You know, every now and again, I think it's important for us to lay aside our anger at leftists and other human plagues and dispel any unkind fantasies we might have about latching our hands onto the front of their heads like that face hugger in the movie Alien and then twisting sharply while shouting, you called me a fascist.
Well, how do you feel now that I've unscrewed the front of your head so I can inject some truth into what used to be your face until it bursts out of your stomach and grows into a monster that tears you to pieces with its teeth?
I'm sorry, I forgot what I was talking about.
Oh yeah, it's time for us to lay our anger at these pseudo-Americans aside and truly open our ears and our hearts so we can begin to understand whatever destructive crap they're trying to sell us now.
For instance, many of you have written to me to ask, what is intersectionalism?
Is it fatal?
Can you catch it by having gay sex?
What makes you think I've been having gay sex?
Is it because I wear skinny jeans and sleeveless undershirts?
And yes, it was the undershirts that gave you away.
But to help you better understand the leftist doctrine of intersectionalism, today I'd like to provide you with this handy Q ⁇ A. Q. What is intersectionalism?
A. Intersectionalism is a highly scientific system in which the very best minds laboring day and night on the hamster wheel of self-delusion invent imaginary categories of victimhood and randomly use them to ruin people's lives.
Q. What are examples of these victim categories and how does intersectionalism help them?
A.
Well, for instance, let's say you're a fat, ugly little man who wears a dress, dyes your hair pink, and puts metal studs in your cheeks while declaring your pronouns are poo-bear and ding-dong, and then you go on TikTok to talk about how you convince the children in your kindergarten class to judge each other by the color of their skin.
Intersectionalism helps you to understand that you're a victim of culturally created categories of sanity.
And if you can only shriek at everyone else and call them bigots until they pretend you're fine, you'll no longer be as mentally ill as you obviously are.
Q. Will that make me feel better?
A. Of course not.
You're still a total loon.
But through intersectionalism, you can become happier relative to everyone else because you've made everyone else as totally miserable as you are yourself.
Q. What about people who have, in fact, been historically victimized, like black people?
A. Intersectionalism helps black people by explaining to them that they're victims of bad things done by dead white people.
And so they have to either wait helplessly or act in self-destructive violence and anger until living white people feel guilty about bad things they didn't do and give money to black people who didn't experience those bad things, but are black like the people who did.
Q. Well then, shouldn't black people feel guilty about violent crimes committed by other black people and give money to white people who didn't experience those crimes?
A. No.
Q. Why not?
A. Huh?
Q. If we're distributing guilt according to race, shouldn't innocent black people be guilty for things done by criminal black people?
A. No, that would be racist.
Then a group of Twitter bots with seven followers each would shriek ugly names at you until you apologize, and then they wouldn't accept your apology, and your cowardly boss would fire you, and your life would be ruined.
Q. And that's helpful to black people?
A. No, you're not listening.
It's helpful to intersectionalists because it makes them feel they're powerful and virtuous instead of the lying, stinkface bullies they really are.
Q. Well, what about women?
Are they a protected class?
A. Absolutely.
Sometimes.
Or possibly never.
It depends.
Under intersectionalism, women are a protected class as long as they don't actually exist.
Non-existent women must be protected so they can experience the normal biological processes of getting drunk and having promiscuous sex, becoming pregnant, and then having an abortion so they can spend the rest of their lives loudly celebrating killing their children to drown out their guilt and misery.
However, if a woman should cease to be non-existent by claiming, for instance, that a man can't be a woman because a woman is an actual thing that exists that isn't them, then the woman becomes what is called a turf, an acronym which stands for stop telling the truth, it upsets mentally ill people and exposes our love to scam.
Q.
But that acronym can't stand for that.
That's not reality and makes no sense.
A. Exactly.
Now you understand intersectionalism.
Trigger warning.
Phone Carrier Data Collection00:03:57
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing hunky donkey.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, the vast right-wing conspiracy known as Clavinon continues.
I had a really interesting experience this week, and I'm going to talk to you about that.
It concerns abortion.
So we'll talk about Republicans and abortion.
We'll talk about Biden's tragic, hilarious celebration of the end of inflation as inflation spirals upward and a lot of other things like that.
And we have Mark Greene, the author of the Gray Man series, which I really enjoyed.
But that's no excuse for not to go out and pre-order Strange Habit of Mind.
Please do this.
You can actually pre-order some signed copies from the Mysterious Bookshop or from the Poison Pen bookshop in Arizona.
I didn't know they were going to do that.
So some of you may feel, well, gee, I already pre-ordered.
That's not fair.
Here's the trick.
Pre-order another one because that will be very helpful.
If you can't do that, get the one that you already pre-ordered and then send it to me through my, I'll tell you how to do it if you write to me through andrewclavin.com and then I'll sign it for you.
It's gotten its first review.
A Strange Habit of Mind was reviewed by Crime Fiction Critic site, the website, and they called it a superb novel filled with fascinating multi-dimensional characters and spellbinding original storytelling.
Also, if you're in New York City, 928, September the 28th, Eric Metaxas and I will be having a chat together in his Socrates in the City program.
Go to socratesinthecity.com.
Finally, please subscribe to my personal YouTube channel.
That's the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
If you go there, you will get exclusive content that you can't find anywhere else.
Just ring that little bell and someone you dislike will pass away miraculously and you'll be free at last.
Also, if you leave a comment and it's sufficiently hateful, we'll read it here because that's how we roll.
Today's comment is from Kevin O.
He says, after disappointingly not finding any Daily Wire authors, particularly when Christmas comes for friends to read at my local Barnes and Noble, I was kicked out for moving the 1619 project books from U.S. history section to science fiction where it belongs.
Why is it science fiction?
Why is it science fiction?
So I'm on my phone all the time.
I'm sure you're on your phone all the time.
And you may not know this, but your phone carrier collects data on all your online activity.
Verizon has admitted it.
They say it's so that they can better understand your interests.
But really, all they want to do is sell your activity to advertisers.
The more they can track you, the larger their paycheck, which is why I use ExpressVPN everywhere I go.
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When your phone carrier tracks you, that's a gross invasion of privacy.
You can either keep letting them cash in on you or visit expressvpn.com/slash clavin to get the same VPN I use.
Take back your online privacy today and use my link to get three extra months free.
You're thinking, I told you how to spell express, but how do you spell clavin?
Tensions in the Human Heart00:07:33
It's k-l-a-v-a-n.
There are no easing funny data.
You know, recently I've been talking a lot about materialism.
The idea that everything there is is material and you're a meat puppet with chemicals inside.
I gave a speech to YAF about that, the way we are sold materialism by the culture.
And I was specifically talking about the song WAP, the song WAP by Megan the Stallion and Cardi B.
And it was actually talked about in an amazing clip with Gutsy Hillary Clinton and Gutsy Chelsea Clinton, who were talking to Gutsy Megan the Stallion on their TV show, Gutsy, I think, or was promoting their TV show, Gutsy.
And here's that clip, cut 17.
Chelsea follows rap music.
She has ever since she was a little girl.
But I kind of came to awareness of you with the Cardi B whap.
I've always wanted to do a song with Cardi.
As soon as she sent me the song, I think I sent it back to her like the next day.
And it was just so exciting.
The men, they seem so confident in what they're saying, and they don't have no problem with talking about their sexuality and how they're going to have sex with you.
So I was like, well, I could do that and it's going to sound fire coming from a woman.
It's great to see women be so kind of fierce.
That is my life's mission, to make sure that I'm always unapologetically me.
So just in case you don't remember the song WAP, here's a little clip of Cardi B singing the lyrics.
Whores in this house.
There's some whores in this house.
Hold up.
I said certified freak seven days a week.
Wet ass P-word.
Make that pullout game weak.
Yeah, you effing with some wet ass P-word.
P-word is female genitalia.
Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet ass P-word.
So obviously the B stands for Ben.
Not everybody knows that.
But have you ever noticed that the feminists always want to imitate the traits of the worst men, the worst traits of the worst men?
I mean, no one, no one knows better than Hillary Clinton about the humiliation and pain caused by men who treat their sexuality like Cardi B says, and Megan the Stallion says she wants to treat her sexuality.
They say, well, men act like this, so why can't we act like this?
It's always the worst men.
They never say, you know, men are chivalrous.
Men will run and die to protect you.
And that's what I want to be like.
It's always like, no, we want to act like the most borish people.
And the reason is not because they're feminists.
The reason is because they're materialists.
And the only thing that they can see is the differences between people are differences in power, immediate power, not emotional power, just immediate power, wealth, differences in money.
And that's the way materialists think.
And that's why they wind up doing the worst possible things.
Just like the race, the critical race people who say, well, now, if we hate white people, if everything's about white people, that's going to solve the racist problem.
Because they think, well, if that's how you get powerful, we can get powerful that way instead of taking the moral stand.
Now, obviously, this kind of materialism has ramifications for people's personal lives.
And that was what I was talking to the YAF students about.
But it also has ramifications for our politics.
I wrote a piece this week for the American Mind, which is edited by my son Spencer Claven is no relation.
But the piece is called Fair is Foul, if you want to look it up.
But I point out that all of moral philosophy in the West, really everywhere, I think moral philosophy is always based on one thing.
It's based on the fact that life is unfair, but the human heart wants it to be fair, wants it to be just.
And basically in the West, we have developed three ways of dealing with that.
Two of them are materialist.
One of them is from Frederic Nietzsche.
It kind of circles around Frederic Nietzsche.
I won't say he invented it, but it's the idea that since the world is unfair, why are we wasting our time with Christianity and being nice to losers when we should just let the strongest man, the winningest man, the guy who is the winner, he can set the morality for all of us?
And that's how you kind of, that leads to fascism.
Now, people who defend Nietzsche say he didn't like, wouldn't have liked the Nazis because he wasn't an anti-Semite, but I think the Nazis were inspired by Nietzsche, and I think fascism is the logical end of his philosophy.
And Karl Marx had a different way of looking at it.
He said, well, since the world is unfair and the human heart knows fairness, the human heart will ultimately make the world fair.
And that's the path of history.
History is taking us in that direction.
And therefore, if you get in our way, we'll have to kill you.
You know, Marx didn't actually say that, but that's the way it turns out, because when you know which way history is going, then anyone who's getting in your way is on the wrong side of history and can be eliminated.
Now, obviously, the Christian way of thinking about this, the Judeo-Christian way of thinking about this, is no, something's wrong.
The world is good because God is good, but we broke it.
We're sinful.
Something is sinful in our hearts.
And in this piece, I point out that this way of looking at things has two different big implications.
One of them is that there are supernatural meanings to our lives.
And that's what I was talking about, the Queen last week when I was talking about her death and celebrating her life.
I was saying that she lived into the supernatural meaning of her life.
She lived as the incarnation of the nation.
George Washington is another person who lived into the moral meaning of his life.
When he handed over his sword to the civilian authorities and gave up an empire that was his for the taking, he basically said, I represent liberty.
I am giving liberty a place to be.
This is what Shakespeare said the artist does.
He says he gives to every nothing a local habitation and a name.
And Washington gave to liberty, the idea of liberty, the habitation and name, the United States of America.
People who live into the moral meaning of their lives live very consequential lives because most of us don't do it.
But this also means something else.
It means that if there is such a thing, to put it in Christian terms, as flesh and spirit, such a thing as the physical life and the meaning of my life, there's always going to be a tension between those two.
See, Marx thought that that tension was going to resolve itself in history until we reached a kind of utopian Marxist world.
That's not true.
What Christians know is that history will end.
It will end, and then there will be a revelation where the spirit wins out.
But in the meantime, it is the tension between unequal things that makes us move forward.
So, you know, we know that the spirit and the flesh are always in tension, and you can't ignore the flesh.
You know, St. Paul says the flesh comes first, and then comes the spirit, because it's through the flesh that we experience things.
So you have to learn how to treat your flesh, how to treat your body, how to treat other people's bodies, and through that you start to learn a spiritual life.
The fact that some people are more talented than others.
Some people have more gifts than others.
Some people have more privilege than others.
And other people are left behind, and we have to actually care about them.
There's a tension there.
Do we make the world just equal by taking away the talent of LeBron James and giving me 100 points to start the game with and maybe only two minutes for James to play?
Or do we say, no, he is an inspiration into my life because he is so talented and he works so hard that I'm going to try and be that talented to work that hard to improve what little talents that I have.
Those tensions are always there.
And what happens is in a process like our process, in the American process, we believe in that spiritual idea of the process, of the tension.
And so we let different characters, different sides play out against each other freely.
Home Security Pro00:02:08
And what happens when extremism comes to the fore, which is what is happening now?
The extremism of leftism has taken over the White House, the Senate, the House, TV, the movies, the academies, the deep state.
Every institution is owned by the left, except maybe the Daily Wire.
And we're not so sure about us.
But when one side takes over like that, the tension is gone and then you have tyranny.
If you have people who are kind of side to the left but understand the right and people who side to the right but understand the left, then you have this living process that we try to keep alive.
The process is in danger.
The process is in danger right now because of materialism because no one can understand the symbolic life.
No one can understand living into the meaning of your life.
And I'm going to show you the results of that when I tell you about this experience I had this week.
So I recently finished a draft of the third novel in the Cameroon Winter series and I thought I was going to have an easy time of it.
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And you ask with those sad eyes, how, how do I spell Claven?
Tragic Situations Debated00:12:40
I just want to know.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So a life that's lived completely into the spirit is always going to be a sacrificial life.
And you want to know some of the ugly things that can happen when somebody lives into the spirit and lives a sacrificial life.
You want to read the Gospels.
They'll tell you all about it.
But a life lived purely into the flesh, which is the life being sold to us today and the life that the world always sells to us, can be incredibly ugly.
This week I got an invitation to go to the Susan B. Anthony List Pro-Life Gala in Washington, D.C.
And it was a celebratory event to celebrate, obviously, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, something the people at Susan B. Anthony, SBA, they call it, have been working on for 25 to 30 years.
And so it was a joyful occasion.
And you got there and there was a huge protest going on outside.
When you went inside, people were obviously very nice, well turned out at a Washington event and all this stuff, but they were also very, very prayerful.
That was a prayerful event.
And that includes people who might be a little pious for me, maybe a little, you know, people who are a little bit too in your face with their religion.
It's not something I actually prefer, but it included a lot of people who were not like that, but who were faithful, who believed in God.
And the atmosphere was joyful.
It was quietly prayerful.
It was elevated.
And it was beautiful.
It was patriotic.
But it was beautiful.
It was celebrating the lives of unborn children and bringing those lives to fruition.
And there were many people who were moved to tears.
In the course of the evening, a lot of big powerhouse politicians were there.
Tim Scott was there.
Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia, a lot of others, Lindsey Graham, a lot of other senators, Kevin McCarthy from the House.
And yet the whole thing was just a very, very polite, prayerful event.
The people outside protesting, and it was a protest, and I have nothing against protests, although I think if all you can do is protest, maybe you're missing out on debating and listening to other people, were looked to me demonic.
The filth coming out of their mouth, just four-letter word after four-letter word, sometimes repeated endlessly in chants, you know, F you fascists, over and over and over again.
I could see people from the event were getting unnerved by it.
I'm not unnerved by it because I know that's what the world looks like, but also playing in loudspeakers that hip-hop music, which I just think is just, I just think it's trash.
I think turning that stuff, putting that stuff in your head is a huge mistake.
And it was so obvious the difference between these people that I just thought, gosh, you know, look in the mirror.
You know, there was this clip going around that almost showed you the same thing.
It was Lila Rose.
I love Lila Rose.
She was from live action, also a pro-life thing.
And she was on Dr. Phil, I believe it was.
And a lady started arguing with her.
And here's just a bit of this argument.
You have no empathy.
Abortion is devastating to women's mental health.
No one talks about that.
The year after a woman has an abortion, it's really like the year after a woman to have the child.
What kind of trauma is that?
The trauma is bringing on somebody.
The trauma is from the right.
The child's an innocent party there.
The child is not there.
We should not take out generational sin on a child to say there's generational sin and that dad was an abuser.
The child should be killed.
That's not clear to the child.
We're talking about rights.
And he just says, we've been taken, a right has been taken away from us.
And what is?
I want to address that because our fundamental human right that we all share in this room is life.
It's the first human right.
Laws are meant to protect the weak.
In a society, who's the weakest?
Who's the weakest in the society?
A child.
They don't have a voice.
They can't speak.
A child in the room.
Or child.
We're going to either keep them that way.
And a child with disability.
Listen.
Whether you live 10 minutes or 10 years or 100 years, you're a human life and you have the right to not be killed.
Now, I tweeted this clip around and I pointed out that if you turn off the sound, you don't even have to listen to the words, though I'll get back to the words in a minute.
Just look in their eyes.
Look in their eyes.
Lila Rose has eyes that are compassionate.
She's speaking compassionately.
She even has compassion for this person screaming.
And then you look at this other woman and I don't want to attack.
I feel bad for her, actually.
Her face is full of piercing and she's piercing herself and her hair is kind of looking weird and her eyes are just like hardened like rocks, you know, and yet and yet also kind of bright as if they were lit from within by something that maybe she shouldn't have allowed to get in.
you know that's that's the the one thing that we just look at people i I felt that when I was looking at these people outside this SBA dinner, that rage and the filth coming out of their mouth and that actual gleam of self-righteousness, I felt bad for them.
I felt these are souls that maybe have gotten lost.
I mean, if I looked in the mirror and saw those eyes coming out of me, I would change whatever opinion I had.
I would change my opinion.
I would think if this is what this is turning me into.
But the other thing is the logic.
The logic just completely disappears.
I mean, Lila Rose is speaking pretty logically.
Now, people can take different sides logically, but that's not what you're getting.
There's another clip.
I guess it was CNN.
Maybe it's MSNBC, was Alison Camerada.
You know, Lindsey Graham has introduced a law that would federally ban abortion at 15 weeks.
Now, some people are saying that's a stupid thing to do, but he's trying to basically show how extreme the other side is.
They say it's stupid politically.
But it's fascinating to me.
This is CNN.
Allison Camerada makes this remark about Lindsey Graham.
She's making fun of him.
Here she goes.
Tears, I want to stick with you.
What is Senator Lindsey Graham doing?
Why is he proposing?
I mean, honestly, I don't understand this.
Why is he proposing a federal anti-abortion law that would ban all abortion across the country at 15 weeks?
I don't think that he understands how pregnancy works.
You don't often get testing, important testing until 20 weeks.
So I'm not sure, I'm an English major.
I might have a little trouble with the math, but 15 weeks is three and a half months, right?
I mean, three and a half months.
So I think if you're getting testing, you may not know.
I guess maybe what she's trying to say is that you don't know whether this child has some kind of glitch that you want to kill it for, if that's your argument.
But at three and a half months, that's a child.
There's like no getting around it.
You're not talking about a clump of cells anymore.
So she's kind of like, she doesn't even, they don't even hear what they're saying.
I mean, Nancy Pelosi was making a joke about this, about this at 12, cut 12.
As I say, as a mother of five in six years in one week, I keep saying, I respect everybody's view about how they decide to do what they do, and we should continue to respect their freedom to do so.
But I think what you're seeing there is a conflict within the Republican Party.
There are those in the party that think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.
And these people are in defiance of that, right?
they're in defiance of that so that's uh that's interesting Yeah, that's nothing funnier than killing babies.
When I want a good laugh, I kill a child.
But, you know, there are three arguments for abortion.
There are three arguments that the left makes for abortion.
One is the argument outside of time.
We live in time, but suddenly they take time out of the equation.
And the baby can't play chess.
They say, so let's kill it.
The baby can't suffer.
It can't feel anything, which isn't true.
But they say, you know, it can't make decisions, so it's not really human.
But of course, we live in time, right?
So you can't kill a person when he's asleep because he'll wake up.
And you can't kill a person when it's just a baby, you know, not fully formed baby, because it will become a person.
We live in time.
The second argument is the one that's good for any murder, is this person is in my way.
I could be a rock star if my wife weren't holding me back.
I could do whatever I want.
I could have a much better life.
I wouldn't be constrained to work in this crummy job if I didn't have this wife.
That's the argument, like, this child is going to get in my way.
This child is going to hold me back.
This child is going to hold me down.
So I have the right to kill it.
You can make that argument about any person who gets in your way.
But the third argument is the argument from tragedy, that some situations are so tragic, there can't be a happy ending.
Rape, incest, and the life of the mother are the ones that they draw out.
And I agree, those are tragic situations.
And if I ruled the world, I would come down on the side, except in this situation of the life of the mother, which is so rare these days, but I would come down on the side of the baby in rape and incest.
But I do understand that that's a tragic situation.
And I don't have like the whole thing about tragedy is there are no good answers.
That's what a tragedy is.
A tragedy is a situation with no good answers, where either way you go, you're going to get pain and suffering and possibly death.
So what the media, the left and the media do is they take away every other situation, which is 99% of them, and they just focus on those.
And Republicans have to be careful not to get caught in that overreach, not to get caught and saying, well, we don't care about that because everybody feels the tragedy of it.
That's why the left uses it.
But the fact that they have lost all sense that our lives have moral meaning.
It's just a clump of cells.
I can't see it, so it's not there.
It's not talking.
It can't play chess.
Why should I preserve this life?
And that's what turns your eyes.
That's what turns your eyes into those little flaming stones that the devil hands out after you've accepted what he's been whispering in your ear.
The tragic situations, I'll leave them open to debate.
I have no problem understanding that there's tragedy in life.
But the rest, the rest will drive you crazy.
Bad ideas, bad ideas will lead you into darkness.
They really will.
And one of the true worst ideas is to misunderstand that life is a series of tensions that hopefully drive us forward when we give each of them a voice.
You know, whenever I read a ZipRecruiter ad, the first thing that comes into my mind is Michael Knowles.
I kind of think Michael Knowles, and I sigh sadly and shake my head and think we should have used ZipRecruiter.
Because hiring is challenging, especially right now when business owners have so much on their plate.
Luckily, there's one place you can go where hiring is simple, fast, and smart, a place where growing businesses connect to qualified candidates.
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ZipRecruiter does the work for you.
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You can easily review these recommended candidates and invite your top choices to apply.
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Right now, to try ZipRecruiter for free, you can go to ziprecruiter.com slash Clavin.
That's ziprecruiter.com slash, how do you spell it?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No ease in Claven.
I just make it look this easy.
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So this is why I think the media is such a problem.
You know, the media has become less powerful the more they've lied, and they've had to lie more and more as it once again becomes clear that leftism doesn't work.
But the media, what the media does by siding with one side, and when I say the media, I mean the networks, I mean the New York Times, I mean the Washington Post, I mean all that echo chamber of what they call mainstream news.
It's only mainstream news in the elite world, but still it's lost some power, but it still creates this narrative, this powerful narrative that there is only one side, that there is only one right side.
It actually hurts the process that is America, that is freedom, because that's what they're trying to get rid of.
They're trying to demonize it.
They're trying to arrest people, decriminalize anybody who takes that point of view, calling them fascist.
And yeah, in politics, people call each other, you're a fascist, you're a communist.
But when you have the media on your side, when you have the academy on your side, when you have Hollywood on your side, it just becomes an unfair fight.
Mainstream Media Narrative00:14:15
And that's the thing.
I would be willing to sit down with anybody in the middle left and have that debate and have a debate and maybe reach a compromise.
But you can't do that when he is wrapped up by that media telling him that there's only one side.
There was a moment this week that it was hilarious, but it also was pitifully sad.
The Biden administration decided to throw a jamboree.
They were going to have a celebration.
It was celebration time.
They're going to have a big party celebrating the Inflation Reduction Act, which even the CBO says is not going to do anything about the Congressional Budget Office says, and they're a nonpartisan group, they say it's not going to do anything to change inflation.
It might over time, but as you know, there is no time in government.
There's no future in the government because the government will spend more stuff and already has because they've forgiven student loans, which is going to cost $600 billion or something like that.
So any inflation reduction that's going away.
Because let's remember where inflation comes from.
Here is the Milton Friedman, still the greatest economist we've ever had, the immortal Milton Friedman, explaining where inflation comes from and why Cut 6.
Inflation is made in Washington because only Washington can create money.
And any other attribution to other groups of inflation is wrong.
Consumers don't produce it.
Producers don't produce it.
The trade unions don't produce it.
Foreign chics don't produce it.
Oil imports don't produce it.
What produces it?
It's too much government spending and too much government creation of money and nothing else.
That's it.
That is the truth because the government doesn't make anything.
See, when Jeff Bezos, you may not like him, but when he builds a business, he creates wealth.
So if you print more money to keep up with Jeff Bezos, you're not printing empty money.
But the government doesn't create anything, not one thing.
It subsidizes things.
It messes up markets.
It raises prices.
When it subsidizes an electric car, the price of the electric car goes up.
You're not getting any of that money.
That money is going right to the richest people in the world who make those electric cars.
That government money that they give to you, they give you $100.
I'm making that up.
It's a lot more.
They give you $100 to buy an electric car.
The electric car company raises their prices $100.
That's how they screw up the market.
Everything they do increases inflation.
So there they are celebrating the Inflation Non-Reduction Act.
They've got James Taylor singing Fire and Rain, which is about suicide, so that makes a little bit of sense.
And then Pelosi, in her effusive way, is cut two.
Mr. President, thank you for unifying and inspiring a vision of a stronger, fairer, safer future for all, for our children.
Your extraordinary leadership has made this glorious day possible.
That's an applause line.
Please clap.
Please clap.
That's an applause line.
He didn't know because nobody's listening to him anyway.
While they're doing this, the market crashes.
Why does the market crash?
Because the new inflation numbers have come up and they're enormous.
They're the same.
They're worse a little bit than they've always been.
CNN quickly cuts away.
Here's cut three.
So I thank the Republicans who stood up.
Okay, you're listening there to President Biden at the White House.
He's celebrating the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.
He says that he's been fighting big pharma for decades.
But there is this unfortunate split screen right now with the Dow taking a total beating down more than 1,200 points.
And so it feels like it's hard to be celebratory for some people in the crowd.
But the reason you want to mention why that's happening is because inflation is up.
That's why the Dow is crashing.
I like the way that ABC and CBS reported it.
You have to listen carefully to hear because the networks are a little bit more honest than the cable stations, but they still have this one tick.
I'll let you see if you detect it.
Cut four.
He is stressing that inflation is relatively flat, up just one-tenth of a point since July.
And he argues the economy is strong, pointing to low unemployment numbers and plunging gas prices.
The president is also touting Democrats' new Inflation Reduction Act.
He's promising it will do just that, that it will bring down energy and prescription drug costs.
But George, it was notable that at a big celebration here at the White House yesterday, the president largely ignored these worse than expected numbers.
Look, the White House is well aware that inflation is a big potential political liability.
With the midterms now just eight weeks away, the economy is top of mind for voters.
And while the president is confident that he can turn this around, the White House does admit there is still a lot more work to be done here.
Yes, this has been the toughest issue for the White House.
The president cannot be happy about any of it.
Good morning.
No, he cannot.
Tony, good morning.
That inflation report dashes hopes of a quicker economic rebound.
Government figures show groceries climbing more than 13% on average, electricity spiking nearly 16%, and rent up nearly 7% over the last year.
So if you listen carefully, they're telling the story from Biden's point of view, not from yours.
Biden is confident.
It's a problem for him.
It's a problem for him, but he's confident.
And it's only one-tenth of a percent, which isn't true.
I mean, families in August spent 23.8% more for energy than last year, 6.2%, more for shelter, 11.4%, more for food, which means their wages, any wage increase they get, any help they get from the government is just wasted money.
It's just burning it off because the money they get from the government is increasing the inflation.
So it's like a tax on everybody.
So hilarious because the press is not reporting reality.
They're reporting the mind of the president.
It's a problem across the board.
I mean, the border, this thing at the border, which is making me laugh, but it's not really all that funny.
You know, Abbott in Texas, Governor Abbott in Texas, and DeSantis in Florida are shipping illegals into blue enclaves like Martha's Vineyard, right?
And suddenly, oh, what a terrible thing this is.
I could have picked 100 clips, but I just picked this one, Fernand Commentator Fernand Amandi.
This cut 28 from MSNBC.
That is an act of evil, and it is an act of evil being done by evil men who are using children and good faith parents coming to this country, the land of the free and opportunity, like my parents did and grandparents did, and shaming them for political points.
In the most cynical calculation, Stephanie, what's going on here is they're trying to change the conversation from the Dobbs decision overturning Roe versus Wade and making it about immigration.
But it is the most cynical, cheap, and evil tactic.
And I don't think it's going to play here in Florida.
I think Ron DeSantis overreached this time.
Yeah, I'll bet.
I'll bet now.
So for years now, the left, first of all, the left did everything they could to stymie Donald Trump's attempts to build a wall, to put any kind of security in there.
They've been doing this for years.
They now have open, we have virtually open borders.
Everyone will tell you this.
Anyone who's down there will tell you this.
They're flooding into the border states.
So the border states are shipping them out.
Now, all this time, the Biden administration has been secretly flying them out in the dead of night to enclaves that they think are red enclaves that they can turn blue by shipping in illegals, basically, because they think that they're all going to go blue, which I think is a miscalculation.
But all the same, that's been their ideas.
So now the border states start to strike back by shipping these people to places like Martha Vineyards.
They sent some outside.
Was it Pelosi's house?
It was one of the left's house.
They're shipping them into New York, into Chicago, and suddenly this is evil.
It's evil to use these people for political gain.
It's evil to do that.
It is so hilarious.
It is so hilarious.
It even makes me wonder if some Democrats aren't going, you know, the Democrats, what they basically say is, well, yes, these people are lying about all this, but Trump, They always sound like the Oopa Lumpa people from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Trump, But first of all, the logic of that is that our people are as bad as the most evil human being who ever existed because they think Trump is the most evil human being who ever existed.
But it never occurs to them to take the next step and say, maybe the people lying to us about immigration are also lying to us about inflation, crime, and Donald Trump, and at least the Republican Party, and whether they're full of fascists and white supremacists or not.
Because this is the other thing.
You know, they're doing their best to criminalize, to criminalize the right, to say that they're fascist.
Last week they issued something like 40 subpoenas for people who might have had an opinion about the election.
Somebody who might have walked by the Capitol on January 6th or turned on the TV.
Mike Lindell basically had his cell phone taken away.
Here's Lindell explaining.
This is the My Pillow Guy.
The FBI, you're going to hear this, and you're probably already hearing it in the news.
The FBI came after me and took my phone.
They surrounded me at a Hardee's and took my phone that I run all my business, everything with.
They could have just, what we've done is weaponize the FBI.
It's disgusting.
I don't have a computer.
Everything I do have that phone, everything was on there.
And they told me not to tell anybody.
Here's an order.
Don't tell anybody.
Okay, I won't.
I am.
I kind of like that one.
They told me not to tell anybody, so I won't.
Anyway, now so now they've been doing this.
They've got a special master to look at.
They've appointed this retired judge, Raymond Deary, who has gotten respect on both sides of the Trump.
People seem to respect him as much as the DOJ.
DOJ is still appealing this, trying to get the special master, this guy who's going to take theoretically a non-biased look at the documents that the FBI took from Mar-a-Lago.
But that's not the thing.
The thing is not that they took documents from Mar-a-Lago.
It's not even whether Donald Trump did something wrong by taking the documents to Mar-a-Lago.
It's the difference, obviously, between the way Hillary Clinton was treated and by the way Trump is treated.
And not just by the FBI, who's the FBI has obviously got some corruption going on at its highest levels because we've caught them in their emails.
We've caught them lying to the FISA courts in order to bug American citizens, the phones of American citizens.
We caught them sending the steel documents, the steel dossier, investigating that long after they knew that it was phony.
But it's the press.
It is the press.
If the press is exposing everybody, if it's saying, yeah, they lied about Trump and they've lied about Hillary and they've done this with Hillary.
If they're exposing everybody, I'm fine with it.
I'm fine with them attacking.
They should attack everybody in power.
Anybody with power, they should be down his throat.
But listen to the way, and this is from our friends at Newsbusters, at MRC Newsbusters, listen to the way they reported Hillary's cell phone server, which had all kinds of classified information on it, Cut 9.
I don't think it's a big legal problem.
The American people don't care about this.
I have been utterly bored with the story.
There's going to be a cloud of suspicion, though, by those who just want to see conspiracy.
There's almost no way she can clear this up to the satisfaction of critics on the other side in terms of the politics of this.
It's not even a scandal.
It's a controversy.
The scandal is the Republicans' word for it.
At this point, it's all just background noise.
There is, in some ways, no, they are there.
And voters don't seem to care about it, according to Paul's.
147 FBI agents are focused on this.
I mean, don't they have other problems?
There's no crime in the country they should be worrying about.
So how is she going to overcome these distractions?
All right.
So it's all from her point of view.
And the board, the board voters.
Here's how they cover Trump, Cut 8.
Could some of the boxes recovered from the former president have put national security and perhaps lives at risk?
This is as bad as it gets.
It really does send chills up the spine of anybody who's ever worked at CIA.
you have this kind of information, you guard them with your life.
And that's, you know, it's a serious problem.
It's funny because they're so dishonest and corrupt and they look in the, you know, they, I don't know, it seems to me if you put on a tie-in jacket and you look into a camera, you ought to at least have some respect for honesty.
When I sit down and write, I always think that, what is the point of putting words down on paper if they don't mean them?
The thing is, there are certain things that I, professions that I call meta-professions.
One of them is what I do as being an artist.
When you write a novel, you step out of your own opinions.
You step out of your own opinions and create the world as it is.
A world of tensions, a world of conflicting ideas, a world where two people can see things totally different differently and both be kind of right about something or both have a point of view.
That's a meta-way of looking at the world.
That's the way the journalists are meant to look at the world.
That's the way they're supposed to.
But they have stopped.
And they have stopped because they're materialists.
They've stopped because they do not believe that there is another level of meaning to the world.
And when they do believe in another level of meaning, when they do believe in morality, they don't believe it applies to them.
When they look at the poor, when they look at the underclass, they see people they can feel sorry for and dry their big tears for, but it doesn't occur to them that, oh, maybe, maybe they have to make some sacrifices.
It's always like, oh, well, the environment is bad.
You better ride on a pony or a bicycle while I fly my private jet to Davos to discuss how you can save energy.
It's always like this.
So it's, yeah, bring in those illegals and illegals because there's a lot of room in Texas.
No room in my neighborhood.
No room in New York or Chicago.
Martha's Vineyard, certainly, certainly not.
What's wrong with you?
You know, this is a problem.
It's the problem of forgetting that we are in a process and it's the process that leads us forward.
It is the press that has led the way in ignoring that process and creating a narrative in which that process doesn't exist.
And it has been incredibly, incredibly damaging.
You know, even though I've lived forever, I may not go on living forever.
Tom Clancy's Writing Journey00:15:23
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So as you know, among the many things that I love are action novels and action films.
And some of the best action novels I've read recently are by Mark Greene, The Gray Man series.
It was recently made into a Netflix film with Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans.
Here's a brief scene.
Hey, sunshine.
You must be Lloyd.
What gave it away?
The white pants, the trash dash.
It just.
It leans Lloyd.
Where's the drive?
God, it here's somewhere.
It's hard to see.
Is that it?
Nice try, Popkin.
What size shoe are you?
Why?
Do you want my foot in your ankle?
Mother, I'm such a sucker for this stuff I love it.
Mark Greeney is the number one New York Times best-selling author of 20 novels, including the Gray Man series, as well as the author.
Not many people notice these.
He's also the co-author of seven novels in the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan series.
Mark, thanks so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Andrew.
Well, let me start with this.
I mean, one of the letters I get most often is, how do you break into the business?
And you had a kind of interesting break-in through Tom Clancy.
How did that come about?
Well, I had basically just two paperback novels in my own name, mass market paperbacks, just a little airport release.
But my editor also was the lofty Tom Clancy's editor, and Tom was looking for a new co-author.
And they came to me and they said, are you interested?
It wasn't a job offer.
It was more like they were just gauging my interest.
And I knew there's no way you could say no to that.
Although I felt like I was going from the minor leagues to the World Series just overnight.
But yeah, it was an amazing experience.
I did three with Tom before he passed away.
And then his family asked me to continue the series.
So I did four more Jack Ryan novels after his death.
When you're working with a guy like Tom Clancy, because I know guys who've done the same thing with James Patterson, and they say he just gave them a masterclass on how to do this stuff.
Did you feel that you learned something from working with him?
Yeah, I definitely learned something.
And you can see it so starkly in my books.
My first three books I had all written before I started working with Tom.
And then by book four, they became more geopolitical.
You know, the first three were a little more like diehard or something like that, you know, action.
And then they became a little more geopolitical, a little more high-level.
You see world leaders, whereas before you'd only saw world leaders through a sniperscope or something like that.
And that was all the, that was all the Clancy effect because it was fun.
It's fun for me to work in that realm.
Yeah, no, it's really interesting.
And it is interesting that you're able to break out of it and go off on your own.
Not everybody who collaborates can do that.
When I first started reading The Gray Man, I actually laughed out loud because I thought, here's a guy, here's a gutsy guy who is basically telling me he is going to write an action scene on every page and make it interesting and keep it interesting.
I thought, okay, well, let's see you do it.
And you did.
I mean, it was really entertaining.
How did The Gray Man come to be?
Well, it's funny you say that because I have the easiest answer for that because basically I was trying to get published and there was an agent I really liked who was very nice to me, but he turned down one book and then he turned down another book.
And he basically just gave me a five-minute conversation.
He's like, listen, I want a book with a lot of action because you write action really well, something where you can have a guy with a gun in his hand on the cover, keep it simple, keep it 100,000 words.
And I just decided because I've been rejected.
I'd written three books without being published.
I said, I'm going to really just shove everything he said to me down his throat and just choke him to death on action until he can't make that complaint anymore.
So I really did.
I kind of leaned into it on every page and it really informed the whole series writing that first book.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's true.
Although when I read the second one, I mean, I felt like you were plotting more.
And do you feel like the character is developed?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I like to put the same amount of action in every book, but I will thread in more things.
So the books consequently have gotten longer, as I said.
But yeah, there's a longer arc to the character.
You can read any book out of order and it's fine.
But if you read them in order, you do see growth in him, especially socially and kind of his worldview just grows over time as he experiences different things.
Right, right.
Now, how was the movie process?
First of all, how did that just come through an agent or were you looking to sell it yourself or how did that happen?
Well, I went from being an unpublished author, you know, working in a cubicle all day and writing at Starbucks to about a month before the first book came out, they sold the film rights for the first time and it bounced around Hollywood for years and Brad Pitt was attached to it and then that studio left and then Sony got on board and the Russo brothers had read it and were interested in doing it.
So I had a conference call with them.
I hung up the phone.
I told my agent, yeah, these are the guys I want to direct it.
And they had me come out to LA and spend a few days with them.
Joe Russo wrote the screenplay.
And then since then, other screenwriters got involved.
But I don't have any, you know, I didn't have any day-to-day action on the film or anything like that.
But I mean, they definitely talked to me beforehand and they gave me the script once they started shooting.
So I was, I knew what I was in for.
I was excited.
I was really interested because, I mean, film is such a literal medium.
Everybody will tell you this who's ever transferred stuff from the book to the to the screen.
You know, it's a very literal medium and things that work in the imagination and things that you can sell a reader in his imagination.
You can't always do on the screen.
And I thought they did a really clever thing, which is they made it kind of funny.
They had this deadpan sense of humor, which you could see in the clip.
Did you see that and kind of recoil or did you like that?
No, I actually like that.
I mean, if you read through the series, he has gotten a little bit more, you know, whippy and clever as it's gone on.
And that's sort of my natural personality.
But in the first book, you know, I was new and I was just trying to like, as I said, create this action thing.
So there's not a whole lot of that in the first book, but I know the screenwriters have read all the books and I think they took that from there.
But, you know, I've been told that Ryan Gosling came up with a lot of the little one-liners that they ended up, they weren't even on the page.
So I enjoyed that aspect of it.
Yeah, it's not the same as the book exactly, but I knew that going in.
My expectations were well managed.
Yeah, no, I mean, you have no power when you sell a book to the movies and you just really have, you know, there's a great story about James M. Kaine.
They asked him how he liked what Hollywood did to his books.
And he said, Hollywood has done nothing to my books.
They're right over there on the shelf.
I think you have to have that attitude a little bit.
Now, did this experience, a lot of guys have books made into movies and they think like, hey, I kind of like this movie business.
Has this made you feel like you want to do any screen work or you want to stick to the novels?
I really do want to stick to the novels.
In fact, I have another book that came out this summer called Armored and it's been optioned.
And they asked me if I would be interested in writing the screenplay and I gave them the absolute honest answer.
I was like, no, go get a good screenwriter.
That would be so cool to have a good screenwriter do it.
I did play around with writing a screenplay 10 years ago and I was on like page 180 and halfway done with the story.
And I've just decided I'm the guy that writes 170,000 word novels.
It's really hard to write a 25,000 word screenplay.
No, it's true.
And, you know, a lot of good novelists, they disappear like Scott Smith, I think, is a terrific novelist, but he disappeared into Hollywood and you never really see them again.
Yeah, it's too bad.
Yeah.
So now you've got this incredible series going really well.
The Gray Man, do you want to do more and different stuff or do you think this is your sweet spot?
I've been tooling two books a year for so long.
I'm going to have to dial back on that because it's just harder and harder to come up with new stories.
Every book takes a little bit longer.
But I do have another series called Red Metal that I'll be working on the second one of that.
And I'll be writing the second in the armored series.
They won't all come out at the same time.
This is like over the next few years.
So I do have other ideas.
And I think it helps the Gray Man stories for me to go away for nine months and write about somebody else and another world.
I think once I get back into the Gray Man stories, it's always so much pressure when I do that.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, I don't want to get you in trouble, but I have to ask a little bit about like the political world that you're in.
I mean, one of the things that I find refreshing about both the gray man, the terminalist, and a lot of action stories.
I mean, there's a lot of inaction stories, which are mostly directed toward men and toward male readers.
There's a much different attitude, I think, than in a lot of other fiction.
You're more likely to come upon ideas that have been expelled from the mainstream of publishing.
Did you know that going in?
Do you feel that kind of pressure?
Do you feel that you're like putting yourself, putting a target on your back at all?
I never really thought about it in the early days, but once I started working with Tom Clancy, you would get a lot of, I would get a lot of mail, emails from people.
And it was 100% based on wherever they leaned politically, some comment in the story.
And so I remember being very sort of shocked by that.
And I thought, wow, did I say something in here that's alienated 50% of the people?
But then, you know, you kind of have to be true to yourself.
I'm a relatively conservative guy, I guess.
I'm very pro-Second Amendment.
I own a lot of the weapons that the characters use in the books.
So, you know, I've definitely had people say, well, you're some West Coast liberal who got this wrong or whatever.
I'm like, I live in Memphis.
You know, I've been to LA like four times in my life for like two days at a time.
So, you know, I don't think about it when I write it.
I'm very interested in international affairs and things like that.
So I do have strong opinions and my opinions just go where my opinions go.
So again, to go back to what I said before, I get a lot of letters from people saying, you know, how do I start?
How do I get started?
And I think people are really interested.
I mean, you talked about writing in Starbucks one day and the next day and working in a cubicle and the next day you get a movie deal.
I mean, that happened to me in my 150 years ago in my youth.
And it's a shocking experience.
And people want to know, like, how does that happen?
I mean, how did you get to the point?
You know, when you work in a cubicle and when you have to show up for work, it's hard to write a novel.
Writing a novel is hard work.
How did you do it?
It's absolutely hard work, but I couldn't have done it if I didn't love doing it.
And so there are a lot of people that I think really struggle.
They come to me and they're like, I want to be a writer.
What advice would you give me?
And I want to say my advice is stop asking authors how to do it and then read and write.
Like if you read my books and then you write something that you like, if you don't want to do it, it just seems like it would be torture to do it.
It was a lot of fun for me.
And I came to this point in my late 30s.
I got published when I was 42.
In my late 30s, I said, you know, I actually like thinking about stories.
I like writing stories.
If I never sell a book my entire life, I will be an 80-year-old guy with an idea for a story.
And then I just kind of relaxed a lot and I got published within a few years.
And I won't say things, you know, happened easily, but it just took that thing.
It's like, okay, you like to do this.
You're doing this for fun and you're going to get better at it the more you do it.
When you were growing up, were you a reader?
I was very much a reader.
My dad was the head of the local NBC affiliate here in Memphis, and he was a huge reader.
And I mostly read nonfiction.
He was Second World War, infantry, combat.
So I read a lot about World War II.
I live in the South.
I read a lot about the Civil War.
And the first thriller I ever bought in my life was Patriot Games, which was Tom Clancy's novel.
And then I just became obsessed with thrillers in my late teens and early 20s.
But my dad and I would give each other Tom Clancy novels every year for Christmas and did that up until his death.
And do you work through, do you work through outlines or are you a natural structuralist?
I am always trying to get it right.
And I never feel like I have everybody ask me my process and I'm always like, what's your process?
Because maybe I could learn something from you.
Outlining makes it better.
I've done some sort of by the seat of the pants and you just find yourself a little bit wayward later in the story.
But it's really hard to outline because you don't have time to do all the research before you have to start writing the book when you're writing two books a year.
So I will basically write out like a little five-page story about what the book's going to be about.
And I'll give that to my editor.
So we're on the same page.
And then I don't even really read it again.
Then I just, then I just go to work on the book.
And, you know, it's evolving throughout time.
I would love to have every chapter completely plotted out before I wrote the first word.
That just seems like magic.
I've not gotten anywhere near that in my past.
So when you look forward, I mean, you're doing well.
You're producing a lot.
I mean, I have to say, you're a very productive writer.
What's your goal going forward?
Is there more stuff you want to do, different stuff?
Yeah, you know, I really look at this hard.
And then I realized that my ambition is all about just doing something better.
It's not about, you know, like getting bigger or having more or whatever.
It's literally about executing the story better than last year's book.
And, you know, I want to do Gray Man novels.
I want to do other things.
I definitely want to ratchet back.
I got married and suddenly had three stepchildren where I didn't have kids before.
And life has changed in a whole bunch of ways.
But I'll still probably write a book every nine months and have three books come out every two years.
So I'm going to stay pretty prolific because it's where my mind likes to reside.
Children in Foster Care00:16:25
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mark Greene, the author of the incredibly entertaining Gray Man series.
It's really nice talking to you, Mark.
And I have to say, you talk, you know, it's funny when you talk to aspiring writers, they talk a lot about the business.
But when you talk to real writers, they talk a lot about the process and how much they want to get better.
And it's always nice.
It's always nice to hear, always warms my heart to hear a writer talking about working on his craft.
Great stuff.
And I hope you have continued good luck.
Is there going to be another film?
Is there going to be a sequel?
Yeah, there's going to be another film.
Oh, that's the one you were talking about.
All right, great.
Yeah.
Good.
I hope we get to talk to you again.
Thanks a lot, Andrew.
I enjoy it.
Thank you.
Bye.
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So I'm really happy to have Naomi Schaefer-Riley on today.
She's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
She writes about children, how children are being treated, what we can do to help children.
It is right now one of the biggest topics facing us, one of the biggest problems we're facing.
She has books like No Way to Treat a Child, which is about the foster system, and another Be the Parent, Please, which is about controlling children's use of the internet.
Naomi, thank you for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thanks so much for having me.
So I'm reading almost every day stories about how much children are suffering.
What is the worst problem that children in this country are facing?
So I think you need to kind of think of children in this country in two large groups.
The first, I would say, are kind of middle and upper class kids.
You know, they're kids who are lacking independence.
Their parents are coddling them too much.
They're going to schools where they're just, you know, learning about wokeness.
They're going to some pretty terrible universities and learning some awfully stupid things.
And, you know, I would say that that's its own set of problems.
I mean, they're on screens too much.
They don't know how to read books.
And then there's a whole other group of kids in this country, underprivileged kids, poor kids, kids who are growing up in broken homes, kids who are facing neighborhood violence on a regular basis, kids who are dealing with child abuse and neglect, who are dealing with domestic violence, and kids who are just kind of exposed to sort of all of the worst elements of society from violence to sexual exploitation.
And I think we need to think about American kids not as kind of one typical child, but as these two different groups exposed to really two different kinds of dangers.
All right.
Well, then let's start with the underprivileged kids since they are obviously in danger.
You have the book called No Way to Treat a Child.
When people look at the foster parent system, the foster system, I think most people are shocked at the way the kids are moved around so much that they never have a place to light, never have a place to go.
Is the foster system working?
It's definitely not working.
Just to give your listeners kind of a sense of what goes on, there are about one and a half million or so reports of child maltreatment, abuse, and neglect in this country.
There are about 1,800 kids every year who die as a result of maltreatment.
The majority of those are actually under one years old.
If we find of those one and a half million kids reports that you find, about a third of those are substantiated, meaning we have a good reason to believe that something has really gone wrong in those homes.
And in sort of the cases where we think the kids are really in some kind of danger, we have to remove those kids from those homes.
And unfortunately, the way the foster care system is oriented is it's around an ideology of family preservation and family reunification.
Now, of course, for most kids, the best thing is for them to be with their families.
And we go to great lengths to try to make sure that kids can be successfully raised by their parents.
But in these cases, these are parents who have often repeatedly abused or neglected their kids very severely.
And so we need to think twice about just mindlessly putting them back with those same parents.
I compare it for people to domestic violence.
Like imagine if you had a couple who was engaged in some kind of domestic violence, the police showed up and the first thing they said to the battered woman is, you know, well, how can we get you guys back together?
That's kind of the approach that our child welfare system takes.
The family court system is broken in a lot of ways.
There are just endless delays.
Even for the youngest kids, they often have to wait months or years for us to find a permanent place for them because we're pushing them back and forth in and out of their biological parents' homes.
The drug crisis in this country is driving a lot of these problems.
You know, we have a kind of increasingly lax attitude about drug use, which I think you could argue about when it comes to adults, but it's really hard to monitor small children when you have an addiction.
And it's really hard to monitor small children without an addiction.
Just say that from personal experience.
But trying to ensure that, you know, a child, say, under the age of two, doesn't run out into the street in traffic, touch a hot stove, get into a bathtub when they're not supposed to swallow their siblings' Legos.
All of those things are really hard to do when you have a drug, alcohol, or mental illness that is affecting, severely affecting your life.
So those are the kids, those are kind of the problems overall in the system.
So, you know, I've occasionally had to visit prisons for research.
And the one thing that almost everybody will tell you is that virtually every man in a prison is a fatherless child.
It's almost, I mean, it's almost unanimous.
Is there any way?
Is there any way to address this?
It always kind of fills people with despair because how do you get people to get married?
How do you make people understand that children need intact families?
Is that something just beyond the reach of social policy?
It's so hard.
And I think it's really easy for conservatives to kind of throw their hands up and say, you know, this is family breakdown.
And what do you expect?
The government is not going to do a very good job of raising your kids.
I think that's totally true and totally insufficient as an answer in terms of public policy.
So for kids who really are in the foster care system, I think we need to do a much better job of recruiting, supporting, and really kind of coming around families that agree to do foster care and adopt out of the foster care system because, you know, they're kind of the unsung heroes here and providing stable middle-class homes for kids who are in this situation is really important.
In terms of just the kids who are being raised in fatherless homes, I mean, you know, my colleague at AEI, Ian Row, you know, talks a lot about the success sequence and trying to get young people from a very early age to understand the importance of getting married first before you have children and finishing high school.
And if you do those things before you have children, the likelihood that you will end in poverty is almost nothing.
So, you know, how can we really talk to those kids about that?
I mean, the upper classes in this country have kind of, you know, they talk, they sort of, you know, they walk the walk, but they don't talk the talk.
So they get married, but they don't tell anybody else that it's important.
And you see this so much in the media, you know, the glorification of single-parent families, of polygamy, of, you know, of infidelity.
I mean, it's just, it's ridiculous.
But this is not the way upper class Americans live.
And they know that's not the key to family stability and their children's happiness.
You know, my daughter taught at one of the worst schools in the Bronx, and she had to close the door whenever she addressed an issue like that, lest the administration hear her basically throw her out for telling kids that.
So now talking about middle class and upwards children, you know, you've written this book, Be the Parent, Please, about putting your kids on an internet diet.
I know parents who have literally sent their kids to camps to get them to break their addiction to the internet.
Is it even possible?
Well, my kids all go to a sleepover camp where they don't have access to devices for several weeks, but that's, I mean, that's not the main reason we sent them there.
Like, I mean, you know, you could say people have difficulty sticking to diets too, but I think that there are some main principles that people who have managed to diet successfully have stuck to.
And the first is, you know, sort of setting expectations early on and then sticking to them.
And so, you know, in our household, like the kids are really not on screens.
And we started this when, you know, they were probably in kindergarten or so.
Like, we had set times, like weekend evenings, you know, where they could be on an iPad or be on TV.
And by the way, I don't really make much distinction among the screens.
Like, I don't think, oh, this is educational TV, so it's okay.
Or, you know, this is just emailing.
So it's so, so, you know, I think sort of setting those expectations and then not giving in because it's like, it's also like kids in food right now.
I mean, kids are sort of constantly snacking.
They're like berating their parents.
They're like, but I'm hungry now and I want it now.
And the thing is, like, we do set expectations.
Like, none of our kids actually expect to have chocolate cake for breakfast because we have told them, like, these are the breakfast options.
And if they said, like, I want chocolate cake, you'd laugh at them.
And so I think if you sort of are able to say, like, no, that's just not one of our internet times.
Like, I've laid it out here very clearly.
That would be the place to start, I think, in terms of the diet that I'd recommend.
And just trying to keep it to as, you know, as much of a minimum as you can, because I really do think that there's so many better things to fill kids' time.
You know, not just reading, but being outside and playing with friends and having dinner with their parents and doing their homework.
And, you know, if you like sort of exhaust that whole list of things, I'd be surprised if your kid has like a half an hour left in their day at the end.
Yeah, that's an interesting point.
I do remember we were talking before we went on air about a panel you and I were on where you were talking about some of the dangers of the internet.
And I was kind of laughing because I remember researching books in libraries and it was such a painful, horrible experience that my feeling was like, please don't attack the internet.
I love the internet so much.
But I do wonder still, what is the worst thing about the internet?
Is it just being on the screen or is the stuff coming out of there so toxic that it's deadly in itself?
You know, it's the media and it's the message.
Like I would, I would say it's both.
I mean, I think that once kids sort of get used to constantly being on the screen, it's also, you know, you and I as adults, like we kind of had this childhood where we remember the pleasures of not being on a screen.
Like I could be like, oh, you know, I could really use a break and I should go for a walk or I should really take my novel into the other room and like I will enjoy it better.
But if kids have never really had that experience, it's hard for them to kind of recall that as an adult and then know when to cut themselves off of the device for a little while.
So I think just sort of getting those tastes and temperaments for as long as possible.
I mean, I know there's nothing you can do with a, you know, with a 17-year-old in the internet.
I'm just saying, you know, in terms of trying to wait as long as possible, like, you know, I'm a big fan of Wait Until Eighth, which is a group that sort of suggests you wait until eighth grade before you get your kid a smartphone.
Like you can get your kid like a flip phone if you really need to get in touch with them.
But, you know, having the whole internet in your pocket is something that you could wait till you're 13 or 14 to do.
And there's a lot of pleasurable things you can experience in the childhood before then and habits that you can develop before then.
But by the way, I'm also like, I also think that there's a reason to not even get your kid a flip phone.
Like I think there's really important lessons that kids learn when they're not constantly tethered to a phone.
I mean, I just give the example because, you know, something that my parents did for me, you know, they would drop me off at swim practice and then they would say, I'll pick you up at 6:30.
And I had this amazing thing on my wrist that was called a watch.
And I would meet them outside at the appointed time.
And of course, you know, if some emergency happened, they would come in because they'd wonder where I was at 6.45.
But I do this.
I did the same thing with my daughter when she was 12.
I would drop her off.
All the other kids are like in the locker room texting their parents like the parents are Uber, saying, come get me.
But my daughter also had an experience one day where she forgot her swimsuit.
And she had to go to the front desk at the Y and say, excuse me, I forgot my swimsuit.
I need to call my mother.
Can I use your phone for a few minutes?
She had to have an interaction with an adult who is a stranger and like figure it out.
And I think that's something very few kids have to do now.
Is there any way, since you wrote a book, Be the Parent, Please, about this?
Is there any way to control what kids look at on screen?
I mean, I've researched things as obscure as what the name of the part of your foot is between your toes and your ankle and got porn, you know?
There's probably a fetish for that.
So, yeah.
I just go, gee, can you protect kids at all?
I think you can protect them to some extent, but it's a really, it's like a full-time job.
I mean, like looking at your kids' devices on, first of all, it's not going to be done by artificial intelligence or some kind of filter that you put on the phone.
It's going to be done because your kid is going to know that on a regular basis, you are looking at their phone and they are going to be monitoring what it is they're looking at because they don't want you to see whatever it is.
You know, you can use these filters too.
You can take Safari off their iPhone.
You can just give them a watch, you know, all these, all these sorts of things.
But really, like, I think parents who are about to give their kids a smartphone should ask themselves, like, am I really willing to devote that many hours to this?
Because that's what it's going to take if I'm truly interested in protecting my kid.
I remember hearing a woman who was working in an Apple store.
Like, a guy came in and he said, oh, I'm going to get this phone for my 10-year-old.
And how can I protect them?
And the woman at the Apple store was like, well, you know, you just have to learn to live with these things sometimes.
Root Of The Question00:10:25
I was like, who are you?
Like, why would this is supposed to be a parent?
Like, and by the way, mister, like, why would you take advice from this like 22-year-old at the Apple store?
It's ridiculous.
But that's apparently the attitude we're all supposed to have now.
Yeah, no, I was going to say, nobody in the Apple store has been, was born before 2000.
So that's.
Yeah.
Naomi Schaefer-Riley, she's got a book called No Way to Treat a Child.
Naomi, it's good to see you again.
Thank you for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Absolutely.
Thanks for having me.
All right, it's time for the mailbag.
But before we do it, I want to tell you how to get into the mailbag.
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Hit the watch tab at the top.
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Will they change your life for the better?
Let's find out with the mailbag.
My name is John Federwoman.
God.
All right.
This is now I never do this.
I never take follow-up questions because it seems unfair and doesn't give enough people a chance to ask questions.
But this one I actually wanted to.
This is from Erin.
She said, I appreciate you took the time to answer my question on the show.
And I love and value the show and value your opinion, but I want to push back a little.
She had asked me about talking to her friends about abortion, and I said, don't, she said, basically, you said, don't talk to your friends about murdering children being wrong because you don't know what their life experiences is.
And she says, I've been friends with some of these people for 10 to 15 years.
These are people I did think I had a deep connection with.
So I shouldn't talk about things I find important, like the value of human lives, because I might offend someone.
Beyond that, let's say someone who had come from another land where murder wasn't an inherent evil had murdered someone, shouldn't I tell them that it is?
Should they just live in ignorance because the truth might upset them?
What if we did the same thing with slavery in this country?
Some people believe that holding slaves was all right.
I guess the root of my question is this.
When can we speak about things that we view as a true moral wrong, in your opinion, or should we stay silent forever?
I appreciate your time.
I know you're a busy man, but I've been mulling over your response to my last question all week, and I had to ask this follow-up.
Yeah, first of all, that was not my reason for telling you not to say to someone, oh, you murdered your child.
It was that I thought that that would harden their heart and bathe them in shame and give them no way to start to mull over maybe that maybe what they did wasn't optimal and maybe that they should rethink their opinions about this.
Now, you say you've known these people for 10 to 15 years.
Use your imagination.
When you say, oh, you murdered your child, are they going to say, oh, God, I knew I was doing something wrong, but I didn't know what it was?
Or are they going to say, screw you, never talk to me again?
I suspect it's going to be closer to the latter than to the former.
And then my question of you is simply this.
What is your purpose in speaking?
Is your purpose on speaking to change opinions to save the life of children?
Or is it to display your righteousness?
Because the bad news is you have 0% righteousness.
You have no righteousness like everybody else on earth.
And that is why Jesus and God, this is why God does not care about your judgments.
He makes the judgments.
All you have to do is love people.
And if in loving them you can find a way to tell them the truth that might enlighten them, that's one thing.
But if you just want to express this condemnation and judgment that I think is going to harden their hearts, I don't see what the point is, except for feeling like you're doing something.
So that was the purpose behind my answer.
And I think that I wanted to get that follow-up because a lot of people don't understand that I feel that we have to take stock of the results of what we do, not just of how good they make us feel or bad they make us feel.
For Malia, as a lover of theater and the arts and a very devout Catholic, I've been having debates with myself about auditioning for the theater program at my college.
This year, the show is Greece, which does not promote good Catholic teachings.
I love the music, and a lot of my friends are going to be involved, but I'm not sure if I feel comfortable being involved in a show that goes directly against my beliefs.
I know that God will always forgive me for my actions, and even though I do not believe anything about what Greece promotes, I still feel weird about the possibility of having to pretend to be a character that so easily sleeps around, just hoping you could help me balance between my father, who thinks I shouldn't do it because of religious reasons and my own love of theater and wish to be involved in the storytelling that I love so much.
Okay, I cannot tell you what decision you should make because that totally depends on your feeling about your values.
I can give you my opinion on how I feel about the arts.
I believe that there are arts that portray the world accurately, which means in a very ugly sometimes way, but actually promote a good values because their honesty is so intense that it illuminates the world.
And in illuminating the world, you illuminate the moral world as well.
So for instance, I would play Macbeth.
I don't go around slaughtering people in order to get the Scottish crown.
But in fact, I would play Macbeth because I think Macbeth illuminates the moral universe.
And I would use curse words that I try not to use in real life because that might be right for that character and true to life and bring life into the light.
And I've gotten lots of emails about how I shouldn't do that.
I don't know.
I don't know whether I would do a nude scene.
I've never actually seen a nude scene that had to be in a movie and just feel that women are being exploited.
I actually just feel that women are being exploited by it.
However, Greece is a play that actually promotes bad values.
And that's a different thing.
It actually promotes that being the bad girl is not so bad.
That is actually the message that Greece sends.
So you have to then decide, is the entertainment value, is the music, the love of the music and the fun of the show and the delight of the show?
And I remember it as being a fairly delightful show.
Does that supersede the fact that it promotes, it does promote bad values.
And so you have to make that decision.
I wrote a book called a pamphlet called The Arts and Crisis, which you can get for free online or you can spend a dollar at Amazon and make sure you got it.
And that'll tell you how I feel about the arts and how expansive my acceptance of the arts is.
But you should question this thing.
You will be promoting the value that being the bad girl is not so bad.
It's not just showing people sleeping around, which is not inherently bad in the arts because that shows reality.
It is telling people that actually in order to be the full girl, it's not that the hood should become more like the virginal woman.
It is more that the virginal woman should become more like the hood.
And you really do have to think about whether you want to promote that.
From Austin, I have a question regarding marriage.
I've been married to a love of my life for five years.
And no, I'll never have a perfect marriage because I'm not married to your wife.
That's true.
We think we could have a better one.
We're both Christians.
We both think that each spouse should consider their own selfishness as the biggest threat to the marriage.
We've reached the point where communication feels almost impossible.
I'm logical.
She's emotional.
We both have baggage coming into any serious conversation or disagreement.
I feel like she's often a self-righteous, ungrateful, bottomless pit.
She thinks I'm a selfish, aloof, uncaring ass.
We've gone to a counselor several times, and that helped, but not as much as either of us had hoped.
Well, first of all, let me say that this is probably the most common problem in marriages, communication.
This is the thing, you know, people sometimes say, oh, it's money or it's this or it's that, but that's because they can't communicate about the money or the sex or whatever it is.
And I actually think therapy, especially what's called emotional focused therapy, can be very helpful in teaching you how to communicate.
And you can't just go to a counselor several times.
It actually is a longer process that might take even a year, even a little bit more before you actually learn to talk.
And the reason for that is because when we get angry about people about things like this, about small things, get into arguments about small things, what we're really talking about is deep feelings we have about things that happened to us when we were young or maybe just things that are part of our nature.
So for instance, if you get incredibly angry at your husband because he doesn't take out the garbage, it may be because that would make you feel taken care of and because your father was neglectful in, I'm making this up, but your father was neglectful when you were a child and now you feel neglected and so that feeling of neglect comes back and instead of saying, hey, you know, this happened to me when I was a kid and I feel bad when you do that.
And I know it's silly, but it means a lot to me that you take out the garbage if that's something you can do and you can say, well, I can do it, but sometimes I forget.
And it's not that I don't love you.
It's not that, you know, those are the kinds of conversations that get around the kind of anger that you're talking about.
And sometimes you have to learn to do that because all of us want to win the argument.
All of us want to get our two cents in.
All of us can see how the other person is being unfair and we're being the soul of reason.
And yes, it is true that men tend to be more logical and women tend to be more emotional.
And women can experience that logicality as coldness and men can experience that emotion as being unreasonable.
And so that's another kind of thing that you can learn to experience in one another.
Sometimes that just takes time.
I mean, you know, it took me time being married to sort of say like, oh, this woman actually isn't insane.
She actually just sees things in a different way because she's a girl.
And that's something I actually like about her.
I like that she's a girl.
And so maybe I can learn to sort of understand what she's saying.
You know, you can do this on your own.
You can learn to do this on your own, to listen more, to listen to what people are really saying, to listen to the emotional undercurrent of what they're saying.
But a therapist is helpful.
And as I say, this emotional focused therapy focuses on exactly this, on exactly how to communicate and reinforce your bonds.
You should certainly not despair if you love this lady, which you say you do, and it sounds like you do, and she loves you.
This communication thing is just really, really, really common.
And people do know how to fix it.
You might be able to read about it and fix it yourself, but if you can't, don't be afraid to go to a therapist and really let it play out over time and not just say, oh, that's not working and give it up.
All right.
For some of you, the Clavenless weekend has come.
For those of you who are not subscribers and don't want to hear the subscriber block, you have an alternative, which is to plunge into a week of darkness, wailing, gnashing of teeth, fire, screaming.
Oh, the screaming is the worst part probably, especially if it's yours.