Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 1099 frames the "right-wing rise" as a backlash against globalist ideologies, from Italy’s Meloni (dismissed by Renzi and WSJ as neo-fascist) to climate panic—mocking Biden and Gates’ exaggerated hurricane claims while linking UN-driven energy control to authoritarianism. Emily Finley’s "democratism" critique exposes elites like Obama and Biden weaponizing democracy rhetoric to silence dissent, while FBI raids on pro-life activists (e.g., Mark Hauck’s armed 7 a.m. arrest under the FACE Act) reveal a politicized DOJ targeting peaceful protesters, with 53% viewing the FBI as Biden’s "Stasi." The episode ties these trends—from gender indoctrination to media silence on pro-life clinic arsons—to elite fear of populist resistance, framing conservative values as the last defense against state overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
With Hurricane Ian, a category holy crap storm, smashing into Florida, Democrats and other locusts on the amber waves of grain are warning Americans that if useless measures aren't quickly put in place to do nothing about climate change, we will soon be faced with an emergency situation in which hurricanes continue to strike the Gulf Coast as they have done every year in human memory.
According to green experts, Climate change has caused these hurricanes and other storms to intensify to exactly the same level they were at before, while there are now far more climate catastrophes reported than there were before climate catastrophes were reported.
As a result, whereas in the 1920s nearly half a million people were killed in climate-related disasters, last year that number rose dramatically to 7,000 people.
Now, of course, you might say that mathematically that's a 99% drop in climate-related deaths over the last 100 years, but that's where you would be wrong or right.
One of those.
On CNN, soon-to-be former primetime host Don Lemon tried to explain the danger to his audience before his audience had to leave the airport lounge to catch his connection to Denver.
Lemon said, quote, I grew up in Florida, and I'm making my very serious face, so I can say with complete certainty that these storms are getting worse.
In fact, I can pretty much say any garbage I want with complete certainty since no one's listening anymore anyway.
I'm not even sure these cameras are still on.
Why would they be?
Unquote.
Lemon then wept quietly until he was carried off the set to make room for his replacement, a life-size cardboard cutout of Brian Stelter, who was in turn replaced by one of those battery-operated monkeys that play the symbols and will host CNN's latest show, Reliable Battery-Operated Toys.
As the hurricane approached the coast, climate activist Al Gore delivered an impassioned speech to the hotel masseuse he was chasing around the room.
Gore said, quote, we must follow the science through a cartoon forest of the imagination into a gleaming city of make-believe.
Because if we fail to act soon, my most dire predictions will come true and the world will be destroyed 10 years ago.
Now, come to Papa, you little minks, and give me my special massage.
Unquote.
President and venal houseplant Joe Biden, speaking to a collection of mops in the broom closet he accidentally walked into, said, quote, my Inflation Reduction Act will make hurricanes a thing of the past as well as the present and future.
And while the Inflation Reduction Act will do nothing to reduce inflation, it will spend $369 billion on programs that will bring temperatures down by statistically zero sometime in the 22nd century.
We must funnel those huge subsidies to my cronies running green energy scams, and we must do it quickly before I forget what I was talking about.
Why, look at you.
Aren't you a pretty little girl?
Oh, wait, no, you're a mop.
Sorry.
But if you don't mind, I'd still like to sniff your hair, unquote.
Spurgy colonialist fat boy Bill Gates also responded to the hurricane in a speech to a large gathering of the Society of Men Who Haven't Been Prosecuted for What They Did Weffrey Epstein's Underage Women, or the SMHBPTDJEU, HBPTDJEU, a 501c3 charitable organization that raises money for bribes and assassinations.
Gates said, quote, we must act on climate change at once because my private jet is parked outside with the engines running and I've got to get home in time to transfer a billion dollars in stock to my foundation so I don't have to pay any taxes.
So like, follow the science or something and I'll see you later, unquote.
The calls to follow the science multiplied after the hurricane winds grew so strong they blew Dorothy's house from Kansas to the fictional land of Oz, or possibly the World Economic Forum, where she was surrounded by drunken dwarves in ridiculous costumes, or possibly the World Economic Forum, who danced around her in circles, singing in high-pitched voices, quote, follow, follow, follow, follow the science.
We hear it is a whiz of a whiz because of the wonderful things it does.
But deeper, deeper, deep, unquote.
And after all, if you can't trust imaginary drunken dwarves, sex criminals, and old men with dementia, then you can't trust climate change activists at all.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
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, hoorah.
All right, here we are once again, laughing our way through the fall of Western civilization.
I've got some really interesting things to talk about today.
A lot of the stuff we're seeing, the crazy reaction to Hurricane Ian, the transgender butchery, the FBI's corruption, the panic about Italy's new prime minister, they're all traceable back to one kind of idea.
And so we're going to talk about that idea.
We've got some very smart ladies to talk about with us.
Meg Basham is going to make her monthly appearance on the show.
And a lady I just discovered named Emily Finley, who's got some really important stuff to say on why democracy isn't democracy anymore.
This is a great time to subscribe the show.
Leave us a five-star review.
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Sam M says, as torturous as the Clavenless Week is on my psyche, I have survived most of this year by binge reading his back catalog of excellent thrillers and crime novels.
Now that I'm almost done with my reading marathon, I'm not sure how I'm going to survive next year.
I guess now seems about as good a time as any other to just die.
Protect With ExpressVPN00:07:12
Well, you could do that, or you could pre-order A Strange Habit of Mind, the sequel to When Christmas Comes.
I just signed, I was in New York this week, had a really busy week in New York.
I was with Eric Metaxas at Socrates in the City.
That was a great, great experience.
I went to the Manhattan Institute where they gave the first City Journal Awards to Bill Barr and Heather McDonald.
And then I headed down to Mysterious Bookshop where my publisher is and signed about 500 copies of A Strange Habit of Mind.
Go on their website if you want to find out how you can get one of those copies.
If you already pre-ordered a book, buy another one from them as well.
But if you've already pre-ordered a book and you want it signed, I'm putting up on my website.
It's not up there yet, but it will be up there soon, how to get it signed if you already pre-ordered it.
But please do that.
It's important.
The series is going to be absolutely great and it won't exist at all if you don't pre-order and buy the book.
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So on the show, obviously, we talk a lot about the culture, by which I don't mean just the arts, but the ways we behave, whether we go to church or not, whether we get married or not, whether we're faithful in our marriage.
We talk about the Overton window, the things that you're allowed to say and you can't say.
And we all remember Breitbart's favorite phrase, politics is downstream from culture.
And there are other people who point out, I think rightly, that culture is sometimes downstream from politics.
Like if you have the Obergfeld decision that says that gay marriages are right, you're going to, it's going to follow that you're going to get a lot of extremism, a lot of people suing guys who won't bake a cake for you or the transgender craziness is unleashed.
So that's politics having an effect on culture.
But at a moment like this, when an epoch is ending, and it's the post-World War II epoch is ending, the baby boom era is coming to an end, the Reagan era, they're all ending at once.
And a new epoch, which I'll well call the internet epoch, is seeking to come to life and to find a way.
There's a way in which politics and culture become one thing.
Politics becomes an outward expression of the sort of yearning of the human heart for a new way, a new life.
And these things happen from time to time, maybe once a century.
You get a moment like this where there's just going to be a shift in culture that will be expressed politically.
And so I want to discuss a bit of the cultural meaning of the politics we're seeing.
I've pointed out that I think that the culture of Europe from about 1500 to 1915 was the cultural high watermark of humankind.
I think whether you're talking about Mozart or Shakespeare or Michelangelo or the German philosophers to the founding of the United States, which also comes from Europe, especially Britain, Europe, in the midst of the usual human bloodshed and atrocity and all the wrong things, produced greater art and ideas than at any time since ancient Greece and definitely greater than ancient Greece because of the flow of Christianity into those ideas.
That culture died in the bloody convulsions that began in 1915 and ended in 1945, World War I and II, that destroyed that culture and it was over.
And a lifetime later, which is where we are now, the ramifications of the death of European culture are kind of becoming clear to all of us, not just to the human mind, but to the human heart.
It takes a lifetime.
It takes a lifetime before these catastrophic changes actually take effect in people's minds.
So it's not wrong to think, it is wrong to think we can throw that culture aside, just throw the past aside, throw aside everything we learned, and now we're so much wiser.
Now we're woke and we're going to just throw all that stuff away.
You have to keep the good things it gave us.
All the things that people say Western culture didn't do, like they say, well, it was racist, you know, there was slavery, there was atrocity, all those things are things we learned through Western culture, through European culture especially, that we wanted to move away from.
But you can't just throw out the past.
The past is where we came from, it's who we are, it's what we've learned, and you want to keep it.
Pope Benedict once wrote, Pope Benedict XVI once wrote, when memory is poisoned, mankind has likewise been poisoned.
I think we're seeing that on the left.
These people who say they're woke and all the things that came before are going to go away and we're going to invent a new world.
But it's not wrong to try to devise new ways forward to use the gifts you got from the past in the future.
And so when you have 30 years of war that destroys a culture, like 1915 to 1945 destroyed the great culture of Europe, nothing lasts forever, and this was its death.
It was its death throes.
You want to think, well, can something better happen than, for instance, these were wars of nation-states.
Is there something better than the nation-state?
Is there a global government that can deliver blessings not just to the winners in culture, not just to the best cultures, but to all mankind?
And it's not an idea without nobility.
I can understand that yearning for a kind of one world, peaceful existence that's not going to have the bloodshed that would also accompany the great culture of Europe.
What I think we're beginning to see now and why things are getting so ugly and desperate is that that idea, that global idea, that idea of global governance is a false direction.
It's another path to concentrated power.
The limited government of the U.S., the fact that we've had a legally limited government, has created the illusion that government is benign.
Governments are not benign.
The limits on government are benign and they make government seem benign.
Globalism is seeking to destroy those limitations for the supposed good of all mankind.
And we're seeing right now is a battle between this noble idea that makes people feel good, this noble dream that has gone wrong, and individual people and nations and religions and families suddenly saying, no, we don't want this.
You guys are not qualified to govern us without the strong limitations.
Ring's Alarm and Concentrated Power00:02:11
We can't have those limitations without the nation-state.
That's why Donald Trump was elected.
That was part of what people were saying with him and part of the great speech he made in Poland, reminding us that the nation-state is still the best vehicle for freedom we have.
And this idea of global power turns very quickly into a Potemkin village that masks oppression and blood.
And that battle is rising everywhere in almost everything we see.
Transgenderism and climate panic and the election in Italy that we just had and all these different things are actually woven together with this idea of trying to protect the idea of a global government, a global governance that simply is not going to work.
And what we see now is the right wing rising to say no.
We see it rising overseas.
It's going to be rising here soon, I'm pretty sure.
And so let's talk about the ways these things are bound together.
So I'm going to be all over the place this autumn.
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Why The Left Hates National Identity00:15:45
No ease.
I just make it look this easy.
So by now, I'm sure you've heard that Italy is expected to have a new conservative prime minister, Georgia Maloney, from the Brothers of Italy party.
The way it works, she's won 26% of the vote for her party, and another right-wing coalition has 44% of the vote, so she's expected to be the prime minister.
Now, Italy, like Europe in general, is having these economic problems, especially hugely high energy prices.
And our press is immediately saying, well, you know, that's because of Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
And Putin's invasion of Ukraine was wrong.
Putin's a bad guy.
We should make excuses for him or for what he's doing.
But the problem is this green energy push has put Europe in Putin's power.
It was Putin in the driver's seat, as Trump warned it would do to the UN in 2018.
And the Germans laughed at him.
Here's just a clip of Trump in 2018.
Reliance on a single foreign supplier can leave a nation vulnerable to extortion and intimidation.
That is why we congratulate European states such as Poland for leading the construction of a Baltic pipeline so that nations are not dependent on Russia to meet their energy needs.
Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.
The Germans snickered when he said that.
We didn't include that in the clip, but they were snickering to one another.
And notice that the countries that he praised, Poland, you know, these are the conservative countries that are pushing back against the EU, that won't take immigrants, won't have immigrants sweeping in, pushing back.
Hungary is pushing back against their, you know, trying to bring this transgender ideology and really child molestation into their schools.
And the EU is trying to punish them for that.
So here is Georgia Maloney, and she's speaking obviously Italian, and I'll just read the translation in case you're not watching.
This is about what we're doing here today.
Why is the family an enemy?
Why is the family so frightening?
There is a single answer to all these questions because it defines us, because it is our identity.
Because everything that defines us is now an enemy to those who would like us to no longer have an identity and to simply be perfect consumer slaves.
And so they attack national identity.
They attack religious identity.
They attack gender identity.
They attack family identity.
I can't define myself as Italian, Christian, woman, mother.
No.
I must be citizen X, gender X, parent one, parent two.
I must be a number.
Because when I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators.
The perfect consumer.
It's a really powerful idea that we're not just ourselves.
We are defined by our cohort.
We're defined by our families.
We're defined by our culture.
We're defined by our religion.
And they're trying to sweep all of that away.
And God, country, and family are her slogans, right?
Now, here's the reaction of America's news networks.
And by the way, this is the first, Italy's first female prime minister.
So you know if she were a leftist, what they would be talking about.
This is their first female prime minister.
If you listen really closely, these are all the networks reporting on this.
You might notice a slight similarity in the way her election is being reported.
Voters in Italy tomorrow appear poised to make a hard right turn.
The woman expected to become prime minister leads a party with roots in neo-fascism.
The hallmarks of Italian fascism, like this motto.
God, fatherland, and family.
A far-right political party whose roots go back to post-World War II neo-fascists.
Far-right political party whose roots go back to post-World War II neo-fascists.
Roots in Italy's post-war fascist movement.
Its roots in Italy's 20th century neo-fascist movement.
It's not like, you know, they just pass one script around.
It's like those three weird women in the Greek myths who have one eye and they pass it around.
That's our networks, our news networks.
They have this one eye in which they see everything from a left-wing perspective and they pass it around.
CNN has the former liberal prime minister of Italy, Matteo Renzi, on.
And this is an amazing clip.
This is actually an amazing clip because imagine this happening in America.
You actually can't.
So here's a liberal.
He opposes her.
And they ask him if she's a fascist.
And this is what he says.
Personally, frankly speaking, I was against Giorgia Maloney.
So I'm not the best friend that we grew up together in politics, but we were, we are, and will be a rival always.
At the same time, I think that is not a danger for Italian democracy.
She is my rival.
I'm a rival.
We will continue to fight each other.
But the ideas are now there is a risk of fascism in Italy is absolutely a fake news.
Fake news, yeah.
So here's the guy who says, I oppose her.
I stand, I'm against everything she's for.
She's a conservative.
I'm a liberal.
She's not a fascist.
The Wall Street Journal in their editorial page says, Miss Maloney is a career politician.
She's been vocal in defending parliament's prerogatives against encroachments by the executive branch, which is the opposite of fascism, obviously.
She owes her victory, at least in part, to opposing the government's management of the COVID-19 pandemic, which included draconian lockdowns, the most authoritarian policy Italians experienced in generations since World War II.
She is not a fascist.
She is a member of the NAF party, not a fascist, elected by people who were reacting to the oppression of experts, right, which went all throughout Europe and the United States and many states in the United States.
Now, obviously, you may recognize the way she's being treated as the same way we are being treated here, right?
I mean, those of us who believe in freedom, who believe in individual freedom, who believe in religious freedom, who believe that people should be able to train their own children in matters of sexuality and morality, that teachers who haven't really taught our children how to read very well should not be going in there and showing them, you know, talking about their sexuality, should not be having gender, cross-dressing and transgender shows in front of these little kids.
All of us are being called, well, here's a Grabian montage of the way we are being talked about in the press.
And this is not just the left-wing press.
This is the press in general, Cut 3.
This means war.
That is where we are.
We are at war with these people.
These folks are evil.
There is an ultra-right MAGA contention in this country that wants to overthrow the U.S. government.
It is a danger to our democracy.
It is a danger to our way of life.
The MAGA movement is a threat.
The extremists that we're dealing with every single day, we've got to kill and confront that movement.
Clearly, you know, this is a literally call to arms.
Obviously, Republicans, I think, are the biggest threat to democracy.
We don't separate right-wing extremists and the Republican Party anymore.
I see this as a party, a MAGA party that no longer is confident that they can win elections with votes.
And so now they're seeking to enact their political will through violence.
This is literally what conservative white folks do when they don't get their way.
They turn violent.
Today's GOP is no longer a political movement.
It is a fascist movement.
So we're going to talk to Megan Basham about some of the FBI's actions and who is the fascist here.
And we're going to speak to Emily Finley about why democracy is threatened by people voting, why these people keep saying that democracy is threatened by people voting.
She has a really, really interesting take on this.
But this is not just rhetoric.
This is not just rhetoric.
In North Dakota, a man named Shannon Brandt, 41 years old, got into an argument with an 18-year-old boy, Kayler Ellingson, at some kind of street fair.
And Brandt decided that Ellingson was part of what he called an extremist Republican group, got in his car and ran the boy down with his car and killed him under the influence of alcohol, apparently.
Now, I want you to remember when we're talking about this, he ran this boy down and killed him.
This is an 18-year-old boy.
I want you to remember Charlottesville in 2017.
A right-winger ran his car into a left-wing protest and killed one person and injured many people, went to prison for life, as he well deserved.
And there followed the great canard that Trump said there were good people on both sides when he was talking about other people who were discussing whether a statue should be legally taken down or not.
He was not talking about these people.
And that became a canard that Joe Biden still spreads that lie.
This guy, Brandt, who ran this boy down, was released on $50,000 of bail, right?
And so, of course, the media was outraged.
No, the media was not outraged.
According to newsbusters, MRC newsbusters, since September 18th, the morning and evening shows on the networks as well as MSNBC have been silent on this act of political violence.
CNN covered it briefly on Friday's new day for one minute and 45 seconds.
And according to a search of CNNCom, the online version of the liberal cable network allowed just one story.
You know, this is real violence being caused by real rhetoric, or at least let's just say it's not being helped by real rhetoric and silenced, erased.
This boy wasn't just killed.
He was erased by the press, right?
This is how the left regards the ideas of God, country, and family.
Because let's face it, that's what we're talking about freedom.
We're talking about we want to be free.
We want to worship our God.
We want to follow our morals.
We want to teach our children what we believe, not what some, you know, the claracy believe.
We want to have a country that's not governed by the UN, that's not governed by international panels and people who don't get elected like the EU are just installed.
We want our family to be our family.
We want our identities, as the new prime minister or presumed prime minister of Italy is saying.
Now, words like God, country, and family, they can be used to disguise evil things.
Any words like hope and change can be used to describe evil things.
But there's just no denying that the people who are against God and against the nation and against family are the people who locked us down for two years to keep us from catching cold and told us we were all going to die.
These are the people who want to butcher our children, who think it's absolutely fine if a 16-year-old says she thinks she's a boy to cut her breasts off, her healthy breasts.
I mean, these are the people who perform drag shows for these little children and pipe illegals into the country, incredibly lawless.
They're just this totally lawless thing to do.
These are the people who want us to panic about the climate.
So they got it because they got us into this energy situation in the first place, which is getting these people elected.
So what's so terrible if we're really talking about the freedom to worship God, which is in our Constitution, if we're really talking about our love of family, which is a standard of human life and certainly free life, if we're really talking about love of country where all these systems, these freedoms are preserved, why are we so afraid of this?
So I know this guy named John Fonte.
He is with the Hudson Institute.
And John is, he's a brilliant guy, and he knows more about political movements and their history than anyone I have ever met in my entire life.
I mean, it is just remarkable.
You can talk to, you can say any name any person that you know.
I was listening to this guy, I read a book by this guy, and he knows exactly the strains of where he is in the history of political movements.
So I asked him, I asked him, is this woman in Italy, is she a fascist?
And he said, no, what she did was she took over a party, which does have its roots in fascism, because it's easier to take a party over and maintain the party than it is to start a new party.
And then they banished all the bad guys, and now they are just a conservative party.
Now, the other thing about John Fonte, he's with the Hudson Institute, I think I mentioned that, is that he's kind of a visionary.
And you may not have heard of him.
And the reason, in fact, a colleague of his at the Hudson Institute just said, you know, a lot of people have heard of Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the book, The End of History.
But not as many people have heard about John Fonte.
And I said to, this was my pal, Mike Duran, I said to him, yeah, that is the way it works.
If you're wrong, you become famous.
If you're right, nobody wants to know.
That's the Cassandra syndrome.
So while Francis Fukuyama was writing his book about the end of history, John Fonte at the Hudson Institute said, he also wrote a book called Sovereignty or Submission.
Will Americans Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others?
And he said, Fukuyama is wrong.
Fukuyama's thesis was that the Cold War, with the Cold War coming to an end, the argument over governance has ended.
That's what he meant by the end of history.
It wasn't that history was going to end.
It was that certain ideas were now proved, that liberal democracy and free capitalist markets are the most advantageous systems.
The struggle is over.
We all agree this is the way it's going to go.
But in John's book, in Fonti's book, he said Fukuyama was wrong.
There is a new anti-democratic force rising, the force for global governance.
And he was among the first people to foresee that this is an anti-democratic force.
Here he is in a recent video he sent me discussing this at the Hudson Institute.
Why, what it is about global governance that makes it a force against democracy.
It's really post-liberal, but from a left point of view than from a right.
And it's post-democratic in the sense that decision-making is transferred from the parliaments or congresses of democratic nation states to trans in transnational or global institutions, to the European Union, the European Commission, or the International Criminal Court, or the World Trade Organization.
So in a sense, it's post-democratic.
It's actually post-national.
That is, the nation-state is now supposed to take a sort of a subordinate role to these global institutions.
And that means post-American.
It means post-Zionist and so on.
And it's even post-Western because Western leaders no longer talk about the West, but sort of a global civilization.
And they've sort of moved beyond it.
By post-I mean, of course, moving beyond.
So these ideas that we have, these ideas of freedom, these ideas that the individual matters, that God should be worshipped in the way that you see fit, that your children and your family is sacred, these don't just drop out of the air.
They may be part of nature, but they are enshrined in places by people.
They're enshrined by cultures.
And in our culture, that culture is protected by law, by written law in the Constitution.
Sense Of Idealism00:15:23
And it's that that they have to pry loose.
When they hear God, family, nation, they are hearing fascism because they're hearing that their governance, that global governance, that idea of global peace where we're all going to come together kumbaya, is going to be destroyed.
I mean, it's an idea that gives them a sense of virtue.
It gives them a sense of idealism.
It gives them a sense of hope.
It's the grand project that they're working on, and they don't understand why people are saying no.
And that's why a lot of times you hear people say, well, if we lose this election, democracy is finished.
And you go, wait, how can democracy be finished by an election?
That doesn't make any sense.
And we're going to talk about that and some more stuff that's related to this coming up.
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So one of the things you keep hearing from what John Fonte called these post-democratic globalists is you keep hearing that the people who oppose them are a threat to democracy and that weird paradox where they say if so-and-so wins the next election, democracy will be finished, as if the very fact that anyone is voting against them is a threat to democracy.
And I've always found that funny, but also kind of threatening and confusing.
The other day, I read a piece in the Wall Street Journal by Emily B. Finley.
The piece was called Democracy by and for the elites.
And as some of you know, I've had incredibly good fortune in bringing people on who I thought were extremely talented before other people knew them, including Jordan Peterson, Candace Owens, For My Sins, Michael Knowles, but even Ben, I kind of recognized before he was a big deal.
I knew he had the talent.
And when I read this article, I had that same little bell go off.
Emily Finley is the author of the new book called The Ideology of Democratism.
She holds a PhD in political theory from the Catholic University of America and has held postdoctoral appointments at Stanford and Princeton University.
Emily, thank you very much for coming on.
Thanks for having me, Andrew.
So your piece starts with this.
It says, the phrase a threat to American democracy is so commonplace these days that it hardly carries any meaning except that it encapsulates the reigning ideology of our time, an ideology so pervasive that it almost goes unnoticed.
It is like the air we breathe.
What is the reigning philosophy?
I call it democratism.
And it's just, as you say, it's this ideology about that has a pretense to democracy and to popular sovereignty.
But in fact, it's a ruling ideology that is being purveyed by the elites.
And it's by the elites and for the elites.
And so what I argue in that op-ed and what I explore more fully in my book is the idea that what we mean by democracy now or the way that it is used by the elites now does not necessarily indicate anything about popular rule.
And in fact, they can take some very anti-democratic measures, censorship, lockdowns, attempting to disenfranchise certain groups.
They can do all of this in the name of democracy because they have redefined democracy to mean something that's the opposite of democracy.
How do you make that mental transition except out of pure cynicism and power hunger?
I mean, is there a philosophy behind it?
Well, there's a long tradition in the West, I argue, and it starts really in full with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was an architect of the French Revolution, arguably.
His writings were so influential that Robespierre was quoting Rousseau.
And he puts forth this completely new understanding of democracy that goes against the classical idea of rule by the people.
For Rousseau, democracy means something entirely different.
He articulates this idea that there is a general will, which is an ideal of democracy that may or may not be expressed by the people.
And in fact, the general will can and often does go against what the people want.
And so Rousseau says there is a supreme legislator who must help enact this ideal general will, this ideal of democracy.
And so today we have many elites who like to play the role of the great legislator.
And again, there's a long tradition of this.
I argue that Thomas Jefferson was one of these who claimed that he was a champion of the everyman.
But then when it came down to it, he really believed that his countrymen needed to change in some fundamental ways.
They needed to be enlightened.
They needed to hold more progressive views.
He believed that the central government ought to help to shape the people in what he believed was a way toward this new progressive ideal.
Woodrow Wilson is another.
FDR, there are many, many thinkers who contribute to this ideology.
It's so pervasive.
In my book, I mention a Catholic thinker.
This is so far and wide that even the Catholic Church that was traditionally resistant to these ideas of Rousseau, even it has come under the influence of democratism and of this idea.
George W. Bush is one.
And I argue that Barack Obama and the current president is a democratist.
So just so I'm sure I understand this, what we on the right might call the narrative when we complain that the claracy and the movie industry and the academy and the news media have this narrative that even they think is what people believe and which they managed to convince the politicians who are surrounded by them is in fact what the people believe is kind of is kind of purposeful.
I mean, they don't mean to be lying.
They mean to be telling us what we would think if we were the people we should be.
Is that a fair description?
Exactly, exactly.
And so you heard so many times after the 2016 election that the people who voted for Trump were voting against their own best interest.
If only they knew better.
If only they were acting rationally, they would never have elected Trump is what we were told.
And so this plays right into the ideology of democratism because there is this assumption that there is an ideal will of the people.
And when the people are acting against that ideal, they're acting against their own best interest without even knowing it.
And this is what the democratists say.
And so I think that a charitable view is that the democratists don't even really quite realize what they are doing.
Because, again, this is so pervasive within Western thought.
It goes back to Rousseau, and it can be traced all the way to the present.
So that was actually my next question, though.
When Hillary Clinton, you know, she calls all these people deplorables.
And, you know, they now have Joe Biden's calling us semi-fascists.
And yet, if they win an election then, is what they're thinking, I mean, I know you can't speak for them, but do you believe that they're thinking along the lines that you're talking about, or they simply don't understand what they believe?
I mean, do they think, well, if they only knew what they're supposed to be, they would vote this way.
And since they didn't, they have done the wrong thing.
They have voted against democracy.
Is that a fair assessment?
Yeah, I think it is.
They have voted against democracy in the sense that democracy with a capital D has become an ideal, and it is complete with all sorts of assumptions about human nature, about the family, about sexuality, about the way that we ought to live in very fundamental ways.
Their beliefs play into that.
And so this democracy with a capital D is ahistorical, it's an ideal, and it's something that the, it's a way that the elites want the world to look, and they call it democracy.
But it's really not democracy if it doesn't have any meaningful input from the people.
You know, one of the writers you mentioned in your article was de Tocqueville.
And, you know, he had this habit of being right about everything.
He's a very, very strange visionary writer.
But he had this idea that ultimately our freedom and our democratic government would be reduced to what he called an immense and tutelary power.
I don't know if reduced is the right word, but it would be transformed into an immense and tutelary power.
Can you talk about that a little bit?
What was he trying to warn us about?
Why was he saying that was going to happen?
Tocqueville, he saw the American fetish around equality as something that would work to our detriment down the road, and that there would be the crushing of meritocracy and of merit in the name of equality as an idol that Americans worshipped.
And so in the name of that idol, we would not want to seem elitist and we would not want to elevate the true elites based on things like virtue and moral character.
And so there was this confused elevation of people who were, I mean, it sounds cynical, but out for power and out to take the reins from the people in the name of administrative efficiency.
And Tocqueville, he predicted this soft despotism that wasn't going to be the hard totalitarianism that we saw in the 20th century, but it was just going to be the enervation of the American people.
just wouldn't really care about rising to positions of leadership.
And so I think that's...
The guy was right about everything.
Yeah, very prescient.
We're talking to Emily B. Finley.
Her book is The Ideology of Democratism, which I'm really looking forward to reading, having read this brilliant article.
The other thing that I've been talking about today is the role of the family and specifically of women In the eyes of the globalists, the way the family sort of gets in the way of the globalist dream that they are going to bring this men's and tutelary power to fruition all around the world, we're watching in Iran as these incredibly brave women stand up to what is clearly an oppressive rule.
But at the same time, we're seeing here an attempt to sort of eliminate women, even eliminate women as a category, but certainly to take from parents, mothers, and fathers the right to teach their children what they believe and to pass on their culture and their morals to their children.
What is it about women that gets in the way of all this?
How are we supposed to feel about what I heard you recently refer to in the old term of women's liberation?
How are we supposed to feel about this?
Because obviously, as Americans, we want women to be fully enfranchised.
But at the same time, there does seem to be a problem here with who women are and the role they play.
Yeah, it's just like the word democracy.
It carries a lot of weight and it really plays to the imagination.
And so when we hear the need to liberate women, we think, well, of course, women should be liberated.
We don't want them to be oppressed.
But really, this idea of women's liberation from its inception with the Soviets, this was one of the first points of legislation with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1918 was to essentially try to legislate away the importance of the family.
And so we see that in all revolutionary movements.
It's one of the first things that's done is to remove the children from the care of their mother and father.
And that sounds extreme, but look today at the public school system.
Hey, for free, a school bus will come.
Pick up your kids, take them, keep them.
After school, they're there all the time.
And who's going to have more influence over the kids when they're there for 40, 50 hours a week or something for some children?
You or the children?
And so it's such a powerful tool of states, of the state, or of anyone seeking regime change is to break up the nuclear family, get the mother into the workplace, claim that that's her way of being liberated, to go work for a corporation for 40 hours a week and take her kids away from her and say that that is liberating her.
And then her kids are raised by something else.
They're raised by whatever the ruling ideology is in the free school system, the free government school system.
So how then, or those of us who love freedom and who love actual democracy and a democratic republic, how are we to regard these women in Iran who your heart just kind of leaps out toward them as they're tearing off their headscarfs and things like that.
And one of them was killed for violating the morals clauses.
And they can't go out without men, male escorts.
How are we supposed to approach the question of women in our society so that we both have the respect for them as full human beings in our system of rights, but also realize that maybe the differences between men and women are essential to our freedom?
Oh, that's such a huge question.
Yeah, of course, my heart goes out to the women in Iran.
Absolutely.
I feel so blessed to be an American and to have many choices as a woman that I wouldn't elsewhere in the world.
But I think that womanhood and femininity need to be embraced, and we need to have a return to embracing motherhood and understanding that these different biological roles, there's a reason for them.
And we can't simply try to legislate them away.
We can't even get rid of them through medical intervention, we're finding.
And I think that instead of trying to do battle with nature, we should find ways to embrace it and be supportive of motherhood and womanhood.
Razors, Warmer, and Existential Threats00:12:53
You know, it is interesting.
I mean, I couldn't help but wonder when I was reading your piece, you have these, you know, prestigious, you've had these prestigious positions at universities.
Are you persona non grata in the academy?
Or, I mean, how do you, how do you maneuver that?
Yeah, um, probably after this interview, I will be.
Yeah, anybody who talks to me is out of work for the rest of their lives.
The book, again, is The Ideology of Democratism.
Emily B. Finley, you write extremely well, and you obviously have a great command of your information.
I hope you will completely destroy your career by coming back and talking to me again.
Thanks.
I hope so.
It's been an honor.
It's been really nice to meet you.
Thanks.
Me too.
Thank you.
Another thing that's linked into this dream of global governance is climate panic.
You know, Hurricane Ian has hit Florida.
It's moving towards South Carolina as I'm speaking.
And I'm not belittling the storm.
The storm did a lot of damage.
There were some deaths.
But the coverage, you know, I used to be a radio newswriter, and I remember hurricanes coming into New York, and they literally came in and told us to scare people because it would keep them listening to the radio.
I remember once, one time, scaring people so much that I actually scared myself and had my wife taping up the windows.
And of course, the hurricane never arrived.
This is a bad hurricane, but that ethos is how you get some of the coverage you get.
This is a clip from 2016, Shepard Smith at Fox News reporting on Hurricane Matthew, which is a classic version of the way we cover hurricanes.
See this?
Melbourne, Daytona Beach, all the way up to Jacksonville.
This moves 20 miles to the west, and you and everyone you know are dead.
All of you.
Because you can't survive it.
It's not possible unless you're very, very lucky.
And your kids die too.
Thanks, Shep.
But look, it really is a storm.
And, you know, usually these storms, traditionally these storms, are moments when kind of politics is set aside.
The state realizes he needs FEMA federal aid.
The feds realize that they've got to take care of the people in the states because they're part of the country.
And usually there's some cooperation.
There has been some cooperation, but not from the press.
Not from the press.
This has got to be an opportunity to demonize DeSantis.
DeSantis with his pro-family laws, with his protecting the parents' rights to raise their own children, with his hitting back against the major corporations like Disney, with his standing up for the rule of law at the border.
They've got to try to demonize him about this.
And this was a great exchange that proves what a terrific politician this guy is as a journalist tries to make him look bad, Cut 11.
FEMA Administrator Priswell said today that she acknowledged concerns that Florida, as it was said, lacks response to the storm so far.
And that's all that give me a break.
That is nonsense.
Stop politicizing, okay?
Stop it.
We declared a state of emergency when this thing wasn't even formed.
We've had people in here.
You've had counties doing, they've done a lot of hard work.
And honestly, you're trying to attack me, I get, but like you're attacking these other people who've worked very hard.
And so that's just totally false.
I don't think we've ever, certainly since I've been governor, declared a state of emergency this early.
We made sure that we were very inclusive with it.
We said that there was a lot of uncertainty.
And we've worked to make sure the preparations that have been done and all this stuff, you talk to the people at the counties when they've needed something.
Stuff gets there very quickly because of what Kevin and his team have done.
That's great.
I love this guy.
He is really a boss.
He's doing a great job.
And doing the part of what a politician, a Republican politician has to do is he has to be able to bounce the press down the street like a basketball because they're corrupt and evil.
Now, the other one who got his crew cut caught in a ringer was Don Lemon.
These guys on a roll of viral humiliation, which is just making me laugh out loud.
Here he is with Jamie Rohn of the National Hurricane Center is explaining how the hurricane works, and Don has to try and tie it into climate change.
What effect does climate change have on this phenomenon that is happening now?
Because it seems these storms are intensifying.
That's the question.
I don't think you can link climate change to any one event.
On the whole, on the cumulative, climate change may be making storms worse, but to link it to any one event, I would caution against that.
Okay, well, listen, I grew up there, and these storms are intensifying.
Something is causing them to intensify.
Hey, don't give me your science, science man.
I grew up there, and I have a very serious face.
But the point is this.
The point is this, that there is a reason.
There is a reason this climate change is so.
Here's Biden discussing it, CUP 31.
Our commitment to tackling the climate crisis, which threatens all of us, we're seeing the consequences of climate change around the world very vividly, including in the United States right now.
And I know your nations feel it acutely.
And for you all, it's an existential threat.
Okay, it's not an existential threat.
You know, there is no science saying that there's no science saying that climate change is an existential threat.
It's getting warmer.
Human activity very likely has a role in its getting warmer.
Warmer temperatures will probably save lives because more people die of the cold than of the heat.
But there'll be a cost in restructuring things.
Like on Martha's Vineyard, they'll have to let the illegals back in so they can build a seawall.
But if you don't ruin economies by closing down their energy to be replaced with a kind of energy that we simply cannot create and do not have, there'll continue to be fewer climate deaths as there have been, as I said in the opening, over the last century, there have been many, many fewer climate deaths because we're richer and better prepared and better able to build infrastructure.
So what's it got to do with globalism?
Well, you heard what your president, I'm now calling him President-former Joe Biden because he's gone.
But President-former Joe Biden said that this is a global threat.
This is a threat to everybody, right?
So we all have to come together.
We all have to deal with this.
And you're seeing this a lot, this kind of call for the United Nations or some international body to take control and let the experts do what the experts do, which is screw things up.
So the communist prime minister of New Zealand, who had just draconian lockdowns in New Zealand, had people being arrested for protesting the vaccines, just was forcing things down people's throats.
She was at the UN saying the internet has to be controlled lest people should stop believing in this climate hoax.
As leaders, we're rightly concerned that even the most light touch approaches to disinformation could be misinterpreted as being hostile to the values of free speech that we value so highly.
But while I cannot tell you today what the answer is to this challenge, I can say with complete certainty that we cannot ignore it.
To do so poses an equal threat to the norms we all value.
After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble?
How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists?
How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology?
The weapons may be different, but the goals of those who perpetuate them is often the same.
To cause chaos and reduce the ability of others to defend themselves.
To disband communities.
To collapse the collective strength of countries who work together.
But we have an opportunity here to ensure that these particular weapons of war do not become an established part of warfare.
The internet is a weapon of war.
Information is a weapon of war.
Their information is information.
Your information is disinformation.
But most importantly, those questions.
How do we combat climate change if people don't believe it exists?
Well, convince people.
That's how you do it.
That's how Free Nations work, right?
You convince people.
You counter lies with truth.
They can't do that because they haven't got the truth on their side.
And what they want is that global governments, because then, believe me, once you give all your power over to them, all your freedom over to them, believe me, things are going to go great.
And meanwhile, you know, Joe Biden had this moment that you have to mention it.
He was at a conference on ending hunger and he was looking around for this Hunger Bill's sponsor, Congresswoman Jackie Walorski, cut six.
I want to thank all of you here for including bipartisan elected officials like Representative Governor, Senator Braun, Senator Booker, Representative Jackie, are you here?
Where's Jackie?
I didn't think she was supposed to be here.
All right, tragically, Jackie died, I think it was almost two months ago in a car accident.
Where's Jackie?
I think the thing is when you get that close to death, you can see through the veil.
But it actually does matter that we have this demented old man as the president because really, to these people, it doesn't matter who the president is because he's not supposed to have the power.
We're not supposed to have the power.
The power is supposed to be in some place like Davos or Brussels where the great and the good gather together to share their theories.
But you can tell the reason the rhetoric is ramping up, the reason the FBI is being corrupted, the reason people are being called names, the reason they're trying to force our children to become sexually demented is because they're afraid.
They're afraid of guys like DeSantis.
They're afraid of women like Georgia Maloney.
They're afraid of Liz Truss in England because she's bringing back Reaganomics and they're afraid it's going to work when what they're doing doesn't work.
They're afraid of Sweden, once the darling of socialism, now moving toward the right.
They're afraid of women because they uphold the family and because they uphold the lives of children and they're afraid of God because God stands up for the little guy.
And maybe most of all, they're afraid of you.
They're afraid of the people.
You're deplorable.
You're a fascist.
You're a Nazi.
You don't believe in climate change.
You want your boys to be manly, your girls to be womanly.
You think God has made you to be free.
And that gets in the way of their yearning, this noble dream they have that is falling apart around them.
The thing is, you cannot love freedom if you don't love the people who will be free.
They don't love you.
They hate you because they're afraid.
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So there's a Rasmussen poll has come out that basically says that 53% of Americans agree with Steve Bannon that the FBI is now Joe Biden's personal Stasi, his secret police.
The Trump raid at Mar-a-Lago, SWAT teams bursting in on conservatives when they could easily just be asked to come down and give themselves up.
The investigation of parents who are objecting to transgender and other ideology taught to their children.
All of this are giving even Democrats, even much fewer Democrats, but still a majority of Democrats, according to this Rasmussen poll, lost their trust in the FBI, which was once a model agency.
Mark Hauck's FBI Investigation00:13:18
So once a month, we love to have Megan Basham, our cultural reporter, come on who is doing just a great job reporting on the culture for the Daily Wire.
And today I wanted to talk to her about specifically the FBI coming down on pro-life people in the wake of Dobbs, because as we were talking before, part of internationalism, part of globalism is this attack on the family.
So Megan, it's great to see you.
Tell us what is going on with this because it really is kind of terrifying.
It is.
And thanks for having me.
I'm always here to bring the terrifying news.
That's what I do.
But it is.
It's deeply worrying.
I mean, I think what we're seeing here in a lot of different ways, as you mentioned, is a very politicized FBI, a very politicized DOJ.
And one significant piece of that is how the agency has been behaving in the wake of the Dobbs decision.
I think you could argue that we are seeing signs of retribution for not being happy with that decision, for threatening and intimidating pro-life activists and pro-life centers.
Now, the big headline this week, of course, was the Mark Hauck story.
And he is a pro-life activist in Pennsylvania.
And he does what's called sidewalk ministry.
He's a sidewalk counselor, meaning when people come into an abortion clinic, when women are entering an abortion clinic, he stands outside and offers to pray with them.
He offers them information.
He offers to walk them across the street to a crisis pregnancy center.
And everyone I spoke to, and I spoke to a number of people this week, describe Mark Hauck as a very gentle man.
He's a Catholic.
They say he prays the rosary out in front of this clinic, but certainly not somebody who is bombastic or threatening.
So in this specific case, what happened was Mark Hauck got into some sort of argument with a clinic volunteer.
And this clinic volunteer got in the face of Mark Hauck's son.
This is the Hauck family's version of what happened.
And he was screaming obscenities in the face of Mark Hauck's 12-year-old son.
One of those obscenities was he was telling the boy that his dad was a word for a homosexual slur, things like that.
To give you, basically, Ryan Marie Hauck, Hauk's wife, said these were things that I could not repeat.
So at that point, Mark Hauck, if you're not familiar with this story, I'm just going to recap really quick, shoved him away from his son, this 72-year-old clinic volunteer.
Either he fell down, he was pushed to the ground.
You know, obviously there are different versions of what happened here.
But what we do know, confirmed by the Philadelphia Police Department, is that he got a scrape on his arm.
How long ago?
This was last October, so a year ago.
This happened.
Yes.
And he got a scrape on his arm.
And the Philadelphia PD declined to pursue any charges with this.
A Philadelphia DA, a local DA, declined to pursue any case with this.
One can arguably see why.
At that point, this gentleman tried to file some sort of criminal claim, but he didn't bother showing up to the hearings.
So that was dismissed.
And then at some point, he must have contacted the FBI about a FACE violation.
And FACE stands for Federal Access to Reproductive Clinics.
And this was a law put in place during Bill Clinton's presidency.
So, you know, it's been around for a long time, but it really refers to people who are trying to block women from accessing either an abortion clinic or a crisis pregnancy or pro-life ministry would fall under this as well.
So at that point, what happens is that Mark Hauck is contacted by the FBI.
They say they are looking to, they notify him that he's the target of an investigation.
And Mark Hauck retains an attorney who I spoke to this week, a man named Matt Heffron, who is himself a former federal prosecutor.
So he knows how these things work and he contacts the FBI agency and says, look, he will make himself available for any questions.
In fact, the attorney said he did not hear back from the FBI and that alarmed him.
So he reached out more than once.
I think he said three times to try to let the FBI know we are happy to make Mark Hauck available for any questions you might have.
He didn't hear back from them.
And so then last week, a team of FBI agents showed up at the Hauck family home with, they said 25 to 30.
The FBI told Fox News, no, no, no, it was only 15.
Okay, only 15 armed FBI agents.
And they did admit, yes, weapons were drawn.
And they arrested Mark Hauck and carted him off at 7 a.m. in the morning.
That's amazing.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
That's kind of the encapsulation of what happened.
Yep.
Okay.
So, yeah.
So at that point, I spoke to Hauk's attorney.
And what he told me is that he sees this as the weaponization of that face act.
This appears to be a rather flagrant political statement that they want to punish people like Mark Hauck, who quite honestly is just a delightfully peaceful guy.
He prays the rosary on the sidewalk.
He talks to women and asks them if they'd like to go to the crisis pregnancy center across the street.
And so the only thing we can think of is that they want to send a message to the peaceful pro-lifers or anyone who disagrees with abortion.
So is this a general thing when he says this, when the attorney says this, is he referring to other cases or specifically to this?
I mean, this is pretty dramatic.
Right.
And I think that's the most important point here is that this is not isolated.
So he mentioned to me that there are three other cases now that he's been contacted on and that they are seeing a ramp up of this across the country with pro-life activists.
I spoke to the executive director of a pro-life ministry in St. Paul also this week, who said that he has been doing this work since 1986.
And for the first time ever, one of his sidewalk counselors was approached by two FBI agents, again, with questions about a face violation.
So what he told me, again, they've never experienced this before, but they have noticed that these clinic volunteers have gotten very aggressive.
He said they've always kind of done this sort of thing, but they've gotten very aggressive about getting in the face of people on the sidewalk and trying to provoke a reaction.
And in our conversation, I kind of likened it to in a basketball game trying to draw the foul.
And then, you know, maybe you kind of flop on the ground or you try to make a big show so that you can claim there's some sort of violation here.
And so he felt like he had to send a note out to his people and say, look, whatever happens, don't engage with these guys.
Don't respond to any provocation.
Back off.
Don't get involved with them.
So that's a really important piece of this story.
And another important piece of this story is that we have also obviously seen a lot of news about attacks on pro-life agencies, on crisis pregnancy centers.
And these involve really dramatic acts, things like arson, firebombing, significant vandalism and threats.
Those have been going on since May.
There's a particular group known as Jane's Revenge.
She's really been involved with a lot of this.
And it's important to note that the DOJ has made zero arrests in those cases, even though they also fall under that FACE Act.
So guys like Mark Hauck, guys like this pro-life ministry in St. Paul, where they're just on the sidewalk offering to counsel people, they're being investigated.
But the groups that are firebombing and committing arson against pro-life centers, so far, no arrests, no charges.
You know, Miranda Devine, who has been doing a really good job covering some of this for the New York Post, has a story this week about former FBI agents talking about how they would never go in to an arrest with a SWAT team unless they fully expected a hail of bullets to come out.
Did you get to talk to Mark Hauck at all about what actually happened when these guys came into his house?
I didn't get a chance to talk to Mark Hauck, but again, I did talk to his attorney.
And this guy was really interesting because he was a former federal prosecutor.
He has been on the other side.
And he told me this is not normal.
This is not standard procedure.
Particularly as a former federal prosecutor who is proud of being with the Department of Justice, I find the thuggish behavior that we see now to be embarrassing.
There's no reason why the Department of Justice should have brought to such a low level that they are now a political, almost secret service of the Biden regime.
Wow.
All right.
So this is, you know, he's a lawyer.
He's going to bring the rhetoric, but still, it does seem like this across the board.
I mean, I can't remember.
The last time I remember this kind of behavior from the FBI, seriously, is back in the day when they were going after the Black Panthers, who were, in fact, a violent organization.
But still, their behavior in dealing with the Black Panthers was seriously and rightly questioned by the press.
The press in the form of Megan Basham seems to be questioning this, but I'm not seeing any kind of widespread horror at people being treated like this.
I mean, this guy is obviously not a gunman.
He's obviously not going to open fire.
You know, what the hell are they doing storming his house?
And what's the recourse?
Does anybody have any recourse?
Well, you know, I think that's the biggest issue is that this feels like a two-tiered system of justice.
Even if you feel that, okay, maybe some of these pro-life centers, we should take a look at what they're doing on the sidewalk and make sure they're not overstepping their bounds.
Okay, that's fine.
I disagree with that personally.
But if you say that, how can you argue we're not investigating the arson and firebombing?
Or if they are investigating, we're not hearing about it.
We're showing no results from that.
We're seeing no arrests from that.
And so what you do have, thankfully, are some organizations like the Thomas Moore Society, which is defending Mark Hauck.
They're defending a number of other cases.
And that other pro-life activist who I spoke to in St. Paul, who was very concerned, he's one of them.
And he's getting advice from the Thomas Moore Society and Liberty Council and some other conservative legal defense and not even just conservative, but constitutional legal defense.
We're very concerned about the politicization of the Department of Justice, of the FBI, of our authority figures.
And so I think that that is the big concern is that, look, we're not a republic if you have a king giving order to his minions and they're going after enemies.
That's not the rule of law.
But I remember, I mean, nobody said a word, except on the right, when Barack Obama called his attorney general, I'm sorry, when his attorney general said that he was his wingman.
He was the president's wingman when the attorney general was supposed to be independent.
Nobody even said a blip.
I mean, this has kind of been going on before Biden, too.
Well, and that's one of the things that Mark Heffron, the attorney, excuse me, Matt Heffron, the Thomas More Society attorney brought up was that he said, look, this is not actually new.
There was what he called sort of a secret abortion task force under Obama.
And that was news to me.
So that's another thing that I really want to look into.
But so he said it's not new, that that was going on, but he feels that it's much more organized and it's much more ramped up and much more overt than they saw during the Obama administration.
Like maybe there's a lack of fear now that they don't need to hide these things anymore.
They're just kind of doing it out in the open.
So that, if anything, is maybe the most concerning thing, knowing that there's no fear of public perception to just be doing this blatantly in front of the view of the electorate.
Catholic Responsibilities Clash00:11:29
You know, it is terrible.
You feel sometimes when you're ranting against the press, against the media, that it's a cliche and everybody rants against the media.
Nobody likes the media.
But the dishonest media that we have, the corrupt, ideologically corrupt media we have allows this to go on and they turn a blind eye.
Nobody is really covering this except for Fox News and us.
I mean, nobody is paying attention to this in the mainstream press, but it really is terrifying.
And people are seeing it.
If that Rasmussen poll is even close to correct, those are incredible numbers of distrust in what was once one of our most trusted law enforcement organizations.
Megan Basham, read her stuff at the Daily Wire.
It is absolutely terrific.
That was a great job, Megan.
Thank you so much for coming on with that.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
So for those of you who are not subscribers, the Clavenless Week is coming at you like a train comes at Pauline when she is tied to the tracks.
Soon you'll be gone.
But in the meantime, we do still have the mailbag coming up to solve all your problems.
And here it is.
Jackie, are you here?
Where's Jackie?
I think she was going to be here.
Yeah.
I knew that was going to be.
I guessed that one.
All right.
From Jeff and Shannon.
Dear Mr. Clavin of innumerable titles.
Recently, my wife and I had an interaction with our seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter about gender norms that left us feeling like we agreed on the answer but couldn't properly articulate it.
And we're eager to hear your insight.
Our kids are objectively wonderful and absolutely adore each other and nearly always playing together.
My son joins in the dress-up.
My daughter helps with his Legos.
I have no problem with my son playing dress-up, and I know he's still too young to have any ideas about sexuality.
So recently, we let them both pick out new backpacks for school, and my daughter immediately chose the unicorns prancing across the pastel landscape.
My son then picked a butterfly pattern, which was, if I had to guess, was targeted at girls.
My wife and I both felt that he would be better off with more traditional boy pattern backpack when he asked why.
Why is a pattern okay for girls but not for boys?
We couldn't quite find the words.
My mind went to not want him to be bullied.
And really, I don't want a gender-confused society to see him and potentially target him for indoctrination.
Is there a better answer?
Is it right to encourage little boys to pick masculine things or generally to encourage kids to conform to traditional gender norms?
In the end, we found other options, including a space-themed backpack that my son liked even more.
Thank you for sharing your perspective and wisdom, and we appreciate all you do.
Yeah, listen, you're absolutely right about this.
And no, you should not feel bad at all about encouraging your children to conform to traditional gender norms.
And of course, there's a difference between your understanding of what's going on and their understanding.
They're little kids.
They don't need to know all your reasoning about things.
And you're right to be worried about bullying and about targeting from these sick groomers who are now so pervasive in the teachers' unions.
You're absolutely right.
Right about it.
Listen, part of gender is performance.
There's no reason written on the stars why I wear a pair of pants and a girl wears a dress, right?
We perform our gender because we consider our gender a gift from God and also a responsibility.
We think that certain responsibilities come with being a man and a woman and that those responsibilities are good for us and good for one another and actually are a gift that we are given.
We understand that each person is going to have a personality which sometimes comes into conflict with that gift and with those responsibilities, but we believe that in the tension between our individuality and our roles, something creative happens.
And so we embrace the nature of the world that was created by God.
There's absolutely no reason why we should turn that aside except to let leftists destroy us.
So, you know, you did exactly the right thing with this backpack thing.
That is, you found something that he would like more that was more boyish.
You found a space-themed backpack that my son liked even more.
I remember Ben telling a story about his son liking his sister's sparkly shoes because they were sparkly and they were his big sisters.
But he said, why don't we go out and get some cowboy boots?
And the boy liked that even better.
The very smart thing to do to distract them into the thing that he is going to like better.
The other important thing is that you are a married couple and there is a dad and the dad has to be a role model for these things to the kid and also has to give your, you have to give your son time alone with dad to be a dad guy.
Children are looking for ways to be.
And when you have your sister and you're with her all the time, that's a wonderful thing.
It's a wonderful thing that they have a good relationship, but you don't want that to be his only example of a way to be.
You want the father to be very present and show things.
And there's nothing wrong with when a boy says, why do I do it this way?
You say, because that's the way we guys do it.
That's the way we guys do it.
We like to do it this way.
This is what we like.
And then he'll imitate that.
But you have to give him that.
That has to be in front of him.
He has to be able to see that.
So, you know, there's simply nothing wrong with saying, you know, in your deep dad voice, with saying, look, this is what we guys do.
We're guys.
We like this stuff.
We like to watch football.
We like to space stuff more than we like flower stuff.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
It is incredibly reassuring and empowering to live into your gender responsibilities and into the gift of your gender, which both your son and daughter have.
And you are definitely, it's definitely true that you want them to fit in with the other guys, and you don't want these crackpots and groomers and sickos who are also called teachers, to say, oh, there's one.
I got one that I'm going to pull out and encourage to be transgender, because that really is happening, and it really is messing people up, and it really is a dangerous thing.
So you shouldn't feel shy at all about encouraging gender norms, but you have to model them, and he has to have somebody to admire and look up to, namely you, to do that.
So you're lucky you're in a full marriage, not a broken marriage, and you have to take advantage of that and make sure you're present for that little boy, because it's dangerous out there.
From Richard Lord Clavin, you are a Protestant who values the liturgy and rituals of the historic church.
So am I.
I am an Anglican Catholic, which is a Catholic not connected or not dominated by the Roman church.
Why do Catholics so often belittle and demean Protestants as backward simpletons who think it's just me and Jesus and don't understand theology or church doctrine?
I often listen to Catholic radio and find the pride and vainglory of the host regarding anyone outside the Roman Catholic Church off-putting and unchrist-like.
Why the hostility?
Thank you for your unique and invaluable voice, and may God richly bless you.
Well, thank you for that.
Listen, I don't want to just call out the Catholics.
This is a problem across the board.
You know, I make a joke in my book, The Truth and Beauty, that sometimes I have Protestants and Catholics over, and I'm afraid to go inside and refresh the pretzel bowl because I'm afraid the 30 years' war is going to break out again because people are very passionate about these issues.
And I don't blame them.
I think it's important to know God and to know God truly and to not get lost in doctrines that are false.
But we have to trust to our friends and to our neighbors to find their own way and to God to speak to them.
And so the one thing I will say, and not some of my best friends are Catholics.
I think most of my best friends are Catholics and I love them to death.
But they do have a particular way of just assuming that if you follow the path, you will become a Catholic that sometimes makes you want to sneak up behind them and just give them a quick clap on the back of the head.
But Protestants are the same way.
You talk about the Virgin Mary and the perpetual virginity of Mary and they just go nuts.
It's like, oh my God, it's not in the Bible and it's not right and all this stuff.
And Catholics come back at you.
I wrote about this.
I don't believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary.
It's not in the gospel.
But I do understand the reasoning that makes Catholics say it.
And I totally respect it.
And it's very offensive to them that I don't believe in this.
I think the thing is to put Jesus first.
Whether you're a Catholic, I mean, this is, you know, Pope Benedict XVI said this too.
The relationship, I think John Paul II said it, the relationship between you and Jesus Christ is at the center of this thing.
And listen, you are not in charge of how God gets to people and brings them to him.
You're not in charge of that.
So you may think it's a great thing.
You know, I was talking about this at a dinner I was at the other day, and somebody asked me about Jordan Peterson.
And I said, you know, maybe God is using Jordan Peterson in the role that he's in, in the place that he's at to bring people to him.
And, you know, when Jordan stands before the throne, you know, he may get a pad of paper and says, these are the things you got wrong, but you did the job we sent you to do.
And thanks very much.
And welcome home.
You know, I mean, we just don't know.
We don't know how God is using us and God is using different ways to bring us to him.
And we should be just a lot less certain and a lot less, what's the word I'm looking for, a lot less aggressive in pushing our beliefs on other people.
But it's not just, it's not fair to say it's just Catholics.
Catholics and Protestants have been going at it since 1500.
And I assume they're going to continue to do it.
We should do it with a little bit more grace.
All right, I got one more here from Samuel.
Frustrated and enraged by the lies, the lust for power of our leftist elites, their shrill virtue signaling as they proceed with a gross disregard for the consequences of their actions on the lives of their fellow human beings is especially grating.
The dragon in me wants to see their arrogance and smugness replaced with fear and suffering.
How do I, and anyone else who feels the way I do, fight and defeat their evil without succumbing to hatred and desire for vengeance myself?
Thank you.
You know, really, it's a really good point.
I always say anger is the devil's cocaine, which doesn't mean that there's no such thing as righteous anger.
It means that anger is not righteousness and it is very addictive because it makes you feel virtuous and it makes you feel powerful and it makes you feel like you are, you know, in the war for the good and everybody else is evil.
If this is the effect that politics has on you, get out of politics.
Stop paying attention.
Stop reading the newspaper.
Take up gardening.
Do something else because this is not the way you are to live.
This is the world.
This is what the world is like.
The people in charge are almost always the worst people in any country.
In America, briefly, that was untrue, and sometimes hopefully it will be untrue again because of the limits in government so that people who love power go off and do other things.
But mostly governments and countries are run by terrible people.
And mostly political people are not interested in the truth.
They're interested in winning.
And this is the way it is.
This is what politics is.
And if you can't deal with that without being angry and without understanding that this is the world you're in, don't do it because you should not live your life in rage and looking for vengeance.
You know, you've got to live with a sense of humor.
Life is very sad.
And if this day is a good day, you've got to live with joy in that day.
You know, fight your fight, but fight it as a fight of ideas, not as a fight between people.
Fight it, you know, bad ideas with good ideas.
Don't think that you're fighting good people against bad people because none of us is righteous.
No, not one.
And you do not want to live your life in anger.
We stop there for those of you who are not subscribers, you poor, poor fools, the Clavenless Week is upon you.