine a just death penalty for certain kinds of heinous crimes.
I can imagine a death penalty where you put a guy in prison for a year and you begin a process where he gets every chance to prove his innocence.
And if he doesn't at the end of that year, he is put to death.
I can imagine that being fair.
So it didn't convince me to become an anti-death penalty.
It doesn't work as propaganda.
It does work.
It does work as a depiction of Christ acting in the world in a world of tragedy and evil and cruelty by all the people involved.
So how did this bunch of leftists create such a wonderful Christian movie?
And I don't believe that Christ is, I believe Christ is above politics.
I believe he can love Democrats.
I don't know how he can love Democrats, but apparently he can.
I believe that he really is looking into our hearts and not into the way we vote.
So I'm not saying that a leftist shouldn't be able to make it, but I don't think that's the movie they meant to make.
I think they had to make it to get their point across.
And they did it to some degree by the demand on artists that they be honest about the human condition.
Penn's killer is so realistic.
When I covered crime as a reporter, I met people just like this.
There's a wonderful scene where the nun, Susan Sarandon, holds him to account as he tries to get out of the fact that he committed these horrible crimes.
He's in prison on death row for having shot and raped a young girl, an innocent young girl, and killed both her and her boyfriend.
This is cut 21, the scene between the two of them.
You have robbed these parents of so much, Matt.
They have nothing in their lives but sorrow, no joy.
That is what you have given them.
What possessed you to be in the woods that night?
I told you, I was thrown out of my head.
Don't blame the drugs.
We were harassing couples for weeks before this happened, months.
What was it?
What do you mean?
Did you look up the patella?
Did you think he was cool?
Did you want to impress him?
I don't know.
You could have just walked away.
He went psycho-owned me.
Don't blame him.
You blame him.
You blame the government.
You blame drugs.
You blame blacks.
You blame the Percy's.
You blame the kids for being there.
What about Matthew Poncelet?
Where is he in this story?
What, is he just an innocent, a victim?
He doesn't want to see himself as a victim.
She gets him that way.
But the other thing they did was they let the parents of the dead children speak, and one of the dead children.
And this was a big mistake that the nun and Sister Helen actually made in real life that she didn't go to them right away.
And they came to her and said, Why are you talking to this murderer and not to us?
And when she shows up, they assume that she has changed her mind and abandoned this guy, but they find out she hasn't.
She's still the spiritual counselor of the person who killed their child.
And this is the scene where the parents confront her.
And it's a wonderful artistic scene because she comes off badly in it.
It's cut 20.
I'm just trying to follow the example of Jesus, who said that every person is worth more than their worst act.
This is not a person.
This is an animal.
No, I take that back.
Animals don't rape and murder their own kind.
Matthew Poncelette is God's mistake.
And you want to hold the poor murderer's hand?
You want to be there to comfort him when he dies?
There wasn't anybody in the woods that night to comfort Hope when those two animals pushed her face down into the wet grass.
I just want to help him take responsibility for what he did.
Does he admit to what he did?
Is he sorry?
He says he didn't kill anybody.
Sister, you're in waters way over your head.
You don't know what it's like to carry a child in your womb and give birth and get up with a sick child in the middle of the night.
You just say you're praying as he's got a good night's sleep, don't you?
My parents raised me to respect a religious.
Sister, I think you need to leave this house right now.
That's an amazing scene.
You know, it's a great scene because you feel their pain and you look at her face as she listens to them and realizes that she has not done the work of Christ.
She has not reached out to both people.
She's just kind of, it's almost a little bit of an ego thing that she has seen herself as being so open-minded to loving this killer, but not to them.
That's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
And they also changed in the true story.
These killers were electrocuted, which is a horrific thing to watch.
But in this, he's put to death by lethal injection.
And Sarandon talks about this.
Tim Robbins, who is the writer-director, he made that change.
It's cut 25.
The idea was to take the combination of the worst possible person who is guilty and kill him the most humane way.
The people that she sat with in her book were electrocuted, but Tim very brilliantly changed it to lethal injection because everyone thinks that's so humane.
Now, that's an amazing thing to have done because now what she's saying is we took the worst possible person, killed him in the most humane way, and our argument is that even this is wrong.
And they put that forward, and one of the things you come away with from this is not maybe that capital punishment is wrong per se, but you come away from it feeling that you've witnessed a tragedy and you've witnessed Christ acting in a tragic world through a flawed woman who is not always doing the right thing.
That's a very high bar to set.
And that's the kind of high bar that artists set for themselves.
It's not the kind of high bar that propagandists set for themselves.
Propagandists basically say, you know, we're going to make everything look like the way we want it to look like, but artists can't do that.
Real artists can't do that.
And so this is what you have: you have this lunatic, Sean Penn, who sits around thinking that Hugo Chavez is a great guy.
You have Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins voting for Bernie Sanders, a nutbag socialist, and yet their artistic talent demands that they speak the truth.
And that is the thing that makes this a tremendous, tremendous film and a tremendous Christian film.
And they don't show Christianity as nice.
You know, the nuns are sweet, the nuns are nice, but really what they show them is joyful.
And it's really one of the best things about the film is in the midst of this tragic circumstance, in the midst of this ugliness, the nuns are frequently giggling.
Margot Martindale plays her kind of fellow nun.
Margot Martindale, another spectacular artist, if you've ever seen Justified, she played a villain, villainous hillbilly lady in that.
And she is just an amazing actress.
So there's all this artistic talent bringing both the tragedy of the situation and the joy, this giggling joy of these nuns.
My favorite scene in the thing is when she's preaching Jesus to him and he does something that is so like these killers.
It is so real to these killers that it's amazing and she confronts him with it and it shows the Christian love.
It's not that Christian love has its limits, but it does not lie in order to love, which is very different than the left, which wants us to lie.
They say we're not telling the truth unless we're not being loving unless we lie, unless we say men and women are the same, or you can change your gender.
But she shows you, no, you actually have to stand for the truth.
This is this great scene between those 23.
You say like rebels, what do you think Jesus was?
So really he wasn't a rebel.
Sure he was.
He was a dangerous man.
What was the dangerous about love your brother?
Because his love changed things.
His love changed things.
All those people nobody cared about, prostitutes, beggars, the poor, they finally had somebody who respected them, loved them, made them realize their own worth.
They had dignity, and they were becoming so powerful that the guys on the top got real nervous.
And so they had to kill Jesus.
Kind of like me, huh?
Oh, man, not all like you.
Jesus changed the world with his love.
You watched all two kids were murdered.
That's an amazing scene.
It's an amazing scene because that's exactly what he would say.
Kind of like me.
That's exactly what these guys say.
Like he hears a romantic story about a guy who's put to death for being a rebel, and he thinks he's a rebel and he's being put to death, so he's like Jesus in that wonderful look on her face when she says, not like you.
He was killed for love.
You were killed for murdering two people.
So there's all this honesty that is coming through in this story.
And the reason I'm talking about this is because we're entering this phase when Christianity is being demonized and also when we're going to have to make the argument against abortion in the culture.
We're going to have to make it politically, but we have to make it in the culture.
If we start turning out films in which, you know, having a baby solves all your problems, or getting pregnant is not so bad, or being raped by your uncle when you're 10 years old is just one of those things that happens and you just get through it.
And believe me, we're totally capable of doing that.
Some of our Christian families are totally capable of doing it.
We are going to lose the argument as we have lost it every single time.
Great movies, great Christian movies, great art, great Christian art, great true art, great American art.
It's not made by great Americans.
It's not made by great Christians.
Both Timothy Robbins and both Tim Robbins and Susan Serenlin elapsed Catholics, I'm pretty sure.
It's made by great artists.
Great art is made by great artists.
And great art is made, and great artists are people who love the arts.
The arts are changed by people who love the arts.
This has been my argument all along that conservatives are so bad at the arts because we want the arts to look like conservative life, and they don't.
They don't.
The stories of Shakespeare are not stories of conservatives.
The stories of Homer are not stories of conservatives.
The great art, the great art, is art about life because life doesn't fit with our theories.
Life is messy.
Life is full of individuals who do different things.
Great Art Requires Great Artists00:02:36
And when you turn that off and you say that's too sexy, you go, you had a nudcino, you had people cursing, you are turning off life.
And you're turning off life, you're turning off art.
Here's an example of leftists making one of the great Christian movies, and we should follow that example.
So summer is almost over, and you haven't found a summer love, and your car's not running.
These two things can both be solved by just saying rockauto.com.
Because when you say rockauto.com, the women, it's like they fall out of trees like food.
It's amazing.
Plus, plus, they know that you can find parts for your car just by going online.
You don't have to get in your car and pretend it's running, which is just embarrassing, and drive down to an imaginary store where, you know, you may not know this, but chain stores have different prices for professional mechanics and do-it-yourselfers, not rockauto.com.
Rockauto.com has the same low prices for everybody.
They've got an easy-to-use catalog.
It's got all the parts you could possibly want or need.
And all of them are at low, low prices for everybody, professionals and do-it-yourselfers alike.
It's a family-owned business.
They've been doing this for 20 years.
It's almost worth breaking the parts in your car just so you can say rockauto.com and win the love of women.
Go to rockauto.com, get brakes, shocks, carpet, wipers, headlights, mirrors, mufflers, lug nuts, any other part you need, rockauto.com.
Be sure to write Clavin in there.
How did you hear about us box so they know I sent you and make sure to write it in the same way?
Clavin Kaylee V A N. All right, in case you missed it, Ben Shapiro's book club has returned and you're in luck because you can now watch it on DailyWirePlus.com.
This month's book was East of Eden, one of the greatest novels, John Steinbeck.
And you can check it out now to hear Ben discuss the novel and share his notes with you.
Next month, he'll be discussing All the King's Men by Robert Penwarren, another good book.
So be sure to pick up your copy today.
You must be an all-access member to join in on the fun.
So head to dailywireplus.com and become a member today to watch the latest episode of Ben Shapiro's book club and join Ben live for the next one.
That's dailywireplus.com.
And by the way, starting next Friday, there's going to be a portion of this show, which we're going to call the member block.
And that too will only be available to Daily Wire Plus members.
Head over to Daily Wire Plus, become a member today.
Next week, I'm going to talk about writing tips and how to get into the writing business.
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So you want to subscribe.
Founders' View on Religious Rights00:15:06
So one of the many ways that they've been demonizing people, especially on the right, is by demonizing religion, saying, calling anyone who opposes the government a Christian nationalist.
The Atlantic did an article associating the Rosary with extremism.
I love that.
We want to talk to the author today of a book called Religious Liberty and the American Founding.
Vincent Philip Munoz is the Tocqueville Associate Professor of Political Science and a concurrent professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, where he also directs the University Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government.
The book, again, is Religious Liberty and the American Founding.
Vincent, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
It's my pleasure.
So what really fascinated me about this book is that it's not at all a rant or even an argument in defense of the founder's vision.
It's just a way of trying to educate people as to what the founders' vision is, basically.
You want us to understand where they're coming from.
So let's talk about that.
You say that the founders felt that religious liberty was an inalienable natural right.
Can you first of all explain, we always talk about this natural rights.
What are natural rights?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, thank you.
And thanks.
I mean, thanks for having me on the show.
And actually, thanks for noticing.
I try to be as objective as I can as a scholar in this book.
It's not my job to defend the founders, to advocate for their position.
I understood my task is to just try to set the founders' record straight, put it out there for people in the way they could understand it.
And then we can have a conversation after we understand it about whether it's a meritorious or a good understanding of religious liberty.
So it's gratifying that you notice that.
You asked, what is a natural right?
Well, let me start with natural.
It means it's a privileged freedom, an ability that doesn't come from the government.
You know, we think of rights as freedoms.
It's a freedom we have on account of our human nature, our God-given human nature.
So this is the first thing to know and understand that our natural rights don't come from the government.
I mean, we do have rights that come from the government.
Right to serve on a jury trial, for example.
That's an acquired right, to use the founders' terminology.
It's a right that's only acquired or we only possess when we're in a government.
But some rights like religious liberty we have prior to government, and then we actually create government to secure those natural rights.
So there's a materialist argument that goes around Yuval Harari, I think it makes it all the time, that we really have no rights.
This is just a fiction that we tell.
But the founders didn't just decide this was true.
They didn't just decide to tell the story of natural rights.
They must have had some process of logic where they reached the idea of natural rights, or am I wrong?
No, that's exactly right.
And I mean, to say it's kind of nonsensical to say we don't have natural rights.
I mean, natural rights are just a way of talking about justice.
I mean, I suppose you can simply say no justice exists.
I mean, Nietzsche says this.
Other people say that there is no such thing as justice, right?
If you're a nihilist, I suppose that's true, and everything is just the will of the stronger.
But natural rights are the language the founders use and that we still use today to talk about justice.
So when we say we have a natural right to something, it's that it would be wrong of you to deprive me of that natural right.
It would be unjust of you.
What I try to do in the book is to explain the founders' arguments about justice, about why we have natural rights.
It's pretty easy to show that they believe we have natural rights.
That's the language they use.
I try to bring out their arguments.
And there's a theological argument.
It's really a Protestant argument for natural rights.
There's an Enlightenment philosophy that's really through Jefferson via John Lockhood.
And there's what I call Madison's natural theology.
So whether it's Enlightenment philosophy, this natural theology, or a more revealed theology, the founders reached the same place, the same conclusion that we have a natural right.
So when they talk about religion, you know, when I have read Supreme Court decisions on what our freedoms of religion are, I find them incredibly confused and in conflict with one another.
And you sort of point out in the book that they're not really that clear.
I mean, we have the right.
Well, you tell me.
I mean, what were they saying?
They gave us religious rights.
Well, this is sort of the problem why a book like this, and there's been many books like this, why we keep on writing them.
The one thing scholars don't agree about much.
The one thing we do agree about is the Supreme Court is just a mess when it comes to first state jurisprudence and religious liberty.
My argument is the court's been saying they're following the founders.
I mean, liberal justices, conservative justices, everyone says they're following the founders.
None of them have really got them.
And I think the key, as you directed our conversation, they don't really understand what it means to have a natural right.
of religious liberty or an inalienable natural right.
And I think if we can uncover that core concept, we might be able to make sense of the First Amendment and what a just political order regarding religious freedom might mean.
Or at least we can understand the founders' understanding and then we can talk about whether that's good or bad.
Well, can you give us an idea of what that is?
The book, by the way, is Religious Liberty and the American Founding.
Can you give us an idea of what it means?
Why would you, when you're talking about justice, for instance, I can understand why you have a natural right for me not to physically attack you.
But why do I have a natural right to pray to God?
Why do I have a natural right to establish a religion?
Yeah, yeah, no, that's the key question.
And so the founders' reasoning was this.
They said, I'm going to emphasize Madison because I think in a way he has the most compelling or philosophically interesting approach.
Madison said, we have obligations to the creator.
And those obligations are superior to any political obligations we might incur or create when we create a government.
That means we reserve a certain element of our natural freedom.
We don't give to government authority to tell us how to pray or how to worship or even we ought to worship.
One of the questions I often get is, if you have this idea of a creator, does that mean atheists are not protected by religious freedom?
No, no, atheists are perfectly protected.
We limit government.
We don't give government authority over our religion.
And that means government can't tell us how to pray.
It can't tell the atheists to pray.
So the basic core idea of an inalienable right is we have a right over, we have an obligation to worship according to conscience.
That obligation is superior to any political obligations.
So we reserve authority over our religious worship.
That is, we don't give authority to the government over our religious worship.
And that means the government can't tell us to pray.
It can't tell us not to pray.
It can't tell us, I can't criminalize certain forms of worship.
It can't license ministers.
I can go on and on.
We don't give government certain types of power.
This is what we mean by limited government.
Conservatives often confuse the idea of limited government with small government.
Small government means just taxes are low and government shouldn't do too much.
Limited government means there are certain things government can't do because it lacks authority to do them.
It lacks authority to do them because we don't give government that authority.
Does the Madison argument fall apart, though, if you say you have an, he says you have an obligation to worship, but if there's nothing there to worship?
I mean, Anne Escalia made this really interesting argument where he said that government can't choose between religions, but it can choose between religion and irreligion.
It can choose between whether there is religion or not.
Does Madison's argument fall apart if there's nothing to worship?
Well, if we know there's no God, I mean, if we really know that, now we have to think, how could we know that?
Yeah, right.
Madison would say, actually, I think it's no different than Aristotle.
Look, there's two fundamental possibilities, right?
The world is just materialist and matter is infinite, right?
Things have always been as they are, or there's a creator.
And we can't rationally know is turtles all the way down or there's a creator of the first of all.
So, it's reasonable actually to believe that there's a creator.
The atheistic, materialistic, this starting point is an article of faith.
You can say, in some ways, they're both reasonable articles of faith.
Though, once you look at the order of the world, there's, I think, good reasons.
I mean, this is just Thomas Aquinas, there's good reasons to believe in a creator God.
But it's no more faithful than the materialist or atheist view.
Okay.
So can you tell us exactly what the Constitution says and why it's not clear?
Where the confusion comes from?
Yeah, okay.
Well, it's a great question.
It takes me about 120 pages in the book to answer.
Yeah, you got a couple of minutes here, but let me give you the 20-second version.
I have kind of a peculiar argument, and lots of scholars won't like this.
In fact, in the first draft, the original first line of the manuscript was, no one will like this book.
And here's my argument: the original meaning of the First Amendment is not altogether clear.
And it's not clear because the founders didn't make it clear.
Now, I have a story about why that is, but let me try to present it shortly this way.
What we forget is the people who wrote the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights, they didn't think they were necessary.
It was the anti-federalist, those who were against ratification of the Constitution, they said we want a Bill of Rights.
The Federalists said we don't need a Bill of Rights.
To get the Constitution ratified, the Federalists said, okay, if you ratify the Constitution, if you anti-Federalists support ratification, we'll do a Bill of Rights after it's ratified.
And then they had the elections.
The Constitution was ratified.
They had elections for the First Congress.
First Congress was dominated by Federalists.
And James Madison said to his Federalist buddies, Hey, we need to write these amendments.
And they said, No, we don't.
We won.
We got the Constitution ratified.
And Madison understood, he said, Look, if we write the amendments, opposition to the Constitution will dissipate.
Another part of the story: the anti-federalists wanted amendments so they could have a second constitutional convention so they could radically modify and change them.
I mean, they didn't want the Bill of Rights.
They wanted a new Constitutional Convention.
So the people who wrote the amendments didn't really believe in them.
No one knows.
I mean, everyone kind of knows the scholars know this, but no one's thought through the implications of this.
So when they're drafting the First Amendment, they don't really care about the text.
They're just like, we have to draft an amendment because we promised it and we'll kill the opposition if we do so.
And so there's no grand, like careful, what does religious freedom mean?
And I think they just settle on the word establishment because like no one's for an establishment.
Let's just write that in.
Everyone's for free exercise.
Let's just write that in.
But that means there's no clear public meaning of these terms.
I mean, the reason, just to be clear, the reason they didn't think that they needed a Bill of Rights was because they thought if they hadn't given the government the power to do something, it didn't have it, which we now know is not really a good thought.
That, I mean, what you're saying is exactly right.
That the federalist argument was government has no authority, the national government has no authority to establish religion because those powers weren't given.
And the anti-federalists said, no, no, government's going to, national government's going to take those powers one way or the other.
And you could say maybe the anti-federalists were right here, as the comments suggest.
But it still means the original meaning of these texts are, the language I use, they're underdetermined.
So we have to figure out what is an establishment or what would make sense to call an establishment, what is the free exercise of religion.
I'm going to say two things here.
One, judges have done that and they've just kind of made things up.
That's why our jurisprudence is a mess.
I don't fault them for making things up.
They had to.
But they haven't done a very good job of it, I think.
So my suggestion, what I do in this book is say, look, if we have to construct the text, that means if we have to, in a way, create meaning, well, what is the meaning we should create?
I said, well, let's go to the founders' political philosophy.
Their political philosophy was all about natural rights.
So what would a natural rights approach be?
This is the most authentically founders approach.
And so I just try to lay it out.
Well, can you, I mean, can you give a summation of that?
I mean, what should we think are our rights about this?
Because it is true.
First of all, I mean, I can't imagine, or maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem to me that they meant for religion, for instance, for prayer to be chased out of schools or religion to be gone from any government meeting.
Or am I wrong about that?
Well, so this is where I get in.
No one's really going to like the full answer.
So let me talk about the establishment clause.
What is an establishment of religion?
Well, arguably, establishments violate natural rights because it's when government gives away power that rightfully belongs to it.
So it delegates power to churches.
So an example from the founding area is when we talk about tax, people all, everyone thinks taxing for religion is part of an establishment.
Well, it's true, but in a very precise way.
What an establishment is, is when the government commissions a church to be able to collect taxes on its own.
That is giving the government, I'm sorry, giving governmental power to churches.
So churches in an established church can raise taxes on their members, and then those members are compelled by law to pay those taxes.
That's a delegation of government authority.
That's what I call a church establishment.
What I call a state establishment is when the government acts like a church.
And so the South Carolina Constitution of 1778, which established the Christian Protestant religion, in the South Carolina Constitution of 1778, there are articles of faith that every church that's part of the establishment has to subscribe to.
And there's an OAFA office for ministers.
So it's when the government acts like a church.
That would be when the government picks the bishops or the ministers or licenses the ministers.
That's an establishment.
So establishments are about relationships of power and control between government and institutional churches.
Government Acting Like a Church00:11:53
So that's what we can't do.
So prayer in public schools is a little bit tricky.
The government can't write prayers that students have to say.
That would be an establishment.
That's the government acting like the church.
Now, can you have a Bible group?
Can students voluntarily pray?
Can this football coach who's just a Supreme Court pray on the 50-yard line after the game?
Well, of course.
But can the government write a prayer that every student has to recite at the beginning of the school day?
That's another famous case from the 60s.
There, I think not.
Again, not because prayer is bad, but we don't give government authority to write prayers for us.
So what do you think the founders?
I know that there were different opinions among them, but still, just speaking generally, what do you think the founders would have said about the COVID restrictions where they said churches had to shut down?
Yeah, I think, I mean, that's a complicated question.
I think if the regulations are truly generally applicable, meaning that they have to, you know, you can have no gathering of more than 50 people or 25 people or whatever it is, and you apply that general rule to churches, then that's okay.
It's like a building requirement, right?
Your buildings must have a solid foundation.
And just we have a building code, a church would have to comply with the building code.
But when government started to tell, this actually happened in the state of Washington.
I'm from Seattle.
The governor of the state of Washington drafted a regulation for how communion was to be distributed.
It was outrageous.
I couldn't believe it.
That's a quintessential violation of the free exercise of religion.
You can have general regulations for how food must be served or distributed in restaurants or in organizations that serve food, but you can't tailor-made how communion is distributed.
You can't target religious exercises and regulate them.
So that's a again, why not?
Because we don't give government authority to do that.
I'm sorry.
Well, I'm running out of time, and there's the one question I want to ask before you go.
A lot of conservatives, including me, like to quote John Adams and other founders, but John Adams said it very concisely that the Constitution was written for a moral and religious people, and it is not suited to any other.
I think that certainly Adams believed that, and I think even Madison believed that.
The difference here between maybe between Madden, Adams, and Madison, and there are differences among the founders.
Madison thought that religion was necessary for Republican government.
It's not clear that government supported religion is necessary for religion.
The easiest way for conservatives to understand this is think about what most conservatives think about teacher unions.
Like education is important.
Are teacher unions essential for education?
Are public schools absolutely essential for education?
I mean, education is important.
We have to be a well-educated people to be a functioning people.
But it's not clear that you need government support, especially a government monopoly, to provide education.
And I think that's what Madison was thinking.
That he thought religion was important, thought it was a natural right because we have obligations.
He was less clear that government involvement with religion would be good for religion in the long run.
That's just part of the story, though.
I mean, founders like Adams and George Washington were more confident or more optimistic that some government forms of support of religion would be good and perfectly constitutional.
Interesting.
The book is called Religious Liberty and the American Founding by Vincent Philip Munez.
A really good way to actually know what you're talking about when you talk about these subjects, which would make you, you know, make my listeners unique.
Thank you very much for coming on.
It's a really interesting book.
And I hope to talk to you again more about this.
My pleasure.
And thanks for having me.
All right.
I'm sorry to tell you this.
I hate to break it to you.
I know you had your hopes up that the show would go on forever, but in fact, the Clavenless Week is coming up.
Before you enter that vortex, that darkness, that hell that is the Clavelinless Week, you want to solve all your problems.
You don't want to go in there with any problems because, you know, this is the end.
So you want to listen to the mailbag.
This is a classic example of the right-wing media machine.
Ms. Brian Snelder, ladies and gentlemen.
Sorry to see him go or her go.
All right, from Brian.
First of all, I want to say that I appreciate your point of view.
With that being said, I think you're missing the point on prosecution of Hillary Clinton.
I got this letter a lot.
A lot of comments on YouTube, a lot of comments, other places.
Okay, so I'm glad to get this in the mailbag.
You're missing the point on prosecution of Hillary Clinton.
I said that I didn't want her prosecuted because I thought it was a bad idea for us to start prosecuting our political enemies.
While I agree, there should not be any targeting of political opponents, that does not mean that the law does not apply to them.
The pomp and circumstance of mentality has led our politicians to believe that they are above the law and their constituents.
If Joe the Plumber can be charged, then the politicians left and right should be charged regardless of the optics.
Thanks, Andrew.
Keep up the hard work.
Okay.
Joe the Plumber should not have been charged.
That was an obscene abuse of the law.
He should not have been charged.
He should not have been bothered.
The press harassed him.
It was ugly.
It was stupid.
And it was terrible.
So the idea is that I violated the principle that no one is above the law.
And of course, I believe very much in that principle, but it's a principle, and you have to live in the real world.
So let me give you an example.
John Gotti, the mobster, Al Capone, whatever you want, spits on the sidewalk and the FBI arrests him and accuses him of littering and he's put away.
They throw the book at him for littering and disturbing the peace and he's put away for three to five years.
Does anybody complain?
Do you complain?
I don't complain.
I don't complain at all.
The guy's a murdering scum.
They can't catch him on murdering people.
So he's put away for, they catch him on a technicality, essentially, like they caught Al Capone on a tax technicality, and they put him away.
I don't complain about that.
Ron DeSantis spits on the sidewalk and they come and arrest him, or Hillary Clinton spits on the sidewalk and they come and arrest him.
And I feel very differently about that, even though no one is above the law.
And if you're going to arrest one person, you can arrest another person.
But once you start to do that, you have upped the ante.
So if Hillary Clinton is arrested for spitting on the sidewalk, then Ron DeSantis can be arrested for that as well.
When they sent in people to ransack, to search Mar-a-Lago, to search the president, they upped the ante.
And now when people say, oh, Hillary Clinton should go to jail, I don't really have an argument against them.
You're right.
If they're going to do it to one person, they're going to do it to the other person.
If they indict Donald Trump, and you're going to hear all this pontificating and sententious talk on the left, you know, oh, well, no one's above the law.
We finally proved that no one's above the law, except Hillary Clinton.
You know, Hillary Clinton's above the law.
But Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, they're above the law, but not Donald Trump.
That's the problem.
That is the problem.
Once you start upping the ante, there's no argument to stop the other people from doing it as well.
That was why I was against putting Hillary Clinton in prison for what is, you know, you could put her in prison for murdering Jeffrey Epstein if you had her on that, but for taking, you know, for using her cell phone when she shouldn't have used her cell phone, for taking, you know, classified documents out.
You know, no, I think that that's upping the ante too fast, too far.
You have to live in the real world.
And in the real world, once you start to do that, the other side starts to do it.
Now they've done it.
Now they've upped that ante.
Their argument is, well, this is Al Capone, but that argument is a lie.
And so they have never proved any kind of real law breaking against Trump.
And what they're doing is really, really stupid.
Now I have no argument.
You know, you're right.
Now I have no argument, but only because they made this reckless, reckless, stupid move.
I'm glad we didn't do it, but now it's going to be very hard to talk people out of it when power changes hands.
From Jody, you often mention that you once had a great therapist who guided you through some life's changing self-discovery.
I really want to end my years-long Prozac habit and know that I will need some help, but I can't seem to find a therapist who is remotely interested in supporting that choice.
Can you suggest a good first step?
Perhaps the psychiatry world is not the best place to look.
Thanks for the glimmer of hope that it might be possible.
Yes, first let me just say that from what I've heard from doctors, and I'm not a doctor, but what I've heard from doctors is that if you are going to get off Prozac or any other antidepressant, you should do it in a doctor's care and you should do it slowly and gradually so that there's not a reaction.
So that is what I know.
Psychiatry is not the place to look.
In the old days, when I had a crisis in my youth, I went to a psychiatrist and he talked to me.
Psychiatrists don't do that anymore.
Psychiatrists are almost all drug dealers.
That's what they do.
They deal in these drugs.
And I'm very much opposed to the overuse of them.
I'm sure there are some limited cases where they might be the right thing to use, but I think that they are just vastly, vastly overused.
So what you want to do is you want to go to a psychologist or a psychotherapist and have that person help you get, you know, maybe make a referral that will help you get to a doctor who will help you get off these drugs.
If you feel that they are the wrong thing and they are not helping you, you should get off them and get somebody to help you get off them, a psychologist or a psychotherapist, but do it with the doctor's help so you don't just go off right away and have a reaction.
Let's see.
From Emily, you say that Trump is a bad guy and was necessary for the moment.
However, why specifically is he a bad guy besides poor romantic relationship behavior?
Why is Trump a bad person?
I don't see that he is a bad guy.
I have to admit that I say he's a bad guy.
I use it as a sort of shorthand.
He's a bad guy and he's a good guy in other ways.
I mean, I'm not saying he's not a villain.
I don't think he's a villain.
But I don't think he treats people properly, including sometimes the voters.
I think that, you know, the example I've used, and I use it specifically because I disagree with so much of what John McCain stood for.
I think John McCain was just somebody I totally disagreed with.
I think most of what he did was wrong.
I think the McCain-Feingold Act was a travesty.
I think it was a violation of the First Amendment.
I was glad it was finally overturned.
I think it never should have been passed in the first place.
Almost every time McCain opened his mouth, I disagreed with him.
However, he was a man deserving of respect.
Everybody's deserving of respect, but he specifically was a guy who declined to get out of torture because he didn't want to leave his men behind.
That makes him a hero.
He was a hero.
And Trump treated him like garbage.
He treated him like garbage.
You don't do that to anybody, but specifically to an American hero.
You can disagree with somebody very forcefully without treating him like crap.
And because he treated him like crap, John McCain refused to overturn Obamacare.
He refused to get rid of Obamacare, and his vote was the telling vote.
That was all because of the way he treated him.
A lot of the people who went crazy with Trump, John Bolton and all these people who just think he's like the worst thing that ever happened, who were willing to violate their principles to get at him, is because he treated people badly.
And that's what I mean.
I'm sorry, it's not an effective way to do politics.
I'll accept the press.
The press deserved every kick he gave them, every single one.
But not everybody did.
And some of the people, many, many of the people whom he mistreated and bullied were people of decency.
And I don't believe he should behave that way.
I'm sorry.
Just because it's Trump and because he did wonderful, wonderful things and because he was a godsend who I really do believe in some ways saved this country.
Voices Aging Out00:03:32
I'm not saying any of that's not true.
That doesn't mean that we then climb on and say everything he does is right and turn ourselves into little imitations of him.
That's not what our job is here on earth.
It's not the way we're supposed to live.
It's idolatry and we shouldn't do it.
So again, you know, he's a bad guy and he's a good guy.
I'm not saying he's a villain at all.
I'm just saying he had many, many big flaws and they hurt him in the end.
From Chase, I'm a 16-year-old high schooler who loves journalism and writing.
The world of college and university are in my near future.
I've had trouble finding a college with good academics without the woke liberalism added on with it as a journalist and writer.
What college would you recommend?
I love your show and your book, When Christmas Comes.
Don't forget to pre-order the sequel.
Strange Habit of Mind.
Go to Hillsdale.
My friend John Miller runs the journalist department there.
Make his life hell.
I'll tell you why.
No, I'm just joking, but he's wonderful.
He's terrific.
He is absolutely terrific.
And he runs a great, I was there for a couple of weeks teaching a class there under a fellowship.
It's a wonderful place.
And their journalism department, because of John, is just terrific.
So that's a good place to go.
Let's see.
From Anonymous, can you explain a little bit how the publishing of an audiobook differs from the hard copies?
What's the process?
Do the royalties differ a lot more?
Also, why didn't you choose to narrate when Christmas comes?
As years of saying, rock auto destroyed your ability to do the female voices.
You know, they don't pay you very much.
You're locked in a room for like three, four days, a little tiny room.
It drives you crazy.
I feel like the voices of my characters are younger people most of the time and that, you know, I'm sort of aging out of playing my own characters.
I read The Truth and Beauty because I felt it was my book and I should deliver it.
But it's just hard work.
And there are many, many good actors who do a wonderful job.
As I felt, when Christmas comes, the guy did a wonderful job on that.
I still get royalties.
It's still my book.
It's still part of my contract and I get paid for it.
And so it's not really that much different there.
I got to stop there.
The Clavinless Week has come.
It is here.
It is like a dark cloud that has fallen almost like a weight upon your shoulders.
If you've ever read the Edgar Allen Post story, The Pit in the Pendulum, where the blade gets closer and closer to slice the man apart, that's what this is like for you.
So abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
But if, if, in the small possibility, you make it to next Friday, we will be back with The Andrew Clavin Show.
I am 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.
Hair and makeup is done by Cherokee Hart.
Our production coordinator is McKenna Waters.
And our production assistant is Jacob Falash.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.