Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 1111 weaponizes Christmas satire to expose what he calls a "cultural civil war," blending anti-Semitic slurs, election conspiracy claims (Hunter Biden’s laptop as "Russian disinformation"), and attacks on transgender rights with Burkean calls for "ordered liberty." He frames progressive policies as Pharaoh-like tyranny, contrasts Dobbs’ victory with leftist "passion for death," and dismisses Ukraine aid support (47% oppose it) while mocking Putin’s "KGB thug" persona. The episode pivots to media decay—Twitter Files collusion, The New York Times’ decline—before pivoting to mystical childbirth visions, ant observations with James Tour’s science gaps, and a defense of bodily discipline as divine training. Clavin ends by tying Christmas to Christ’s Incarnation, framing modern chaos as a battle between love’s creation and leftist "transcendence" of flesh. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, it's Christmas, and you know what that means, and neither do I.
This is the day when God came into the world to tell us to stop judging and to forgive one another, which of course we have absolutely no intention of doing, so we better buy a lot of presents, and maybe that'll get us off the hook.
Also, we can gather around the television and watch a Christmas carol, in which Scrooge learns to love his neighbors and give his money away.
And that always brings a tear to our eyes because we're not going to do that either.
For one thing, my neighbor's a jackass.
Plus, it's my damn money, so stop bothering me.
I'm trying to watch a Christmas carol.
Now, on the first Christmas Eve, as we all remember from a Charlie Brown Christmas special, the shepherds were watching their flocks or washing their socks or something with ox in it.
Although actually the ox was in the manger with the baby Jesus probably washing his socks.
I don't remember the story exactly, but I think there were some wise men who came from the East, maybe the Hamptons, possibly Persia, and they gave the baby expensive presents like gold and frankincense and myrrh.
And Jesus was probably like, what am I going to do with myrrh?
I don't even know what that is.
And the wise men were like, just take the presents and stop telling us to love our neighbors, okay?
Because believe me, if you knew our neighbors, you wouldn't be saying that.
Which, if that's any indication, they were probably from the Hamptons since some of the people in Persia are actually pretty nice.
And because Jesus was born, everybody changed and became good.
And you could tell everyone was good because they had signs outside their houses that said love is love and no one is illegal.
And Jesus was like, what is this with love is love?
That doesn't even mean anything.
What do you people just babble stupid nonsense and think that gets you points with me?
Plus, if no one is illegal, how come when all those illegals came to Martha's Vineyard, you bust them out of there so fast, Jill Biden could only say they were as unique as a breakfast talk because she didn't have enough time to get to O before the whole combination plate was back on the mainland.
I guess that's love is love for you, you stupid schmucks.
Yeah, that's Yiddish.
Know why?
I'm a Jew, so that's another thing.
Stop waving those crosses around and hating on Jewish people, or you'll get a big surprise and you won't like it.
I'll show you love is love, you fuck that goyem.
Personally, I think by the time the first Christmas was over, Jesus was pretty much fed up with the whole business.
Anyway, another important thing about Christmas is gathering with family, those bastards.
Over Thanksgiving, the Biden administration issued some guidelines on how to respond if your conservative uncle criticized President Biden by pointing out he practically destroyed the economy, set the streets on fire with crime, abandoned the rule of law in order to dismantle our borders, and fell under the sway of a fetishistic fad by defending the sexual butchering of young people on the basis of zero science.
Now, I don't know what the administration's recommended response actually was because, let's face it, in this chaos, who cares?
But I thought it would be a good idea if we conservatives could issue some guidelines of our own on how to respond if, say, your leftist brother-in-law should come to Christmas dinner and start spouting off about how Donald Trump was a threat to democracy because of some damn fool thing he thinks happened that obviously didn't.
Now remember, it's Christmas, so you don't want to start an argument and ruin everybody's dinner.
Just quietly take your brother-in-law's side and show him the pictures you took of him messing around with the pool boy and tell him the next time you storm the Capitol, you expect to see him right there next to you, smearing crap on the walls of Congress like any other good patriot.
So, that's my Christmas message this year.
And remember, Jesus wants us to love and forgive one another.
So buy a lot, a lot of presents, because basically that's all we got going for us.
And don't forget the myrrh.
Trick or warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-hunky.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
All right, last show of the year, laughing our way through the end of days at this point.
Today we're going to review the news of the year, look back on that, look back on some of my favorite movies, TV and books.
And also, now that I'm done joking about it, I will also talk about Christmas in a way I think speaks to a lot of what's happening in our obviously shattered culture today.
I'm going to do the whole show for everyone.
There's no members block, so that's a very, very good reason to become a member, to support us and what we're doing.
You actually protect us from sponsors who get cold feet and pull out because of something we said.
Go to dailywire.com slash Clavin and become a member and join the fight.
We need you.
And this is also the last day, the last day I will plug A Strange Habit of Mind, the sequel to When Christmas Comes.
You can still time to get them for Christmas for somebody you love or for yourself, so you have something to read over the holidays.
To those of you who did buy it, seriously, thank you for putting it on the USA Today bestseller list.
That was a big boost for me, and I was really grateful for it.
For those of you who didn't buy it, I look forward to the day that your son Brenda comes to you in his pink dress and says, what did you do in the cultural war, Daddy?
And you don't have anything to say.
Also, go subscribe to YouTube.
This is my YouTube channel, the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
You will get exclusive content direct from me.
In fact, if you ring that little bell, I will slide down your chimney and leave the content right there under your tree.
Take the silverware and go.
And if you leave a comment, I will, if the comment is morally disgusting and just racist, sexist, all those other things that Media Matters just called me yesterday, I will include your comment on the show because it'll fit right in with the rest of our hateful content.
Today's comment is from Aaron Swords.
He says, as a conservative man, I typically do not show emotion when watching political content, but there was something about that Jewish man crying in the members block over a Christmas tree that really teared me up.
You know, it's funny, me too.
It reminded me of how real Americans care for each other despite our cultural differences.
The left wants us to believe that Americans all hate each other, but they are wrong.
They are absolutely wrong, Aaron.
It was a really good comment, and it's absolutely true.
It made me tear up too, because I think that's the way most Americans are.
I mean, I look around and I see people, you know, we're intermarrying.
We've always done this stuff.
We're getting along together.
It's only the left that wants to make us believe we hate each other and stir up those people who will hate if they are gotten to by enough media and Democrats, but I repeat myself.
All right, Christmas is just about here.
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Edmund Burke's Legacy00:04:17
I hate to begin the last show of the year with a correction, but my policy is on those incredibly rare occasions, I make a mistake, an actual mistake, not just misspeak or something.
I want to correct it as soon as possible.
Last week, I said that I thought that Trump's release of those stupid playing cards, those NFT playing cards, I thought he was trolling us a little bit, that he was kind of making people laugh to get attention.
I don't usually think Trump is playing 3D chess, but when he is playing 3D chess, it's with the media, because that's what he understands as PR.
But I now have inside information, reliable information, that his campaign is just in chaos.
And he's listening to people as he always does.
If they flatter him, if they tell him he won the last election and it was stolen from him, you know, he just listens to what they say.
And apparently, he hasn't really got a very good campaign going right now.
And that doesn't mean he won't get one together.
But right now, he's surrounded by toadies, and that's never a good situation.
All right.
So today, I don't just want to go over the big news stories.
I want to step back and see where we are in the big picture.
Because as I said last week, the past isn't coming back.
And a lot of people push back on that.
Yes, it is, you know, but that's not my goal.
My goal is to win the future.
Some people see conservatism as a way of going back, going back to things that were lost.
You know, we're going to stand astride the future, what was it that Buckley said, and tell it to stop.
These people tend to believe in things that aren't going to happen and then accuse people like me of wanting to conserve the mistakes of leftists.
But I have no interest in going back to the past.
I just came from there.
Believe me, it was not as good as people think it was.
What I want to preserve is the, what I'm trying to conserve is not the way things are, because things can get better and things can improve.
I want to preserve the eternal values so that we can imbue the ever-changing world with those values that never change.
Change is going to come, but I want to push change in the direction of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
And I'm with Edmund Burke on this.
Edmund Burke wrote very beautifully about this in Reflections on the Revolution in France, one of a brilliant piece of political writing, really the foundation of modern conservatism in a lot of ways.
And he said two things that I think are important to this subject.
He said, a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
Without such means, it might even risk the loss of that part of the Constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve.
Because change will come, Burke is saying.
It's inevitable.
If your state and society can't change to accommodate it, it will be destroyed.
The other thing Burke said was this.
This is important too, and I think it has to do with the way I look at change and some of the stuff I was saying last week that a lot of people reacted to.
He said, it is better to cherish virtue and humanity by leaving much to free will.
Listen to that again.
It's better to cherish virtue and humanity by leaving much to free will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence.
The world on the whole will gain by a liberty without which virtue cannot exist.
All right.
So in other words, what he's saying is it's better to have less virtue and more free will, because without free will, virtue can't exist.
Why?
Because it's not virtue if you didn't choose it.
It's not virtue if it's forced upon you.
So I'm not telling you, as some people said, I'm not telling you not to preach virtue.
I'm telling you to resist the impulse to use the state to enforce virtue because that's not virtue and it'll do nothing for the state but make it oppressive.
And I understand there are gray areas and which part is enforceable and which part is preachable, but those are the things that good people argue about and find a way forward with.
Basically, my belief, and I want to state this before I go into a sort of bigger picture, because it's important to know where I'm coming from.
My belief is this.
The aim of life is joy and the path to joy is to become the person God made you to be, not the person you want to be, but the person God made you to be.
And the way to do that is through the exercise of virtue.
And virtue can only be chosen, not enforced.
Joy, to be the person that God made you to be through virtue, but virtue has to be chosen.
And that's why, when it comes to politics, ordered liberty is the purpose of politics and the preservation of ordered liberty is the role of government.
And that's my political philosophy in a nutshell, right there.
The Twitter Files Controversy00:14:53
So that's why I think the biggest story of this year, and one of the biggest stories of my life, is the Twitter files.
And I know the press is not covering it, but that's part of the story and part of why it's such a big story.
It's a big story both for what it tells us, but also for what it implies, what it suggests.
To bring you up to date, the latest tranche of Twitter letters show this remarkable symbiotic relationship between pre-Elon Musk Twitter, the FBI, the DOJ, all the cops, the federal cops, basically, and our corrupt news media, which is now shamed forever, not just for what they did during this period of time during the election, but by their corrupt and wicked refusal to report on what they did now, to report on this Twitter, on the Twitter files,
which is a major part of the story, the non-reporting of it.
Under the guise of policing election integrity, the FBI and other police agencies coerced censorship on Twitter and even have lightly followed sites that were making jokes, like my site, which I believe was suppressed.
I'm sure it was suppressed because it's been climbing ever since Musk came on board.
But most egregiously, they convinced Twitter's leftist head of security, Yoel Roth, that the Hunter Biden laptop story was fake, there was misinformation during the election, right?
When it might have changed things, it really might have turned the tide and it certainly would have turned some votes around.
Now, this is important because we also know that the same government cops were meeting with Google, YouTube, and Facebook, and we know that they all got together and silenced a sitting president of the United States who won somewhere around half the electorate, right?
He came in underneath Biden, but he won more votes than anyone had besides Biden up until that time.
And we know that the press was quoting these people, sometimes anonymously, these spies, basically, but once in the form of this famous piece of spycraft where 51 top CIA people turned their skills against us, the American people, they turned their spying skills against us, the American people, to pretend that Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation when they knew it wasn't and the press complied.
And all of this points to something else, to a collapse in support, a collapse on the left in their support of the First Amendment and free speech.
There is no longer support for free speech on the left because they've lost the argument.
They didn't like the Supreme Court when they lost the majority.
They don't like the Electoral College when they lose the election.
And they don't like free speech when they lose the argument.
They just don't want to lose and they don't care what they have to destroy to win.
Vice President Camillo O'Harris, whatever her name is, Kamala Harris, is openly saying that free speech should be subject to government whim.
This is cut three.
So what I would say about any social media site is this.
I fully expect and would require that leaders in that sector cooperate and work with us who are concerned about national security,
concerned about upholding and protecting our democracy to do everything in their power to ensure that there is not a manipulation that is allowed or overlooked that is done with the intention of upending the security of our democracy and our nation.
So we know that our democracy to Democrats means they win.
The threat to democracy in this last midterms, and this is from everybody on the left, the threat to democracy was Democrats losing democratically.
That was the threat.
Suddenly the threat to democracy, when they didn't lose as badly as they thought they would, suddenly the threat to democracy was over.
Suddenly the New York Times stopped reporting it.
The panic was passed.
The threat to democracy is them losing.
And so we know when Kamala Harris says that she wants to compel social media to not threaten democracy.
We know that she means just what was happening before Elon came in.
We know this because they're attacking Elon Musk for letting people speak until they censor somebody on the left, until he knocks leftist journalists off.
Then, oh my gosh, what happened to free speech?
The thing is, the press, our press, our media, our news media is against the First Amendment that keeps them free.
They are against free speech.
Christine Rosen, here, writing at Commentary, says the Washington Post has created a new position exclusively reporting on health disinformation, which includes the forces promoting scientific and medical disinformation on subjects such as vaccine, drugs, nutritional supplements, and healthcare treatments, which would mean censoring the CDC, which was pouring out all kinds of disinformation and misinformation.
National Public Radio hosts an entire disinformation team whose mission is from the lies about the 2020 election to the growing influence of anti-vaccine activists to the enduring influence of climate change denialism, lies and conspiracy theories have seeped into nearly all aspects of modern day life.
I'm sorry, but all of those things have the mark of truth on them.
We're not against climate change.
The climate is always changing and maybe human beings contribute to that.
They probably do.
But that it is an existential threat is, I think, a lie, but certainly provably not as bad as everybody says it is, because even their own reports, when you stop reading the stuff that they release to the press and start reading the actual reports, doesn't say that.
So the media has become the Nixon.
They've become Watergate.
They are the cover-up.
They're in league with government, with big business, with big Hollywood and big academia, or as they call themselves, the resistance, because they're resisting the freedom of the ordinary man, which is what I am in favor of.
And the reason this is such a big story is because of the bigger story, which is the story of our time.
We are in a tremendously dramatic moment and a tremendously dangerous moment.
This story of our time has three basic components that are all of them linked.
The first one is what I've been calling the information crisis.
This is the rise of the internet, which, like the invention of the printing press, dislocated the control of information, took the control of information away from the elites, made it and democratized it, basically.
And remember when this happened with the printing press that led to the Reformation?
You know, Ben Shapiro is always teasing me about the fact that I bring up the peace of Westphalia all the time.
But there's a correlation.
The Catholic Church wanted control of Christian Orthodoxy.
That's basically they feel they are the church, and they felt then they had been the church for a thousand years, for 1,500 years.
And Protestants wanted to break that control, and individuals wanted to break that control.
And the conflicts that sometimes started as religious conflicts became political conflicts, like the 30 Years' War.
And the reason we cite the Peace of Westphalia, which was a series of treaties, I think it was two treaties, that ended the 30 years' wars, because that was the beginning of religious tolerance and diversity and the modern world.
So that's what's happening now.
An elite class is seeking to keep control over information because this new technology, the internet, has taken that control away from them.
And they're willing to destroy the First Amendment and American freedom to do it because they want to keep their power.
And their corruption and their dishonesty have destroyed our trust in the news media.
The news media is now no longer trusted.
I think a Pew Poll it was, had 34% have a great deal of fair amount of confidence in the media.
One-third of people have a fair amount.
And for the first time, more people, 38%, have no trust at all in the media.
And the only reason 34%, the only reason the number of trusts is that high is because 70% of Democrats trust them, which tells you everything you need to know about the media.
It is a Democrat plant.
It is the plant of big government, which is the plant of big business, which is the friend of academia, which is the friend of so-called socialism, which is really now at this point the mirror image of fascism.
I don't know the difference.
So that's one thing.
The rise of the internet, the information crisis, and the fight for control of media, which is a fight between the people, the individual people, and the power, the entrenched power.
Number two is the failure of that entrenched power.
The elite class has failed.
The people in charge, the media elites, the intellectual elites, the scientific elites, the deep state, the government elites, the resistance, again, they've revealed themselves to be authoritarian, anti-American, corrupt, and utterly incompetent.
The COVID lockdowns, which accomplish nothing but evil, right?
Everything they say is due to the pandemic, except for the deaths by COVID.
Everything they say has to do with the pandemic is actually their incompetence.
It's actually their mistake in panicking and shutting things down and doing things that had no effect on the spread of COVID, but just made children miserable, just through our economy out of whack, through our families out of whack, our businesses, everything, and shifted money from the middle class to the rich.
It was just a disaster.
It was one of the hugest mistakes in American history, certainly.
And this wasn't a one-time deal, this kind of ministry of fear, as Eric Ambler might have called it, this ministry of fear that they set up to make everybody afraid and make everybody compliant.
This has been going on for quite some time.
George Carlin, the comedian and activist, you know, loudmouth comedian, he was talking about this back in 2002.
Here he is, 20 years ago.
This is George Carlin, cut one.
Germs.
Where did this sudden fear of germs come from in this country?
Have you noticed this?
The media constantly running stories about all the latest infections, salmonella, E. coli, Hantavirus, bird flu.
And Americans are, they panic easily.
So now everybody's running around, scrubbing this and spraying that and overcooking their food and repeatedly washing their hands, trying to avoid all contact with germs.
It's ridiculous and it goes to ridiculous lengths.
Besides, what do you think you have an immune system for?
It's for killing germs.
But it needs practice.
It needs germs to practice on.
So, so listen.
So listen.
If you kill all the germs around you and live a completely sterile life, then when germs do come along, you're not going to be prepared.
And never mind ordinary germs.
What are you going to do when some super virus comes along that turns your vital organs into liquid sh ⁇ ?
All right.
So this fear has been spreading a long time.
This look, the deep state, the left basically uses fear, fear of the climate, fear of sunshine, fear of germs, fear of violence, fear of the end of democracy, fear, fear, fear.
It's always a crisis and it's always an emergency.
And so they need emergency powers to handle it.
And you never get those powers back, never, ever, ever.
So the lies about the vaccines, which have completed the destruction of our trust in science, we used to love science and trust science.
Now they've used that as a political tool.
It has become untrustworthy.
And that just climate alarmism is part of that.
That's also destroyed our trust.
The fact that so many loopy right-wing conspiracy theories have turned out to be true, not all of them, but some of them.
So many big news stories, Russian collusion, impeachment charges, vaccine efficacy, climate change, they also are turning out to be false.
This new omnibus spending bill, I don't want to just take in the whole year, but it's just an absolute mess.
It is a brand of failure.
It is a brand of failure that these guys cannot pass individual bills that let us know what is in them.
This is the biggest change I would like to see in our government, basically, is that no bill can be more than 10 typed double-spaced pages with 18 print-inch type.
So I can see what they're passing and they have to pass each one after debate.
This omnibus stuff is garbage.
No one is free when they are passing 4,000 page budgets.
No one is free if you can't read and if our lawmakers can't read the laws they're passing.
So that's number two, the failure of the governing class and their loss of our consent and our trust.
Remember, the government gains its legitimacy through our consent.
They have lost that consent and they've lost our trust.
And finally, number three, and all these things, as I said, are intimately connected, the changing of the guard.
The baby boom generation is dying, and I would thank God for it if I weren't a member of it.
The post-war and the post-Cold War structures are crumbling.
The electorate is shifting, certainly on the right, but we don't know how.
Now, the scary thing is, and historically, at moments of big change like this, generational change, but also just cultural change, where we're going to have to move.
We're moving into a global world.
That doesn't mean I'm in favor of globalism.
I think we should be a global world full of nation states.
But still, I can pick up a phone right now and call Afghanistan and find out why they're not educating their women since Joe Biden deserted them all.
I could do that right now.
So we're living in a global world.
The scary thing is, and I'm a fairly optimistic person, but this is a genuinely scary thing, that historically, in moments like this, of big transition, there's a huge war that sorts things out.
We'll talk about Ukraine in a moment.
Nothing is, but I was just reading in the wonderful new Edgar J. Edgar Hoover biography about in 1905, there was another crisis about gender, another crisis about men, another thing about why aren't men men and why is there a gynocracy and why are women taking over and all this stuff.
And we know that this was another big change, a transition point was 1914 to 1945, the latest 30 years war, and that was a big change.
And so, you know, this is a moment of danger.
When people want to hold on to power, when they've failed, when they're going to shift, it's a moment of danger because wars frequently clear out the old generation.
But nothing's written.
Nothing has to happen.
And that is why I think we, the good guys, have to play a cool hand.
The old elites are going to pass away.
The past is going to pass away.
That's a biological fact, like your gender.
Old people die.
And when the generations shift, new things come about.
But whether something better or worse comes up is up to us.
And a lot of you, you know, a lot of you get angry at me.
And I'm getting a lot of letters.
You get angry at me because I won't play to passion.
You know, I won't declare that, oh, I know the election was stolen and the CIA killed Kennedy, which is, by the way, nonsense.
But all of these things are passions of the moment, and you're absolutely sure of them.
And I don't play to those passions.
I think that the anger that feels like strength actually weakens you.
When I say anger is the devil's cocaine, you know, the devil always works by telling you he's going to make you more powerful.
This bigotry is going to make you more powerful.
This drug is going to make you more powerful.
Having sex with everybody you meet is going to make you an alpha male.
And you always wind up weak and depleted.
And that's the way the devil works.
And that's why anger is the devil's cocaine, because it makes you feel like you're a tough guy.
It makes you feel like you're smart.
Losing the Senate majority because Trump was angry about the election.
This is an example of what I'm talking about.
It's an excellent example.
I told you it was going to happen.
Losing to Anger00:03:01
And Trump was, no, I'm going to be reinstated.
And when I was right, not one person said you were right.
And Trump was wrong.
They just went right on to the next angry thing.
Storming the Capitol on January 6th, no matter what you think it was, whether you think it was a kerfuffle or a riot or an insurrection, no matter what it was, it was a loss for the people who did it.
It was a loss for the good guys.
It was a loss for the right because it gave the left something to hammer us with and an unnecessary thing.
When it comes to politics, I am a very icy person.
I am a very icy dude when it comes to politics.
only thing I'm passionate about, the only thing I'm passionate about politically is American liberty, ordered liberty, through limiting the spheres in which the government is allowed to act and through the right actions of individuals and the security of the family.
I don't have any political, I have no political heroes.
I don't have any political loyalties.
I don't really even have a political party, although right now, of course, I wouldn't vote for a Democrat if he was like if he had wings and a halo.
I will always vote for and support the person or the party I think will move the football toward the liberty goal on the next play.
That is how I work, because you can't predict way into the future.
All these people who tell you what's going to happen in two years do not know.
I just get the guy who I think is going to give us the most liberty next time out, for the next term or whatever it is.
I voted for Trump when I thought he was the best person, but Trump does not mean diddly squat to me.
As a person, he doesn't mean a thing to me.
He's not Hitler.
He's not Jesus.
He means absolutely zero to me as a person.
And other things, you know, protest votes and third parties that can't win, they mean nothing.
People who give up and say, you know, oh, it's all over.
What's the point?
Mean nothing.
Big talk and loud voices means nothing.
The private sins of individuals don't mean anything in politics.
They don't mean in politics.
They don't mean anything to me.
Your skin color, your sex life, your religion, when it comes to politics, if you are for ordered liberty, you are my brother and sister American.
We're on the same side.
That is it.
To repeat what I said at the beginning of this rant, the path to joy is God's creation through virtue, which has to be freely chosen.
Governments are instituted among men to ensure that freedom.
I want them to do that job and not the job that governments have done throughout most of history.
The people who call themselves progressives are pushing the oldest idea in the world, government control, top-down control.
Pharaoh was a progressive.
He taxed the people who took their grain.
And when the famine came, he handed out the grain and then the people who came for the grain became slaves.
That's been around since Pharaoh.
The idea of freedom that the founders of this country put forward is the only new political idea there is.
So the key to winning the future for me is not taking back the culture.
It's creating, recreating a new culture, creating a new culture of our own, a real culture that envisions a realistic future with conservative values, with eternal values, values that can survive the changes that are going to come.
And we can preach virtue while preserving liberty and free will.
This is a moment between one era and the next.
Creating a New Culture00:15:34
It really is.
It's a very serious thing.
And I know it may feel like the end of days, but it's probably just the end of these days.
And the days to come are up for grabs, you know, and these transitions take time.
I'm probably not going to be around to see the end of this transition.
I mean, that's how long they usually take.
So I'm telling you to remember, stay cool, act smart, play the long game, put liberty first, and don't forget to win.
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All right, let's take a look at some other big stories of the year.
The biggest story, another one of the biggest stories of the year was a big victory for conservatives, which was, and it was Trump's greatest achievement and Mitch McConnell's greatest achievement.
I would say it was enough of an achievement for anybody for a lifetime.
And that was, of course, the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
Like everything important, the press misrepresented this, saying it's a hit at women's rights.
But Antonin Scalia explained why we objected to Roe v. Wade.
I know that the paper in the press says it's about abortion, but it's about more than that, really.
I know abortion is important, but it's about more than that.
Here is Scalia explaining why he was against Roe v. Wade, cut two.
My view is, regardless of whether you think prohibiting abortion is good or whether you think prohibiting abortion is bad, regardless of how you come out on that, my only point is the Constitution does not say anything about it.
It leaves it up to democratic choice.
Some states prohibited it, some states didn't.
What Roe versus Wade said was that no state can prohibit it.
That is simply not in the Constitution.
It was one of those many things, most things in the world, left to democratic choice.
Now, the reason that's important, right?
The reason that's as important as the issue itself is because you're going to live.
I explained this after the decision came out when I broke down on air because I was so moved by the victory.
The thing is, the reason this is important is you're going to live in a country where sin and evil exists because you are on the planet Earth.
You're not living in heaven.
Every country has evil in it.
Every country has sin in it.
You know, you cannot eradicate those things without becoming the biggest sinner of all, namely a dictator, right?
But, but it is different to live in a country where evil exists and where sin exists in a country where it's a right to kill someone else, where it's a right where you dehumanize anybody, where you say it's your right to hold a slave, it's your right to segregate people because of the color of their skin, or to keep a woman from getting an education, or to kill a child in the womb just simply because it has no voice with which to plead for its life.
That's not a country where evil happens.
That's an evil country.
And now I feel this was huge because we changed course.
And I know conservatives cherish their pessimism, but it's a good thing.
And I believe it will lead to good things if we can keep that decision in place.
But the left's passion for death, their passion for slavery and death, is still on the march, and it's always going to be on the march.
And it always has an advantage because leftism is a form of decay and everything decays.
So eventually they'll win, but it's just like being a, I always say this, being a conservative is like being a doctor.
Eventually our country will collapse and die, but not today.
If I can keep it going another day and a day after that and a day after that, that's what conservatism is like.
That's why it's always a fight.
That's why you never declare victory.
You know, when I talk about liberty, the reason I mean ordered liberty, which includes virtue, the left wants you to be free, but they only want you to be free to do things that enslave you.
Just like I was saying about like the devil that he tells you this is going to make you strong.
They want you to be able to have any kind of sex you want because promiscuous sex will enslave you.
They want to legalize drugs.
I know some of you guys love that dope.
Don't do that dope.
That will enslave you.
Drugs enslave you every time.
And taking other people's money enslaves you.
Being dependent on the government ultimately enslaves you.
They tell you that they're giving you something.
Nobody gives you anything.
Nothing is free.
What's the price of taking government money?
It's basically losing your honesty and losing your independence.
The things that make you actually free, like religion and moral living and responsibility and hard work, these are the things the left is always against.
But there's just a big difference between what you can force people to do, like not kill children.
without limiting your freedom, you can say you may not kill children, but things you have to convince people to do, which is live chastely.
You do not want the government listening at the door.
People who write to me and say we should outlaw sodomy, which used to be outlawed, although those laws were almost never enforced.
But that's the problem.
They're never enforced, and it just means you can persecute somebody, find a reason to persecute somebody.
And by the way, you know, there's a lot of married couples that do things that, you know, are you going to start policing everything that people do?
People do all kinds of crazy things in their bedrooms.
So if you're just going to be picking on the gay people, I do not think that that is a good way to go.
But only through a moral culture can you produce moral people, which brings me to this war in Ukraine, which is a really important story.
It's the biggest land war in Europe since World War II.
It's a big story for a lot of reasons because of what it could become, obviously.
And I only really want to talk about a kind of offbeat reason, but let's just cover it.
Zelensky came to the U.S. this week to raise yet more money.
His country is being brutalized by Putin and Russia, and it looks like it's going to come on.
What was supposed to be a quick conquest?
What everybody thought would be a quick conquest instead has become a war of attrition.
And here's Biden greeting Zelensky and telling him he has America's support.
This cut 10.
This year has brought so much needless suffering and loss to the Ukrainian people.
But I want you to know, President Zelensky, I want you to know that all the people of Ukraine to know as well.
The American people have been with you every step of the way, and we will stay with you.
We will stay with you for as long as it takes.
What you're doing, what you've achieved, it matters not just to Ukraine, but to the entire world.
And together, I have no doubt we'll keep the flame of liberty burning bright, and the light will remain and prevail over the darkness.
Thank you for being here, Mr. President.
We're going to stand with you.
Now, one of the ways you can tell that the president is lying is when his mouth starts moving.
So when he says the American people are with you, it's really not true.
We're pretty divided.
47% at this point, I think, is the number are against continuing on this war.
Most people want to see it brought to a negotiated close.
And there are lots of arguments good people can make.
I mean, this is the thing.
Not every issue has a right answer.
There are lots of arguments.
You can argue, first of all, that we shouldn't have teased Ukraine with NATO, which baited Russia and made them feel endangered by our empire, which is, I mean, NATO is like the Delean League.
It basically is us.
You can say Ukraine is, I don't care Stan.
It's not us.
Why should we be wasting blood and treasure?
We're not, thankfully, so far, wasting blood, but we're spending a lot of treasure.
Or you can argue that having a new imperial Russia bordering NATO countries like Poland is not a very good thing.
And you can argue that it encourages China to take Taiwan if we show ourselves to have no resolution.
These are arguments that good people can make.
There's one argument you can't make, and some people on the right started to make it and were caught out by Putin's obviously illegal invasion of his neighboring country.
You can't make the argument that Putin is a good guy.
He's not a good guy.
He's a KGB thug.
He's a wannabe czar.
He brutalizes civilians.
He murders journalists.
And journalists are annoying.
They need a good kick in the pants, but you don't kill them.
And it doesn't bother me at all that more isolationist people should want us to stay home.
But the idea that we have to argue that Putin is a great guy, so we shouldn't bother him.
He shouldn't be our enemy.
He's our enemy.
He's the enemy of decent people, and he's a really bad guy.
And this brings up something really important, right?
I mean, I'm glad, by the way, he's having such a hard time this week in a moment of honesty.
He actually said how difficult the war is.
But it also brings to light part of what I'm saying about virtue and force, all right?
When Putin this year declared the annexation of four sections of Ukraine after a sham plebiscite, he had a vote and he declared that he was annexing Ukraine, a very Hitlerian move.
And he said this.
He said, the dictatorship of the Western elites is directed against all societies, including the peoples of the Western countries themselves.
This is a challenge for everyone.
This is Putin talking.
He said, such a complete denial of man, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, the suppression of freedom, acquiring the features of a reverse religion, the opposite of what the religion is, outright Satanism.
Now, everybody on the right who heard that thought, he's got a point.
He's got a point.
You know, we went into Afghanistan and put a rainbow flag on our consulate there or our embassy there in a Muslim country where they don't want to see the rainbow flag.
And it's none of our business whether they accept the rainbow flag or not.
We are definitely in the throes of cultural colonialism.
When Bill Gates goes into Africa and pushes abortion on countries that do not want abortion and do not believe that's a good thing, I know he thinks he's doing the right thing, but that is colonialism and imperialism writ large.
It's the worst of that kind of thing.
It's cultural colonialism.
And Putin is also right about some of this sexual stuff.
Now, the thing is, Putin is a bad guy.
He's an invader.
He's a thug, all the things that I said.
But, you know, he has done some things that I would approve of if they were done here.
The Orthodox Church is thriving in Russia.
The new cathedral for the military is beautiful where our buildings, you should stay at modern hotels.
They're the ugliest, nastiest places I've ever been in.
They restarted awards for mothers from the Soviet Union.
They always had awards for mothers to increase the population.
And these are things I like.
And the fact that a murderous dictator is saying good things should alert everybody to the fact that these things must be chosen freely or they are not virtues.
You know, I met the Russian spy.
I told you about this, Maria Butina.
I was at a right-wing gathering, a David Horowitz gathering, and I knew this guy, Paul Erickson, who was sentenced to federal prison.
I think Trump pardoned him on his last day in office.
But Paul introduced me to Maria Butina, and I took one look at her.
Paul was middle-aged, and she was a very hot young woman.
And I took one look at her, and I thought, Paul, what are you doing?
You know, this is not a good thing.
This is a smart thing, because obviously he was banging this chick, right?
She came up to me at the pool in a string bikini and asked me my advice on how to bring gun rights to Russia.
Absolutely true.
She's close enough to me where I could feel her breath.
And I thought to myself, oh, she's a Russian spy.
Now, I have to admit, I thought it jokingly.
I didn't actually, you know, who thinks anybody is an actual Russian spy?
But I thought, you know, when a young woman asks an older man advice, it is a form of dangerous flirtation.
When a young woman does it in a string bikini and a Russian accent, she's a Russian spy.
So it doesn't matter, you know, and I love gun rights.
I am a strong supporter of the Second Amendment.
It doesn't matter what you're saying.
It matters what you're after and what Putin is after, a new Russian empire, a new right to oppress, to bring himself into conflict with the West is a bad thing.
But he is doing it by appealing to the American right wing.
And in one way, it's a good thing that he invaded Ukraine and woke some people up on the right because Hitler did this too.
There were people, you know, and I'm not comparing Putin to Hitler.
He's not Hitler, but he is a dictator and he does do Hitlerian things on the international scene.
And Hitler appealed to the American right as well with some of his things.
With some of his conservative ideas.
I've said before that Hitler was right about modern art.
Modern art stinks.
about it.
It was all the killing that I wasn't into, okay?
And the same thing is true with Putin.
We cannot be seduced like this woman was trying to seduce people.
You cannot be seduced by what they're saying.
You have to look at what they are after and what they're after is no damn good.
You know, I welcomed home American hating, tattooed lesbian and drug smuggler Brittany Griner, the basketball player.
I don't want any of my fellow Americans in a Russian prison.
I'm a patriot and I do not want that to happen.
But, you know, I'm aware that she refused to listen to the Pledge of Allegiance and she's a leftist fool.
She's no great brain or anything like this.
And yet, when we traded Viktor Baut, a Russian arms dealer, he went home and he was welcomed as a hero and he said, what is happening in the West is a suicide of civilization.
Can you imagine in American schools, they teach first graders that there are 72 genders, not just gays and normal people, but 72.
And meanwhile, our president said this, that the signing of a bill meant to protect same-sex marriages, which didn't need protecting.
This is what Biden said, and I played this last week, but it's worth hearing again.
This is cut four.
We need to challenge the hundreds of callous, cynical laws introduced in the States targeting transgender children, terrifying families, and criminalizing doctors who give children the care they need.
We have to protect these children so they know they are loved and we will stand up for them and say they can seek for themselves.
So when you have a murderous dictator, imperialist dictator like Putin preaching good values, and you have the president, the leader of the free world, saying it's all right to butcher children, to sexually butcher children on the basis of no science, the basis of an academic theory, which when you read it, as I have, makes literally no sense.
It's just nonsense.
Protecting Transgender Children00:02:25
It's babble.
It's leftist Marxist cultural Marxist babble.
When you say that you have the right to sexually butcher children who are going to be suing these doctors until hell freezes over and that's where the doctors will be, that's a bad situation.
That's a dangerous situation.
It is a dangerous situation when free men become evil and when it leaves it open for dictators to preach what's right.
And that is a really dangerous situation.
It's complicated and it's dangerous.
So we on the right have to walk a very careful line.
We have to stay cool.
I'm telling you, being cool in a moment like this is the only way to win the future.
You have to stay cool and remember that virtue is not virtue if it is not freely chosen.
And so what we have to be in favor of is not any ism, not this-ism or that-ism.
We have to be in favor of ordered liberty and limited government.
Government limited in its sphere of action and the things that it can regulate and the things that it cannot.
The fight is to restore.
I want tolerant attitudes on the West.
I don't want people's bedroom doors being kicked down by government to make sure they're having sex in the right way.
That's ridiculous.
I want people to, I want to be tolerant, but I want a sense of virtue to understand where virtue is.
It is virtuous to leave people alone in their personal lives.
It is not virtuous to butcher children on the basis of an academic theory or anything or any reason when the children have not got the ability to decide from themselves.
You know, it's easy for right-wing talkers to go on TV and say, oh, why do we hate Putin?
And we hate him.
Why is Putin our enemy?
He's our enemy because he's a tyrant.
We should be enemies of all tyrants.
I don't care if they're Muslims.
I don't care if they're Russians.
I don't care if they're Americans.
We should be the enemy of all tyrants.
He's an invader.
He's a danger to liberty.
And all that talk about old-fashioned values is just a girl in a string bikini trying to lull us into playing along.
We have to stay cool and support the liberty in which virtue thrives.
That's why we are here.
That's why we're conservatives.
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So one of the things I want to look back on is the year in culture, the year in the arts.
And this is actually a very important year in the arts, but not for a good reason.
I've been talking a while about the slump in American creativity.
Part of that probably has to do with the COVID lockdowns that did curtail the movie industry and the TV industry and maybe a little bit the publishing industry even.
But I think it's more than that.
I think that storytelling has declined since the turn of the century, a golden era of television.
And as I've said many times before, that golden era of television focused almost entirely on anti-heroes.
It was like the SHIELD and the Sopranos and Breaking Bad.
It was one bad guy after another.
And I really did believe that that was, I think it was René Girard who said that a culture in decline, a culture that's decadent, cannot produce heroes.
It can only produce anti-heroes.
And so I think that that was a moment when we actually did not know how to portray a good man.
And a good man, a man, to be a man, had to be some kind of outlaw.
That's not always true in society.
In some societies, I mean, for instance, if you have the legends of the Wild West and the legends of King Arthur and his knights, the good man is the hero and he's a guy who does right and he is a protector of women and the weak and he is somebody that you turn to for help and he may have to be a tough guy at times, but he doesn't have to be a bad guy.
There was a real kind of consensus that the only way we could see men, real men being men, was if they were in some way dishonest.
And I think that that has played out and now we are looking, searching, groping for what a good man looks like.
But the problem is, is feminism, you know, has basically curtailed all the actions of men.
So if a man saves a woman, oh, why isn't the woman strong enough to save herself?
Well, because in real life she wouldn't be and he would be, but they don't want to do real life because feminism is a fantasy.
So I think that has really hurt our culture.
And wokeism, of course, which is a total lie.
The thing is, you know, I always say I'm not anti-woke in the same way I'm not anti-astrology.
It's just worthless.
It's worthless garbage, and it's destructive to people who believe in it.
It's destructive to our culture.
But you can't make art out of wokeness because it's a lie.
And so you have to say something true, even if you don't mean to say something true, in order for it to be art.
So this was a bad year, one of the worst years I've ever seen.
On backstage, Ben said at some point that there were no good stories anymore.
I don't believe that at all.
First of all, I write some good ones, but I think that there are people writing good stories.
But I think right now in the big culture, in that mainstream culture, that money-making culture that sort of dominates the conversation is very hard to come up with anything good because the people doing it are all left-wing.
They have nobody to correct them.
They have nobody to argue with them, no one to bring them down to earth, and they're making garbage.
And they've been making garbage a long time.
I mean, I think most of these superhero pictures, as I've said many times, are garbage.
And one thing that people don't like, though, they don't like to hear that their culture is bad, inherently bad, like rap is inherently bad or superhero movies are inherently bad.
Everybody backs off because if they weren't making money, if people weren't going to see them, they wouldn't be getting made.
So they are saying something into the culture.
It just doesn't mean that they are real art.
So let me look at some of this stuff.
I have to tell you that I did not see a single movie this year that I thought was good.
One of the things, by the way, I should go back and say I agreed with Ben about is the reason for this is because nobody wants to talk about God.
And without God, there's no moral world.
And without a moral world, there's no struggle to become what a good man is or what a good woman is.
And so there is no struggle.
There's just kind of wandering around having feelings.
This was exemplified for me in a movie that did pretty well at the box office called Ambulance, which was an action picture by Michael Bay with Jake Gillenhall and Yahya Abdul Mateen.
And it was a heist picture.
But the thing that was really interesting about it was it had no moral core.
It was about, it starts out with this guy.
He's black.
He's a veteran.
He's on the phone trying to get insurance for his wife and child from the VA, which is not responding.
And so we immediately sympathize with him.
But very early on in the picture, he's responsible for the death of a cop.
And he does all kinds of terrible things throughout the movie.
And yet somehow, we're supposed to have this feeling that he's a good person because we've seen him in a sympathetic light.
But bad people are in sympathetic lights too, as every thriller writer knows.
You can put a bad person in a sympathetic light.
And it was really interesting, this picture ambulance, almost worth watching as a cultural relic for its lack of moral core.
And I think that has been true a lot.
You know, what was good?
Northman was okay.
Everywhere all together all at once, whatever it was called, was okay.
Nothing was great.
The Agatha Christie film Death in the Nile was fun and entertaining.
Some people were angry on backstage when I hit Top Gun 2.
I said it was tons of fun, wonderful to watch, an amazing technical experience.
Cruz did a great job, you know, kind of carrying a very corny, old-fashioned story on his shoulders.
But it was empty of content.
It was empty of moral content.
And that meant it looked conservative.
It was a conservative gesture, but it wasn't actually a conservative movie.
And that's not, a movie doesn't have to be good, conservative to be good, but it has to have content to be good.
And so it wasn't like a really good movie.
It was just an entertainment, and great as an entertainment.
I thought Father Stu was pretty good.
I thought the performance by Mel Gibson, it was a surprising movie because I thought it was going to be a kind of slap happy, you know, tough guy becomes a priest and everything is great.
But instead, it was a true story about a guy who had a terrible progressive muscle disorder, became a priest, and found out that suffering was part of the path to God.
Good performance by Mark Wahlberg.
Excellent, excellent performance by Mel Gibson.
of the best performances of his career as the lead as Father Stu's father.
Here's just a moment of Wahlberg talking about his suffering as his body decays and saying that this is actually, I mean, it's a complicated and difficult thought, that this is actually a gift from God.
This is cut seven.
All our outer nature is wasting away.
But our inner nature is being renewed every day.
This life, no matter how long it lasts, is a momentary affliction preparing us for eternal glory.
We shouldn't pray for an easy life, but the strength to endure a difficult one.
Because the experience of suffering is the fullest expression of God's love.
It is a chance to be close to Christ.
That's a very tough thought that suffering is the fullest expression of God's love, God's love, and just an interesting movie.
You know, at least it wasn't a great movie, but it was a good movie and it was very interesting and good performances.
TV, which is still the best venue for film entertainment, for pictures, moving pictures.
The Terminalist, I liked a lot.
It was a lot of fun.
Jack Carr came on the show and talked about that.
And I think they did an excellent, excellent job with it and really good adventure story stuff.
I hope they make a sequel.
The books are really good too and worth getting.
And Severance, which was, I guess, on Apple TV, that was really an interesting show.
That was the one that was created by Dan Erickson, directed by Ben Stiller and others, and had Adam Scott in it.
It was about a brain operation that means that you can go in and do classified work and not remember it during the day when you're not at work.
So your work life and your life life are severed.
And we know something is going on, but we don't know quite what.
My favorite scenes in Severance were the scenes outside of the workplace, which were the rare scenes where you saw a very kind of liberal middle-class culture, but it was just incredibly stupid.
I mean, so stupid it was almost hard to believe, which made me think that something more was going on.
I don't know whether this is a great show or not, because it just hasn't gone far enough to sort of reveal itself, but it certainly was gripping and interesting and entertaining.
And I will definitely go back and see it, see the next season when it comes out.
One show I felt that was underwatched, I think I covered it maybe on a YouTube video, but it was Blackbird.
Blackbird is by my second favorite American crime writer after me.
My favorite crime writer is me, and I had a great book come out this year.
But Dennis Lahane is just a terrific crime writer, and you know him because he did, oh, he's done a lot of things that were made into movies.
Gone, Baby, Gone was one.
The Mystic River was another.
Mystic River, is that what it's called?
Anyway, he's just a terrific writer.
His novels are great.
But he took an autobiographical novel by a guy who was sent to prison, a rich drug dealer who was sent to prison and enlisted to get a confession out of the serial killer who was already doing time.
Here's a bit of the trailer.
It's cut five.
Tell me there's a way out of this.
Not a quick one.
We would like you to transfer to another prison and befriend someone to elicit a confession.
We suspect that this man killed 14 women, but we only have one of the bodies.
Larry has vivid dreams.
Tell me about him.
In my dreams, I kill women.
Those are just dreams.
In this prison where the guy is?
Maximum security specializing in the criminally insane.
You want me to check into hell and befriend the demon?
Not for all the money in the world.
How about freedom?
So he makes the deal, obviously.
Taryn Edgerton turning into a really good tough guy performance, a kind of Jimmy Cagney style performance.
Good cast.
Greg Kinnear is in at Ray Liota.
The late now Ray Liotta.
And the guy who plays the serial killer is excellent too.
I think his name is Hauser.
Paul Hauser, yeah.
And what's wonderful about it is its moral core.
It is about an arrogant, rich, pamphered guy who becomes a drug dealer and makes all this easy money, has all these easy relationships with women.
And in confronting this serial killer, he basically has to change and confront the evil in himself.
Very, very good show and underwatched, I thought, undersold.
Hillsdale College's Moment00:14:31
For me, always, always, always, the main culture is books.
Books remain the heart of culture.
And I'll tell you why.
Movies, you always want to see the latest movie.
I love old movies, but you want to see the latest movie TV.
You want to see what's going on.
You want to talk to people.
But books, you can read any book.
Any great book is always relevant.
And you can always go back into the past and find incredible entertainment.
And you don't have to, whether the American culture is in a slump, you can read books from all over and from any time.
And that's why I love them.
So let me just give you a quick list of the best modern novel I read this year was a small novella really called Small Things Like This, Small Things Like These, I'm sorry, by Claire Keegan.
It's a very, very small book about the Magdalene laundries, which were abusive Catholic laundries for wayward girls in Ireland.
And it is a confrontation between this laundry and an ordinary man, a coal merchant named Bill Furlong, who confronts the evil in his town.
And it's very quiet, very restrained, subtle book, but very, very moving and entertaining.
Actually, really moved me.
Just really good stuff.
The best contemporary nonfiction I read this year was Desperate Remedies, Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness by Andrew Skull.
And this, I really recommend it if you want to read it about how awful the psychiatric industry has been, how awful the medical industry has been, and how each time a new, horrible, demented, terrible torture of a cure like, you know, lobotomies came along, the mainstream media was like, this is a miracle, this is great, while people were just absolutely torn to shreds.
So if you think it's bad now with the New York Times fronting for dishonest guys like Fauci, it has always been bad, and this is worth seeing.
The best nonfiction book I read was really wonderful called Centuries by Thomas Trahern.
He was a 17th century Anglican cleric and theologian.
This book, I don't think this book was even published.
It was published for the first time in 1908, so it wasn't published in his lifetime.
It is Meditations on Christ.
C.S. Lewis called this the most beautiful book ever written.
And I think it's right up there.
It's certainly a really, really moving work.
I'm going to reread it next year as my devotional because I just thought it was so good.
And the best novel, not contemporary, that I read this year was The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham.
I did this on a member block in 1944, which is a wonderful novel about a man who is searching for enlightenment in the midst of all the business of the world.
And he's kind of a background figure who's looking for enlightenment while all of the loving and cheating and lying and sex and marriage and divorce of the world and money making is going on.
And that is something that I think is really important to remember that most of the important stuff that's being going on is not on TV.
It's not being done by famous people.
It's not being done by actors.
It's not being done by celebrities.
It's being done by moms.
It's being done by guys living ordinary lives.
That, I think, is a theme of small things like these two, but certainly a theme of The Razor's Edge, one of the best novels, modern novels I've ever read, up there with Ulysses, which is a much, much harder book to read.
And this is a very, very straightforward story, but very, very good.
Books are always the place to go for culture.
They're always alive.
There's always good culture to be found somewhere.
It just might not be the culture of the moment.
And I do believe this culture, American culture, will come back as this period of demented decadence changes and we make the transition into a new generation, the generation hopefully that will be better than the one we've got now.
Well, if you're looking for some holiday reading for yourself or to give us a gift, here's a real showstopper.
This made me question my entire literary career.
I've written countless books, of which I was, until this weekend, immensely proud.
However, after encountering this masterpiece, I just want to retreat into a deep, dark cave, never to put pen to paper ever again.
And the worst part, it was written by another host here at the Daily Wire, a host I always thought of as another one of my, like he was one of my sons.
But now, after reading his masterpiece, I just have to call him sweet daddy.
Yes, Matt Walsh, who may come across as just a devilishly handsome yet rugged lumberjack.
He actually has a mind more powerful than his stunningly broad shoulders.
That's why his head probably keeps rolling around like that.
As the world comes apart at the seams over one particular issue, Matt Walsh has captured the moment with his book, Johnny the Walrus.
What a classic.
It fights the gender madness of today with an argument so profound, I almost dropped the walrus plushie I was holding so very tightly while I was reading it.
Matt is a great guy, a brilliant scholar, a gifted writer, and what a beard.
He's so handsome.
When I grow up, I want to be like Matt Walsh if I grow up, which is doubtful.
I hope I never lose an election bet to you again, but who am I kidding?
You will beat me every time, no matter the competition, because you are just so good at everything.
I'm reading this because I lost the bet.
The Mott Walshaw Show, the Matt Walsh Show, streaming every Monday through Friday at 1.30 p.m. Eastern on dailywire.com.
And while we're talking about reading, Ben Shapiro's book club returned last night for a brand new episode.
It is now available to watch exclusively on Daily Wire Plus.
I don't have to say anything nice about Ben, do I?
That would kill me.
In it, Ben goes through the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.
Great book.
Shares his notes and insights with you and answers all your questions about the book.
The Screwtape Letters is a terrific book about a demon plotting to take a man's soul.
It's funny, but it's also incredibly deep.
You have to be an all-access member to watch.
And trust me, when I say you don't want to miss this one, head to dailywire.com slash Clavin to become a member and watch the latest episode of Ben Shapiro's book club.
That's dailywire.com slash Clavin today.
So I don't know if you've noticed, but Hillsdale College is having a real moment.
I mean, some of their people are absolutely terrific and are making a real dent in both the culture and our intellectual life.
One of the best people at Hillsdale, as far as I'm concerned, is John J. Miller, the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College.
And since we're talking about journalism today and the death of journalism, I wanted to bring him on and have him talk with some expertise.
He's also the executive director of the College Fix, which is an absolutely great site exposing some of the insanity at the academies.
John, it's great to see you.
How are you doing?
I'm excellent.
How are you, Drew?
I am good.
I am good.
We have been, I spent a lot of time today talking about what I call the information crisis, which is the internet basically creating this place where people are just desperately trying to take control, take back control of the media.
I think the media, the news media's corruption is almost entire.
I would like to know what you are seeing when you look at the media, the news media landscape today.
Well, it's never been worse.
Journalism has never been worse than it is right now.
And our most esteemed institutions, the great New York Times, the Washington Post, you name them all.
You can't trust them anymore.
You can't trust them, certainly on their politics.
They do have some virtues still.
I do like the New York Times for some of its foreign coverage and science coverage and so forth.
But you really can't trust them for some of the most important things Americans need them for, read them for.
And I like to say journalism never has been worse, but I also say there's a kind of caveat there, which is it's never been better in the sense it's so diverse right now that you can go and seek out all kinds of alternative views.
There are great journalists at work today.
There are great news sites.
There are even great podcasts, Drew.
And, you know, if what we're doing right now is a form of journalism, it's certainly media.
And, you know, a generation ago, we didn't have these options.
You couldn't turn to them.
All you had was the New York Times and the Washington Post.
And, you know, they drove all the news coverage.
The TV stations looked to them for everything.
And they had more authority than they do now.
And one of the great accomplishments of the last generation is that they've lost their authority.
And we've done that through alternative media.
That's a really interesting and optimistic thing to say because obviously if it weren't true, they wouldn't be panicking so desperately and trying so desperately to shut us up.
You know, one of the questions, I get asked this question all the time, like, how do you find the facts?
When I started doing the show, which was not that long ago, it's like a little over seven years ago.
If I read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, I knew the facts and then I could go other places to get different points of view.
Now it takes me at least three times as long with at least five times as much information.
What do you say to people when they want to know where do I go to get the truth?
That's a great question.
And the first point is you've got to be deliberate about it.
You can't just let the news come to you through your Twitter feed or your social media.
That's letting other people choose what is your news.
It's letting, first of all, your friends choose, but also the algorithms of these big tech companies are choosing for you.
And you can't do that.
I mean, you can certainly acquire news that way.
But if you want to be a good consumer of news, if you want to know what's going on in the world and have at least a partial grasp of what's happening in our country and the world, you've got to go search it out yourself.
And you've got to find those sites that are reliable, that you trust and so forth.
And I still go to the Wall Street Journal every day.
I regard its news coverage as really pretty good, not flawless, but nobody's news coverage is ever flawless.
It's really a pretty good, reliable source of information.
Also, I love its editorial pages for their insights and the reporting that goes on there.
So I start with that, but then I go to a number of other sites.
I do read the New York Times every day.
I find it valuable for certain reasons, partly know what's on their minds and what they're thinking about.
But their coverage of Ukraine has been pretty good and sort of what's going on over there and their coverage of science and business.
That can be pretty good as well.
But you've got to be deliberate.
You've got to know what you're going to and you've got to choose what you're going to rather than let other people choose it for you.
So you run this journalism department at what is now like probably the best college in the country.
I taught there for two weeks and I think I won the official John Miller restraining order never to come back.
But these kids who came in that I met, incredibly smart, incredibly active, lively thinkers.
What is the thing that you are looking?
What do they come in with that you want to get rid of?
And what do you want to give them before they leave?
Well, first of all, the students at Hillsdale College are terrific.
I love them.
They're great kids coming here.
It's like the opposite of garbage in, garbage out, right?
We get really good kids coming in.
And first and foremost, they're smart.
It's a pretty selective college.
It's getting harder and harder to get in.
Your test scores need to be good.
You need to be a really strong applicant.
And unfortunately, the admissions office has to turn away some really outstanding applicants.
But the kids that we get coming here, they're smart and they're hardworking, number one.
But, you know, smart and hardworking, there's a lot of kids who are like that.
What I really like about these Hillsdale College kids is they're decent people.
They're good people.
And, you know, I want my own kids to be around people like them.
And I think any parent should want that.
These are really fundamentally good people.
Look, they're 19, they're 20.
They do stupid, crazy things the way college students always do stupid, crazy things.
They make mistakes and so on, but they're really good, fundamentally good, solid people.
So number one, that's a great asset we have.
Now, now they do come here in terms of media consumption, if that's what you're asking.
I'm always asking us, where do you get your news?
And the answer is always, well, I read Twitter and I read Facebook or Instagram or whatever, TikTok.
I get that a lot too.
And fine, these are great tools.
I actually love social media.
What a terrific device this is for gathering information.
But that's not how you need more deliberate.
You need to choose yourself.
You need to learn in other ways rather than let it come at you by the choices of the people you follow and the companies and their algorithms and so forth.
So I've got to, you know, we don't teach this and we don't have courses on how to do Twitter, but it is something that everybody needs to learn.
You need to become a good discriminating consumer of news and information.
So I was stunned when I was there by how, I mean, we had some conversations in my class where I walked out afterwards and I thought, if I were at Yale, I would be up on like a Title IX fight or something.
I'd basically be out of a job where they were absolutely willing to talk about anything and discuss things and argue about things.
That was great.
You've placed a lot of people at very high level points.
I think Barton Swain was one of your guys, one of my favorite young writers coming up.
He's at the Vice for the Journal a lot.
He's not a Hillsdale grad, but he was a Polym Fellow, as you were.
And so he came and taught here at the college and has been a great ally.
And of course, he's just a terrific writer and thinker.
I mean, Barton's a destination writer.
I mean, I will read like anything he writes because he wrote it.
I don't care what the topic is.
But our alumni are really flourishing.
We have, well, at the Wall Street Journal editorial page with Barton, four of his colleagues come from Hillsdale College.
Jillian Melcher, who's a great foreign correspondent, kind of always running to the sound of gunfire, reporting from Ukraine and Hong Kong.
She's a Hillsdale grad.
And Kate O'Dell is a great editorial writer there, often writing on the Navy and the need to rebuild our Navy and other topics.
We also have Nicole Alt and Mark Naida are both on the editorial page doing great work.
So they're there, but they're all over the place at National Review, at Washington Examiner, Daily Caller, Daily Wire, and so on.
We have alumni everywhere.
So, you know, the places you mentioned are all conservative.
And one of the things that has been so distressing on the left is getting rid of basically blacklisting and destroying anybody in their ranks who doesn't toe the party line.
Barry Weiss On Fake News00:06:10
Barry Weiss being the most obvious example.
I think she refused to hate Jews enough.
I can't remember why they threw her out of the New York Times.
But, you know, she's doing great journalistic work on these Twitter files and has been doing great work all around in just her interviews.
Is there any hope do you see for some kind of awakening or is it basically about building our own media, building a media to fight with them?
Well, I think it's we're building our own media.
That's actually what we're doing.
And that's the effect we're having.
I mean, Barry Weiss, this is an example of when I say the best journalism ever is going on right now.
It's Barry Weiss.
It's people like that.
I mean, they're on Substack.
They're all over the place.
I mean, some of the very best journalism is going on, you know, in the history of journalism is going on right now.
And it's because these independent truth-seeking journalists and voices have platforms that were not available to them in the past.
And they don't always have the biggest followings, although Barry Weiss seems to be doing okay.
But so these are these are suddenly available to us and combine that with the amazing technological resources we have.
I mean, when I got into journalism, if I needed to find the president's speech from a week ago, you know, it's phone calls.
It's like, would you please fax it to me, you know, with our high-text fax machines and then go wait, you know, waiting for the thing to kind of kind of crawl out of the machine, you know, and so, you know, now it's just a fingertip away.
I mean, our access to information is so good and so instantaneous that, you know, our factor at our fingertips.
So if you are a legitimately truth-seeking journalist, you can have this information quickly and you can convey it to readers immediately.
So that brings me to the Twitter files, which I just think, to me, the Twitter files is one of the most important stories I've ever seen in my life because of what it suggests about the general collusion of social media with not just government, but the government police powers.
When you look at this, I mean, and you look at the treatment of Elon Musk, who's just trying to let people talk, does that discourage you at all?
Do you think like, yes, yes, it's a wonderful thing that these voices are coming up, but the government is actively trying to shut them down.
Yes, distressing.
I mean, I used to be one of these people who would say, well, you know, Twitter wants to block you.
It is, you know, ban you or shadow ban you well.
It's a private company, right?
I mean, I sort of fell into that way of thinking and the company can do what it wants.
But when you see this kind of collusion, you see what it actually is an abuse of free speech and so the government interfering with First Amendment rights.
And so it does take on these principles.
And, you know, I'm the last person to say, you know, Google and so forth are public utility companies now and we need to regulate them in that way.
But my goodness, with this information that's coming out, you're seeing how the government is abusing its power to manipulate these companies to do its bidding in ways that just feel wrong.
And thank goodness this information is coming out right now.
We're still learning about everything that's happening.
And it's one of these cases where I think the information, the knowledge we're going to have is just going to get worse and worse as we learn, you know, what was it, you know, just now it's the FBI, right?
And so forth.
And we're going to hear more and more about this.
And we may be in for some kind of reckoning.
And thank goodness we're now at least discussing it honestly.
Whereas in the past, this would all be covered up.
We'd never hear about it.
It would be rumored.
It'd be conspiracy theories.
Turns out it's true.
And we're learning about it because there are different voices in the media that did not exist a generation ago.
Well, let me ask you about this because this is something that disturbs me.
The mainstream press, as they call it, I don't know why they call it the mainstream press, but the corporate press, whatever you want to call it, is not covering this story.
I mean, if you're watching Fox News, you're finding out.
If you're listening to the Daily Wire, reading the Daily Wire, you're finding out about it.
But if you read the New York Times, and I know people who actually think the New York Times is the news, you have no idea this is going on or think it's just some kind of strange thing.
Is that, I mean, is that going to stand, do you think?
I, you know, I hope not.
But you're right.
The Times doesn't cover this.
They don't, they don't, they don't, you know, COVID, the kinds of COVID coverage you see, pandemic coverage you see is different depending on where you look.
I mean, these are almost alternate realities.
And I do think, Drew, we've got to stop using the term mainstream media.
There was a time when that was a useful phrase.
It did capture something.
Our media was at least, you know, it was center left maybe, but it was kind of a mainstream-y kind of phenomenon.
It is not that anymore.
And I find myself using that term all the time, just out of habit.
I've used it my whole life.
But really, there is no mainstream media anymore.
We're fractured.
And that has both challenges and opportunities.
The opportunities is that voices that didn't have audiences before had trouble connecting with their audience, now they have them.
They have them through podcasts.
They have them through Substack.
They have them through social media accounts.
They have them through websites.
You can connect and tell the truth and the truth will come out in ways it never could before.
But at the same time, we have lost authoritative voices in the culture.
And that has its own kind of consequence.
I've only got a minute, so you got to keep this quick.
But did Trump expose the media or did he change them or both?
And in other words, what I'm asking is, will things get better after Trump is off the scene or is this a permanent?
Yeah, that's a great question.
I mean, I do think it's both.
The media became so Trump obsessed.
I mean, Trump became their North Star.
And that's true for the ultra-mAGA crowd.
It's true for the Trump-deranged crowd.
I mean, it's like everything is Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.
They can't stop talking about this guy.
On the one hand, on the other hand, he called him out pretty effectively.
I mean, we now have this term fake news.
Eternal Flesh00:15:26
I mean, what a simple term that is.
But boy, does it capture an awful lot.
And it's a great term we have.
And we wouldn't have without him.
You could say those words, but it wouldn't have the same kind of resonance.
So he exposed a lot of the lies and he was a subject to a lot of false accusations.
But we'll see what happens next.
Yeah.
All right.
John J. Miller from Hillsdale, the director of the Dow Journalism Program.
A great program from what I saw of it.
Also, I should mention that you're also a terrific writer, especially on horror writers and classic genre writers.
He has a great book called Reading Around Journalism on Authors, Artists, and Ideas.
It's great to see you, John.
Have a Merry Christmas.
Thanks a lot.
Merry Christmas, everybody.
All right.
Let us close the show by talking about Christmas.
I was baptized in the Church of the Incarnation in New York.
And of course, the Incarnation is exactly what we celebrate on Christmas, the Word of God being made flesh.
Incarnation comes from the same root as carnivore.
Carnivore, you know, someone who eats meat.
Incarnation is someone who becomes flesh.
And it means that God enlivens flesh with his presence.
He's completely God, but completely human.
And that means that in this moment, something infinite becomes something limited.
And that's one of the great mysteries of Jesus' life and his death and his resurrection.
He's holy God and he can't die, but he's holy man and he can die.
He's the limitless within the limited.
And I think in a smaller sense, that's true of everybody.
We are all something limited in our flesh, but something potentially eternal in our spirit.
And it creates a lot of life suffering, is the tensions between what we feel ourselves to be and what our body demands that we are.
And the Romantic poets, I wrote this book, The Truth and Beauty, which was a book that came out this year, I believe.
It did.
And this is about the Romantic poets and what they tell us about the Gospels and what they tell us about the truth and beauty.
And the Romantic poets wrote a lot about the limitations of flesh.
Wordsworth wrote about it in a wonderful poem called Intimations of Immortality.
And some of this is informed by what was called Neoplatonism, but we don't have to deal with that now.
But he talks about, this is what he says, Wordsworth says in Intimations of Immortality.
He says, our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
In other words, we're coming from somewhere that we forget.
We fall asleep from eternity into the world.
He says, our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
The soul that rises with us, our life star, hath had elsewhere its setting and cometh from afar.
In other words, this thing that is flesh is actually something eternal, is carrying something eternal.
And he says, not in entire forgetfulness, not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.
So in other words, we come from somewhere.
We are not just born out of nothing, and our bodies are, you know, live and die like the sun arcing across the sky, a star arcing across the sky, but there's a full circle that we don't see.
There's something else that we come from and are going back to.
And then he starts to lament the fact that as we grow older, as we become enclosed in flesh, we lose touch with the eternal.
He says, heaven lies about us in our infancy.
Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy, but he beholds the light and whence it flows.
He sees it in his joy.
The youth, who daily farther from the east, must travel, still is nature's priest, and by the vision splendid is on his way attended.
At length, the man perceives it die away and fade into the light of common day.
So as you get older, you lose touch with your eternal self and with the eternity from which you come.
And you might see how this can become, translate into a desire for death.
You want to be free of this thing and get back to eternity.
And that was the way Percy Shelley, who was one of the most radical of these poets, Wordsworth became a conservative in middle life.
But Shelley was a radical and he perceived this as a bad thing.
He thought that life was essentially a form of death.
And he wrote in his elegy to his fellow poet John Keats, he wrote, listen to this carefully, is a wonderful passage, but it says some very disturbing things.
He says, the one remains, the eternal remains.
The many change and pass.
Heaven's light forever shines.
Earth's shadows fly.
So in other words, the eternal, that is one thing, is real, but all we see in front of us is illusion.
It's kind of an Eastern philosophy.
Shelley says, life, like a dome of many colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity until death tramples it to fragments.
This white, beautiful radiance of eternity is stained by life, which is like a prism that turns it into all the many things that we see, which are all an illusion.
And then the poem says, die if thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek.
So in other words, the only way to find what you want is to die, and death becomes liberation from life in Shelley.
And you can see that image of that the glass, the prism has to be shattered for us to see it.
And the guy who believed this most in a way was William Blake, who was a mystic and a very, very strange guy, a very difficult poet.
But one of the things he did was he created his own mythology.
He had these different characters who represented different parts of the human mind.
He prefigured Sigmund Freud, who gave him credit for a lot of what he believed.
But he talks about people falling into flesh.
He says they shrunk into two narrow, doleful forms, creeping in reptile flesh upon the bosom of the ground, and all the vast of nature shrunk before their shrunken eyes.
And Blake thought that from this came all the bad things about gender, envy, jealousy, covetousness, and religion with its sexually restrictive rules.
He was, in fact, some sort of Christian, a mystic Christian, but he thought that the flesh was taking us away from our real stuff and it wrapped us around and he wanted to break free.
So the revolutionaries, this was a revolutionary time.
It was a time very much like ours, which is one of the reasons I wrote The Truth and Beauty, time very much like ours when things were changing, when the revolution in France was failing as our revolution in the 60s failed, and yet the ideas that were perpetrated were becoming very widespread and radicals were looking to break free of this thing, this flesh.
And so they believed in free love and their gender roles became confused.
Feminism was on the rise and people were saying, why should men be treated any different than women?
And you can see where a lot of this is happening now in the same kind of, you know, when there's a transition, people think that anything's possible.
Just like when you have a midlife crisis, you start to think, when I went through midlife, I started to think, maybe I should become a fighter pilot.
Like, wait a minute, that's actually no longer possible.
It's like saying maybe I should become a major league baseball player.
And that's what happens in these transitional moments that like the one we're going through now, people start to think that more is possible than there is.
So that's where a lot of this comes from, this transgender mania.
How can we break free of our flesh?
The death mania, the love of euthanasia and the love of abortion, is this idea is why should the flesh be dispositive?
Why should the flesh imprison us?
This fact that I had sex and now I'm pregnant with a baby.
Why can't I just kill it, you know, and be free?
And of course, it all leads to murder and death.
It always does.
But you can see that it has a mystic impulse in it, a mystic impulse, a yearning to be free of the flesh and to get to the spirit.
And that's where you get drug use, too, this kind of idea that you can dose yourself and then you're going to see, suddenly see reality and the mystic truth.
The Christian approach to flesh that is represented by the birth of Jesus Christ on Christmas, I think is very different.
It's not as easy as sleeping with everyone and being free, sexually free, or taking drugs to produce visions.
It's harder, but I think it's more real.
I myself have witnessed incarnation twice.
I saw both my children get born.
And the first time I watched my daughter, Faith, being born, I had my one and only truly full mystical experience.
I think I've talked about it before.
But you watch this incredibly material experience.
There's water and blood and crap and piss and then this matter, matter everywhere.
And then suddenly in the middle of this mess of matter, there's a living new human being.
And when I saw this, I was literally blown out.
My consciousness left my body.
And I wrote about this in my memoir, The Great Good Thing, and I'll read just a quick passage of it.
I said, the baby came and the surging torrent of creation swept me away.
The borders of myself shattered like a barrier of glass and out I flowed.
My consciousness, my psyche, the whole invisible presence of me was carried out of my body on the tide of love.
I became not one flesh with my wife, but one being beyond flesh with the love I felt for her.
My spirit washed into that love and became part of it, a splash in a rushing river.
In that river of love, I went raging down the plane of her body until the love I was and the love that carried me melded with the love I felt for the new baby we had made together, and I became part of that love as well.
And then, like living water rushing at full speed into the open sea, I saw I was about to flow into the infinite.
I saw that beyond the painted scenery of mere existence, it was all love.
Love unbounded, mushrooming, vast, alive, and everlasting.
This is all true.
I had this incredible, it was real.
It was not an illusion.
It was not a hallucination.
It actually happened.
And it basically altered my life.
I mean, I pulled myself back because I was afraid of flowing away out of myself.
I don't know what would have happened if I didn't.
But the meaning of it has haunted me my whole life because it made it almost impossible for me to be an atheist after that, although I struggled with atheism for many years afterwards, but it always haunted me.
And I always sort of wrestled with the actual meaning of it, if in fact there was a meaning of it.
Then recently, this year, I was on a hiking trip with my wife in Maine, and I saw an ant on a rock.
And I was stunned by the difference between the ant and the rock.
I think I've spoken about this too.
I was struck by the infinite difference between an ant and a rock, the infinite difference between the inanimate and the animate, the living and the dead.
And this year, too, I met an organic scientist.
I'm going to ask him to come on next year, a guy named James Tour, who's a, like me, a Christian Jew, who speaks about how scientists do not know how life began.
They have no idea how life began.
He doesn't say it's because there's God.
I mean, he believes there's God, but he doesn't say it's that.
He just says they are lying about how close they are to understanding how life began.
And he said this one thing that really struck me.
He said that when a cell dies, scientists can't even tell you what has been lost.
They don't know what that life thing is that is gone.
And when he said that to me, or briefly, shortly after he said it to me, I realized that my reaction to the ant on the rock, which was amazing, and my reaction to my daughter's birth were connected.
They were both about the infinite distance, the infinite distance between the inanimate and the animate.
And the fact that this is filled, this distance is filled and connected by what we experience as love.
There's an entanglement between nothingness, the inanimate and life that is the act, the great act of creative love.
I am convinced that the opposite of evil in the world is not good.
It's creation.
And creation is something that we are all called upon to do, whether it's the creation of children, families, charity, life, art, all the things that we experience, the only we can experience.
That is, to me, the great good of God is creation, creation, which is powered by love.
The idea that on Christmas, love, the God of love, is born into the world as flesh, to me, that changes the scenario of life.
It's saying that you're not being limited by being made flesh.
You're being schooled.
You're being taught the eternal.
You're not just given the eternal.
You have to learn it, just like everything else in life.
John Keats, one of my favorites of the Romantic poets, said, life is the veil of soulmaking.
And that makes sense.
Learning to be eternal is hard.
And that's why, you know, that's why I don't do drugs.
It's because I don't trust drugs.
I think everything, I have faith that God gave us everything we need to become eternal.
And what the radicals see as limits and gender and chastity and self-discipline, all those things.
I think those are tools, like a sculptor's tool, for honing the body down into what's eternal.
The restrictions on sex, which I know the left is always complaining about, I don't think they're meant to hurt you or make your life frustrating.
I think they're meant to teach you to focus your sexual life on love.
The restrictions on anger and covetousness and greed.
I don't think they're meant to destroy capitalism or make us uncreative or make us not have any ambition.
I think we're supposed to be flesh.
I think we're supposed to have desire for sex.
I think we're supposed to have desire to create things and make things and build things into the world.
That's what we're here for.
We are the part of creation that creates.
We're the extension of God's creation.
I don't think those are bad things.
I think the discipline and the honing of things takes nature, which has no moral sense.
Nature just says, I want to sleep with everything.
I want to eat everything.
I want to get fat.
I want to be promiscuous, all those things, and to hone it down until you are just a tool for finding, for experiencing love and creativity.
The genders, which the left has such a hard time with, the unfairness of the genders, are there to teach us love because we can only know love by loving what we are not, by loving something other than ourselves, maybe even in some sense opposite to ourselves.
And in that act of love, we commit the greatest act of creation, which is the creation of more people, more of God's image.
And this is a training class, you know, and I think that we're training the body.
And Christmas is God's statement that our bodies are made to learn God, that they can contain God, our little piece of God.
And none of that, of course, makes any sense if there's no life after this.
If we just die, then the left is right.
If we just die, everything's a construct.
Nothing means anything, good and bad, or all relative, if we just die and go away.
On Easter, the resurrection confirms that that is not the case, but that is another holiday and another story.
And with that, I will end for this year.
It has been a great year for me.
I thank you so much for buying both The Strange Habit of Mind and The Truth of Beauty, putting them both on the bestseller list.
I thank you very much for that.
It was very gratifying to me.
Join us here.
Will you?
You know, be part of this.
What we're doing here is amazing.
All of the guys, Ben and Knowles and Walsh and Jeremy, I love to tease them all, but they're doing an amazing thing at the Daily Wire.
Join us.
Christmas's Eternal Promise00:01:01
Go over to dailywire.com/slash Clavin and become a member.
I didn't talk about the mailbag today.
I used up my time.
I know a lot of you have troubles, and it's very hard to have troubles on Christmas.
You think that Christmas is supposed to be a time of joy and you're not feeling joy and it's painful.
It seems more painful than it would seem at other times of the year.
The only thing I can say about that, I don't minimize suffering.
I know that it can be just awful.
But the only thing I would say to you is it's not a time of joy because you're happy.
It's a time of joy because Christ is born to tell you who you really are, to tell you that you were made in his image, that you can become like unto him and live forever.
This world is not an illusion.
It is a training ground.
And even your suffering, even your suffering is a way of honing your body into something beautiful and everlasting.
So have a Merry Christmas, even if it's a tough one.
Have a Merry, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
The Clavenless New Year will, of course, be very difficult, but I will be back after with the Andrew Clavin Show.