Kurt Schlichter dissects America’s collapse—from Vanderbilt Hospital’s $100K transgender surgeries on minors to Harvard elites’ power grabs—while Matt Walsh exposes hospitals profiting from "induced mental illness" in youth transitions. He frames leftist lies (Holocaust comparisons, slave-trade revisionism) as cultural suicide, predicting backlash against woke extremism. Schlichter’s We’ll Be Back argues the U.S. is broken but fixable by rejecting progressive overreach, citing Latinx voter shifts and school board rebellions. The episode blends conspiracy-style attacks on "woke" policies with faith-based advice, ending with a fantasy football plug and a tease for his spy novel Inferno. [Automatically generated summary]
The Martha's Vineyard Neighborhood Association of Selfish Entitled Hypocrites has released a statement attacking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, saying, quote, Governor DeSantis acted in flagrant violation of federal law by exposing our association of selfish entitled Hypocrites as selfish entitled Hypocrites.
At least, we assume that's a flagrant violation of federal law.
If it's not, what are the little people paying taxes for?
Unquote.
DeSantis cruelly tricked 50 illegal immigrants into going to Martha's Vineyard by telling them it was a lovely summer colony of sandy beaches and beautiful homes filled with leftists who wholeheartedly believe in unpoliced American borders and would therefore welcome them with open arms if they had an ounce of integrity.
DeSantis revealed his evil intentions by chuckling darkly as he spoke the words, if they had an ounce of integrity, and by then muttering to himself, and if pigs could fly, it would rain bacon.
One illegal, speaking in his native hellhole, told a translator, quote, When I reached the vineyard and saw the many signs that said, we believe no person is illegal, I was overjoyed because my English is not so good and I thought those words meant, we believe no person is illegal.
It was very cruel of Ron DeSantis not to explain how wrong I was, unquote.
Bravely fighting back against the malevolent DeSantis, some Vineyard residents clarified the signs for the illegals so that they now read, quote, we believe it is good to put up a sign that says we believe no person is illegal, after which we will call the National Guard and have your brown suckers bust out of here so fast we'll still have time to play a quick 18 holes at Farmneck, where the views, by the way, are absolutely breathtaking, unquote.
As Martha's Vineyard residents waved a tearful sangria at the departing illegals, they suddenly found themselves besieged by flocks of journalists who came out of their summer homes to ask just how evil is Ron DeSantis before heading over to the deck at the dunes where the raspberry lemon drop cocktail is an absolute must.
One Vineyard summer resident, Thurston Howell IV, told the journalists, quote, listen, lovey, my father spent three years on an island with Gilligan, so we know what suffering is.
That's why we're committed to making sure this island remains a safe place for us to posture virtuously without experiencing any of the discomforts of actual virtue.
It's not like we don't let in any immigrants.
After all, that Kenyan fellow, Obama, is here.
And we even let him bring his wife, and she's a black man.
So we're really very tolerant of anyone who's rich and powerful and basically white, unquote.
The Obamas themselves issued a statement and promised one of the illegals $6.50 an hour to deliver it to the media.
The statement said, quote, Today, Michelle and I are thinking of the glorious Statue of Liberty who raises her lamp over New York Harbor to embody the words, give me the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Because believe me, if we wanted to live in New York Harbor with a bunch of wretched refuse, we wouldn't have made $65 million producing unwatchable documentaries for Netflix.
I mean, think about it.
We actually made a documentary called Our Great National Parks.
Do you think that was interesting?
Do you think we did that so that people would be informed or entertained?
Don't be ridiculous.
We did it so we could afford to summer in a place without people from crap hole countries screwing up the view.
Now pay this guy a $6.50 and put him on the bus, unquote.
Vastly overrated documentarian Ken vastly overrated Burns used the Martha's Vineyard event to plug his new vastly overrated documentary about the Holocaust by making a convoluted comparison between flying illegals to Martha's Vineyard and shipping Jews to death camps.
Burns added, quote, sure, that's complete crap, but it will ensure my documentary is vastly overrated by many of the same people who just chased the illegals back to the mainland.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm late for my golf game at Auschwitz, or Martha's Vineyard.
I always get those two confused because I'm so shallow, I'm virtually two-dimensional.
⁇ In the aftermath of DeSantis' brutality, Martha's Vineyard Summer Residents vowed to come together to restore the islands in this house we believe signs, many of which were quickly destroyed in the catastrophe.
The Obamas announced they would be making a film about the dramatic events entitled, Our Great National Parks 2.
This time, it's personal.
And Ken Burns disappeared up his own fundament, which turned out to be vastly overrated.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Shop.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bibbyzing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, we are back laughing our way through the absolute destruction of the Republic.
Today we're going to talk about the lies, the left pedals about slavery and race.
We're going to do a deep dive into that.
We're also going to explain why Sylvester Stallone and the late Queen of England are actually the same person.
Plus, we will have right-wing lunatic Kurt Schlichter on in the hope we can hold him here until the FBI arrives and arrests him.
You know, I have to tell you, I got, my publisher got a note from Barnes ⁇ Noble saying that we want to order more of A Strange Habit of Mind, the sequel to When Christmas Comes.
But Clavin keeps sending everybody to Amazon.
So if you haven't pre-ordered A Strange Habit of Mind, please pre-order it.
And if you want to go, if you don't like Amazon, you want to go over to Barnes ⁇ Noble, please go over to Barnes ⁇ Noble. They would like some pre-orders as well. It really is important. You will love the book, I promise you, and you will turn it into a series. If you pre-order enough of them, buy enough of them, we will be able to make this into a series. You know, today I'm going to be talking about the lies in the culture, and my strategy in writing these books is not to propagandize or say, you know, promote anything,
any kind of political agenda. It's simply to tell great stories in the world as it actually is, as opposed to the world the left wants us to believe it is. So that's the difference between the lies I'm going to be talking about in just a minute and the truth of the actual world. Also,
you want to subscribe to my YouTube channel, Andrew Clavin YouTube channel, the personal one, because that's the one where you will get exclusive content that is not on this show. It's usually just lying around in the gutter. I pick it up and I'll send it to you in a brown paper bag so you don't have to explain it to your spouse. And if you leave a comment there and the comment is absolutely despicable in every possible way,
if it's phobic about everybody, you know, I hope you're phobic about people, like even white men, I hope you're phobic about, we will read it on the show if it's that despicable because so are we. Today's comment is from Phil Bridges, who says,
as much as I dread the Clavenless Week, I have to admit that waking up on Saturday morning and knowing I have a new Clavin show waiting for me to listen to while I drink my coffee and eat my muffin is as close to paradise as a human can expect to get. That's a typical conservative comment because you notice Phil doesn't care about the many people who died during the Clavenless Week. He has absolutely no feeling for the torment that they went through and the fact that they didn't survive. As long as he has his lousy muffin and his coffee,
he's going to enjoy the show. So he's a typical right-winger. So for me, there's nothing more refreshing than a good night lying awake, especially because I'm lying awake on my Helix mattress. If you're going to lie awake,
you've got to be comfortable. Helix has several different mattress models to choose from. They have soft, medium, firm mattresses. Mattress is great for cooling you down if you sleep hot. Mattresses great for spinal alignment to prevent morning aches and pains. And even a Helix Plus mattress for plus-sized sleepers. They also have a sleep quiz that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress because why would you buy a mattress made for someone else? So if you're looking for a mattress,
take the quiz, order the mattress that you're matched to, and wait for the delivery. Your mattress will come right to your door for free. You don't ever need to go to a mattress store again. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for 100 nights, risk-free. They'll even pick it up for you if you don't love it, but you will love it. Helix has over 12,000 five-star reviews. Their financing options and flexible payment plans make it so that a great night's sleep or a great night lying awake is never far away. For a limited time,
Helix is offering up to $350 off all mattress orders and two free pillows for our listeners. This is their best offer yet. So hurry over to helixsleep.com slash Clavin. How, oh, how? Tell me how do you spell Clavin? You're saying to yourself,
it's K-L-A-V-A-N. So I want to begin with what I think is the clip of the week. And it's a long clip, but I'm going to play the whole thing because I just think it is really important and it has a lot to say about what is happening in our culture. And I'll show you why in an absolutely specific way. But it's Don Lemon. He's an idiot,
Britain's Naval Heroism and Slavery Reparations00:08:04
but he was just reduced to dust and ashes by a commentator on the royals, a British lady named Hilary Fordwich. And it's hilarious to watch because Lemon just got demoted to a morning show. He's not going to have his primetime show anymore. He'll still be playing the black elf on Rings of Power,
where he pretends to be actually a worthwhile human being. But here you'll just see him utterly destroyed as he tries to make a point about some kind of reparations for slavery that the British owe somebody. And Hillary Fordwich just destroys him. It's cut one. Well,
this is coming when, you know, there's all of this wealth and you hear about it comes as England that's facing rising costs of living, a living crisis, austerity budget cuts, and so on. And then you have those who are asking for reparations for colonialism. And they're wondering,
you know, $100 billion, $24 billion here and there, $500 million there. Some people want to be paid back and members of the public are wondering, why are we suffering when you are, you know, you have all of this vast wealth? Those are legitimate concerns. Well, I think you're right about reparations in terms of if people want it, though, what they need to do is you always need to go back to the beginning of a supply chain. Where was the beginning of the supply chain? That was in Africa and when that crossed the entire world when the slavery was taking place,
which was the first nation in the world that abolished slavery? The first nation in the world to abolish it. It was started by William Wilberforce, was the British. In Great Britain, they abolished slavery. 2,000 naval men died on the high seas trying to stop slavery. Why? Because the African kings were rounding up their own people. They had them on cages waiting in the beaches. No one was running into Africa to get them. And I think you're totally right. If reparations need to be paid,
we need to go right back to the beginning of that supply chain and say, who was rounding up their own people and having them handcuffed in pages? Absolutely. That's where they should start. And maybe, I don't know, the descendants of those families where they died in the high seas trying to stop the slavery, that those families should receive something too, I think, at the same time. It's an interesting discussion, Hillary. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. We'll continue to discuss in the future. So if you're watching this,
you see Lemon's face just fall as he realizes his legs are essentially being cut off on the air by this woman who's not going to take any guff from him because she knows her history. And yet, and yet, this is being sold all across the board, as I'm going to explain in a couple of minutes. But just here's one more clip of a royal biographer. He wrote a book called something like The Last Queen or something like this, Clive Irving,
his name is. And he is delivering the same garbage. This is cut 14. Now, remember, this is while the Queen's funeral is going on and while all of Britain is mourning and many other countries that love this woman because as I spoke about the fact, she incarnated the idea of the nation, which the left hates because it means that a human being can incarnate a metaphysical or immaterial principle like truth and beauty,
the way Jesus incarnates God. And that's everything that they hate. They want you to be stuck in your desires. They want you to be stuck in your physicality. They want you to care about money and power instead of making your life the full life it can be. And Queen Elizabeth was actually an example of someone doing that. But here is her biographer selling the same line as Don Lemon's Cut 14. A lot of this seems to be facade. This legacy,
it requires something that I haven't seen coming from the Windsor family at any stage in recent history, which is it requires atonement. It requires acknowledgement of the true cost to those colonies of slavery which began under Charles II in 1666. Charles II. No one was holding slaves before Charles II began that. Now,
I want to quote from Douglas Murray's excellent book, The War on the West. This is his best book. And to give credit where it's due, he is essentially quoting from a history by Anthony Sullivan. It is true, says Douglas Murray, that Britain engaged in the slave trade and that it took part in a trade in human beings that was appalling. But Britain also led the world in the abolition of that trade, and Britain not only abolished that trade for itself,
but used its Navy to seek to wipe out that trade in all parts of the world the Navy could reach. If Britain's decision to abolish slavery in 1807 was unusual, more unusual by far was her decision to send the Royal Navy around the world, establish the West Africa Squadron based at Freetown, and grow the fleet until a sixth of the ships and seamen of the Royal Navy were employed in the fight against the slave trade. This is the Navy that ruled the ocean waves, right? And Britain,
Britain would never be slaves, and they decided that no one else would be slaves either if they could help it. Murray goes on. The cost of this extraordinary decision was not only financial, it was paid for in British lives as well. Between 1808 and 1860, the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 African slaves. They also lost a huge number of personnel themselves. More than 1,500 men of the Royal Navy were killed in action during this period,
And the acts of bravery and selfless heroism of those men is worthy of some note.
And he goes on to talk about the extraordinary bravery of these British soldiers chasing boats across the oceans, boarding them and fighting for their own lives and for the lives of the slaves that they invariably found stowed away in the holds of ships bound for a wide variety of countries.
It was a game of cat and mouse across the high seas, with standoffs and guessing games about slave ships trying to pass themselves off as other vessels.
Until the British sailors boarded the ships and searched for themselves.
They never had any certainty that they were right in this high-risk strategy.
It is a tale of great heroism that carried on for six decades.
It's also important to note, by the way, that the abolition of the slave trade in Britain was brought about by the rise of evangelicals like William Wilberforce, who was the leader of that particular movement. So it was the rebirth of Christian feeling in the country,
evangelical Christian feeling, basic Christian feeling, after the Regency period in which basically sexual freedom rose and a sense of immorality rose that the evangelicals were conquering. I've talked about that before, but we should always remember, while there were bad Christians, and there are always going to be bad people in every movement, but while there were bad Christians who used slavery, who used Christianity to sort of justify slavery, the true Christians and the true Christian feeling, when it rose again,
said this cannot go on and stopped it, not just in Britain, but on the ocean waves where Britain's Navy ruled. Now, because we on the right have failed to understand the importance of communication and the import of culture, and because we're always cranking about the culture and complaining about the culture, but we're never producing culture, we're never doing things, culture that we love, the left is able to push its lies on every platform. And you know, if you think this doesn't affect you,
you are wrong. If you've ever used the expression, I got an adrenaline rush or a dopamine high, if you take drugs to get out of your depression, and I'm not telling you to stop, I'm just telling you if that's the first thing you go to is, yeah, I have depression instead of I'm depressed. I have depression and therefore I have to go and get myself some drugs or I'm going to find God by micro-dosing LSD. All of that stuff is because materialism has been sold to us by every single venue that the left has taken over,
which is every single venue. We think in materialist terms, we think that we're motivated by sex instead of the desire to find God, which sex basically symbolizes in its search for love. And they do this with these lies of race,
The American Project's Betrayal00:15:01
which they have used to essentially destroy the American project, the American project, which was from George Washington on that we would not turn people away because of race or because of religion,
but as long as they embraced the doctrine of freedom. Slavery was a violation of that principle, as even the founders knew. Even some of the founders who held slaves knew it, and those that didn't know it learned a lot of them over time. It was a violation of our principles, and everyone knew it was a thorn in the side, but history decreed that they could not build the country until they let the South keep the slaves on which its economy depended. And it led to civil war. And as Lincoln said,
every drop of blood that was shed by the lash was paid for by bloodshed by the sword. So this week, right, and so the left is pouring this effort into dividing us by race and this critical race theory, which they claim is not being taught in schools because it's not being taught in schools. It simply affects everything that is being taught in schools. They're teaching us that there is something inherently oppressive in whiteness and white culture. This week, to sort of drive that message home,
The top movie released was a movie called The Woman King with the absolutely great actress Viola Davis.
Here's the trailer.
That's cut three.
An evil is coming that threatens our kingdom.
Our freedom.
But we have a weapon.
are not prepared for the Europeans wish to conquer us They will not stop until the whole of Africa is theirs.
We must fight rock for our people.
So I haven't seen the movie.
This is not a review of the movie at all.
Anything with Viola Davis in it is going to at least have one great performance.
The movie's not getting good reviews, but I haven't seen it, so I'm not reviewing the picture. But here's basically the story. I'm taking this from Wikipedia in the West African kingdom of Dahomey. During the 1820s, General Nansika Naniska, leader of the all-female group of warriors, the Agoji,
liberates the Homean women who were abducted by slavers from the Oyo Empire. And this provokes King Gezo of Dahomey to prepare for an all-out war with the Oyo. Naniska begins to train a new generation of warriors to join the Agoji in order to protect the kingdom. Now, whenever they write an article about this, is this true? The article always starts, well, yes, it's true, but there are creative liberties. Garbage. The morality of the entire picture is a lie. Dahomey monopolized the slave trade in Africa. It was a slave-raiding,
slave-trading kingdom that conquered the other kingdoms during the 18th century and basically became the biggest slave traders in Africa. The Oyos were competing slave traders. That's why they went after them. And the wars that were meant to capture their fellow Africans and use them as slaves and keep them for themselves and sell them to other African kingdoms and then eventually to the Europeans,
those wars meant that so many men were being killed. They were at war so often that they basically had to bring in these women and train them to be warriors as well. But what they did was just amazing. Here's Dan McLaughlin,
who writes a very long article about this at National Review, but it's an excellent article. I'm going to read a bit of it. He says, throughout its history, the transatlantic slave trade was truly a trade, a voluntary exchange in which African kings and merchants engaged for their own perceived benefit. Virtually all of the nearly 25 million Africans sold into slavery down through the centuries,
roughly half of them in the Atlantic slave trade, were taken and sold by fellow Africans. Dahomey, he writes, was not merely a nation that engaged in slavery or slave trading. It was a kingdom built on enslavement. So as I said,
so many people were killed in these slave raids and these wars that they had to create a female force that the Europeans called the Black Amazons. And visitors were very impressed by the Amazons. They were really good soldiers and they were very good at training. One observer noted that the women shot their antiquated flintlock muskets from the shoulder,
which is the proper way to fire them so you can control the weapon, while the men shot from the hip, which was a chronic bad habit of African soldiers. They were ferocious in the getting of slaves. And basically their job was to go into the undefended villages around where there was nobody, there was no army to defend them, attack them in the dead of night, round up the slaves, and cut the throats and behead anyone who stood in their way. At the same time, this king, there were many kings, obviously,
over this period. It was more than 100 years. The king was a dictator. It was one of the more absolute monarchies that there was in Africa. He would kill anyone who would compete with his slave trade, but he also kept these Amazons as wives. Now, he kept them in their palace where there were no other men but eunuchs. They were not allowed to sleep with anybody else. Whether they slept with him is uncertain. We don't know about that. But in other words, they were basically his slaves.
They were basically working only for him.
So in other words, if you were to judge the Dahomey under the same woke principles that you're judging the British, you would have to say these are the worst people who ever existed.
They were sexist, they were patriarchal, they were slave-taking jackasses, all right?
Now, how'd they get into a fight with the French?
Well, they had terrible relations with the British because the British wanted to ban their slave trade and the Dahomeys were living off the slave trade.
They didn't want to give it up.
The British abolitionists and mercenaries were basically saying the only way we can get these Africans to stop selling slaves is to convert them to Christianity and to teach them how to sell palm oil and other things.
which they didn't want to do. They didn't want to give up their slave trade. That puts a really different face on the British Empire. And I keep telling you, the British Empire was a civilizing force. So this King Gezo, who's the hero, one of the heroes of the film, he was the one who was saying to the British, We don't want to give up our slaves. And that's why they started dealing with the French, and that ultimately led to war with the French, in which the Amazons, the Goju, were basically wiped out. They'd already been destroyed in other battles, but they were wiped out. So, so, Why are they lying?
Why do they have to constantly lie?
Why can't we just tell history the way it was?
Well, one of the things, Bill Maher has been picking up on this.
Bill Maher basically, is now just smoking dope to keep from finding God.
That's my theory about Bill Maher.
He's always smoking dope on one of his screening shows.
He's doing it because he can't face the fact that everything he thought before was untrue.
And now he's after woke history.
Here's cut five of Bill Maher talking about this.
We're a species prone to making others of our species our b?
⁇ .
I've said it before and I'll say it again.
Humans are not good people.
And the capacity for cruelty is a human thing.
not a white thing. That's the truth, even though it doesn't jibe with the current narrative. But in today's world, when truth conflicts with narrative, it's the truth that has to apologize. Being woke is like a magic moral time machine where you judge everybody against what you imagine you would have done in 1066 and you always win. So the thing that's so brilliant about those remarks,
first, obviously, cruelty, brutality, slavery, atrocity, these are not black things or white things. These are human things. These are the things that bind us together in sin. And that is, of course, why we are here in America trying to get rid of those things as one, As a one people out of the many becoming one.
And yes, there have been wrongs done to the black race in America, but there have been wrongs done to everybody everywhere.
And that is the whole point of America.
But the other thing that's really smart about Bill Maher is he's showing you that this is personal.
What they are saying is, you are a better person for these lies.
Here's the cast of the woman king coming on the view.
And listen to how personal they make it all.
It's cut.
Four.
You've said that friends and family and even strangers have shared anecdotes with you about what this movie means to them.
Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, one of my friends who's an actress, Joan Iola, back at home, I sent her the trailer when it came out and she messaged me back saying, I'm crying in the middle of the street and I just forced three random people to watch it. Roughly forward was like, look at this. Well, he's a friend, Michael. There have been so many responses like that. I think seeing the trailer,
just seeing the image of us all coming out of the gate, you know, it's been, it's conjured up feelings in people that I don't think they even knew were there. So it's like so beautiful. And you're also beautiful. It's breathtaking. Oh, you're so beautiful. It's so beautiful. And the women are so affirmed. And they saw the women coming out of the grass with swords. So let me ask you a question. So it's all personal, right? These lies, these lies are there for you. They're to make you feel better,
that female affirmation. You feel so much better. You're a strong woman. There are no strong women. And the reason I say that is because for every woman, no matter how strong, there is a stronger man. That's the whole point. One of the things about being a woman that you have to deal with if you are in fact a real woman and not a make-believe one. Let me ask you this,
though. Should women be affirmed by seeing these women with swords coming out of the grass and how tough they were and how they got slaves and cut off the head of anyone who tried to stop them? Or do we look at this and say, hey, this was a king who was a slaver? This is a king who was a fascist. This was a king who kept the women for himself and cut off the testicles of anyone else who tried to come near them. Maybe all that deformity,
maybe all that oppression and deforming women into these vicious killers, maybe that's all one thing. Maybe it shouldn't be affirming. Maybe a picture of, say, the Pieta or the Virgin Mary with her child. Maybe that should be more affirming,
but at least we should ask that question. But turning history to personal empowerment means that when you call out a lie as a lie, you're attacking people personally, and that's why they get offended. And that is also why these lies start to drive people absolutely insane. You know,
with COVID, we saw how fast the government can cut you off, how fast you can be separated from friends. We've seen disasters, earthquakes, storms, all those things. There's no excuse for not being prepared, especially with a great money-saving offer from MyPatriot Supply. For a limited time, they're taking 20% off their three-month emergency food kit. This kit is packed with 90 days worth of breakfasts, lunches, dinners, drinks,
and snacks per person. And the food stays fresh for up to 25 years. It will be there when you need it. My Patriot Supply is charging less so they can help families more, but the sale ends soon. To save 20%,
go to preparewithclavin.com. That's preparewithclavin.com. Your family will love this food. It's delicious. It's easy to prepare, providing more than 2,000 calories a day for optimum energy. Someday your family may need this food. Why not get it today while you can save 20%? Get yours at preparewithclavin.com. That's preparewithclavin.com. The first thing you need to know in an emergency is how you spell Clavin. It's K-L-A-V-A-N. There are no E's. I just make it look this easy. There are no E's,
anybody that way. So when it comes to all the lies that the left feels should be at the basis of your personality and your self-affirmation,
there's this quote from Alexandra Occasional Cortex that in some way should become the motto of dishonest leftist cultures, Cut 26. I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely,
factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right. So you're morally right. The facts don't matter. But can you even be morally right? Can you be morally right if you don't know the facts? How can you be morally right if you don't know the facts? You know,
there's a thing in the law called the McNaughton Rule. The McNaughton rule is based on a guy named Daniel McNaughton, and he tried to assassinate the prime minister, killed another guy instead by accident, and he was ruled insane because he thought the prime minister was basically plotting to take his life, which was just deluded. And the idea was that if you didn't know reality, you couldn't know right from wrong, and therefore you were insane, right? If you don't know morality,
if you don't know reality, if you don't know the facts, you can't know right from wrong. You can't know what you should be doing if you don't know what reality is. So on backstage the other day, I was talking about the rise of mental illness. Candace Owen said that transgenderism was a religion, and I said, it's really not. It's a mental illness. It is a mental illness of people who do not know what is going on right from wrong. And that's not true of all of them. It's not true of the doctors. I got to say,
I just have to give a shout out to Matt Walsh. He's been trending on Twitter for like three weeks or something. He's doing this God's work and calling out this hospital here, the Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville. And he found all these videos online where they were telling people we have to do more of these transition surgeries on young people,
people as young as 16, I believe, was the youngest they found here, but this younger other places. And he found these speeches that they were giving to doctors about how much money you could make. Here's Dr. Shane Taylor explaining, this was just online, he found them,
how much money you could make doing transgender surgery. It's cut 17. These surgeries make a lot of money. So female to male chest reconstruction can bring in $40,000. A patient just on routine hormone treatment who I'm only seeing a few times a year can bring in several thousand dollars that requires a lot of visits and labs. It actually makes money for the hospital. And the female to male bottom surgeries,
these are huge money makers. Again, I think this has to be an underestimate. If they're voting around $20,000 for a phalloplasty, there's been different things that I've read that say it could be up to $100,000. Dr. Winokur, who's our surgeon,
says that there's entire clinics where the entire clinic is supported just by their phalloplasties. And that is like a fraction of the surgeries that they're doing. So what she's saying essentially is you're going to make a lot of money because this is going to make people so miserable and so sick that they're going to have to keep coming back for more treatment. So you're going to make a bundle. So,
Why Fascism Feels Normal00:09:25
you know, when Matt called this out, these people took down their entire website, which shows they know what they're doing. They know they're doing wrong or they wouldn't be hiding. But the children who are going in there, who have been taught that they can become happy by changing,
turning their body into a costume of the opposite sex or whatever they're being told, they are the ones who are suffering from a kind of mental illness because they have, not, it's induced mental illness, because they have been told something that isn't true. And that is why I'm constantly hammering back and saying we have to have the truth in order to really feel who we are,
know who we are and to know reality and to know morality. And what the left does by personalizing history and then lying about history is they make it essential to your well-being to live in a lie. They essentially drive you insane. This thing about being proud or ashamed of racial history is real. It is real. I've talked about this before,
that like when Sandy Kofax, a Jewish pitcher, was the great ace pitcher in my childhood. I was proud of that. I have nothing to do with that. I didn't have that skill. It wasn't me doing it. But you can't help it. It's just a natural human thing. And the Italians sit around, oh,
we wrote opera and these beautiful paintings. And the British created a great legal system in their literature. The Jews gave us our religion. But these things that happen to people of the same race also come back to haunt us. The Jews had a big problem with this. It was still going on when I was a little kid after the Holocaust. Why didn't they resist? Why did they go to their deaths like sheep? Why did the Jews assist the Nazis,
which they often did thinking that maybe they could make things better? And some of them were just corrupt because every people has corrupt people as well. You know, there were some Jews who went, were shipped from their slums, their ghettos, to the gas chambers, and rarely saw a German at all because the Jewish system had been put into place doing this. And they felt shame about this, terrible shame. And it's one of the reasons I always disliked Schindler's list, because I feel it's a dishonest view of the Holocaust,
seen from a perspective of a charitable act. And there were so few of those in the Holocaust. And Africa has this problem. Africa has been dysfunctional. It's not dysfunctional because of the British or the colonizers. It was dysfunctional from the start. It was dysfunctional when they got there. It was a slave state when they got there. If you read the journals of explorers like Mungo,
you'll just see how crime-ridden it was, not just from the Africans, but from Muslim colonizers who had come in, who were greater slavers than the Europeans, certainly, and who castrated their slaves so that they didn't have descendants, which at least we can say the Americans didn't do as a small comfort, but still. But, you know, it has been this way for a long time. Now, in prehistory, in prehistory, Africa probably contributed more to human advancement than any other place. But again,
this isn't a racial thing. Thomas Sowell writes about this. He writes about it brilliantly, where he talks about the fact that there are no navigable rivers in Africa, the fact that there are no draft animals, so it was harder to build a civilization. The weather probably had a lot to do with it. Cold countries have a tendency to become more higher civilizations because they have to defend themselves from the weather. You know, whether it has anything to do with race,
I have no clue. All I know is that every time people get out of the places where they are oppressed or where the systems are dysfunctional, when they come to places like America, they rise. That's all I know. I think a lot of this is just culture. And that's why I think it's so important to defend American culture and to keep American culture intact. And that's why this thing about immigration,
basically we have no borders. We have no borders. Millions of people are pouring over our borders and the Democrats sit there pro-faced and say, what, are you a bigot? And what's really interesting about this, this is what drove me crazy about Ken Burns. I always, I find his stuff just stultifying. His documentary is just stultifying. It's, oh, he's so brilliant. He's so brilliant. Well, he's obviously a shallow pretender because he goes on and he's talking about this thing that happened on Martha's Vineyard where they just basically were called out for their virtue signaling and they were humiliated. Now everybody's covering up for them,
but they were obviously humiliated. And Burns goes on and he's on CNN and the host says something about, yeah, it's kind of like the Holocaust, isn't it? Because Burns has made a documentary in which he blames America for not taking in the Jews, Basically saying, this is why we must take in people from South America.
If we don't do it, we're being just like the evil people of the Holocaust.
And Burns basically agrees.
And this is what he says about DeSantis' political game of shipping the illegals to the places where they said they would be welcome.
This is cut six.
It's basically saying that you can use a human life that is as valuable as yours or mine or Lynn's, and to put it in a position of becoming a political pawn in somebody's authoritarian game.
This is coming straight out of the authoritarian playbook.
This is what's so disturbing about DeSantis is to use human beings, to weaponize human beings for a political purpose.
It's like when somebody disagrees with him in Florida, like the Walt Disney Company, he punishes them. Now, why this is so shallow, I mean, it's so, when I said he's so shallow as to be two-dimensional, it really is true. You know, there's a very famous book called Eichmann in Jerusalem by the philosopher Hannah Arendt. And,
you know, it's a problematical book because it turned out Eichmann was just pretending to be this kind of normal guy who got caught up in the machinery of Nazi Germany. In fact, he was a virulent anti-Semite. But she points out in this, that when the Nazis tried to deport Jews to other countries and the other countries didn't want them, the Nazis, who were eager to generalize, as Hannah Arendt, would say, see,
nobody likes the Jews. They're undesirables. That's why we had to kill them. Nobody liked them. Nobody liked the Jews. And they would say this in their trials as they were fighting for their lives. And Hannah Arendt said, it's not as though those tightly organized European nation states would have reacted any differently if any other group of foreigners had suddenly descended upon them in hordes,
penniless, passportless, unable to speak the language of the country. In other words, people don't want unbridled immigration because it throws off the population of the country. We in America are incredibly generous by letting people in if they can then be assimilated into our culture because our culture is why they're here. That's what they're coming for. We don't want to lose it. So to lie about this,
to lie about why people reacted as they did to this mass migration of peoples during the wars is just so false. And it's basically saying you're a bad person if you say, well, you know, this is a great country and we want to keep it a great country and we can let in a certain amount of immigrants. But after a while, it becomes a problem. You know, that's nuanced. That's just simple moral truth. It has nothing to do with compassion. It's very compassionate to let in some immigrants,
but it's not very compassionate to destroy the culture that they're coming to find. And, you know, of course, if you let people flood in, you can't just lift the people of America off and throw in a bunch of other people and say, oh, now be Americans. That's not the way it works. We have a history of tradition, things that have built up over time that have made our ideas real, that make this country what it is. And it's not about race. Anytime you start talking about race, in my opinion, you start to sound like an idiot. And that's why the Nazis were so quick to generalize, oh,
this is about race. And the Europeans would say, no, you know, we have these kind of tightly organized societies that cannot take in as many people as you're trying to dump off on us. You know, the problem with this, and this was another point I only had a chance to make briefly during the backstage, but it's so important, is, you know, we're being accused of being fascist. I love the fact that they're accusing Ben of being an extremist. Ben is like an Eisenhower Republican. And, you know, because they have become so extreme that they have to demonize the normal,
and Ben is certainly a normal conservative guy. They have to demonize the normal to make themselves look normal, which they're not. They're incredibly extreme. You're butchering children. You're extreme. And I've made the point that fascism, which what they call, they call us fascist, fascism is a reactionary philosophy. It is something that comes into play when the left has gone too far, almost every time. You know, in the Spanish Civil War, they talk about Franco and the fascists,
but Franco wasn't a fascist when he started. He became a fascist over time because he thought that's how he could gather people around him to fight the left. And so, you know, if people are overreacting, if people are becoming angrier than is healthy for them, that is because they have been lied about and lied to so often. That too is a kind of madness and a kind of madness on the left. And when you have people suing Donald Trump and criminalizing everything he does,
when you have people silencing anybody, the FBI agent who pointed out that they were just inventing all this white supremacy danger, he's been forcibly retired. When you have them demonizing everybody on the right, eventually the right is going to react. And yes, you will. You will get fascism. And what you want, this is why what I keep saying is what you want is, listen, I can live with freedom-loving left-wingers. I can live with freedom-loving left-wingers,
Rocky's Distance00:15:50
not the left-wingers who are in power today. And they're not just in power in the government. As I'm pointing out, they're in power in Hollywood. They're in power in the universities. They're in power throughout the culture. We let them take that power. We have to bear the burden of it, but we have to strike back. We have to build a culture of truth to fight back against them. It does no good to build a culture of right-wing lies to fight the left-wing lies. We have to build a culture of truth and compassion and reality in order to bring this country back to the freedom-loving country that it was and can be,
I'm sure, again. I don't know where you are, but where I am, fall has begun, not just officially, the weather is changing. That means stuff is going to get busy fast. And when you are traveling and when you're running around,
you want to rest easy with the protection of ring alarm. This is ringing those video doorbell guys that let you talk to anybody who comes to your door. Ring now makes an alarm. It's an award-winning home security system with available professional monitoring when you subscribe. And best of all,
it's really easy to install. I've done it. Ring didn't stop there. They've changed the home security game with Ring Alarm Pro. When it comes to protecting your home, you should go pro with Ring Alarm Pro. It's a whole home security system with available professional monitoring when you subscribe to Ring Protect Pro. Plus,
with a Ring Protect Pro subscription, you get professional monitoring for the ultimate peace of mind. If anything happens, professional monitoring will call and can request emergency services. This fall, whether you're across the country or across town, you will know everything at home is protected if you have got Ring Alarm. So protect your home by going pro with Ring Alarm Pro. Learn more at ring.com forward slash clavin. That's ring.com forward slash clavin. Anyone comes to your door,
look at your ring doorbell and say to them, like a code, say, how do you spell clavin? If they know, set off the alarm. You know, there's this funny ad on TV. I think it's an ad for DirecTV where a woman keeps turning between one of those housewives reality shows in a football game, and ultimately they blend together so that the housewives are playing football. It's pretty funny. But I had a similar experience watching the solemn funeral of Queen Elizabeth and then flashing to this movie on Amazon Prime called Samaritan starring Sylvester Stallone. It's,
You know, the movie gets a 40% from the critics, 73% from real people.
It's watchable.
It's a watchable picture, but it's a goofy, simple, simplistic little picture.
But it grabbed me because I thought it caught at something in the culture and something that has to do with why people are so stunned and so deeply in mourning over Queen Elizabeth and something that the left hates because of the subtext I was speaking about Before.
And the subtext of Samaritan is this search that I feel that the culture is in for what it means to be a good man.
And Sylvester Stallone has always understood what the culture was looking for and what the elites hated.
And I want to explore that for a minute.
I want to talk again about the queen, the symbolic life that she was living, a life lived into its supernatural meaning. She embodied the nation. She embodied duty. She embodied faith, as opposed to a life lived into the self, like Edward VIII, her uncle, who abdicated the throne for the woman I love, and Megan Markle, who said,
I want to be me, me, me, right? The symbolic life is always sacrificial because you're sacrificing something of your own personal desires to incarnate an idea, maybe the idea of truth and beauty. And George Washington used his life. He gave up an empire to incarnate the idea of liberty. And you can see how powerful that is. George Washington shaped the first 200 years of this country. And it's only now that we're losing touch with who he was and what he did. And I write about in the truth and beauty,
I wrote about that Jesus, his life was the metaphor for God. It was the incarnation of God in life so that everything he did had meaning,
but was also itself. Shakespeare writes about this in the wonderful scene in Henry V when he's waiting on the night before Agincourt. He's outnumbered. He's going to be slaughtered. Everybody's going to die. And he realizes that all this responsibility falls on his shoulders while his soldiers are asleep. And his faith is shaken. And he starts to say,
what makes a king, all it is, is ceremony. Here's a brief clip from the great Kenneth Browning film 20. Let us our lives, our souls, our debts, our careful wives, our children, and our sins lay on the king. We must bear all. Oh, hard condition. Twin born with greatness,
subject to the breath of every fool. What infinite heart's ease must kings neglect that private men enjoy? And what have kings that privates have not too? Save ceremony. And what art thou,
thou idle ceremony? What drinks thou oft instead of homage, sweet but poisoned flattery? Oh, be sick, great greatness, and bid thy ceremony give thee cure. So Henry V here is a great movie, by the way, one of the best. Henry V here is losing faith. He's afraid, you know, his people are going to be wiped out. He's outnumbered. And he says, all of this is just ceremony. That's where, you know, the ceremony flatters me and everybody thinks I'm the king. So all the responsibility of the king falls on my shoulders. But of course,
by the end of the play, he has lived into that ceremony. He has lived into the image of the great king and becomes a great king by doing that. So the artist understands that, you know, this has this, that there is a meaning there and understands that wonderful human moment where he goes out to give his soldiers a little touch of Harry in the night and realizes that he's alone, that they are sleeping soundly, but he is awake waiting for what goes on. So you hear all these people saying, well,
why should we Americans care about Queen Elizabeth? We hate monarchy. We overthrew the monarchy, and that is right. But the American idea does not dismiss the fact that people can live symbolic lives, can live into the meaning of life rather into the flesh of life. That doesn't dismiss that. What it does is it says that everyone can do this. This is the famous scene from Huck Finn that I'm constantly quoting,
where Huck Finn says he's willing to go to hell to free his friend Jim from slavery because of love. And that is Huck Finn, this little nobody, little tramp, essentially, embodying something so noble that it is just incredibly dramatic. And this is where we get the tragedy, 1949, by Arthur Miller, The Death of a Salesman. It's about a not very nice guy, a kind of low-level salesman, traveling salesman,
who cheats on his wife, and he's not a noble person, and he starts to go a little bit crazy, and he's going to lose his position. And his wife, in one of the great speeches in American theater, a speech that moves me to tears every time I hear it, says, you know, He matters.
I know he's a nobody, but he matters himself.
Here's this famous speech from Death Of The Salesman, Cut 21.
I don't say he's a great man.
Willie Loman never made a lot of money.
His name was never in the papers.
He's not the finest character that ever was.
But he's a human being.
And a terrible thing is happening.
So attention must be paid.
He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog.
Attention.
Attention must finally be paid to such a person.
That famous line, attention must be paid to such a person, is basically saying, I'm writing a tragedy about a person who's not a king, because every person has this dignity.
It's the essential, essential Christian idea. And this is the idea that the left hates because they hate every person. They want the elites to be in charge of everything. They despise you. They despise everybody who disagrees with them. And this is why Sylvester Stallone is an actually important figure in the American cinema. He's easy to make fun of because of that voice when he talks that voice,
but he's actually a talented writer, an intelligent man. And in 1976, he made the picture Rocky, right? Now it's a classic picture. And the famous scene, he's going to fight this kind of Muhammad Ali character, a knockoff Apollo Creed. And he realizes that he's not good enough to beat him. He's not good enough. He's not going to win. He's going to get the crap beat out of him because Apollo Creed is a great, great fighter, and he's just a paluka from the streets. And he goes to Adrian,
His girlfriend, and he tells her that even though he can't win, he can do something.
And here's that speech, Cut 22.
It really don't matter if I lose this fight.
It really don't matter if this guy opens my head either.
Because all I want to do is go to distance.
Nobody's ever gone the distance with Creed.
And if I can go that distance, you see, that bell rings, and I'm still standing.
I'm going to know for the first time in my life, see? I weren't just another bum from the neighborhood. So the famous line from the picture is he goes the distance. If he can go the distance, then his life has meaning. He's not just somebody. He represents something. He represents endurance. He represents the strength of the ordinary man. He represents the courage of the ordinary man. And of course,
the New York Times, Vincent Camby, was the snooty reviewer for the New York Times, and he hated this picture. And he said, he says, by making the Alley-like fighter such a dope, the film explores areas of latent racism, of course. And we're asked to believe that Rocky is compassionate, interesting, even heroic, even though the character we see is simply an unconvincing actor imitating a lug. Well, big surprise. The people loved this film. They gave it, it won the Oscar, and Stallone won the Oscar. He was fantastic, and it made his life,
it made his career. He was doing sequels of it forever. And it did have something to do with race in the American sense of saying, yeah, you know, black people in this country have suffered, but everybody suffers. All God's children have problems,
right? And this guy has his dignity too. And we can't just say, oh, we're going to replace one with the other. We have to give that dignity to everybody. That's basically what he was saying. But the hatred that they had for Rocky was nothing compared to the hatred they had for Rambo. That started with a movie called First Blood by David Morrell,
a great guy and a great thriller writer. You heard when we had Terminalist author Jack Carr. He's listing the guys who made him a writer. One of them was David. And so the first Blood Rambo movie was based on David's novel. But then he made First Blood 2. And this was his reaction to the loss of America's loss in Vietnam and the attack on the people who fought in Vietnam,
who were called baby killers and the agents of fascism and all the rest of the stuff that the left always deals. And Stallone struck back again and basically said, no, they had dignity. In the sequel, Rambo's in prison for the stuff he did in the first movie. And his commanding officer comes to him and he says he wants him to go in and free the POWs, which was a big cause at the time that there were still people stuck overseas. And this is Rambo's response. He's in prison. This is his response,
Cut 23. The next time we meet, it'll be in Thailand with a special ops designate who launched the operation. Yes, sir. All clear? Yes. John, I want you to know that I did what I could to keep you out of here. Yeah. Sir, do we get to win this time? This time it's up to you. Great,
great line. Do we get to win this time? This time it's up to you. It's not up to the government. It's not going to be the government who retreats. The people, the soldiers, are going to do the job, the ordinary guy. And if that didn't drive the left crazy, the end of the movie did. There's nothing subtle about Stallone. Stallone knows exactly who he's talking to. He's not talking to the literary elites. He's not talking to the country club. He's not talking to the critics. He's talking to his audience,
the people. And so he just spells it out. This is the end of Rambo after he's absolutely decimated everything and freed the POWs, Cut 24. The war, everything that happened here may be wrong, but damn it, don't hate your country for it. Hey,
I die for it. And what is it you want? I want what they want. And every other guy who came over here has built his guts and gave everything he had,
once, for our country to love us as much as we love it. So he's telling you, basically, they love the country because it's a country of freedom, but you can't love freedom if you don't love the people who are going to be free. And that's the thing, and they hate him. And Vincent Camby, once again, just jumped on this picture, said it was bubble-headed, it was terrible. And the ultimate insult from the left,
it's always the ultimate insult from the left. He says to anyone who doesn't share the camera's adoration of Mr. Stallone's torso, this sort of behavior becomes so comic that Rambo turns into something of a camp classic. So if you like this movie, you're gay. That's always what, that is always, always the final insult from the left. If you don't like, if you admire manly individualism, you must be gay. Now, my point is simply that Stallone has made a career of understanding the meaning of lives that elites despise,
that he has made his career doing that. And can he be corny? Can he overdo it? Yes, he can. But still, still, it gives the people inspiration because it says you too can represent something, which is why I was so taken with this second-rate, third-rate film. I mean, Stallone is now an older guy. He's doing this film called Samaritan on Amazon Prime, and it's the story of two twins born with super strength. Here's a little bit of the trailer,
Cut 19. Let me start at the beginning. They were freakishly strong. They unintentionally hurt people. The residents of the town grew to fear the brothers. They waited until the family slept,
boarded up their home, and set it on fire. The parents were burned alive, but the twins were unscathed. Samaritan grew to fight for justice, to be a protector. Nimes is consumed by revenge, wanted the world to suffer as his parents had. Samaritan tried to contain his brother's fury. So Nimesis forged a powerful weapon,
a hammer that he poured all his hate and rage into. It was the only thing that could destroy Samaritan. Twin brothers, a good one and a bad one, fighting for the city. And the minute I saw this, I knew every beat of the story. Not because it was so corny, although it is kind of corny, but simply because I know that the culture is looking for an answer to this question. What is a good man? And the problem is we can't find that answer until we understand what is a good woman,
Rockauto.com And Beyond00:04:41
because a woman and a man become one flesh and a full person only when they come together. And the whole point is this monarchical idea that the king represents the nation becomes the American idea that each of us represents the nation. And so each of us has to find that meaning. It's that meaning that the left hates. Leftism is a materialist idea. It has been from the very beginning. It is the idea that there is no spirit in history. There are just material forces,
money being among them, but also power that are played off each other until full justice blossoms and we live in utopia. It's all a lie. It is all a lie. And even though, and Stallone understands this, and he's talking to each person, as good American artists have been doing from the beginning, saying, what will your life mean? What will you represent? You are the king. You are the king. Now give your life meaning. It's a beautiful message. And when we find the answer to that question, what a good man is,
the culture will come back. You know, there are so many makes and models of cars that when you need a part, you might sit there and whine and complain and women will find you just embarrassing. But if you just say,
I know, I'll go to rockauto.com, the women will come running. Just because you sound like that, just because you say rockauto.com, but also because it means you know you can get the parts you need without getting in your broken car and rolling downhill, hopefully finding a car parts store somewhere. No, you just go on your computer and go to rockauto.com and the parts are right there in their easy-to-use catalog. Not only are they right there, they're inexpensive. They're great,
great prices. The rockauto.com catalog is absolutely terrific and will give you the choice of brands you need and the specifications and prices you prefer. So go to rockauto.com today, get great prices and a great selection right there on your computer. Also get a date because you're saying rockauto.com. And if they say who sent you,
tell them it's Clavin and you got to say it the same way. Say Clay L-A-V-A-N. I don't know if you've been following the Crane and Company Fantasy Football League, but I'm proud to announce that I am currently undefeated at 2-0 and I'm tied for first place with Ben Shapiro. We're coming up on week three and I will be facing off with one of the Crane guys,
Blaine, who is currently 1-2. As of right now, Blaine is projected to beat me by four points, but Hot Gandalf is not going to lose. The prize of winning the full season is a beautiful golden leftist tears tumbler, but worse,
the loser of the league must attend a WNBA game and sit courtside for the full duration. Keep track with the Crane and Company Fantasy Football League by watching Crane and Company on weekdays at 7.30 a.m. Eastern and see who the unfortunate soul is that will be attending the WNBA game,
probably Walsh. Like a lot of Democrats who have switched party affiliations in the past few years, a lot of people have made the decision to switch from woke razor companies like Harry's to companies that actually stand for what they do. Like Jeremy's Razors, we keep winning and winning is a beautiful thing, which is why we want to encourage even more of it with the Jeremy's Razors contest for the car. Here's how it works. For every person you refer, whether they buy a Jeremy's Razors kit or a Daily Wire annual membership,
you both get points in the race to win the God Kings McLaren. That's right, it's a sports car so masculine, the ghost of Burt Reynolds shows up to high-five you for winning it. I just made that up. And if you refer enough people, that might just happen. And as someone with the most sophisticated audience on the Daily Wire, it would only be fitting if one of you were to win this thing. I mean, if you're listening to this show, you are morally deserving of winning the God Kings car. To sign up and start competing,
go to jeremy'srazors.com slash play. The race for the car ends on November 1st, so get in the competition today. See terms and conditions for complete details at jeremysrazors.com slash referral terms. The program is open only to legal U.S. residents residing in the U.S. or DC,
excluding residents of Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, and Puerto Rico and U.S. territories and possessions. 18 and older, you've got to be. Remember, friends don't let friends shave with woke razors. You know, every now and again, I get complaints that this show is a little soft. It's not the right way enough. So, I like to bring on Kurt Schlichter so you can see what happens to you if you go too far. Kurt is actually one of my favorite people. He's a senior columnist for Townhall.com,
The Fall and Rise of America00:14:55
a Los Angeles trial lawyer, a retired Army infantry colonel, and he's the author of Will Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America. Kurt, it is always incredibly dangerous to see you. How are you doing? Well, hi, Andrew. Wow. That's quite an introduction. I mean,
look, we're old, we're Breitbart OGs, man. We're old school school. It's always good to, it's always good to see. I wish you hadn't moved. I had to. The zombie apocalypse was just, I couldn't hit them in the head fast enough. Well, I'm a Los Angeles trial lawyer, so this is my natural habitat. This whole state was made for me to make money. So it's kind of like,
you know. So I want to read you a, you've heard this, but the audience may not have. I want to read a section of We'll Be Back and get you to expand on it a little bit. You say at the beginning of this book, a couple of decades ago, we were great, untouchable, indisputably more powerful than any other nation in human history. And yet today, America is broken, exhausted, morally bankrupt, and the citizens are at each other's throats. The choices we make in the coming years will determine whether we slide further down the slippery slope into chaos, conflict,
and perhaps even collapse. Alternatively, we can decide to make America great again, just like the Red Hat says. So, first of all, give me a summation of what you feel went wrong in these last couple decades. Well, look, look, like I, you know, I read at the beginning of my book, We'll Be Back, The Fall and Rise of America. And I have to say that over and over again. People at Regnery will release my family. And, you know,
I didn't realize until recently, and it's kind of bizarre, that I was physically present at the time and space of America's pinnacle. I was at 7th Corps headquarters in Desert Storm after we had executed a victory that if you're a military historian,
it's really on par with things that Caesar, Alexander, you know, that those guys did, that they pulled off Hannibal. I mean, it was just a massive, total annihilation of an enemy, a total destruction of an entire nation's massive military force in 100 hours. And at that point, America's unchallengeable. Russia basically threw in the towel. China said, gosh,
it's going to be what, 31 years until we can start really good, you know, and they'll have to have a senile old pervert for a president before we can compete with them. And I think it went to our head. I think we thought, oh, well, this is just the natural state of things. This just sort of happened. It didn't help that our institutions are run by essentially cultural trust fund babies, a bunch of people who didn't build anything, never really fed or fueled anyone,
didn't defend anything. They just got handed it because they went to Harvard. And of course, we all know the hardest state of Harvard is filling out your application. Because once you get in, you don't flunk out of Harvard. You can leave Harvard, but you get your credential, and then you're essentially done. So what have they been to the establishment? Aside from saying, you know, leftism, leftism,
what are the mistakes that we made that brought us down from that pinnacle to what is your description of us is right, chaos, conflict, and maybe collapse. I mean, that is true. I think, like I said, I think it went to our heads. I think we began to believe this was a natural state of man to live like Americans did. And of course, I had the advantage of living overseas. This ain't the natural state of man, of course, if you know anything about history. And of course, history began, you know,
when Obama was elected or 1619, take your pick. Nothing ever before happened that's interesting or important. You know, that civilizations grow and then they kind of become stale. And I think that's kind of what happened to us. The energy that was required to build a country,
the excitement of it. That's gone because now we're established. So we have a bunch of people who are not concerned with building, not concerned with actually doing their job, but preserving their power, prestige, and position. And I mean,
if you want to look at the classic guys to do that are the dispatch guys, the bulwark guys, right? These are credentialed folks. They had a nice power and position as the House conservatives. And they never actually did anything,
though. And lo and behold, something happened that has not happened to our institutions in a long time, accountability. People got sick of them and did something about it. They elected a guy named Donald Trump. And these guys went crazy because they were held accountable. That's the reaction we're seeing so much is so much as a reaction against accountability. A lot of it's snobbishness. These folks running our institutions look at us and go,
I can't believe these normal people are daring to criticize me. How dare they think that I have to answer to them? But that's, you know, that's the purpose of an elite. Elite, you get a lot of privileges. I don't mind you taking some big off the top, you know,
give them some cream. That's fine if you're doing a good job. If you're doing a good job, it's so true. You have a comment in this. I want to get to how we come back. But before that, you have a comment that you say, even if we do come back, even if we make it back,
we're going to be changed by what we're going through now. Describe that. How are we going to be changed? I think for a long time, the American people had the luxury of not participating as citizens because we had an elite that was actually doing an okay job. And,
you know, they certainly made mistakes. They certainly screwed some things up. But you did, but except for a couple of times in history, like right before the Civil War or right now, you didn't see a foundational challenge. You just saw problems and things were, you know, if a Democrat got elected in 1976, your taxes might go up. You know,
Nicaragua might turn red on a map. That was back when red was bad. But you didn't have to worry that some FBI agent was going to come to the door because you decided to go being part of a protest. So you could not participate. You could go to the Little League games,
grill your ribeyes, which you could afford at the time, drive your truck, your boat out to the lake because you can afford gas. Your life wasn't going to change that much. But this, what's going on now, these guys are about major, major change. They want to transform America. And hell, that includes transforming kids with surgery. I mean, 20 years ago, if somebody said,
your child has the delusion that he is really a she. So to treat that delusion, we're going to take a scalpel and slice his genitals off. They would throw a butterfly net around your head. Seriously,
Hitler wouldn't have done it. Hitler would have said, like, I'm sorry, Mr. Mengele, Dr. Mengele, you know, that's going too far. Look, we look back on, well, we, because we believe in history, look back on Rome. It's like Caligula and everything. Oh, he made his horse a console. Oh,
it's crazy. Romans. What do you think the Romans would do? He said, Yeah, in 2500 years, a child who tells his mom, Yeah, I'm really a girl. And the mom goes, Oh, okay, puts down her trader, Joe Chardonnay, takes him to the later gender clinic and has him freaking castrated. Yeah, yeah. The Romans go, What the hell? So, so what does the effect of the come back from this? But if we come back from this,
what's the effect going to be? You're talking about a trauma. I think we're well, the effect is going to be you can't sit out citizenship in it. Ah, okay. Because there is a, and right now it's ascendant. I don't think it will be for long. Uh, I think they have overstretched because these are these are people who want to transform the country, uh, the entire world actually,
into this bizarre progressive screen scheme, where, of course, they're on top, right? Have you ever met a communist who is like, Yeah, in the new revolution, I'm going to be the guy who picks up the garbage,
right? No, it's always the guy, yeah, I'm going to be uh supported in my poetry, right? Is it ever the guy, so it's about their power and prestige. I think we're going to toss these guys out. I think you're seeing that they have overstepped. You know, we got this impression that these guys are some sort of like Blofeldian geniuses and they're volcano layer stroke, and they're like white cat, right? But they're not smart and they're not accomplished. I mean, talk about walking into an ambush, what uh,
your own Matt Walsh is doing in Tennessee. And I keep coming to the gender thing because the gender thing is just, I think it sums up the moral, intellectual vacuity of these people and their absolute lack of wisdom. They're very,
some of them are very smart, but as I get older, you know, and I was sorry, you're a smart kid. Okay, that's part of the equation, but what about wisdom? And wisdom means understanding the ways of man and God. I think that's a good way to put it. And they aren't. So,
your book, your book will be back, but just by its title, The Fall and Rise of America, is kind of optimistic. What's your prescription? What do we do besides electing Republicans who historically have not been that great either? Electing the right guys is a tactical thing. That's part of what we have to do. What we have to do is first recognize the threat. Second of all,
say no. And that's starting to happen. People are recognizing the threat. And I think COVID was one of them. When your kid comes home muzzled and you're watching them do homework at home because they can't go to school because the unionized teacher is deathly afraid of a cold. And then you see on there,
you know, hey, if you're a white person, you're an oppressor, blah, which is like super confusing to those of us whose relatives fought for the union. But we'll leave that aside. People saw it. They became aware of it. I mean,
right today, as we record this, they're becoming aware. I lost 3% of my retirement today. 3% of all everything I've worked for for 57 years vanished in a puff of smoke today because of Democrat policies. That's the kind of thing that wakes you up. So you first is knowing what time it is. You get aware. Then you react. Part of it is voting for the right people. And part of it is the right people running. You know,
we saw the, and I think Mitch McConnell is a whole subject, but I think he's losing a step. He allowed this gun control thing to go through. Let me use that as an example. And of course, zero Republicans were allowed to vote, were elected to vote for gun control. But 15 of them voted for this gun control thing. 30 would have done it 10 years ago. We are slowly getting a based political base in the Republican Party. You have guys like Blake Masters,
JD Vance. I mean, I had a chance to talk to Dr. Oz. He's getting aware. I mean, this was a normal Republican back in the day. He's becoming aware of what's going on now, too. And he's getting harder. So that's part of the thing. And it's manifesting. It manifests in Virginia, where a blue state elected a fairly moderate,
but determined Republican in the form of Glenn Young. You see parents, you know, these terrorists daring to participate in democracy, which I was, I'm confused because I was told our democracy is important, but another tangent. They're showing up at school boards saying no. I am thrilled with the change in Latinx Americans. Hispanic Americans are rejecting the Democrats. And you remember,
You remember the coming Democrat majority, Roy Texerreira's book, where he said, hey, you know, Hispanics are going to join the Democrat Party.
Republicans will never get elected again.
But the underlying assumption is that they want to be essentially serfs taking scraps from rich liberals' tables.
And that's not who they are.
These are faith, family and flag folks who want to build their own business.
You're from LA.
Did you ever see a construction company that wasn't like Gonzalez Construction?
No, it's hugely hardworking, entrepreneurial people.
Hugely work, hardworking, entrepreneurial people should be the base of the Republican Party.
They are a natural thing, and they are coming. So these are indicators. But here's the biggest thing why I think we're going to come back. You only got 30 seconds. Can you? I can't see losing to these unaccomplished dorks. I cannot see being beaten by these weirdos, losers, and mutations. I can't see it. Yeah. Yeah. Kurt, it's always good to see you. The book is, we'll be back, The Fall and Rise of America. You've also got another one of your spy novels coming out,
Inferno. You're on. I'd like to see a hardware. When is it? October 15th. So the people who go on to pre-order A Strange Habit of Mind can actually pre-order Inferno at the same time. Look for Kurt Schlichter in townhall.com and look for his book,
We'll Be Back and Inferno coming up. Kurt, it's always great to see you. Come this way and we'll have a drink. Excellent. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you. All right. Thanks a lot. All right. As you know, we now have a system where we have the clavenless week begins for those of you who don't subscribe. And then we have a little bit of a subscriber's block to just keep it. It's like giving you oxygen to keep you alive before all the air is sucked out of the room and you're left with clavenless darkness. But before all that,
Believing in Miracles00:04:38
no matter whether you subscribe or not, we're going to solve all your problems with the mailbag. How would you say your mental focus is? It's focused. Yeah. All right. Now we've gone way beyond. This is getting esoteric. All right,
from Ava, Mr. Claven, I am 21 years old and a new Christian. I'm really struggling with what it means to have faith in God. I look online, I talk to others in my church. I get the answer that you have to have faith in Jesus and that to have faith in Jesus is to believe he was the Son of God, that he performed miracles on earth, that he died for our sins. However, it seems very difficult, if not impossible, for me to cultivate that kind of belief in myself. And I have been altogether unsuccessful in changing my innate feeling that such a God does not exist. I have a feeling, however,
that the Bible's construct of faith goes beyond mere belief in God, but encompasses more. What inspired me to write this email was listening to an older conversation you had with Jordan Peterson, in which he says something to the effect of, to have faith in something is not to believe it exists, but to bet your life on it. This idea of faith makes much more sense to me than the idea that one must just wholeheartedly believe in the existence of God and what he's done. After all, Satan believes in God, doesn't he? Anyway, I was wondering if you have any words of wisdom for me,
or maybe even better because of the limited amount of time you have to answer questions, if you have any book recommendations which would help me sort this out. Thank you so much for your help. You know, yeah, Jordan and I are in different places when it comes to faith. I mean, he talks about betting your life on it and acting as if you believe, but I think that he's still held back by what I would call intellectual pride, which is the idea that we have to, that our feelings have something to do with whether God exists,
and they don't. You bet your life on it because it's real. And by betting your life on it, you find out that it's real. So, you know, the old expression, seeing is believing. In religion, you find believing is seeing, that when you believe in something, you begin to see it. And so,
you know, the argument about whether faith or works justifies you has always been a little bit meaningless to me because if you have faith in something, you act as if it were there. You don't step off the edge of a building because you believe in gravity and you live your life in a certain way or you seek to become a certain kind of person because you have faith that God is actually there. I talk a lot,
and I've been talking a lot even on this episode about the symbolic life, living into the meaning of your life. And by that, the ultimate way of doing that is living into the meaning of yourself, of Ava, of what Ava, you think Ava was made to be, not what Ava is, not how her body feels, but what you think that person is that you haven't become yet, and living into that. And you can only do that if you have faith that you were made, that you are a made creature by someone with a plan for your life,
and that a plan that can be discovered in the Bible. So I know, I think what you're talking about is struggling with the idea of miracles. We know that miracles don't happen. Those of us who have faith in God know that miracles don't happen. And those who don't have faith in God believe that miracles don't happen. The only difference is we believe that miracles did happen,
that Jesus did come and do miraculous things. Now, I have seen miraculous things in my life that people said beforehand couldn't happen, and then they did happen. Then after they happen, they say, oh, the explanation is this, right? Because anything that happens in nature, anything that happens in real life, will happen in physical nature, and so it will have an explanation after the fact. It's only before it happens that it isn't possible at all. So I guess what I would say to you, you want books,
you should read obviously Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I think you should read The Great Good Thing, my own memoir, because it explains the process of reasoning by which I came to believe. But the thing is, you know, you live into what you believe, and as you live into it, you will find your belief grows more and more. And I think that that maybe is the way of combining what Jordan said with what I'm saying, is that when I became a Christian, I said to myself, if it turns out that it's all false or I become unrealistic,
I'll stop believing. But in fact, it made my life more realistic, and so I believed more and more. I hope that's helpful. From Patrick, he says, I really enjoyed listening to your show. I'm steadily finding you to be my favorite daily wire host. I was hoping to see if you would be so kind to rank your books or if you could point me in the direction to what you would consider a must-read of your works. Thanks,
Andrew. You know, I can't do that. You love your work like your children. But what you should do is probably read them backwards. Not all of them. If you come to a series, read the series forward. But start with When Christmas Comes and you can go back and read Werewolf Cop and maybe the Another Kingdom books,
Slowly Leaving Toxic Friends00:03:59
True Crime, Identity Man. Pick them up as you wish. I don't think, I'm not going to tell you there's a stinker in there. There are a couple I might have back to fix, but most of them I think are worth reading. So if you read them from the latest and go back earlier,
at least you'll get my latest stuff. From Radio Helomisclavan, I want to thank you for being such a positive influence in my life. You've truly changed my life for the better. I want to ask some advice about my friends. I'm a 32-year-old man who is married and has a beautiful two-year-old daughter. I also have a group of about seven lifelong friends of mine. We've been friends since high school and have always been very close. Over the past year,
I felt disconnected from my friends and, quite frankly, disinterested in spending time with them. They're diving further into alcohol and other recreational activities that don't align with my values. They're completely immersed in video games and continually make crude and disgusting jokes about race, women, and religion. These things are bothering me more than ever before. Maybe because I've changed. I'm a father and a Christian. I feel like a hypocrite spending time in that type of environment. At the same time,
I feel like a bad friend and too judgmental if I abandon them. Am I wrong for not wanting to be friends with them anymore? Any advice you could give would be greatly appreciated. You're not wrong. Obviously, they're boys and you're becoming a man. You know, you've become a man and they've remained boys. And so you've grown out of them. But listen, you don't have to say anything to them. You don't have to lecture them. You're not going to change them. If they come to you and ask your opinion,
then it might be powerful to give it to them. But in the meantime, what I would do is I would not just cut them off, but I would see them in circumstances when they're not going to be doing the kinds of things that you don't want to do, like during the daylight hours, say, hey, you know, I'm a father now. I've got to get home. And they'll make fun of you for that and they'll tell you you're whipped and whatever. Just laugh it off and do what you're going to do. Be a man. Let them continue to be boys. But if you see one of them for a cup of coffee,
you might have a better time with them. You don't have to make a dramatic effort to cut them off, but you've outgrown them and there's nothing wrong with moving on. Friendships live and die. Some friendships last a lifetime, some don't. And these obviously are way,
way beneath you. But again, it doesn't have to be a dramatic, I'm drawing a line in the sand, but you don't want to go out drinking with people who overdrink too much. It's for amateurs. You don't want to go out with people who are making racist and sexist remarks. That's just ugly stuff. So again,
you don't have to be dramatic about it. Just stick to your family. Do what you have to do. Be the man that you're becoming, which is a great, great thing and will make you incredibly happy in the long run. Trust me on that. And just leave them, slowly leave them behind. They'll drift away. Once they see that you're not drinking with them,
that's the biggest thing. If you don't get drunk with them, they'll stop inviting you after a while. And it'll just kind of die of its own free will. And if somebody says to you, what's going on? Why are you like this? You can quietly and politely and lovingly explain to them that this is not the way you want to live. From Ben,
oh great Gandalf of our day, last week you mentioned that you went through your crisis of stuff. You bought yourself a sports car. What sports car did you buy and why did you choose it? I'm answering this because I get, I was asked this a lot. It was a Beamer, it was a BMW, I think it was 330 was the number on it, 330M class. It was a convertible. And as I said, my wife ruined it because she wouldn't get in with a top down because it messed up her hair. So the only thing she's ever made worse in my life was that car because I love that car. And I had a couple of times, you know,
because I was going to LA all the time from Santa Barbara, which was about a 90-minute drive. And to drive 90 minutes with the top-down was just bliss. It was just bliss. Yeah, one more question. Not a lot of time. Brandon says, I have a question about Christianity. I'm plagued by doubts because everyone in all history thought that they had it right in terms of God and religion. The ancient Greeks thought they had it right,
Infinite Answers, One Truth00:00:54
and the modern Muslims believe the same. But it seems that I may be wrong as well. You know, I always get this question, too, that how can we believe in God when there's so many different versions of God? You know, it seems like two plus two is an infinite number of answers, but only one of them is right. And I think that we believe that this one is right. We don't have a problem with saying modern medicine is right, and when the Greeks, you know, talked about the humors,
they were wrong. We don't have a problem in thinking that our ideas have advanced. And I think the thing about Christianity is that it's so true that even though we may advance in our understanding of it and may change in our relationship to it, you know, it may become, we may have a different, more modern way of thinking about it, new words, new metaphors, and all that stuff. The truth just doesn't change. The truth remains the same. It doesn't seem like a good argument to me that a lot of people have answers, so how can my answer possibly be right? I think you think about it,