Ep. 1104 skewers Emily Oster’s COVID-era "forgiveness" plea as delusional, contrasting elite Chardonnay woes with economic collapse and vaccine mandates while mocking drag debates as culture-war distractions. It slams Democrats for weaponizing Paul Pelosi’s assault to smear Republicans, exposing media hypocrisy in amplifying leftist narratives like Biden’s baseless "election denier" attacks. The episode frames the internet’s truth democratization as a threat to elite control, comparing it to Reformation-era heresy hunts, then pivots to election legitimacy, dismissing Russian interference claims while branding Hunter Biden’s laptop and lab-leak theories as suppressed truths. A theological detour ties Christian nationalism to moral decay, warning that secularism fuels extremism, before critiquing gender ideology as a "mass madness" and Halloween’s demonic risks—all while promoting Daily Wire Plus as a bulwark against cultural collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
There was a new article in the Atlantic magazine this week entitled, Let's Declare a Pandemic Amnesty, with the subtitle, We Need to Forgive One Another for What We Did and Said When We Were In the Dark About COVID.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, oh, Clavin, you hunky hurricane of hilarity, how do you manage to create these unbelievable, absurdist satires of elite thinking that make us laugh so hard?
We almost put down the torches with which we were going to burn down their corrupted institutions so we could roast marshmallows in the flames of their spurious expertise and then smear what's left of their supercilious lack of self-awareness on a graham cracker in order to make s'mores out of their criminal presumption, before devouring even the crumbs of their unearned sense of superiority, while we sing Michael Row, The Boat Ashore and other favorite campfire tunes.
At least I guess that's what you're thinking.
But no, in fact, I'm not making this up.
This article actually appeared in The Atlantic, written by Emily Oster, who to be fair is an economics professor at Brown University and so lives in a fathomless darkness of ignorance that you and I couldn't possibly comprehend.
But still, it is worth exploring her arguments before, you know, we relight our torches and continue on our way to the elite's corrupted institutions in a well-ordered, angry mob.
Professor Oster proposes that on the one hand, ordinary Americans should forgive government officials, so-called experts and cultural elites for destroying our economy, vaporizing our dreams, crushing small businesses, and locking us in our apartments while forcing underpaid, mostly minority workers to expose themselves to disease in order to deliver Amazon fresh luxuries to their country homes.
Then on the other hand, cultural elites and government experts will forgive ordinary Americans for being 10 minutes late delivering their Chardonnay and thus forcing them to rewind to the beginning of the Downton Abbey Marathon before sinking into their bubble bath with a glass of wine in order to endure the horrors of lockdown.
Professor Oster proposes that on one side, ordinary Americans should forgive the government experts and cultural elites for preventing us from visiting the hospital so that our grandmothers died alone crying out for the touch of a familiar hand.
Then on the other side, cultural elites and experts in the government will forgive ordinary Americans for all that whining about, oh, please, please don't let our grandmother die alone, which was really distracting when government officials were right in the middle of a Zoom call with Mark Zuckerface telling him to cancel the accounts of anyone who contradicted the science by telling the truth.
Professor Oster proposes that on the one hand, ordinary Americans should forgive the government and cultural elites for shredding our Constitution, shutting our churches, encouraging Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots, and destroying the careers of anyone who wouldn't take their untested vaccine.
Then on the other hand, the government and cultural elites will forgive ordinary Americans for pointing out that these so-called elites and experts are in fact the biggest collection of perfidious clowns to ever pour out of a Volkswagen.
And if they ever had any claim whatsoever to their positions of privilege and power, that claim has now been reduced to less than the fumes of a mosquito's belch by the vastness of their domineering incompetence.
A comment that really, really hurt the elites' feelings, especially after it turned out to be completely true.
Now, after we declare amnesty for the experts and the government officials and the cultural elites for forcing us to wear a mask and show proof of vaccination before going out to dinner while demanding that imaginary people be allowed to cast imaginary votes for an imaginary Joe Biden without even showing their imaginary ID,
maybe we should also grant the experts amnesty for that time they destroyed our energy independence and made us slaves to oil-rich tyrants because of a climate emergency that's every bit as unreal as the experts' expertise.
Then we can declare amnesty for that time.
The president called us fascists while he was having FBI SWAT teams raid our homes for disagreeing with him.
And how about we declare amnesty for cultural elites sending those drag queens into kindergartens to simulate sex acts?
Then in return, the elites can forgive us for calling them demonic deviant groomers just because they're grooming children to accept sexual deviance before butchering and drugging them to destroy the male and female images of God and remake them in the image of their own demonic evil.
Then finally, after we've all declared amnesty and everything on both sides is forgiven and forgotten, America can at last return to the things that matter, like burning down the elite's corrupted institutions and smearing their melted egos on our s'mores while singing, Michael, row the boat ashore.
Hallelujah.
Hooray For Today00:04:36
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey, life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
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 everything we hold dear.
Today we're going to talk about Paul Pelosi's fractured skull, Scary Brandon's final speech, and a bigger fight that actually goes beyond Tuesday's election, a fight I believe we're actually starting to win.
And also we're going to talk about the role of Jesus Christ in our politics.
Jesus will be on the show.
No, that's obviously a joke.
Please subscribe to the podcast.
Leave a five-star review.
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Subscribe to the YouTube channel.
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This is my personal Andrew Clavin YouTube channel where you will get exclusive material sent directly to your door.
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And when he leaves, most of your silverware will be gone.
And if you leave a comment that is really disgusting and racist and sexist and phobic, just phobic about everything, just like it's so phobic that you can't even leave your house without wearing several masks and actual an eye mask covering, we will read it on the show because that's basically fits right in with our attitude.
Today's comment is from Time My Shoe.
He says that Matt Walsh in his 20s would say, don't tase me, bro, where Clavin in his 20s would say, Edison's light bulb won't catch on.
That's actually untrue.
I told Edison that he was onto something right away.
In fact, not many people know this, but he actually got the idea from me because when I would have an idea, a little light bulb would appear above my head.
And he thought, I can use that.
So just setting the record straight.
Also, I want to thank you so much.
Today I found out that A Strange Habit of Mind, which I should put up here, I should put it up so you can see, A Strange Habit of Mind, the sequel to When Christmas Comes, made it onto the USA Today bestseller list.
This is a big deal.
It means that, you know, probably we'll get at least a third one and the series is really rolling.
And, you know, I don't want to say, listen, I don't want to say that, you know, if you haven't bought it yet, there are hundreds of thousands of you, literally, who haven't bought it yet.
And I don't know if we can put this on the New York Times list.
I don't know if they would put me on the New York Times list.
But I don't want to make you feel bad about it.
I just want you to think about, you know, your kids coming to you with those little spaniel, sad spaniel eyes, and saying to you, you know, what did you do during the culture war, Daddy?
You know, with your son, who now calls himself, you know, Harriet, coming in his pink dress and saying, you know, could things have turned out differently if you had fought the culture war?
You know, don't feel guilty or anything.
Just buy the book.
Strange Habit of Mind.
It's the sequel to When Christmas Comes, You Will Love It.
The guy, the series character, Cameron Winter, faces off against a social media billionaire who is canceling people in a very dangerous way.
I'm just going to read you very briefly some of the reviews, the five, sorry, over 100, close to 200, I think, five-star reviews.
Best book I've ever read, one says.
I'm not making these up.
It was impossible to put down Claven's Best.
WOW, just a fantastic book all the way around.
I had to go back and order the first in the series and can't wait for more to come.
And here's one I really like, a transcendent accomplishment.
If you like thrillers and spy novels as a general matter, this book will check every box in the genre, but the remarkable thing is that A Strange Habit of Mind transcends its genre and treats also of the soul of love, men and women, reality and illusion, the moral landscape, the world of letters, God, fathers and mothers, and the princes of this world, action and sorrow, the loss of things beyond the possibility of return.
This series must continue.
So again, just, you know, not to make you feel bad, just remember your son, Harriet, coming to you.
What did you do during the Culture War, Daddy?
All right.
So it's nasty.
Go buy the book and I'll stop picking on you.
I have been traveling so much and I'm going to keep traveling.
Autumn is like that.
So many things happen.
The kids go back to school and we travel around to see our families and loved ones for the holidays.
During this busy time of year, you may find yourself away from home more often than not.
Lies Exposed00:14:35
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All right, so Nancy Pelosi's 82-year-old husband, Paul, is out of the hospital.
I am truly glad to hear this.
As I'm sure you know, a crazy guy broke into his home.
The police in D.C. have, this is a San Francisco home, but the police in D.C. have cameras in the home, but they just weren't looking at him because Nancy Pelosi was in D.C. Crazy guy broke in, fractured 82-year-old Paul's skull with a hammer, but he's out of the hospital now.
There have been a lot, a lot on the right, a lot of absolutely cruel and heinous jokes about this very ugly event.
And as you might expect, my joke was the funniest one.
I was talking with some guys this week.
I was talking to, I don't know, Walsh and Knowles and Ben, Jay Crane was there.
And I said, you know, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like Paul Pelosi.
And while, yes, that is a hilarious joke, I want to make it clear that it is not a joke about Pelosi's injuries.
I'm actually serious about this.
I truly believe that everything in the world is funny except for other people's pain.
I try never to make jokes about other people's pain because you can make jokes about your own pain, but other people's pain is not funny.
And I seriously am against all kinds of political violence committed by insane Canadian nudists, child molesters, or whatever this guy was.
What I was joking about was this.
When the story came out, you know, Lunatic Breaks Into the Pelosi's San Francisco mansion.
And because the details were unclear and because the media lies to us all the time and they follow whatever lies the Democrats want to tell, they do it all the time, immediately people on the right started constructing alternative stories.
This was Paul's gay lover and he let him in and he picked him up on the San Francisco streets and the guy attacked him and all this stuff.
And what was funny about this, what actually was funny about this, is that the Democrats and the left, by which I mean the news media, because the news media are just their talking mouthpiece, like they're like the dummies that sit on their laps and move their mouths while the Democrats do the talking, they were absolutely horrified that right-wingers would make these baseless speculations while they were in the midst of making baseless speculations about right-wingers.
I mean, it was like, don't make up this stuff.
Well, we're lying about you.
You know, you're interrupting us while we're lying about you.
And, you know, it's just rude.
It is rude for you to start making up these stories while we're in the midst of accusing you of having something to do with this.
And remember, remember, this is the media, the media and the party, the left-wing, it's all one thing.
It's all one institution that said that Brett Kavanaugh was standing online at the gang rape party.
Remember that?
Oh, you want to, hey, Brett, you know, could you hurry over?
We're having a gang rape.
Oh, I'll be right there because I love beer, so I'm going to come.
They were actually reporting that story as if it had some kind of veracity.
Only one of them brought on the source of that story and took her to pieces on the air, but the rest of them were just reporting it, just po-faced.
So, you know, we don't really need to hear about how they, you know, how shocked they are that we would say these things.
So the attacker was like so many of these guys.
He was a nutbag.
He's a violent schizophrenic.
He was gay.
You know, he was pro-gay.
I don't know.
His politics were absolutely confusing.
But when the left has nothing to show for their work but record inflation, spiking violence, spiking violence after 25 years of record low violence brought on by tough policing and arresting criminals and putting them away for a long time, that was too harsh.
No, no, it was the weather that was changing.
You know, it was something else.
All of that, they've now got spiking crime because of their policies, their George Soros DAs, the destruction of our energy independence because of this loopy climate disaster scenario, which even the New York Times is starting to quietly admit is a lot of crap.
The incitement of racial violence and the division, racial division to cover up for their failures since the 60s, since the Great Society, everything they've done to destroy the lives of black people, and now they blame it on the, you know, first they blame it on the schools, then when they own the schools, they blame it on the colleges, then they blame it on the employers, then they blame it on the police.
It's all them.
It's all their policies.
When all your policies have failed, all you have left is a hammer attack and everything has to turn into Paul Pelosi.
That was what the joke was supposed to be.
And it's truly disgusting.
And I'm going to show you, you know, I'm going to show you in detail how this works, because it talks about what I'm going to be talking about in this show is this greater fight.
You know, we're coming into an election.
In the moment of an election, everybody's focused on the fight of the moment, the fight of the day.
And that's how it should be.
That's what you're voting on.
You're voting on how things are going.
But as you know, there's this larger cultural fight.
This is a moment when this cultural fight is at its peak.
And I want to point out to you that some of the things that are happening in this election are talking to us about that larger cultural fight that we have to be paying attention to even as we go out and vote and do not stay home.
I know the polls are looking good for Republicans, but that doesn't matter a damn if you don't go out and vote.
So go out and vote.
All right.
So Joe Biden makes a speech, and it's another one of these dark Brandon speech, scary Brandon speeches.
And he blames Republicans for this lunatic attack on Paul Pelosi, for which Republicans had nothing to do.
And he links it to the January 6th kerfuffle because they think this is somehow they're, you know, nobody's bought into this lie yet, but somehow this is the worst thing that's ever happened since the Civil War.
So here's part of the speech that's cut 13.
Just a few days ago, a little before 2.30 a.m. in the morning, a man smashed the back windows and broke into the home of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the third highest ranking official in America.
All this happened after the assault.
And it just, it's hard to even say.
It's hard to even say.
After the assailant entered the home asking, where's Nancy?
Where's Nancy?
Those are the very same words used by the mob when they stormed the United States Capitol on January the 6th when they broke windows.
Unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
You know, it's like, where's Nancy?
It almost sounds like, where's Waldo?
All those kids who've been saying, where's Waldo were probably involved too.
And listen, Joe Biden is a lying snot rag.
He has been his whole life.
He's been a small, corrupt, venal, angry, nasty little man his whole life.
He knows how to talk to other politicians, but he despises the people he pretends to represent.
He always has.
He's been a liar his whole life, a plagiarist and all these things.
But, but he made this speech, which went over like a lead balloon.
Nobody's paying any attention to this garbage anyway.
But he made this speech knowing that he could tell this lie, this distortion, and the press would back him up.
And boy, oh boy, did they ever.
Not just, you know, there's an old expression in the Army.
There used to be an expression in the Army.
Tell them you're going to tell them.
Tell them, then tell them you told them.
In other words, you got to explain things to people because they don't listen.
So you've got to really tell them.
Tell them before.
Tell them you're going to tell them.
Tell them, then tell them you told them.
So in the lead up to the speech, the corporate media who share with the cultural left this interest in undermining American institutions so they can have an expanded global consumer base.
I mean, and things like the family, the Constitution, all these things get in the way.
It's the things like the UN that really help them expand their trading bases to the whole world without being bothered by things like, you know, paying workers right and treating people well and all that stuff.
And freedom and individual freedom and maybe, you know, religious beliefs that cause people not to buy your goods, all that stuff they want to get rid of.
So the media comes out and they just sell the speech before he makes it.
So this is a montage from a media research center, the newsbuster site.
This is cut five.
President Biden now said to deliver a speech on democracy in our country, preserving democracy, in the wake of the attack on Paul Pelosi and other threats, the escalating rhetoric across the country.
The president is going to make it crystal clear what is at stake in this election.
He is pointing out that there are candidates running for every office, every level of office in this country, who will not commit to accepting the results of the very elections they are running in.
And the president is also reminding every American that it could take several days to get the final results, saying that is the system working.
Tonight, President Biden is calling on all Americans to stand up to protect our democracy amid the threats that election deniers pose to the voting process.
Two years after the 2020 election, there is still no evidence of systematic voting problems.
And tonight, according to his prepared remarks, President Biden is going to argue that conspiracy theories and election lies could once again spark chaos the way they did on January 6th.
Really, shame on this dishonest trash.
You know, this rubbish that these people are that they've become, these people who used to be journalists, those splots used to be filled by journalists.
No more.
They're filled with these people.
So now that's before the speech.
Then he gives the speech.
And then after the speech, remember, it's tell them you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them you told them.
After the speech, they then sell, you know, bring the message home.
And this is a montage from Megan Kelly.
I was talking to Megan yesterday, and she was joking because Biden has this thing about the mega MAGA people.
And she says, if he comes after him, she'll be the Mega MAGA Megan.
So this is Mega Maga Meghan's media mayhem montage.
This is the media after the speech is cut four.
Years of Republican propaganda and Trump-fueled fascism led 42-year-old David DePapp to break into Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco home, seemingly with the intent to harm her.
Specific motive has been identified.
The circumstances are eerily similar to the January 6th attack, some bringing zip ties into the Capitol, attempting to find officials and take them hostage Pelosi one of the targets that day, and Friday.
This is an incredibly toxic moment that has been building for years and only getting worse.
Threats against members of Congress have more than doubled since 2017, while there have been victims in both parties targeted Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals.
The structure of the Republican Party, more recently, with the advent of Donald Trump, has put a person at the top of the party who has consistently advocated violence and who has created a market within his own party where it's fun to joke about violence.
So you know the old expression, cream rises and crap floats.
These guys have been floating for a long time these journalists, you know what, and they've become this thing.
So again it's, it's, tell them, you're gonna tell them.
Tell them and tell them.
You told them.
They're really hammering this home and Biden is depending on that.
He knows he can depend on that, just like I know that if I say something in public, or Ben says something in public, or Knowles or Walsh, they're going to get attacked.
They know that.
These guys know that they are going to get the complete support of this.
These massive corporations remember these news media organizations are massive, massive corporations and they're going to give their support to Joe Biden's angry, venal lies.
Okay, they know that.
Now, just just to give a little comparison, it takes Tom Cotton senator Tom Cotton, who I like a lot.
Actually, senator Tom Cotton.
It takes him about 20 seconds to to eviscerate one of these guys.
He goes on CBS Morning, I believe it is, and they the.
The narrative they always push is the violence was caused by Republicans standing up for their beliefs.
So if you criticize Nancy Pelosi about one of her policies, that that's just as good as hitting her husband over the head with a hammer.
And Tom Cotton just very quietly takes this narrative apart.
So I just want to play that as a sort of palate cleanser after listening to all that garbage, which is what it is it's cut to.
You've seen deranged lunatics attack both Democrats and Republicans alike.
Uh, I don't think John mayn't care.
Kevin Mccarthy now pointing out that she passed.
Trillions of dollars of spending that causes inflation led to this.
You know, apparent nudist activist breaking into her home.
The simplest way to stop crimes like this is to get tough on crime.
It's not to try to stop campaigning in the middle of a campaign, seven days for an election, on legitimate issues of public concern.
Absolutely, people should continue to campaign on legitimate issues of public concern.
No uh, no debate there.
But, to be clear, from your answers here i'm here you don't see any connection between things said in this country, in particular, by people denying the results of the 2020 election uh, and the motivations of, as you call it, this madman.
No more connection than Chuck Schumer going to the steps of the Supreme Court and saying that Brett Kavanaugh wouldn't know what hit him if he issued rulings that Chuck Schumer disagreed with.
And what did you have?
A left-wing hitman showing up at Brett Kavanaugh's house to assassinate him.
So they call him senator Cotton because he mopped the guy up uh, and.
And so the point that I want to make is that Biden could make this thoroughly dishonest ugly, ugly speech, Demonizing half the country as anti-democratic, autocratic, whatever he was calling us, semi-fascist.
He could make it because he depends on this media machine.
And the media machine is starting to fail.
And this is the thing.
I've said this a million times, I know, but we're coming to the end of an age.
We're coming to the end of the baby boomer generation, the post-World War II, the post-Cold War epoch.
All of those things are ending, and we are entering into, I know it feels like we're already in the internet age, but that's not true.
We have entered the internet age, but the effects of the internet are only now really becoming clear.
And the panic that is going through those people who controlled the narrative for so long is palpable.
And that's what this is about.
And that's the battle we are having that goes beyond this election for the control of information.
And that's the battle we're starting to win because we don't want control of information.
We want everybody to speak.
And we're starting to win because the battle is coming out into the open.
The left wins when they can act in secret, when they can take over institutions, when they can pretend they're one thing, but actually they're another.
The Battle for Information00:11:48
Oh no, we don't want to destroy marriage, but yes, we do.
Oh no, we're not going to transgender your children, but yes, we are.
When they can act in secret and creep into things, they win.
But when they're exposed, then the story changes and we start to win.
And now they're smoked out into the open with their lies and with their distortions and with their corrupt news media.
And that is the secret to our victory, our coming victory, not just in the election, I hope, but also in the long run.
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So just to give you an idea of the extent of the panic, the Democrats are experiencing not just because the polls look bad for Tuesday's election, but because they are losing their grip on the narrative.
Biden goes out and he makes this speech and nobody really is paying attention.
I just want to show you this.
I don't want to make fun of Paul Pelosi's injuries and I don't want to make fun of Joe Biden's dementia, but he is the president of the United States.
And this is just a little clip of some of the stuff he said this week.
This is cut 15.
How many of you know somebody with diabetes needs insulin?
Well, guess what?
And when Debbie and I passed this law, it included everybody, not just seniors.
And so what happened was, we said, okay, you know how much it costs to make that insulin drug for diabetes?
Cost.
It was invented by a man who did not patent it because he wanted it available for everyone.
I spoke to him.
And so she was one of my biggest, biggest supporters in helping me not only pass, but draft and move some of the legislation we're going to talk about today, a couple pieces of it.
And I don't have a greater friend in the United States Senate, and I don't have a greater friend when I was vice president, nor is president.
So Debbie, thank you.
Inflation is a worldwide problem right now because of a war in Iraq and the impact on oil and what Russia's doing.
I mean, excuse me, the war in Ukraine.
And I'm thinking of Iraq because that's where my son died.
Because he died.
Unbelievable.
So he's got Debbie Wassman-Schultz in the Senate, which she wasn't.
He met the guy who discovered insulin.
He said, invented insulin, who died before he was born.
And his son didn't die in Iraq.
He died here.
He died in America.
You know, it's so bad that the New York Times actually noticed that things were getting bad.
And when they did, Maggie Haberman tweeted the article that said his dimension is getting worse, versus that his flubs are getting worse.
And they attacked her.
Democrats attacked her.
Stop doing that.
Stop telling the truth.
That's what they're dealing with.
They've owned the narrative so long that their people now only believe the narrative and they don't want to hear the obvious truth.
And this accounts for part of Biden's speech.
Let's play a little bit more of Biden's speech, blaming the mega maga megas, mugamaga maga mugagagaga, for destroying democracy by trying to get elected.
It's cut 14.
I wish I could say the assault on a democracy ended that day, but I cannot.
As I stand here today, there are candidates running for every level of office in America, for governor, congress, attorney general, secretary of state, who won't commit.
They will not commit to accepting the results of election that they're running in.
This is path to chaos in America.
It's unprecedented.
It's unlawful.
And it's un-American.
I've said before, you can't love your country only when you win.
All right.
So let's look at this for a minute, right?
You know, my wife, who's totally non-political, she said to me, what do they mean when they say it's a threat to democracy?
I don't know.
You know, I have no idea what they're talking about.
But what they believe is that if you doubt the results of an election, you are the enemy of democracy.
You can't love America only when you win.
Here is a montage of Democrats reacting to the election of Donald Trump this Cut 6.
Trump knows he's an illegitimate president.
The president or elect, although legally elected, is not legitimate.
I don't see it.
President-elect as a legitimate president.
You said you believe that Russia's interference altered the outcome of the election.
I do.
And we have a president who, if in fact it is proven, has been assisted by the Russians and may in fact not be a legitimate president.
The one thing that Trump is fearful of when it comes to his being president is that finally we will see how illegitimate his victory actually was.
I have an objection.
I object to the 15 votes from the state of North Carolina.
I object because people are horrified.
He's an illegitimate president.
Do you believe Trump is a legitimate president?
What I believe is that there's no question that the outcome of this election was affected by the Russian interference.
But there absolutely is a cloud of illegitimacy.
So this is what, remember, all this time, I'm talking about 30, 40, 50 years, they have depended on your not having access to that information.
Stop telling the truth.
When the audience of the New York Times and the readers of the New York Times get angry at the New York Times for telling the obvious truth about Joe Biden's deteriorating condition, when they get angry, it's because they have been insulated so long and that insulation is fraying and breaking down because we live in the internet age.
As I've said a zillion times, the internet is like the invention of the printing press and the industrial revolution put together.
It is not just spreading and democratizing information.
It is also fraying, as the Industrial Revolution did, is fraying our old connections, our family connections, our attachments to our business, our attachment to our locality.
It's internationalizing things.
It's globalizing the world.
It's doing all those things.
And the question is, as we come through this, how much of freedom is going to survive?
Or will the elites, will the powerful, be able to say, no, stop it?
That's what the Catholic Church tried to do with the printing press.
No, we're not going to let people read the Bible.
No, we're not going to let people disagree with us and establish their own churches.
And yes, the Protestants fought back in the same way, and people were burning each other at the stake.
This is what we're fighting right now.
Right now, what we're trying to do is avoid charges of heresy, which they call misinformation, and just say, look, let's all talk and we'll get at the truth that way.
Because when they say, oh, you know, we're the violent ones, every single Republican out there, it's just the mega maga mooga magas who went out there and they hammered Paul Pelosi in the head.
And, you know, anyone who ever said, where's Nancy Pelosi or disagreed with her communist policies, anyone who ever said that is responsible for this attack, they forget that we've seen them, we've seen them, all of us have seen them calling for violence themselves.
Here's cut seven.
I just don't even know why there aren't uprisings all over the country, and maybe there will be.
People need to start taking to the streets.
This is a dictator.
You know, there needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as there's unrest in our lives.
Enemies of the state.
Show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.
Do something about your dad's immigration practices, you feckless honor.
They go low, we kidnap.
How do you resist the temptation to run up and ring her neck?
Biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right.
I thought he should have punched him in the face.
I said, even if you lost, he insulted your wife on the escalator and called Mexicans rapists and murders.
He said, well, what do you think I should have done?
I said, I think you should have punched him in the face and then gotten out of the race.
He would have been a hero.
I'd like to punch him in the face.
I said, if we were in high school, I'd take you behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.
Punch some people in the face.
When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?
They're still going to have to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump.
And that's a fact.
It surprises those violent Republicans.
They depend on you not being able to hear this, but you can.
The curtain is open.
We see the Democrats singing while the media mouths the words.
We see that.
You know, it's the end of singing in the rain.
We see the Democrats singing behind the curtain while the media mouths the words.
And we have the facts at our hand.
We have them on tape.
We have the receipts, as they say nowadays.
So this is the moment that we're in.
And I want to just emphasize one thing.
You know, I know that I've been begging you and hammering you and guilting you into buying a strange habit of mind.
And it doesn't have to be me, but it does have to.
We do have to understand that we believe in the facts.
They believe in the story.
We believe in telling people the facts, but they believe in the story.
We have to do both.
Because the thing is, the facts will win you a political battle.
They will.
The facts will win you a political battle.
But the stories we tell, the stories we tell, undermine the long-term mindset of the people.
You know, James Joyce said that artists forge the uncreated conscience of the race.
And Percy Beishelle, the poet, said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.
And what he was saying was over time, over time, it's the narratives we tell, the stories we tell that shape and organize the minds of man.
So it's wonderful that we make documentary after documentary because that will help us win the fight in the moment.
But if we're not telling stories to that, then we're going to lose the fight of the age.
The fight of the age is this one.
It's this one that we're in right now.
It is, will we be able to speak?
Will all of us be able to speak?
Because I do not want to silence the left.
I do not want to silence the left.
Let them come on in.
They always say the left wants the right to shut up.
The right wants the left to keep on talking because when they talk, when we see who they are, as we've seen who they are right now, that's when they lose.
And that's why I think things are changing.
I think this is really an epochal moment because even the people on the left who have been leftists all their lives, who have been Democrats all their lives, can see what's happening.
They may be saying, yeah, we don't agree with you about abortion or we don't agree with you about trans or whatever cultural thing they're into this moment.
But they can see when people are trying to be censorious and they can see when people are trying to shut the opposition down.
And that's what's happening in this election.
Elon's Defense of Free Speech00:07:55
And I hope there's a red tsunami.
I truly do.
But even if there's not, even if there's not, we've got to keep pushing on this information and narrative battle because that's the one we have to win over the long term.
All we got to do is get through these elections and the holidays will be upon us.
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So this is why this Elon Musk story, Elon Musk taking over Twitter, is a central story.
Not, you know, I don't want to make a hero out of Elon Musk.
I kind of like his prankster personality, but I'm not going to live by him or die by him anymore than I'm going to live by Kanye West or any of these guys.
But the thing is, his taking over of Twitter and his promise to lighten up on the censorship of right-wingers has brought these guys out of the woodwork, has brought them out into the open.
Now, my followers had flatlined.
They basically had stuck at one place until Elon said he was going to take over Twitter.
Then suddenly they rose like 30,000, like in a couple of days.
And then they stopped again when it looked like he wasn't going to take it over.
And now that he's back, my followers have started to rise again.
And not only that, people are saying, gee, I haven't gotten a tweet from you in months, and now suddenly I am.
So clearly I was shadow banned.
I mean, I think that was pretty obvious.
But here's the thing.
They are now forced into the position of just like they're forced to argue that democracy is a threat to democracy, they have to argue that speech is a threat to free speech.
Here is an LA Times editorialist, Suzanne Nassau, I think her name is on MSNBC, is cut 11.
When it comes to a social media platform that, as Elon says, is trying to create an environment for public discourse, a place where people of different ideological persuasions can come together and can reason.
In order to do that, you need to create some parameters.
We've learned that.
Speech in Twitter is not the same as a town square.
It's algorithmically driven.
We've seen that falsehoods travel faster than the truth on Twitter, that polarization can be stoked, that it's a weaponization of human nature.
And that can be for good or for ill.
We can celebrate something and we can go down a very dark path if that's where our nature draws us to.
The algorithms fuel and supercharge that.
So free speech is a threat to free speech.
Now listen, I hope you listen to me because people keep telling me I'm wrong about this and I am so completely right.
It's frightening.
Elon Musk is not going to save free speech.
The free market is not going to save free speech.
Already Elon Musk is kowtowing to his sponsors who are threatening to pull out if he restores harmless sites like the Babylon Bee, who are just making fun of the left, like the left makes fun of us all the time.
Jordan Peterson, I mean, if Jordan Peterson is a threat to this country, you know, I'm the king and queen of Romania.
You know, that's like ridiculous.
So already he's kow-towing.
The free market is not going to save free speech.
This is a new technology.
It is an alien intelligence.
As David Bowie said, the internet is transforming everything.
It has to be regulated like every other thing we do.
When the Industrial Revolution came along, they were putting eight-year-olds in factories.
There had to be government regulation saying, no, you know, you can't make children work eight-hour days in factories.
There has to be regulation now that people cannot be knocked off what is essentially the town square for having a different opinion.
And you can't find an excuse to do it.
You know, you can cut out cursing if you want.
You can cut out name-calling if you want.
But you have to be able to say, you know, a trans woman is not a woman.
I'm sorry, I feel for him, but that's one thing he is not.
Listen to the things.
The misinformation.
When they talk about misinformation, all they mean is right-wing opinion.
But what about Biden's laptop was Russian misinformation?
Remember, they knocked the New York Post off Twitter for reporting the truth about Hunter Biden's laptop.
The Wuhan lab leak theory was fringe and anti-Chinese bigotry.
They're still selling that.
Fauci helped, you know, Obama, I have to say, stopped funding on gain of function research, but it came back in because Fauci snuck it back in behind Trump's back, and he was funding the research that spread, that created the disease, that spread as COVID.
That's the best theory we've got.
It's the smartest one.
It's the one that makes sense.
And they want to shut that down because the elites don't want to pay consequences.
All the crap they sold, all the steel dossier, all of that stuff.
Trump saying there were good people on both sides, meaning the Nazis, all of this, the Haitian immigrants were whipped by ICE agents.
We are not fighting about misinformation.
Misinformation is another word for heresy.
That is just all it is.
It's just heresy against the left.
And what we have to do is we have to make sure that ideas, you know, the First Amendment protects us from the government regulating speech.
That's great.
But the government is instituted among men to ensure and guarantee our God-given rights, one of them being the right to express not just our opinion, but also the things that we believe to be the facts.
That is what our rights are, and the government is there to guarantee that.
So while the First Amendment protects us from the government, the government is supposed to protect us from Twitter and Facebook.
Instead, we now know that the government, the Biden administration, at least 45 members were on the phone with social media telling them to shut people down for speaking the truth that might cost them some consequences that might mean Fauci should have to go to jail where he belongs or at least be fired instead of being honored and turned into prayer candles.
This is the fight.
I understand there's an election coming.
Again, get out there and vote.
Do not sit there and complain.
Do not sit there and write me angry letters about how everything's falling apart and then not go out and vote.
Go out and vote in all your numbers while you're buying Strange Habit of Mind.
You should be going out to vote.
You can do two things at once.
Go ahead and do them.
You can do buy a strange habit of mine on your phone and also go out and vote while you're standing online.
But also remember, this is an ongoing fight.
One election victory is not going to win it, but we can win it because the truth has a voice.
The truth has a voice and it speaks in stories and it speaks in facts.
And we have to tell them both and we have to protect the sphere in which we can speak.
We cannot allow, we cannot just say, oh, the free market and democracy or whatever is going to save us.
We have to ensure that opinions stay free, that voices remain free, that we get to tell our story.
Gender Roles Reversal Stress00:15:26
So last week in the members block, which some of you may not have gotten a chance to hear, I talked about a Wall Street Journal piece by Erica Comissar about traditional gender roles and how they often help marriage.
A kind of shocking piece to appear in any newspaper, but in the Wall Street Journal.
Erica Comasar is a clinical social worker, parent guidance expert who has been in private practice in New York City for over 30 years.
She's a contributor to the journal, the Washington Post, New York Daily News, and she's the author of Chicken Little, The Sky Isn't Falling, Raising Resilient Adolescents in the Age of Anxiety.
Erica, thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you for having me.
I just, I don't know how you can dare to say the sky isn't falling, but you know, I'm going to leave that alone.
So I read this piece by you, which I thought was absolutely terrific, in praise of traditional roles in marriage.
So for the audience, could you kind of go over some of the findings, some of the things you were talking about?
Well, I mean, I'm a clinician, so generally I write about what I see in my practice, but I also use research.
I never write without really understanding what the research has to say.
And there's quite a bit of research to back up what I was seeing in my practice, which is that the quick turnaround with which we are trying to implement all these gender role reversals.
And I just say that.
It's a quick turnaround.
I'm not saying that a lot of these things aren't necessarily good or that we can't manage them in the future, but the quick turnaround is really impacting relationships and not always in a positive way.
So could you give an example of why?
Yeah.
Well, so what the research says and what I was seeing is that couples were coming in with a kind of stress around this gender role reversal, meaning when women were taking on a more traditionally masculine role, going out and being the breadwinners, but more than that, kind of, you know, not raising children, not really being at home that much.
And then men were taking on that role.
And what it was doing is it was impacting their sex lives.
It was impacting things like fidelity in marriage and overall satisfaction in marriage.
And it was leading to a higher divorce rate.
So, and you know, people come to me for couples therapy often.
And so, you know, couples therapy is meant to bring couples back together.
But some of these stresses I was seeing were sort of pervasive.
And I really felt that no one was talking about it because it's not politically correct to talk about.
So a lot of the things I write about and talk about are things that are seen as the unspeakable truths.
You know, I wanted to ask you about that because one of the things I've noticed is that recently, like kind of little points of light that appear during a paradigm just before a paradigm shift, I've noticed a lot of women are starting to write op-eds, even in the New York Times, a traditionally left-wing paper, where they're saying, you know, the sexual revolution really didn't work out that well for us.
And we're really in bad shape and we're unhappy and we're not getting the things that we want out of life.
And every one of them, they always say, it's not that I want to go back to the 50s.
They always have a kind of disclaimer.
And I thought you had one in your piece where you said ambition is fine, but maybe you should think about that.
Even when you said just now, you're not saying this shift in gender roles is bad.
You're just saying it's very quick.
Is it possible that it's actually just bad?
Is it possible that not that we should go back to the 50s?
Not that we should go back to the 50s, but maybe the 50s had something, some good things as well as bad?
Well, they did.
I mean, they also had some bad things, but they did have some good things.
And one of the things that I believe is that if you think of a family like a corporation, you know, like a company, it's really important that people have different roles.
If everybody played this, if you had two CEOs, I mean, there are companies with co-CEOs, but it generally doesn't work out very well.
And so the idea is that you really want to have a division of labor.
And so that's quite a good thing.
And I think we've come to a place where things are supposed to be all the same.
Gender is supposed to be neutral.
Responsibilities are all the same.
And I think it doesn't work out for children for a variety of reasons because children really need one go-to person who is their primary attachment object.
But it doesn't work out for a number of other reasons, which is that it creates more competition between people, between couples.
It creates more conflict over doing the same role differently.
It was in many ways better when people were not trying to do the same role, but had a division of labor.
Meaning, I'm always saying to my patients in couples therapy that you want to respect the quality in many ways, but also embrace the differences.
And I don't think we really like to hear that today.
It is interesting.
I mean, one of the reasons I have gotten, I'm so sour about feminism is not because it gives people the right to make choices, which I'm totally in favor of.
It's because feminism seems to me to have adopted male values as the standard value.
So women-you know, women have to be strong.
They have to be career-entry, they have to be aggressive.
And you think, like, well, really, can't they build, you know, can't you design a feminine life?
I mean, my wife, you know, raised our children, cared for our house, and then when the kids were free, you know, we put her through school.
She got an advanced degree.
She does what you do.
She's a therapist for couples.
And she's had a different shaped life than my life, which was out of the gun.
Is that a problem?
Is there something wrong with that?
So I have this wonderful t-shirt that I should wear for these interviews.
It says maternal feminism.
It says maternal feminism.
And it's actually a shirt that was given to me by an organization who asked me to do a keynote speech, this organization called Big Ocean Women.
But essentially, it denies the idea that to embrace nurturing our children is to be anti-feminist.
It says, I can be both a woman who believes in having choices, because that's what feminism was meant to offer us, choices, but still sometimes make choices that involve sacrifice for my children's well-being or sacrifice for my family's well-being.
And so, yeah, I consider myself a feminist in that I appreciate what it's given us.
I think any movement when it starts tends to go to an extreme.
The pendulum tends to swing in a very extreme direction.
And we need to get it to come back from the extreme.
We need to get it more centered.
So, again, we don't want to take women's right to choose their lifestyle.
You know, maybe some women don't want to have children.
Maybe they do want to have careers.
But I think the concept that choice in feminism has given us both rights and privileges, but it's also very complicated.
I think the pendulum just has to swing to a kind of center place, but not swing back completely to the 50s.
That makes perfect sense.
I mean, I'm concerned that there is a denigration of motherhood that has risen up with feminism.
I get a lot of letters from women saying that they have felt very bad about being at-home mothers, even though it's given them the satisfaction that they've run a happy home and they've built this wonderful family.
And I feel that mothers are the core of a healthy society.
I mean, this is something that C.S. Lewis talked about.
He said, really, all professions are built to support motherhood and homemaking, which is the core profession.
And I feel like now there's even this thing, this idea going around in the media that the maternal instinct is a myth.
Let me read you.
I want to read you something that was from the New York Times.
It says, new research on the parental brain makes clear that the idea of maternal instinct as something innate, automatic, and distinctly female is a myth, one that has stuck despite the best efforts of feminists to debunk it from the moment it entered public discourse.
What do you think of that?
I think that's absolutely incorrect.
I think I have read thousands of pieces of research, neuroscience research.
And we are not the same.
Men and women are not the same in terms of their nurturing behaviors because it's tied to our hormones.
And our hormones are quite different.
Meaning when women give birth, when they breastfeed, when they nurture, produces a tremendous amount of oxytocin, which is a neurotransmitter hormone, which makes women's behavior more sensitive and empathic towards their children.
That is if they're emotionally healthy.
If a woman has been neglected or abused or hasn't had a very good experience of her own mother, and we say that nurturing behavior is, excuse me, generationally passed down.
So if your great-grandmother and your grandmother and your mother were nurturing, it's passed down.
If they were not, what's passed down, according to research, that is not passed down.
But having said that, oxytocin production connected to sensitive empathic nurturing is different than with men because the research shows that when men nurture their young, when men stay home and are the primary caregivers, they also produce oxytocin.
It comes from a different part of the brain and it makes them more playful, tactile, stimulating caregivers, meaning it makes them more fatherly in terms of their nurturing.
Also, men produce more of something called vasopressin, which is a protective aggressive hormone.
Women produce it too, but men produce more of it.
So we are not the same because our hormones dictate certain nurturing behaviors, which isn't to say that men can't learn to be sensitive empathic nurturers or women can't detach from their nurturing behaviors.
But instinctually, evolutionarily, in terms of our neurological neuro, sort of neurobiological development, we are very different.
I mean, it's almost as if they're so desperate to defend a philosophy that has gone off the rails that they want to eliminate evolution.
I mean, there are no animals.
There are no.
There are no mammals.
I mean, we're a mammal.
I mean, it's as if we're denying that we're mammals.
Can I just tell a quick, quick story?
So Gloria Steinem, when she was starting the feminist movement, she asked Mary Tyler Moore to be the face of feminism.
Mary Tyler Moore had the Mary Tyler Moore Show, which was a feminist show, you know, a woman on her own in Minneapolis.
I don't remember.
And Mary Tyler Moore said, I can't be the face of your feminism because your feminism says to women that unless they go out to work and leave their children, they're traitors to feminism.
And she said the most important role that a woman can play is as a loving, nurturing caregiver and to her children.
And I can't be the face of your feminism.
So I think we have to come back to a place where we can both be feminist, have choices, have careers, be educated, be respected for our intelligence, but really make sacrifices and understand that the role of nurturing is probably one of the most important roles, maybe the most important role you'll ever play in your entire life.
Whether you're a man or a woman, I don't know if you know Aristotle's deathbed question.
On your deathbed, when you're lying dying, what are you going to do?
Are you going to wish that you had worked more hours and made more money and had more stuff and bought a bigger house and taken better vacations?
Or are you going to be wishing that the person sitting by your bed actually loved you, was connected to you?
So the idea that relationships are the most critical part of happiness and that we're denying that now.
Yeah, no, it is true.
And I mean, Simone de Beauvoir, the very start of feminism, said that women should not be allowed to make the choice to stay home with their children because too many of them would make it.
So I think that Mary Tyler Moore was right.
I never heard that story.
Let me address, I don't have too much time, but I want to address this issue of transgenderism.
I don't want to pick on people who are dysphoric about their bodies.
I mean, I have a lot of compassion for people who feel uncomfortable in their bodies.
But at the same time, the idea that a trans woman is a woman seems to me simply, on the face of it, untrue.
And it seems to me on top of that that it's somehow degrading to what a woman actually is, the lives that women lead.
Is there some, it seems to me there's just a hostility toward actual womanhood in the culture?
Am I misreading that?
I mean, I think there's a hostility towards differences.
I think it is making much of the much, making everyone the same, as if we are the same.
In many ways, we're the same.
We're similar in intelligence.
You know, but I think that we, I guess we could be similar in ambition.
But in terms of our, you know, gender differences and biological differences, I think, you know, it's this movement to make everything kind of the same and everyone the same.
And I think that's really what's at the root of it.
It's we really are afraid to admit that there are differences and maybe some of those differences are rather rather good.
Kind of nice.
I've only got a minute left.
Let me ask you this.
I was a little surprised you agreed to come on the show because I know that you have been on a lot of mainstream media.
Do you get hostility from the mainstream media or do you find your ideas are more accepted than people would think?
I mean, I would, you know, so if I was, I had a profile in the Wall Street Journal when my first book, Being There, Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters, came out.
And the profile basically was a profile.
And it was interesting to the Wall Street Journal because I was in this funny in-between place of I was liberal originally, Upper West Side Jewish psychoanalyst.
I'm, you know, live in New York, liberal.
But what was happening is liberals rejected my book and they rejected me because of my ideas.
Conservatives embraced me wholeheartedly, but yet didn't want to pay for what I was advocating for, which is paid maternity leave so all women could be with their children for the first year.
And so I found myself in this crack that between these two worlds with no home.
So I would say I'm still pretty homeless.
All right.
Well, I know, I know that.
Maybe that's a good place to be.
Maybe it's better in this society of crazy differences.
Now, this is where differences maybe have gone too far.
Political differences to say maybe I'm a centrist.
Maybe I don't have a home and maybe that's okay.
Yep, I know the feeling and it is liberating.
Erica Comassar, her latest book is Chicken Little, the Sky Isn't Falling, Raising Resilient Adolescents in the Age of Anxiety.
But you really should read her stuff.
Christian Argument Matters00:16:57
It's really interesting.
Erica, thank you for coming on.
I hope we get to talk again.
Thank you for having me.
Two things I'm looking forward to this week.
One is the absolute schlonging the liberals are going to get in this midterm election, God willing.
The second is all of the brand new content rolling out on Daily Wire Plus.
We started with episode two of Jordan Peterson's new series on marriage.
This episode explores the proper communication techniques, which include negotiation.
I've never tried that.
I just kind of stomp on all my wife's dreams and keep going.
Believe me, negotiating really does come in handy in a marriage.
And also available now is Candace Owens' brand new show, Taboo, featuring special guest and multi-platinum-selling musician, MIA.
You'll hear about her rise to fame and being canceled for speaking out about vaccine mandates, among other topics.
Then there's Ben Shapiro's Sunday special that comes out this weekend.
Ben sat down with Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to chat about school choice, fighting through COVID policies, his experiences on a women's health clinic board, and more.
And last up, Daily Wire Plus is now streaming the documentary film, My Dinner with Trump, which is a behind-the-curtain look at the former president and his closest advisors as they dine together at his private club at Bedminster.
Regardless of how you feel about the man, this is truly Donald Trump as the media would never show him to you.
And certainly nothing like this exists or has ever existed on the right.
Once you're done celebrating the restoration of this country, you want to join us if you're not yet a member because there's never been a better time.
Go to dailywireplus.com to become a member today.
So as we approach the election, one of the big questions that is roiling on the right is the question of the role of religion.
You know, we've been called Christian nationalists, and a lot of people say, no, Christian nationalists is good.
And obviously, we feel that our values are essentially Christian values, or at least we're shaped by Christian values.
But we also believe that there's a separation of church and state, and we want to know what that's about.
So I learned something in church this week, last Sunday, that I didn't know before, and it was really interesting.
It was the feast of Christ the King.
I go to an Anglican Catholic church, which is essentially a Catholic church, but without the overriding allegiance to Rome.
And it was the feast of Christ the King, celebrating Christ's kingship over all people and all nations.
Now, you know, when you talk to Catholics, devout Catholics, a lot of them really know the history, not just of the church, because I know the history of the church.
I know the church's role in history, but they know the history of like kind of weird, you know, small arguments and not-so-small arguments.
And they can quote this, you know, this epistle and that encyclical and all that stuff.
That's, you know, if you ever wonder why Knowles is so annoying, that is why, because they know so much about this stuff.
But I don't.
I actually don't.
And so when I'm told that it's the feast of Christ the King, I just think, oh, well, that's one of the feasts of the church.
And it's been the feast of the church since St. Paul spoke in Greece or whatever.
But in fact, this turns out not to be true, as the priest in my church in an excellent sermon explained.
He said that Christ the King is a fairly recent feast.
It's only about 100 years old, and it was declared a feast in the 1920s by Pope Pius XI.
And the Pope explains in his encyclical that established the feast, that feasts are made by the church to meet the needs of the historical moment.
So in the old days in the age of martyrdom, there would be feasts of martyrs to encourage people to understand that you were not going to be forgotten, that martyrs became saints.
And there was a feast of Corpus Christi, which was instituted in a more modern age when people felt, or the church felt that the devotion to the sacrament of the Mass needed to be reinforced.
So the Feast of Christ the King was instituted in the 20s by Pius XI because in the aftermath of World War I, the Pope saw that international politics was unraveling.
And he saw that there was this two-part division, leftist discord between the classes and right-wing hypernationalism were both on the rise and threatening to lead to more wars.
They obviously did.
And this is the Pope who made a treaty with Hitler and was one of many, many, many people, I mean, who had to find out the hard way that a treaty with Hitler was not a meaningful thing, right?
Because Hitler didn't pay any attention to treaties.
And by the time he died in 1939, Pope Pius XI, he died warning people about Hitler and Mussolini and saying they were not good guys.
So the Feast of Christ the King was supposed to remind people, was supposed to remind people that while many forms of government can be Christian, all politics has to serve Christ above them, has to put Christ above them.
And he writes in his encyclical, with God and Jesus Christ excluded from political life, which he saw happening more and more as we see it now, with authority derived not from God but from man, the very basis of that authority has been taken away because the chief reason of the distinction between ruler and subject has been eliminated.
The result is that human society is tottering to its fall because it has no longer a secure and solid foundation.
Now, this is what I talk about when I talk about supernatural meaning, a meaning above nature, the idea that the material world is like a language that speaks to us of a world higher than itself.
And if we live without that meaning, you know, Christianity, I know this is going to be a surprise to somebody, but Christianity is not defined by who you dislike.
It's not defined by what you disapprove of.
It's not even defined by what you have determined is sin in other people, right?
It is determined by living in such a way that you are living not into the values of this world, but into the values of that supernatural, above nature meaning, which is the kingdom of heaven.
So the Pope gives examples of citizens obeying their leaders and women submitting to the authority, wives submitting to the authority of their husbands, and even slaves, meaning the old kind of slaves, a family servant, submitting to their masters, not because of the nature of their leaders, but because the leaders, the husbands, the masters are supposed to act in the image of Christ.
That is the whole point, right?
So if your leader is literally Hitler, by which I don't mean Donald Trump, I mean literally Hitler, and if your husband is punching you or something like that, or if your father is molesting you, if your experts are castrating little boys and cutting the breasts off healthy girls, submission time is over.
That's it, right?
Because it's a two-way deal.
It is a two-way deal.
You know, as a husband, you have authority in your home because you represent God, essentially.
And if you're not doing that, if you're beating your wife up, you are not doing that.
So if you regard, so here's the thing.
When you eliminate that, when you eliminate that supernatural meaning, when you say that the world is just the world, the flesh is just the flesh, that's it.
There's no meaning above the world, then just there's no reason to do anything but make some money, screw some dames, and have a good time and die, right?
Because there's no kingdom of heaven, so what difference does it make?
If there is no supernatural meaning, here is the trick to this.
Then everything the demonic left says is true.
Everything they say is true if there is no God.
I keep telling this to people, and they don't seem to quite get it.
They say that gender is a performance.
I was talking about this before.
Gender is a performance.
They say morality is relative.
Society is a construct.
All those things are true if gender and morality and society aren't symbolic of something above the flesh.
If they're not symbolic of God's truth, of God's kingdom, if they're not grounded in God, if they're not relative, men and women, as I keep saying, are an image of facets of God, right?
And they may be performances to some degree.
There's no reason a woman should wear a skirt and a man should wear pants.
That's a sort of performative thing that we do to remind ourselves of the role we play in symbolizing God.
Without supernatural meaning, this is the other thing.
The Pope was worried about communism and fascism.
Without supernatural meaning, those are the only forms of government that actually make any sense.
Because you have to have some standards.
You have to have some justice.
And if you either have the state come in and say, we're going to decide that everybody's equal, everybody's going to be equal.
The state said, not us, of course, but the rest of you are all going to be equal.
And that means you're not going to have freedom.
Because you can't make me play at the level of LeBron James.
I can't play basketball at the level of LeBron James.
He wants to be equal.
LeBron has to play at my level.
And that means he can't be free to make the best of himself, right?
That's how it works.
If you can't be free, if Jeff Bezos can't be free to get rich, no Amazon.
If he has to give all his money to me, he's not going to get up in the morning and build an Amazon, which is actually a pretty good service.
So all of these things work if there's no God.
And if there's no God, the other thing is you can invent a system that is going to fix everything.
And this is why I get into arguments even with people here at the Daily Wire about capitalism and about the wonderful separation of powers in the Constitution.
If there's no God, those things fix everything.
Because capitalism harnesses your greed, harnesses your ambition so that it actually has to serve other people.
It has to give other people what they want.
But as I keep pointing out, capitalism also includes selling porn, selling fentanyl, selling prostitutes.
All of those things are perfectly good capitalism.
Capitalism also involves people becoming billionaires and then treating their workers like garbage.
And that really happens.
They didn't come to be workers' unions because we didn't need unions.
Unions are a necessary evil.
They are evil because they abuse their power.
But without them, before them, even before the threat of them, people abuse their workers on a very regular basis.
And it still happens.
And capitalism has to basically be override by overseen by Christ the King.
Democracy, too.
If you have democracy, you have powers in conflict, that's great.
It means that each person's striving for power is going to play off somebody else's striving for power, the Senate against the President, the President against the courts, all these things.
And so you're going to get everybody's supposed to rise.
But pretty soon they're all going to collude together because they're all in power and we're not.
And pretty soon you're going to get a government like we have now where it's really a deep state that's not responsive to what we want at all.
So all of that stuff, all of that stuff, has to be run by Christ the King, which means we understand that there's a supernatural meaning, which means we understand that each person matters.
Each person doesn't matter without God.
Without a supernatural meaning, who cares if some guy is on the street?
Who cares?
Really, really?
I mean, what difference does it make?
I always wonder why the atheist left, why they're so against racism.
Who cares?
Who cares?
It's only because we believe that they are the image of God.
That's what I'm talking about, having a supernatural meaning.
It's only because we believe that people are in the image of God that we expect them to be treated with respect.
Now here is the confusing thing about Christianity.
This is a really important point because those of us who love the Christian religion, as I do, we take some pride in the fact that over slow centuries, Christian ideas have transformed our society for the better.
Ideas like the dignity of the individual and care for the poor, the rights of women, the sacredness of marriage, these are gifts of Christianity and they have transformed our society for the better.
Even people who violate these ideas, even the left when they want to destroy marriage or destroy women basically by saying they don't exist, they are frequently making Christian arguments.
We are frequently having these internecine feuds where we say, thou shalt not commit adultery, and they say, judge not, lest you be judged, right?
And we say, well, wait, that's not what that means exactly, because adultery remains a central sin.
But still, you understand that they are making a Christian argument, and we have to argue on Christian terms.
So Christianity has made society better.
But the other side of that is Christianity doesn't tell us that society is going to get better.
It doesn't promise us that society is going to get better.
It promises us that the world is going to be bad and then it's going to end.
And when it ends, it's not going to be pretty.
Some of us think that the Clavenless Week is a form, a shape of what's to come in the apocalypse.
I think it probably is.
But the point is, Christianity tells you the world is going to stink.
Christ is king, but as he himself said, his kingdom is not of this world.
And that is why I'm not technically a Christian nationalist.
Christ is king, but his kingdom is not of this world.
And in order to follow Christ and obey him, you have to put the kingdom of this world second and his kingdom, the kingdom of heaven, first.
So that means this, right?
What does that mean?
Because people ask me, well, how can a Christian be effective politically?
And the truth is, there are times when you simply can't.
There are times when you simply have to follow the kingdom of heaven and let the kingdom of this world take care of itself.
Times of peace are better than times of war.
We should all work for peace, but sometimes there has to be war.
Times of unity are better than times of division.
I think in heaven people are so unified that maybe the borders of self actually vanish, if possible.
And times of greater freedom are better than the Joe Biden administration.
But in every time, evil is present and somebody's getting it in the neck.
You're just lucky it doesn't happen to be you.
The 1950s were a healthier time in America, but yes, black people were getting it in the neck.
They were being mistreated.
You know, they want to be included.
That's great.
But then somebody else is being mistreated.
It's always somebody who's getting the short end.
But we can't be doing it.
We can't be the ones who are doing it.
Eventually, the end of the world will come.
And while I'm not in charge of judgment, I don't think the thing they're going to ask you at the Pearly Gates is, did you remember to condemn other people?
What I think the truth is that Christianity does not save the world.
It openly says it does not save the world.
It saves you.
And that means you have to sometimes act against the world.
You have to tell the truth and get canceled.
You have to be true to your wife and miss out on falling in love with somebody else.
You have to make less money in your business in order to do the right thing.
You can't always be an effective Christian and an effective politician.
And that's why you've got to stay cool.
That is why you have to have joy in your Christianity, because sometimes you're not going to have joy in life.
People write to me and say, well, you're a traitor because you said something nasty about Donald Trump.
I don't serve Donald Trump.
I don't serve Donald Trump.
And people will say, well, you know, you supported this and you supported that.
I only am trying to do what I think I'm supposed to do.
So listen, everything dies.
Everything falls.
And if you're lucky, like I was lucky, you get born into a time of prosperity and peace and freedom and things are tickety boo, right?
You guys who are younger than I am, you're a little less lucky.
You are born in this time of transition when things have a possibility of flying apart.
I don't think they will.
I think they'll come back together.
But right this minute, things are kind of falling apart a little bit.
Our values are uncertain.
Our ideas are uncertain.
There's this terrible fight between two sides.
But you just have to keep doing what you believe with your discernment and prayer, what Christ wants you to do.
Every system has within it the seeds.
You know, Marx thought that the tensions within a system were going to lead to paradise.
I think the tensions within the system are part of the fact that it dies.
Eventually, that system falls apart.
It doesn't necessarily get replaced with paradise.
Sometimes it gets replaced with chaos.
This is the curse of the world.
Death arises from human brokenness and it infects everything.
Sometimes you'll live morally and speak truly and everybody will respect you for it.
Sometimes you'll live morally and speak truly and they'll throw you off Twitter and then cast you to the lions, right?
At every time, in every case, in war and peace, from dawn to decadence, from wealth to ruination, Christ is king.
So follow your king.
You know, follow your king and pay the price.
His kingdom is not of this world.
This world is going to happen, is going to unfold as it unfolds.
The election is going to take place.
Things are going to happen you don't like.
Hopefully things this time will happen that you do like.
I really hope that's true.
But do not, do not let it disturb your peace.
Be not afraid.
Let not your heart be troubled.
You know, it wasn't Sean Hannity who said that.
It was Jesus.
Let not your heart be troubled.
Neither let it be afraid.
And follow the king.
All right, so we were talking about the apocalypse coming, and in fact, here it is.
Because if you're not a subscriber to Daily Wire, and I can't even understand that mindset that would make you not be a subscriber to Daily Wire, the show is coming close to its end, which means you will be plunged quite hastily into the Clavenless Week, where there will be wailing, gnashing of teeth.
I hear the moon is going to turn to blood on election day.
They're actually saying it's going to be a blood-red moon.
Mental Illness in Halloween00:09:03
They think it's because of election day.
We know it's because of the clavenless week.
So subscribe and you can hear the members block, which comes afterward.
But for now, even for those of you who don't subscribe, just to show you how generous we are, we are going to solve all your problems with the mailbag.
We don't settle our differences in America with a riot.
We settle them peaceably at the battle park, the ballot box.
Yeah!
See, people thought he was bragging, but he was complaining.
Why can't we settle it with a riot?
We had all those riots.
We started all those riots in 2020.
Why didn't we settle all our differences?
From Ben, my friend I have literally known his entire life apparently now identifies as transgender.
He literally never ever expressed a shred of gender confusion or anything.
He married a girl who openly acknowledges she is on the autism, autism spectrum and who fits to a T what Abigail Schreier talks about.
I've only seen him once at another friend's wedding since this happened.
He is totally 100% male.
Less than three years later, he now says he's a woman.
His wife is openly transgender and well into hormones, which has caused her to have a stroke.
To this day, almost a year later, I still get that pit in the stomach feeling thinking about this and seeing him.
I feel like I can't not say anything.
They at least formally claim to be Christians for my own sake.
I don't want to go through life having never warned them about the road they're going down.
What would you do thanks?
Now, the reason I put this question first and I wanted to answer is I'm getting this question a lot.
I'm getting people talking about people they've known, people they're related to going transgender.
This is a mental illness that's traveling through the country.
This is a mass madness, kind of the madness of crowds.
And it's happening because of the things I talk about, which is that an epoch is ending and a new epoch is beginning and we're in between.
And so all the furniture, the gravity's gone out of the room and all the furniture is floating around.
Nobody knows where it's going to come down.
And just like when you have a midlife crisis or you go through a midlife period, you think suddenly, well, maybe I should become a fighter pilot.
I mean, yes, I'm an accountant, but maybe I shouldn't really become a fighter pilot.
And then as that period passes, you come back and say, no, many of the things I did in youth still make sense, and I want to add new things and change things a little bit.
So we're going to go into a new age, and this will pass.
I would guess in about 15 years from now, this transgender stuff is going to pass because we're going to see the results of the evil that they've done and the horrible things they've done to these young people.
And they're going to find out that they're not happy and they've ruined lives.
And just the furniture is going to settle down.
The gravity will come back into the room.
But in the meantime, what do you do?
Because this is happening all over.
So you asked what I would do, and I will tell you.
I have a policy about the disastrous things that people around me do.
Now, I'm an artist, and I've lived my life in the arts, and artists are famously badly put together.
I am one of the very, very rare serious artists who is not falling apart and has worked very hard to remain sane while I do the kind of insanity-inducing things that artists do, like open old wounds in order to remember how it feels to be crazy or something like that.
Those are the things that drive artists crazy.
But a lot of the people around me have become alcoholic or have destroyed their marriages or have done stupid stuff that has gotten them injured or destroyed their lives.
My policy is this: only say and do what will help.
Do not speak because you feel you must.
Do not speak because you feel you should.
Do not speak because it makes you feel righteous.
Only say what you think will help.
And the thing I often think about is I've been on several hotlines for people who are troubled.
And a lot of times you're talking to young people, people who are suicidal.
And I remember once talking to a person who, because of his fights with his religious father, had become, had joined a satanic cult, right?
And so now, call me crazy, but I don't think worshiping the master of evil is the best way to run your life.
But if I had said to him what I wanted to say was, like, that's a terrible thing to do, that's what I wanted to say, I don't think that would have done anything.
I think that just would have reinforced his anger about his father.
So instead, I talked to him about his father.
I talked to him about how the guy felt and how, you know, maybe what he was trying to say and maybe how he had suffered and felt things too.
There's no ending to the story because I don't know how it turned out.
But I thought, like, if anything is going to help him, if anything is going to help him, it might be understanding that he's doing this because of his feelings about his father.
And then the next time he's sacrificing a goat to Beelzebub or whatever the hell he's doing, he might think, you know, this is really kind of stupid.
Maybe I should just ignore my father or change my phone number or something like that instead of worshiping all evil.
So if you think that you can help somebody, that's a different story.
You know, there was a, this is really important because there was a priest on YouTube they were sending around on Twitter and everything, a retired priest who condemned homosexuality in keeping with the teachings of the Catholic Church and said, you've got to tell gay people that they're going to hell.
And I thought, well, do you?
Because, you know, is that what they're going to ask?
Is that, you know, at the Pearlie Gates is St. Peter going to say to you, did you remember to tell your gay friends that they were going to hell?
I don't think so.
I think he's going to ask you about things that you did and you said and you felt and your experiences.
And maybe you don't know how he's going to treat other people and what they did.
Maybe you have no idea how the judgment is going to come down and why.
And so that's my response to you.
Is this guy asking for your help?
Is he coming?
I mean, first of all, there's clearly mental illness in his family because of his wife's autism.
So already there was mental illness.
And what's happening when a mental illness sweeps through society, it basically validates other people's mental illness.
So they start to feel, oh no, I don't just think I'm a woman.
I actually am a woman.
That's how the mental illness works.
That's how the madness of crowds work.
It picks people out who are weak and broken and it emphasizes and encourages their brokenness.
So if he's coming to you and saying, I'm miserable, or if he's coming to you and saying, this is how I feel, then maybe there's a response that you can make that's loving and compassionate and understanding and talks to him about things that are going on in his mind.
And maybe you can listen to him.
But this idea that you can't not say anything is false.
You can not say anything if it's not going to help.
Because if it's not going to help, it's just for you.
It is just doing it for you.
And that's selfish.
I'm sorry.
It's selfish and it's self-righteous.
And it doesn't have to be done.
So that's my response.
What I would do is keep my mouth shut unless this guy gave me an opening to help him.
And I thought, yes, I really can say something to him that will help in a compassionate and caring way.
From Hannah, I'm a huge fan of your show and how you handle today's culture and events with wit and sarcasm.
I have a question for you about Halloween.
Should professing Christians participate in a Halloween tradition?
We as a family participate in a local trick-or-treat at our home church.
I have been hearing, though, for the past few years, even from extended family, that Christians absolutely should not have anything to do with Halloween, but I've continued to support our church's.
She keeps calling it trunk or treat.
Maybe that's something different than trick-or-treat.
I even ran across a quote from Ruth Bell Graham, Billy Graham's wife, in response to a similar question saying, Christians ruin all the fun.
So which is it?
Are we called to abstain from the frivolity or have some fun too on this frivolous candy-ridden holiday?
Thanks for your insight and wisdom.
You know, I think it's a really more interesting question than a lot of people do, because a lot of people say, oh, you're ruining all the fun.
I think it's absolutely fine to participate in trick-or-treat and dressing up and all this stuff.
But I do think that I do think that there is, you're opening the door on something.
And, you know, it's fine to play.
It is fine to play.
It's even fine to play at being evil.
You know, it's even fine for it's fine for an actor to pretend to be Macbeth.
There's nothing wrong with that.
And it's fine for kids to dress up as monsters and all this because it can be healthy.
It can actually dispel their own fears about things like that.
And just, you know, it's just fun.
That's fine.
But yes, does it open up a door where you can go beyond that fun into something bad?
Yes, it does.
I mean, I was in New York the other day and saw people had put up decorations in a family area that were frightening and ugly and demonic.
And I thought, no, you know, somebody should knock on the guy's door and say, hey, look, children are walking by.
They don't need to be terrorized by your Halloween decorations.
It's one thing to put up a sheet with eyes on it and say it's a ghost.
It's one thing to put up maybe a skeleton.
But once you start putting up like demonic baby dolls, knock it off.
You know, stop.
So there is, I think, an opening for abuse and Christians should be willing to protest against it and certainly should keep their children away from it.
But as long as you're playing, I mean, if your kids are going out as, you know, being Harry Potter or whatever they're dressing up as this year, I just think that that is fun and it can be done.
You know, there is, again, I think almost everything can be done well.
You know, not every everything, but I think a lot of things can be done well and done badly.
And that's what you have to watch out for.
Is the holiday being celebrated well or is it being celebrated badly?
All right, for those of you who don't subscribe, you are now plunged into the Clavenless Week.