Ep. 1122’s satirical New Year’s doomscrolling mocks 2023’s absurdities—from Xi Jinping’s transgender takeover to Putin’s muddy Ukraine retreat—before pivoting to Pope Benedict XVI’s legacy, contrasting his theological depth with media caricatures and DeMar Hamlin’s spontaneous prayer as proof of humanity’s resilience. Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse faces skepticism for Atlantis theories, despite archaeologists debunking Göbekli Tepe claims without outright bans, while conservatives like Daniel McCarthy argue for an "avant-garde" to counter progressive cultural dominance. The episode then defends Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend as morally complex fiction, slamming Avatar’s leftist messaging and The White Lotus’ wokeness satire, before tackling listener mail on intimacy, biblical translations, and Jewish-Christian identity—all framed as battles for truth in a polarized world. [Automatically generated summary]
It's time for me to reveal my predictions for 2023.
To begin with, I believe the pandemic will return with a vengeance.
This time, it will kill everyone on earth who thinks differently than I do, and also all the men except me, and also the unattractive women, so that only beautiful women who agree with me will remain, and they'll be desperate to have children to replace all the dead people who disagreed with me, and so they'll have to line up to have sex with the last man on earth.
All right, maybe that's not actually a prediction.
It's more like a daydream.
That probably would never happen.
Forget I said anything, I was just kidding around.
That's not my daydream, really.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh yeah, predictions for 2023.
As the new Republican majority takes over the House, the boisterous GOP conservative minority will band together to form one gigantic moron, making it impossible to get a winning vote so that absolutely nothing will be accomplished until the conservatives cave in and vote along with the moderates so that absolutely nothing will be accomplished.
Climate change will ensure that there are more violent storms in the heavily populated news media, although there will remain the exact same number of storms in reality where no one lives.
The catastrophic rise of temperatures in Democrats' imaginations will leave their minds in chaos and ruin, so there won't be much of a change there.
But this disaster will finally make it clear, even to deniers, that if we do not act quickly to hobble Western civilization for no reason, the world will come to an end five years ago, exactly as Al Gore predicted.
Even now, as 2023 begins, it is obvious that climate change represents an existential threat to both polar bears and journalistic integrity, although not to polar bears.
Fortunately, we can depend on global leaders to respond to the danger by vigorously giving billions of our dollars in subsidies to those of their relatives and friends who make electric vehicles, solar panels, bird-shaped whirligigs, and other attractive lawn decorations.
In medical news, doctors will develop a pill to reverse the effects of Alzheimer's.
President Biden will take the pill and suddenly leap to his feet and shout, what the hell am I doing?
I've spent trillions of dollars we don't have, left the border unguarded, and allowed crime to skyrocket.
I must have had Alzheimer's.
Then the drug will wear off and he'll lapse into a state of delusional dementia, namely California.
Elsewhere around the country, new laws will go into effect raising the minimum wage for fast food workers so that each and every worker will finally be able to get some rest as they're replaced by machines.
This will be a big improvement as customers will no longer have to deal with some annoying worker at the drive-through window, and in fact, won't even see a worker until they drive past the window and the worker hijacks their car, hoping to sell it so he can buy something to eat at the automated fast food place.
Chinese Dictator Name Change00:04:37
In foreign news, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping will change his name to He Jingping because he's tired of sounding like a girl.
Western leaders and journalists will celebrate the Chinese president's change of pronouns and cheer him on as the first transgender leader to conquer Taiwan.
The global Welcome to He's territorial aggression will encourage Russian leader Vladimir Putin to send a new battalion of tanks into Ukraine to pull the last battalion of tanks out of the mud.
Russian journalists will then declare Putin a great man or fall off the top of a building.
Finally, in cultural news, Hollywood creatives will produce a new Marvel film in which each and every superhero represents one of the letters in LGBTQIA.
Thus, the creatives will finally realize their dream of developing an enormous franchise movie that literally no one watches.
This amazing cultural feat will be celebrated at an Oscar ceremony that no one watches, before being adapted into a streaming series that no one watches.
Then, when Hollywood creatives are absolutely sure no one is watching, they can finally get back to screwing their interns.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, happy new year.
We are back laughing our way through the destruction of everything we hold dear.
We will be talking about the ancient apocalypse and the present apocalypse.
And who knows, maybe we'll even talk about Kevin McCarthy if I get bored with everything else.
This is a great time as a New Year's resolution to subscribe to my personal YouTube channel, the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
You will get exclusive content there that you do not get anywhere else.
And all you have to do is press that little bell.
Someone you don't know will die, but you will then get notified that exclusive content has come along.
And it probably won't be anyone who's too closely related to you if you don't count your mother-in-law.
All right, also leave a comment on the Andrew Clavin YouTube place.
And if the comment is sufficiently aggressive and cruel and just with no regard for any of the niceties or morality itself, we will include it on the show as fitting right in with the rest of our content.
Here's a comment from Victor Reznov, who says, once again, Clavin comes in with his utter nonsense and limp-wristed attempt to normalize things that are objectively wrong.
At this point, I just don't see him as a conservative.
He's not trying to conserve anything because he wants tolerance.
Well, tolerance is what got us into this mess, so I'm sure, I'm not sure why you'd want more of it.
Well, Victor, absolutely.
From now on, we are going to go for intolerance and hopefully shading over into hatefulness and bigotry.
And that will be our new year's resolution.
And if I'm limp-wristed, Victor Reznov, isn't Victor Reznov the guy in Call of Duty?
Isn't that what he's from?
I'm pretty sure he's from Call of Duty.
So if I'm limp-wristed, how come you're using a phony name?
Okay, so I don't know.
All right.
Start the year by making enemies everywhere.
Why not?
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And I know at this point you're just desperately wondering how, yeah, but how do I spell clavin to get that deal?
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There are no E's in Clavin.
There are no E's, Inclined Clavin.
God's Message in History00:13:04
I don't know about you, but sometimes events unfold in such a way that I actually feel I can hear God speaking in history.
And for me, that's the way last year ended and this year began.
I began every day of 2022 reading from my year-long devotional called Co-Workers in the Truth.
It was a series of writings by Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI.
And on December 31st, I woke up, I read the final passage in the book, and then turned to the news and saw that Pope Benedict XVI had died.
He was a great man.
He was the greatest theologian of his times.
He was a friend and help to the greatest pope of my lifetime, John Paul II, who's now a saint.
He brought reform to the church via Vatican II, but also defended its eternal truths.
I always called him the last European.
I always used to say he should turn the lights out on the continent when he left.
But, you know, despite anything you hear about him, he wasn't a particularly conservative guy.
He had a very elaborate theology.
He defended reason and science as the key to living in everyday life.
But he also argued that humanity could not survive materialism, scientism, and relativism, which is already being proven true.
But he said we needed faith to connect us to the things that mattered.
Now, of course, the moment he died, the haters turned out on Twitter.
I think Victor was there to condemn it for his stance on homosexuality, to make jokes about his being forced into the Hitler youth as a boy.
The news media, whose combined intellect almost equals, I think, the IQ of one of Benedict's liver spots.
I think there was one on his cheek that was almost as smart as the entire news media put together.
Immediately, they went into reducing this genuine genius of a theologian and a philosopher into a series of political clichés.
Just as a sample from our friends at Newsbusters, here's ABC's, or NBC's, I think it is, Ann Thompson.
Benedict came with a cartoonish reputation.
As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger under John Paul, critics branded him God's Rottweiler, a strict conservative theologian.
Yet the oldest man elected pope in nearly three centuries took on modern issues, defending the Catholic faith against relativism, opposing women, priests, and homosexuality.
So he's a cartoonish old man who was opposing things at NBC, where you remember they killed the Harvey Weinstein story because they were too busy covering up for Matt Lauer, that they don't agree with.
So obviously he couldn't have been a deep guy, as deep as these journalists.
But this is only part of the attacks that have been going on against him forever.
You know, remember that Hollywood and the news media are basically the same people.
And Hollywood produced that award-winning idiotic Netflix show called The Two Popes.
The one thing it did deserve awards where it had two of the greatest actors of our times, Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Price, were in it.
But they depicted Benedict as this clueless old grumpy crank who had to be schooled in morality by Jonathan Price's wonderful liberal Pope Francis.
And he was so open and relaxed and all this.
Here's a quick bite of Francis lecturing the cranky, clueless Pope Benedict.
We defend 2,000 years of tradition, but Cardinal Bogoglio, he knows better.
No, no.
We have spent these last years disciplining anyone who disagrees with our line on divorce and birth control and being gay.
While our planet was being destroyed, while inequality grew like a cancer, we worried about whether it was all right to speak the mass in Latin, whether girls should be allowed to be altar servers.
We built walls around us, and all the time, all the time, the real danger was inside, inside with us.
What are you talking about?
I think you know what I'm talking about.
What are you talking about?
How could Benedict, an old crank, know what he's talking about?
You know, Vincent, after he retires as pope, he can get a job at NBC.
You know, the thing about this is, is we blame on this show as everywhere.
We blame Twitter.
We blame the news media.
We blame Hollywood.
But the thing is, as I realized as I was watching some of this, they're just the world.
They're what Christians call the world.
They're us.
They're, you know, the normal way of things.
This is the broken, sinful world that we read about in the Bible, that we hear about in Catholic and Christian theology.
You know, this is the world that crucified Christ.
They always say, oh, it was the Jews, it was the Romans, it was the crowd, it was the mob, it was the religious leader.
No, it was the world.
It was the ordinary way of things when it sees the truth.
It doesn't want the truth to get in the way of the world because the world is sinful and corrupt, and so it crucifies the truth.
The truth keeps coming back.
That is the gospel message.
But still, the world keeps crucifying it and does it every day.
And does it, these are the vehicles by which it does, by which it crucifies the truth.
It's TV news media, it's Hollywood, it's Twitter, where all of the people are.
And that's why the church and people like Pope Benedict XVI tell us to live in the world, but don't become part of the world.
Always keep your heart and mind on the things that matter.
And if you want to know why they say that, if that message didn't come clear to you, it came clear to me when I sat down to watch the big football game on Monday, two days after I found out about Pope Benedict.
I sat down to watch the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals, and I was very excited to watch this game.
It's a big game in the year.
To coin a phrase, I was waiting all day for Monday night, and I was kicking back with real excitement and anticipation.
And then, like everyone else, I'm sure you know, I watched an absolute, I was absolutely gobsmacked and horrified as Buffalo Bill's safety, DeMar Hamlin's, keeled over, and I could see at once it was a terrible thing going on.
His heart stopped after a routine tackle.
They still don't know why.
Everyone on Twitter knows why, but all the real people don't know why.
He's a 24-year-old kid, apparently a very good guy.
His mother was watching in the stands, just an awful, awful thing.
I mean, I sat there with my jaw open watching this tragedy unfold.
And here's the medical, here's a little clip of the medical teams reacting to this in real time on a public station.
It's Cut 16.
Go ahead and go over to the cot.
I don't like how he went down.
We're going to need everybody.
I'll call him.
I'll call him.
We need airway.
Come on, bring everybody.
We need air doctor, everybody.
Bring the cot with the medics.
You could hear the panic rising that all call means red alert, basically.
We've got to give a shout out to the Bill's assistant athletic trainer, not even the athletic trainer, Danny Kellington, who got the CPR going right away.
They administered CPR for what seemed endless as you were watching it.
Brought him back by God's good grace.
He is apparently recovering.
Apparently, he hasn't suffered brain damage or neurological damage.
They've taken the air tube out.
Just, you know, virtually a miracle.
But guys like Kellington, and not just him, but the whole team that came out and so far it seems like, and please let it be so, it saved this kid's life.
But when this happened, something happened in front of us as we were watching that was remarkable only in the sense that it wasn't remarkable at all.
And it didn't even shock us that suddenly the people, I mean, all the world went on.
Twitter went on.
People saying, oh, it's the vaccines when they don't know what they were talking about and blaming the NFL and the New York Times talking about the violence of football.
You know, a bunch of girly men at the New York Times.
You know, Nietzsche said that what real men want out of life is danger and play.
And that's what football gives us.
It gives us danger and play.
And so it's something very natural to men.
But at the same time, as that was going on, something else happened right in front of our eyes.
People started to pray.
People fell to their knees on the field and started to pray.
In the stands, started to pray.
Announcers started to pray.
Things that you're not supposed to do in public that have frowned upon in public were suddenly happening.
Bengals fans on the other team, he was a Bill, you know, who had collapsed.
Bengals fans who had come to the stadium specifically to engage in the harmless fun of jeering for their opponents.
That's harmless fun.
But suddenly they were standing outside their opponent's hospital room with lighted candles.
Money started pouring into DeMar's small children's charity with millions of dollars.
You know, I don't usually use this language, but to put it politely, bullshit walked and love talked.
And the reason that was unremarkable is because the world is a corruption of who we are, and love is our real nature.
And when Jesus said things like, love your enemy, he wasn't telling you to make a special effort.
He was telling you to let go of the world and be yourself, the self that you were made before it was twisted by the world.
Let me read to you the last sentence I underlined in my Ratzinger devotional before the year ended and Ratzinger left the stage.
He was talking about Christmas and John's famous phrase that in Jesus the logos, the word, became flesh.
And Ratzinger said, for John's word in Greek stands at the same time also for the meaning.
Thus we would be entitled to translate, the meaning has become flesh.
Here's the thing I want to point out.
This is the message that I got from these events.
Sports, it's an odd thing.
Sports is no fun unless you care about it passionately.
I care passionately when I watch sports.
In fact, when this young man, DeMarr, woke up when he came to, he had a breathing tube in.
He couldn't speak, but he wrote a note to the nurse, and the first thing he wrote was, did we win?
Did we win?
You have to care enormously about sports in order for sports to matter at all.
You have to care passionately about your team, about your players.
You have to hate the ref when he rules against you, even if he's right.
You have to really care, live and die over who wins and who loses.
But the minute king death appears on the scene, you realize this thing that you care so passionately about means absolutely nothing.
It takes place in the world, and death is the king of the world.
The same thing is true of politics.
We care passionately.
We hate the opponents.
We're desperate to see our side win.
Each election is the most important election of our lifetime.
But death will devour that too.
Everything you do in life.
You have to care passionately about it to do it right.
But at the same time, you have to understand somewhere in your heart that it means nothing because death is king of this world and will devour it all.
So you have to ask yourself, why do we have to care so passionately?
Why shouldn't we just be indifferent?
Why don't we not care about sports, not care about our jobs?
Now, why don't we just not care about politics?
And the thing is, it's because we are caring about something beyond that, the thing that it means.
What Benedict said, that the logos, meaning, is made flesh.
And the things of the world we care about because of the things that they mean.
The world is an idol, but the things that the world means that we reach through the flesh are not idols.
When we care about sports, we care about excellence and dedication and decency.
And that's why you fight with everything you've got to win, but you don't cheat.
You don't attack your fellow opponent player.
You don't try to hurt him.
You try not to act badly on the field.
You remember that it doesn't mean anything.
It's just a symbol of what means something.
The excellence and dedication and decency when you care about politics.
You have to remember it's about freedom.
It's about fairness.
It's about peace.
It's not about the fact that you hate Nancy Pelosi.
It's not about the fact that Nancy Pelosi hates you.
It's about what you are trying to accomplish.
And the people are just representative of those things.
And you can do it without hating them.
If Benedict is right, and I know he's right, the flesh has meaning.
When we care about worldly things, we are trying to get at that meaning.
And the meaning we are always trying to get at is love and creation, because God is love and creation.
And love and creation are the substance and purpose of our souls.
They're who we really are, not who the world tells us we are.
That was God's New Year's message to me.
It's like, happy New Year, Clavin.
Death devours everything.
I was like, thanks a lot.
All your passions and your politics and your desire and your anger and your projects and your principles, all of them are dust and will turn to dust and so will you, unless you see the meaning of them, which is always love because God is love.
Death is the king of this world, but love is the Lord of all.
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Graham Hancock's Archaeological Claims00:15:05
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And you know this is important.
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All right, so before we get to the political nonsense, let's talk about something really important, Ancient Apocalypse, the Netflix show.
Why do I want to talk about ancient apocalypse?
Because, not so much because of the content, because it is a perfect, perfect representation of the information crisis, which I believe is the most important thing happening.
It may not be the most important thing happening in the moment, but I think it's the big picture of what's happening.
So this is by a guy named Graham Hancock.
He identifies as an investigative journalist.
They keep calling him a pseudo-archaeologist, but that's not fair.
He's not.
And he has a theory about the world.
Let's take just a quick look at the trailers, cut six.
I don't think we're seeing the origins of civilization at the end of the ice age.
I think we're seeing a reboot of the civilization that existed previously.
Don't look for ourselves in the past.
Look for something different from ourselves, but nevertheless was capable of doing things that archaeologists tell us nobody was capable of doing at that time.
We need more questions, not less questions.
We need more competing narratives, not less competing narratives.
And that's why I'm very disappointed in archaeology, in the way it's reacted to this, and in journalism, in the way that it's just taken on board what the archaeologists say without asking any questions at all.
It's like a black hole.
You almost recognize it by its absence.
There's something missing in the past, and there's loads of anomalies that come down to it that can only be explained by a forgotten episode in the human story.
So I've made it my business to be an advocate of that position.
So his theory is basically that before the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago, about 10,000 years before Christ, it was called the younger dry ass, because when all the ice melters was hard to find a place where you could keep your ass dry.
I just made that part up.
But anyway, his theory is that before the ice age, there was an advanced civilization, kind of like the legends of Atlantis, the sunken city, and that after the ice age came the floods, which are celebrated in legends and in the Bible and all this.
But some of the people from this hyper-civilized society remained and they traveled the world teaching people how to build and how to do certain things.
And that's why you find very sophisticated buildings that seem to date back or possibly could date back to the Ice Age, even though most people think there were not highly civilized societies before that.
And the sites, I have to say, I watched the entire thing.
It was very gripping.
The sites he visits are, his basic idea is that all these hunter-gatherers, these primitive people were there, and then these guys from Atlantis or whatever came and taught them all these different skills.
So the sites he visits are incredibly interesting, you know, actual famous real sites.
Some of them just actually interesting to hear him describe them.
He raises some interesting questions like why are there so many myths about people bringing culture to a civilization, the myth of Prometheus, why does Prometheus have to bring fire?
You would think that would be an easy thing for man to discover, just watch lightning set a tree on fire and realize it's more fun to cook your meat and eat it after you put it over the fire.
That seems like an easy discovery.
Why does Prometheus bring it?
I've always wondered how they figured out to turn wheat into bread.
That seems like a much more difficult discovery.
But even in Black Panther, the movie, remember, the culture comes from the sky.
It comes out of, it's not people inventing culture, it's culture being given to them.
But other things are a lot less convincing.
He talks about the repeated use of pyramids and the fact that pyramids are often tombs.
And he says that they all have the same idea.
But a pyramid is an easy thing to build.
And the human mind is not that varied.
People think of the same things all the time.
Happens in Hollywood all the time.
They come up with the same movies in different places.
It kind of, the whole thing kind of reminded me when I was a kid.
There was a book called Chariot of the Gods.
It made a very big splash claiming that the pyramids were built by aliens, that their aliens had come and given the civilization.
It was silly stuff, but people enjoyed it, and it speaks to something.
But the point is not for me whether what Hancock says is true or not.
My point is how we deal with what he's doing.
Let's talk about Hancock first.
The first thing is he doesn't allow in any counter evidence into his story.
And that's very important psychologically.
This is why I didn't cover the January 6th hearings, because they didn't cross-examine.
And even a good journalist, this is perfectly natural, this is human nature, they will start to say, well, there's no cross-examination, but here's an interesting fact.
No, if there's no cross-examination, there are no interesting facts.
You have to hear both sides.
And if you don't think that's true, think about how easily you are fooled by conspiracy, absurd conspiracy theories, until you hear the other side, the absurd.
And it is an absurd conspiracy theory that the moon landing was faked.
It's a conspiracy that doesn't even make any sense.
But, you know, you listen to people and you think like, yeah, yeah, that's true.
And then you hear the real story.
You only have to look on like popular mechanics and they'll tell you the real story.
They say, why did the flag wave?
Well, you know, it was kind of an aluminum flag that wasn't waving.
It was all this, you know, just, it was just really silly stuff.
But if you don't hear the other side, it's very convincing.
The 9-11 attackers, that's one of my favorites.
I mean, my favorite thing, Muslim radicals tried to blow up the World Trade Center.
They failed.
They said we'd come back.
They came back.
They blew it up.
They said they blew it up.
And people went, who wasn't really?
It was the Muslim radicals.
They told you they were going to do it.
And we had them there.
And there's one moment when a BBC reporter reports that one of the buildings has fallen down about 20 minutes before it actually falls down.
And people say, see, she knew it was going to happen.
I think, well, what is that theory that George W. Bush plotted to murder 3,000 Americans so he could get the Patriot Act passed?
But first he briefed the BBC.
That's all they knew.
Don't tell anybody.
Don't tell anybody, BBC, but we're going to kill 3,000 Americans.
BBC, okay, well, we'll wait until, you know, then, oops, we slipped.
We got it 20 minutes early.
You know, I've covered breaking news stories, the panic and the chaos and all this stuff.
People say a lot of things.
This just turned out to happen to become true later on.
So absolute nonsense.
But it's very believable if you don't hear the other side of the story.
Just the other day, Tucker Carlson put out this thing about the CIA involvement in JFK's assassination.
Now, I don't happen to believe that, but he has a right to make that claim.
But it's not that he made the claim.
It was suddenly people were saying, why isn't everybody covering this?
And I thought, because I watched the segment.
He didn't have it.
He didn't have proof that it was a speculation, which he's welcome to make.
And I like Tucker.
He does great journalism sometimes.
But you're going to make a claim like that.
You really need to do some journalism and get some proof.
But people just instantly bought into it.
So, you know, Joe Rogan appears on this Graham Hancock show.
And I thought to myself, I like Joe Rogan.
I think he does terrific work, but I don't care what he thinks about this guy's theory.
Why should you care what I think about his theory?
You know, you've got to talk to archaeologists.
But this brings me up to the other side of this.
If anything gives Graham Hancock's amazingly weird theory any kind of credibility, it was the way that archaeologists reacted.
Now, to be fair, Hancock rips into archaeologists, the whole thing, and a lot of it was unfair.
It was all about how, you know, they dismiss him and they're condescending and they're small-minded.
But archaeology is really hard.
And you've got this very, you know, there's a famous story called the Motel of the Mysteries, where they uncover a motel and, of course, make all the wrong judgments about what everything is.
It's hard to do archaeology.
You're getting very little stuff.
So you find a picture of a woman.
They say, well, it was a fertility goddess, but maybe it was a piece of porn.
You know, you don't know what it was.
It's really hard.
It's all speculation.
So he's very tough on them.
So their responses, just really, really interesting.
The Society of American Archaeology wrote a letter to Netflix urging the platform to reclassify the show as science fiction rather than documentary, arguing it publicly disparages archaeologists and devalues the archaeological profession.
So what?
Publicly disparaging archaeologists isn't a crime, and it isn't a reason for Netflix to care.
You know, I mean, maybe he's right.
He's putting forward an opinion.
What you want to do is you want to debunk him.
You know, there have been stories in the past where the experts were wrong and an amateur was right.
Schliemann, back in the 19th century, discovered Troy.
You know, and he was kind of a con man.
He got things wrong and he did it wrong.
But he did find the city of Troy when other people say, no, it's just Homer, it was just poetry.
It was just a myth.
So these things do happen.
And disparaging archaeologists, you have no right to respect.
You don't have a right to respect.
You earn respect.
Now, if I'm an archaeologist, I don't write to Netflix to attack the film.
I post videos debunking the film.
And I might want to make a documentary debunking the film.
And some people did do this.
There were a lot of them.
There weren't enough of them, but there were a lot of them.
There's a site called Ancient Archaeology.
Now, Hancock's most convincing episode is about a site in Turkey called Gobekli Tepe.
And he says it appears out of nowhere.
And there was no sign that they could build something so spectacular before this.
So it must have been the guys from Atlantis came and taught them how to do it.
And Ancient Archaeology posted this on YouTube, debunking this.
And this is how it's done, Cut 7.
In Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix, when talking about the 11,600-year-old site of Gobekli Tepe, Graham Hancock says, You can't just wake up one morning with no prior skills, no prior knowledge, no background in working with stone, and create something like Gobekli Tepe.
There has to be a long history behind it, and that history is completely missing.
But in ancient Anatolia, there are a number of sites with origins older than Gobekli Tepe, going back to the epi-Paleolithic.
And this number is growing all the time.
Kakmak Tepe, in particular, is now a growing site of interest because it shows a clear evolutionary step in human skills, architecture, and art.
None of these sites were mentioned in the show, but proved that these people lived through the younger dryers and did have A, prior skills, B, prior knowledge, and C, a clear background of working with stone.
That's how you do that.
You show what the guy said.
You show the answer to what he said.
I happen to know that this video is absolutely right.
There are these older sites.
That's how you debunk somebody.
You don't tell them to, oh, you know, take the show off the air.
There was one guy that wouldn't even let Hancock on their site to film because they didn't like his theories.
And it makes them look like children.
And it makes Hancock look like the big boy in the room.
You know, that's not how you do it.
And it's so often how experts react.
Now, I showed you a good version, but a lot, a lot of the reaction from archaeologists, from professors, and from professional debunkers, misinformation guys, was much different.
And I'm taking this one guy out.
His name is Farley, Bill Farley.
He's an associate professor of archaeology, but I don't mean to pick on him.
I'm just doing him because he represents a lot of the stuff that they got.
Here is one of his attacks on Graham Hancock.
This is cut eight.
I'm not going to knock the guy for writing books and selling books, whatever.
But he's being elevated right now into this thing called the intellectual dark web.
For those of you who aren't aware, this is the sort of loosely knit group of conservative thinkers like Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and in this case, most notably, Jordan Peterson.
I think Graham Hancock is the Jordan Peterson of archaeology.
Now, I have complex nuanced feelings about Jordan Peterson, and I'm not going to discuss that here in this video.
Hancock is an interestingly similar figure, right?
He doesn't always say heinous stuff.
He's not constantly lying.
Sometimes he says things that are nice, but he has this academic-like pedigree.
He doesn't have a PhD and he's not a professor like Peterson, but he has this long pedigree of publication and decades in the public eye to lean on in a very similar way.
That makes him potentially more impactful and dangerous, right?
He likely explains the dark web.
For those of you who are not familiar with it, the dark web is where they teach terrorists how to make bombs.
It's not Ben Shapiro explaining the Constitution and Jordan telling you to make your bed and get married and talking to experts about the Bible.
That is not the dark web.
I'm sorry, we have a lot of good qualities, but one of them is not being the dark web here at the Daily Ward.
He has Joe Rogan up there.
It's just people he disagrees with.
And the fact that Graham Hancock, there's nothing political in this.
There's not one political thing in this.
But this is the other thing he says.
And again, I'm not picking on this particular guy, but this is representative of a lot of things that people were saying and given credence in the press for saying it is cut nine.
I don't know if Graham Hancock is a racist.
I don't know if Graham Hancock is a white supremacist.
He may or may not be.
But what he does not do in this show is address a long and deep history of white supremacy that is associated with his ideas.
So Hancock's ideas, some of them are his own.
Some of them are borrowed from previous scholars going back to the 19th century and earlier.
And all of them are utilized and associated with white supremacy movements.
They are used to undercut Indigenous claims to landscapes.
They're used to undercut the achievements of Indigenous people and ancient peoples of all types around the world.
They are problematic and they are utilized, used to launder ideas by white supremacists and white supremacist groups.
So my question to Hancock is this.
You knew that was going to be a criticism of this show.
You understood that going into it.
I know you knew that.
So why don't you address it?
So, you know, I don't know that this guy is a pedophile.
He may or may not be a pedophile Nazi communist.
You know, he may or may not be.
But, you know, he knew I was going to say it about him, so why didn't he address it?
It's an absurd thing to say.
What he's referring to is the thesis that these indigenous people didn't have skills, so therefore they must have been given to them by somebody greater than they are.
But Hancock makes absolutely no claims about the racial quality of these people.
I think he believes they come from Turkey, really.
And he also is very respectful toward indigenous people.
He talks about their skills and all this.
It's just crap.
And the thing is, violating leftist orthodoxy doesn't make the thing you say untrue.
Even if Hancock, and he's not, but even if he were a racist or a white supremacist, the words coming out of his mouth might be the facts, right?
He might be talking, he's talking about archaeology.
The archaeology might be the facts.
This thing about calling people racist, calling people white supremacists, is a failure of the expert class.
Coffee and Controversy00:16:15
And that's what they keep arguing about.
There's another lawyer, Timothy Caulfield, and they call him a debunker of misinformation.
And he says, Ancient apocalypse is just one example of a wider cultural trend denying expertise in the value of science.
It almost makes denying expertise sound like a noble task.
Well, you know, if the experts stop calling people racist, if they stop lying about Hunter Biden's laptop or whether the vaccines were properly tested to see if they would stop the spread of disease or whether they do stop the spread of disease or whether the disease came from China or not, if they would stop lying to us, if they would stop trying to control us instead of informing us, maybe debunking experts wouldn't look like such a fun thing to do, like such a noble thing to do.
This is the information crisis.
It's people fighting for their power position, for their status positions, rather than doing the job that makes those positions worthwhile.
You're not an expert if you lie.
You're just a liar if you lie.
You might have expertise, but the minute you start lying, you're no longer an expert.
You're just a liar.
Fauci lied.
The government has lied.
The left has lied about amazing millions of things.
Our president lies.
We wouldn't be debunking them if it weren't possible to do it.
Twitter lied at the behest of the FBI.
So all of this stuff is part of this crisis that we're in.
And this ancient apocalypse, it's a silly show.
I'm not going to tell you it's true.
That's the whole problem.
The conspiracy theories sound true because the people debunking them have lost our respect and they deserve to have lost our respect.
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All right, I have to talk briefly about this Kevin McCarthy kerfuffle in the house.
The Republicans have won a majority in the House.
We're hoping they would get down to work, but instead they're arguing over whether Kevin McCarthy can continue to become the Speaker of the House.
As I'm speaking, they're in the 12th vote.
This is historic.
It hasn't happened for 100 years.
They're in the 12th vote.
It looks like he's going to lose this vote too, but some of the hardliners have come over to support him.
I'm assuming that he's eventually going to get it.
And I want to say that there's a legitimacy to some of this, even though it's insane making to watch them squander the opening of the session when they should be starting to do stuff like cut the funding for the new IRS agents or demand investigations into Hunter Biden's laptop and into Twitter, the way the FBI is working with Twitter and all the stuff that we want them to do and to make Joe Biden's life a living hell, which I hope they will.
And they're squandering that time while the left celebrates because of the chaos on the right.
But some of it, some of it, up till now has been legitimate.
You know, Kimberly Strassel wrote a really good column about it this morning.
She said exactly what I was going to say, so I'll just read you a little bit of it.
That Nancy Pelosi, as always, we should be used to this by now.
The people who scream most about losing democracy have done the most to hurt our democracy.
So Nancy Pelosi just crushed the system in the House of Representatives and made it so, and really hurt democracy.
As Kimberly Strassel says, speakers increasingly have centralized control of their office.
Committees barely function.
Members have no ability to debate or amend.
Leaders disappear into backrooms to cook up mammoth bills that are dropped on the floor for last minute take-it-or-leave it votes.
Add Mrs. Pelosi's COVID proxy voting rules, and most of the House didn't even bother to clock in.
This is bad for democracy.
It makes a mockery of representative government.
So some of the things that these guys have demanded, these 20 conservatives have demanded, the concessions they want from McCarthy, are perfectly legitimate.
They want the House to work again.
And because this stuff really hurts conservatives most of all, it makes it impossible to do limited government when you come out with a funding bill for the government that's six million pages, you know, this pile of paper and say, oh, yeah, you got to vote on that in 20 minutes.
You know, that's not freedom.
That's not representative government.
That's a complete sham.
And Pelosi knew it was a complete sham.
And while she was sitting around saying, oh, you know, democracy is in danger because we might lose an election, we were losing our democracy because they had won the election.
So the conservatives here had a point.
But McCarthy has made the concessions that he has to make.
I'm not supporting McCarthy, by the way, as a representative.
I'm with, politically, I'm with the 20 conservatives.
But that doesn't mean they're doing the right thing.
That doesn't mean they're fighting in the right way.
You have to use the power you have.
When you're in the minority, you can only use the power so much.
What they want to do is they want to sort of take away the power of the Speaker of the House by saying anybody can stand up and call for a vote to vote him out of office.
We don't want that.
We don't want some of the more hot-headed conservatives being able to bring the House to a stop whenever some action is going to be taken.
Representative government, democracy, a republic requires compromise.
The base doesn't like compromise, but it has to get done.
Things have to get done.
And if we're going to get anything done, you have to have a leader, and the leader has to have some power.
Nobody else wants this job.
Jim Jordan doesn't want this job.
The people that are throwing up don't want the job.
Kevin McCarthy wants the job and he's got almost all the votes.
He's so close to it.
I get it.
I get it.
But this is the way institutions work.
If you're not operating in reality, if you're not operating in reality, you're not operating in politics.
Lord Acton had a famous line where he said, at all times, sincere friends of freedom have been rare.
Its triumphs have been due to minorities that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own.
You have to make common cause with the rhinos because they have the majority.
And sometimes that means compromises that you don't want to make.
And he says it's always dangerous and it leads to kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success.
That's what we're seeing right now, is the dispute over spoils in the hour of success.
You got to learn the right lesson of Donald Trump.
Donald Trump taught important lessons.
Go after the press.
The press don't matter.
They think they represent the world.
They don't.
They don't represent the country.
They don't represent morality.
They are a sick, corrupt institution.
Go after them a whole hog and the people will go with you and they will support you.
That's a good lesson from Donald Trump.
Bad lesson from Donald Trump.
Become a narcissistic showboater saying stuff that you know will get people on Twitter pounding their fists and saying, yeah, you tell them, you tell them and accomplish nothing.
That's the bad lesson of Donald Trump.
So they've done some good things.
I'm not knocking them all the way, but it is time to let this go.
I'm sorry.
McCarthy is the only guy who's going to win this thing and they've gotten the concessions that they need.
It's time to vote him in.
And, you know, you can say that I'm being limparisted and evil, but that's reality and that's politics.
So I'm really happy to bring on my guest today because as I'm sure you're aware, in the political world, loudmouths get a lot of attention.
People who bloviate get a lot of attention and they get big ratings and all that stuff.
But all of the really good work is being done elsewhere, I think.
And I wasn't even aware of Daniel McCarthy until I saw one of his pieces in Real Clear Politics.
And now I've just been devouring his stuff.
He's the vice president for the Collegiate Network at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
He's the editor of its journal, Modern Age, a Conservative Review, which I only subscribed to two other reviews.
Now I've subscribed to that one.
Daniel, thank you so much for coming on.
It's appreciated.
I appreciate it.
Thanks, Andrew.
Delighted to be here.
Yeah, it's really nice to meet you.
Let me begin by talking about this column that brought you to my attention.
You said that the right needs what the left has is an avant-garde.
And you begin with the famous quote by Lionel Trilling back in the 1950s.
He said that the right doesn't have any ideas.
It has conservative or reactionary impulses expressed, quote, in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.
Is that still true today?
Well, perhaps less true today than it was back then, but it's worryingly true even now.
So there's a tendency, I think, for conservatives to get absorbed by politics, as you alluded to, and to just think in terms of reacting to what the left is doing rather than looking at why the left is succeeding.
And the left is succeeding because it's trying to basically understand human nature in order to change human nature.
And I think that we too often want to rest on our laurels and say whatever we've done in the past is going to be sufficient for the future.
And when you're up against a force as revolutionary as today's left is, that's unfortunately not going to be the case.
You actually need to be as searching and as, in some ways, avant-garde as they are.
Well, you know, it's interesting when you say avant-garde, the people who go ahead, there's this idea that conservatives have, and I get this letter all the time.
You know, we've got to get back to such and such.
We've got to get back to this.
We've got to get back.
There's always moving backward.
The famous Buckley line, we're standing across the future saying stop.
How can you have an avant-garde in a movement that's dedicated to going backward?
Or is that the mistake?
Is the mistake that we can't go backward?
Yeah, I think you need to have both.
So one criticism that you can make of progressives is that they lack an appreciation, a sense of pietas or piety for the past, for the great inheritance of Western civilization, of Judeo-Christian morality.
The left simply wants to disregard all of these things.
And that's detrimental even to many of the goals the left itself wants to pursue.
So to the extent that the left is trying to totally transform life and humanity, they may be happy to reject all those things.
But to the extent there are actually progressives who want to be a little bit more moderate, who want to preserve something good about Western civilization, by neglecting its roots, by rejecting the inheritance, they're actually losing the very thing that they depend upon and they need in order to have the kind of life that they want.
Well, on the right, it's the opposite.
We have this wonderful appreciation for everything that we've inherited.
We want to preserve what we've inherited, but we don't have the sense that we need to be creative and we need to transform things in order to beat the left, in order to actually have an alternative to the future that the left is creating.
And that's the thing.
We can't just live in the past.
We have to cherish the past, take what is valuable about it into the future, but then we actually have to make the future.
And that's going to be a creative act rather than simply an act of preservation.
So this is a tough question.
I don't want to put you on the spot, but can you give me an example, an idea of what that might look like, even if you just took one subject?
What would it look like?
Yeah, I'll give a historical example.
So if you think of someone like T.S. Eliot, who was, of course, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and also was one of the great conservatives of the 20th century, he has a wonderful phrase.
I'm going to perhaps slightly misquote it, but he defined himself as a royalist in politics, a classicist in literature, and a sort of a conservative traditionalist in religion.
But T.S. Eliot actually got his start as a modernist poet.
And a work like The Wasteland, for example, is a brilliant diagnosis and a brilliant sort of image of modernity, even as it was a century ago in the 1920s.
Even then, it was quite clear to people like Eliot and to William Butler Yeats that the center could no longer hold, that we were in an age of whirlpool and kind of flux and disintegration.
And a poem like The Wasteland communicates that.
And Eliot was someone who therefore inspired a lot of other modernist poets.
He was on the avant-garde creatively, and he was very transformative.
But then, of course, he is someone who also was not politically of the left.
He was someone who, in fact, had very strong conservative and in fact traditionalist conservative leanings.
And you can see a whole generation of very creative people in the, you know, about a century ago, Wyndham Lewis and others, for example, who similarly were modernists in terms of what they were creating as literature, as poetry, as novels, sometimes visual arts, but who were very conservative in the way they looked at politics.
And they were able to put these two things together in a way that made sense and that was organic.
I think someone like the great novelist Evelyn Wall, for example, is another case in point.
Especially if you look at some of his early works, some of his early short stories, they are quite fascinatingly modern.
So, you know, Wall was writing some of his early short stories in the 1920s and before, and film was just developing as a medium.
And Wall has some of these short stories.
They're stories, they're written, they're prose, but they actually adopt techniques of film, and they take film as a subject matter.
It's just fascinating to see a brilliant young mind that will eventually flourish into a, you know, develop into a great conservative who's capable of taking this completely new technological medium and actually adopting some of its techniques and some of its spirit in an old medium like prose.
I think that's the kind of creativity that conservatives need to embrace today.
You know, it's a great point.
And Eliot is a perfect example.
The Wasteland is, I think it's a titanically great poem, but it is a highly modern poem.
And it's about, you know, he talks, he uses these phrases from classic literature and says, these fragments I have stored against my ruin, you know, sort of showing this destroyed society, but propping it up with the fragments of what has been destroyed.
So he's actually being conservative at the same time.
He's being tremendously modern.
You know, I have found, I mean, I've been beating this cultural drum for now over 20 years.
And I have found, I love conservatives.
I personally think that Lionel Trullian is no longer right, that most of the good ideas are on the right, which I don't think was true when he was speaking.
But I have found a lot of Philistinism on the right, a lot of ideas that basically art should be pounding the political drums and saying, you know, be G-rated, family-oriented, happy-talk Christian things.
Not that I have anything against those, but they're not the path to actually creative work.
Why do you think that conservatism and Philistinism are so interlinked?
Yeah, I think there are really two sources of conservative Philistinism.
One is a sense of utilitarianism that comes through in part through free market economics.
Free market economics is wonderful.
I think we need to always be aware of the danger that is posed by centralization of economic power.
And socialism is certainly centralization of economic power, Index Chelsis.
When we talk about free market economics, we're often talking about efficiency.
We're often talking about simply providing existing market appetites and preferences, whatever it is that they want.
And that kind of mindset, if you start applying it to the arts, winds up being very reactive, very Philistine.
It just says, well, whatever sells is all that's good, and you don't have to get ahead of the curve.
It's very funny and ironic, actually, that conservatives, when they look at the business world, they understand the need for entrepreneurs.
And entrepreneurs are artists.
They are creators in the space of business.
They go, they create technologies that have never existed before.
They create sort of brands and means of distribution that have never existed before.
It's very much an artistic form of work.
And it's not simply reacting to market signals.
You actually have to get ahead of those market signals and create something new.
But conservatives, when they look at the arts, they oftentimes don't have that same sense of appreciation for the avant-garde, for the people who are going beyond the horizon that they have when it comes to entrepreneurs in a purely economic sphere.
So I think utilitarianism is part of the issue.
Conservatives As Complacent Trumpers00:04:09
The other difficulty that conservatives face and that gives rise to Philistinism is conservatives are generally happy people and they live in relatively well-ordered and satisfactory communities.
And if you have a happy life in a well-ordered society, you're not going to see a need to innovate and to sort of uproot things and create sort of new ways of living life because you think, well, we've already perfected this.
We've already shown that this is the best way of doing things.
And so conservatives can become complacent.
They can become a little bit sort of, it's the classical idea of an idiotes.
We get the word idiot from this Greek word, but it doesn't mean idiot originally.
What it meant originally was a kind of someone who was comfortable in his own sort of little platoon of friends and family and therefore was not engaged in the great sort of cultural as well as political issues of the public.
And Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about the same thing.
When he talked about individualism in democracy in America, he didn't mean individualism in the kind of just selfish sense.
He actually meant individualism in the sense of retreating away from the big questions of society and culture and focusing instead on just one's personal and sort of immediate family happiness.
And while that's a good thing up to a point, what it does is it winds up seeding these big questions of the direction of society to the left and to the progressive avant-garde.
Now that's really interesting.
I've sometimes wondered whether creativity was some kind of separating wound, a sort of bleeding wound from trauma.
And maybe people who are happy don't actually turn to it as easily as others.
Let's talk a little bit about politics.
When you're looking at the Republican Party now and it has the majority in the House and they can't get started and they're arguing over the Speaker of the House and this is a kind of, whether you think that's right or wrong, it's kind of indicative of the civil war that's going on within the party.
Where do you see the conservative movement at this moment?
What's the way forward here?
Yeah, this is a painful moment for conservatives, but at the same time, that pain is necessary.
That conservatives politically had become very complacent, especially before Donald Trump emerged in 2015 and in 2016.
And as a result, not only were they losing elections, but I think they were losing the hearts and minds of their own next generation.
That's why someone like Trump, who was as disruptive as he was, was able to completely sort of steamroll right through not just the conservative, not just the Republican establishment in the GOP, not just Jeb Bush, but in fact, all of these different contenders in 2016 who represented different philosophical aspects of conservatism, they all fell before Donald Trump because Donald Trump was offering something that, whatever its strength or weaknesses might have been, was creative, was new, did seem very fresh to the American people.
Now, of course, since then, there have been these difficulties where conservatives have tried to figure out what the post-Trump future looks like for them.
Does it mean more Trump?
Does it mean retreating away as the anti-Trumpers or never-Trumpers would like to do?
Or does it mean, you know, kind of creating some sort of new synthesis or even something that goes beyond the issues that we were fighting five or 10 years ago?
And these questions, as difficult as they are and as painful as they are, especially when you have this extremely small House majority that's trying to answer them by selecting a speaker, as difficult as all that is, I think this is the difficulty we should embrace rather than run from.
We actually need to have these discussions about what conservatism is about, what we can achieve, what America, what the social status of the American people is in the 21st century, both economically and also culturally.
And we have to admit, we're not going to get perfection.
We're not going to get 100% of what we want.
But at the same time, we can't afford to just say, well, therefore, we can be kind of equivalent to the progressives.
We'll just go a little slower.
And I think that, unfortunately, is the wrong message that a lot of people took from the Buckley quote you mentioned at the beginning of the show, which is, you know, Buckley in National Review's very first issue said they will stand athwart history saying stop.
Well, that's actually, you know, a very strong, bold statement.
But a lot of conservatives in the decades since then interpreted that instead as being, well, we're just going to say stop, but if they don't stop, we'll just kind of slowly catch up to wherever the left is taking us.
Rich Father, Hidden Son00:14:58
And I think that's been a recipe for defeat, irrelevance, and despair, frankly.
And of course, despair is one of the major demons that is sort of haunting our country right now.
And we see life expectancy in this country dropping as a result of despair.
So I think conservatives, in embracing the battle, even if it's going to be a difficult and embarrassing battle like that for House Speaker, that helps to strengthen their spirits again.
And it is actually a remedy for despair, even if it is very embarrassing and very awkward to be hit by the media all the time for having these debates.
I have to ask you, we've only got two minutes left, but I have to ask you, you wrote this lovely piece for the Imaginative Conservative, also a really good site, talking about some books you like.
And your first pick was Richard Matheson's famous horror novel, I Am Legend, which I also really like.
And you mentioned before, his name just went out of my head.
You mentioned the great British science fiction writer who wrote the Midwish cuckoo.
Didn't you mention him or did I miss that?
Oh, I'm forgetting.
I don't think I did, but I should have.
But why I Am Legend?
Oh, well, you know, if you look at a lot of science fiction today, in fact, you can look at Avatar, for example, right now.
You can look at the recently canceled Westworld series on HBO.
All of these programs have a certain left-wing, anti-human and transgressive element.
So in West World, we were supposed to sympathize with the killer robots as opposed to humanity because humanity had too many old rich white guys or whatever.
So it was a very didactic, sort of heavy-handed left-wing message that was being put across in this HBO series, not the original Westworld by Michael Crichton, a film from the 1970s, but rather this series.
Similarly, I think with Avatar, again, you have the idea that humanity is the evil side.
Well, Richard Matheson in this story, I am Legend, he actually is able to present a story that is very, it presents a great sense of human heroism.
It's basically about the last man alive on earth.
You know, the world has been taken over by these vampire-like or zombie-like beings.
There's one human being left alive in this apartment building.
And he's trying to maintain himself as an individual.
He's trying to keep not only his life, but his sanity.
He's also trying to preserve what remains of Western civilization simply in his own mind as he is fighting these monsters out there.
Well, there's a twist at the very end of the story.
And the twist is, and I'm sorry to give away a story that's a couple of decades old here.
But of course, at the very end of the story, you get to see things from the perspective of the monsters.
From the perspective of the monsters, this one guy who individually goes out there and kills a lot of them at night, he's the monster.
He's actually, you know, this force that is, you know, this, that people will tell their children about.
He's the boogeyman.
What it is, what Matheson's able to do that these creators of things like Avatar and Westworld are not able to do is to both dignify humanity while also giving a sense of alternative perspectives.
And I think that creates an enlarging of our humanity, an enlarging of our sense of not only our own civilization, but how we interact with others.
It allows us to respect others while still recognizing, hey, if they're trying to kill us, we probably do have to use force against them.
So Matheson, I think, is a true man of the West, a true man of Western civilization in his creative works.
And I think that he has great lessons.
He wrote for The Twilight Zone.
He wrote for a lot of classic sci-fi programs.
He has a lot to teach today's generation.
Daniel McCarthy, where can people find your work?
Where's the best place for them to go?
They can find me on Twitter with the rather curious handle at Tory Anarchist.
They can find me at Modern Age.
If you go to isi.org, you'll see, if you look at Modern Age there, they'll tell you how to subscribe to it.
It's a quarterly journal.
We also are working on a new website that will debut later this year.
Beyond that, I'm a regular columnist for the Spectator World, which is the UK Spectators US edition.
So if you just go to SpectatorWorld or spectator.com, you should find me there.
Thanks so much, Daniel.
You're welcome back here anytime.
It's great talking to you.
Thanks, Andrew.
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All right, the cultural section today is entitled How Not to Enjoy Art.
I want to talk about this show that I watched, White Lotus.
I've watched both seasons of it now.
I didn't want to talk about it until I was finished with the second season.
I won't give you spoilers, but, or any bad spoilers.
And if I have time, I also want to talk about the sequel to Knives Out, The Glass Onion.
But what I want to talk about is the way people react to it and why this is not what art is for, the political way, the reduction of art to politics and why that's not what art is for and what art is for.
And I think the White Lotus is a fun show, an interesting show.
It's what you might call an opera boof comedy of manners or a sex comedy, really, a sex farce.
It's about, it was supposed to be about this luxurious resort, but now it's about a chain of luxurious resort because it's got a second season.
And it's written by this guy, Mike White, it's with HBO.
And White is an interesting character.
His father was a reverend and a former speechwriter and ghostwriter for guys like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the religious right.
And then he came out as gay and became a gay activist.
So that'll turn you into a writer real fast.
It's exactly the kind of trauma you need to become a writer.
And Gray White, I'm sorry, Mike White is himself gay.
And he calls himself bisexual, but come on.
He's living with a guy.
And like I said, the white lotus shows are basically sex comedies that deal with the rich and the people who run the place where the not rich, the rich come to the resorts and the not rich run the resorts and work in the resorts.
And so there's that kind of rich-poor conflict, a rich-middle-class conflict.
There's a lot of sexual tension, a lot of tension between of a political sort, the kind of woke young people versus the more crusty old people.
And it's really well written, I think.
You know, the thing, the reason I say that, first of all, I enjoyed the show.
I should point that out.
It's entertaining.
It's different.
It's kind of like a play.
It's very much like a play, very character-based, very dialogue-based.
And what I like about the writing is he deals very honestly with the characters.
He lets the characters be the characters, and he doesn't judge them on that basis.
He just lets them do the things they do and makes fun of them, makes fun of just about everybody equally just because of who they are.
He has one character in the first season, a black woman who works in the spa, who's kind of the magic negro.
You know, I hate that character.
You know, she's like, everything is fine, except if these rich people wouldn't ruin everything.
Everybody has flaws.
Being black doesn't save you from having flaws, as any black person who's honest will tell you.
But all the rest of the characters are really real and interesting and fun and funny.
And he makes fun of them all equally.
And here's a really good example, a wonderful scene.
Steve Zahn, all the actors are great.
Steve Zahn, I really enjoy watching Steve Zahn work.
I've enjoyed all these actors working.
He's the father of a dysfunctional family where the wife makes all the money and he's kind of lost and a failure and hypochondriacal.
And he finds out his father was gay and died of AIDS.
And he's just utterly depressed and distraught to find out that his father was secretly gay.
And he's just an absolute mess.
And he's sitting there with his wife and his daughter and his daughter's friend, who are played by Sidney Sweeney, a real up-and-coming new actress and a good actress, Brittany O'Grady, who I'd never seen before.
And they start reacting to the news that their father's father, their grandfather, was gay.
And does this make, why is he so depressed about this?
And here's that scene.
Dad, why are you so upset, though?
You're like catatonic.
Well, it was a secret that was kept from him his entire life, Liv.
So now whatever image he had of his father, of his childhood, has been pulverized.
You know, he was probably a bottom.
That's how you mostly get it, receiving.
Dad, do you feel like your father was less of a man or something?
He might have not been gay, a lot of straight guys like Asfley.
Yeah, maybe he was just too embarrassed to ask grandma to use a dildo on him.
Can we please?
Even if he wasn't a top, it doesn't mean he was femme.
He could have still been butch, Dad.
Maybe he was a bossy bottom.
Yeah, maybe grandpa was a power bottom.
Does that make you feel better?
So what is terrific about that scene is that these girls think that they're sophisticated.
You always see them, they're reading Nietzsche, they're reading Freud.
They think they're sophisticated, but in fact, they're adolescent idiots, right?
Because this is a human situation.
Their mother just explained to him that his entire life, his entire history of his own life has been turned around.
And they think this sexual woke politics and their tolerance of all this stuff, they think that they're telling him, they're teaching him something where really they are absolutely disconnected from the reality of human suffering because they're children and they're acting like children.
And that means they could probably get a job at NBC.
So, you know, that's good writing.
That is really good writing.
And it's interesting and it's funny and it lets you laugh at everybody.
And there's a lot of this stuff where wokeness, You know, there's a lot of stuff, for instance, where wokeness is depicted as posing and as corrupt and as unknowledgeable, while at the same time maintaining a sense that, in fact, the rich sometimes are unkind to the poor, that inequality is a sore in human relations, that these things are real, that we do struggle with them.
They are, you know, it's not like you sit around and say, oh, it's fine that some people live in palaces and some people live in slums.
It's not fine.
You know, our argument is that socialism doesn't work and there are better ways of handling it, but not that, oh, yeah, they should just forget it.
They're just not as good as the rich people, and that's the way it is.
So good for Mike White for actually portraying both the fact that these are problems, but also the fact that that doesn't make wokeness right.
I mean, I always say this, that people are very good at describing what a problem is, but that doesn't mean their solutions are always good.
There's also something else that's kind of interesting about it that I just noticed, and I don't think that the writer meant this to happen, but he's a guy who grew up in a religious household and later found out his father was gay, so he knows what he's talking about.
And yet, some of that religious training, I think, is still inside him because there's a lot of sex in this, of course.
Everybody's having sex with everybody else.
But the only sex, and this is true of both seasons, in each season, there's one act of sex that is meaningful and healing, and it's always between a husband and a wife.
And it's always reigniting the spark that has been lost between a husband and a wife in a family.
And it very much points out the fact that families, even this dysfunctional family that we were just watching, that families, despite their dysfunction, with their dysfunction, with their tribalism, with their being sequestered from the outside, and even when everybody in the family is a fool, that families are themselves a great sense of moral nourishing and emotional support.
What's a little depressing and not the writer's fault at all is that no one in the show has anything deep or interesting to say about anything.
And that's just depicting American culture as it is right now.
And so that's not him.
But the thing is, art is not about a message.
There are themes in art.
There are things that art says, right, in the same way there are things that life says.
And this is just life seen by a clever, talented writer.
And I'll talk about that more in a minute.
In the second season, it's more about sex.
It's more of a sex comedy.
There's two couples, a hot but shallow couple and a serious but sexless couple.
And they have interactions.
And there's three generations of men who are addicted to sex, which is wonderful acting, especially F. Marie Abraham.
Everybody is good in it.
And then F. Marie Abraham comes in and just sails over their head because you don't even notice that he's acting.
You know, you don't even realize he's the one guy who's just way, way above everybody else, but that's not knocking everybody else.
They're all good.
So here are some reactions to this show.
For instance, this is the second reaction to the second season, The Toxic Masculinity of Every Character.
White Lotus proves that toxic masculinity comes in many flavors.
The cold and aloof Ethan doesn't show interest in his partner physically or emotionally until another man does.
If you're with this type, you might experience loneliness, confusion, and feelings of rejection.
Cam is not only aggressive with his wife, but also with, well, everyone.
The aggressor makes those around him uncomfortable, and they just deal because who can argue with this confidence?
Anyone who is actively looking for someone to fix is a walking red flag.
This type might seem less toxic than the others, but they're just better at hiding it.
Whereas this guy takes the opposite approach.
He thinks that as long as he's open about his actions, they can't be harmful.
Listen, it may not be all men, but it's definitely all of these men.
So she's doing exactly what Sidney Sweeney did.
The writer has written full-blown characters with faults and flaws that make you like them and make you hate them and make you feel for them and make you worry about them, just like human beings.
That's what a writer does.
That's what a good writer does.
And all she can see is her political philosophy.
She's doing exactly what the girl did in that other scene where she started talking about all the sexual stuff because she knew all the answers.
She had all the answers, but she knew nothing about humanity.
There's a wonderful scene where a young woman is attacked by her pimp and the guy, the father of this Italian trio who is a sex addict and has done horrible, horrible things, jumps out to protect her because he's also a man.
And he actually shows you that he has his real manhood comes along with these flaws, but she can't see that.
But if you want to know what, you know, the left is thinking, you can always go to the New York Times and their op-ed page, or as we like to call it, Knucklehead Row.
Now, one of my favorite people on Knucklehead Row is Michelle Goldberg, because Michelle Goldberg actually sees things and she gets at the truth, but she can't break free of the cocoon she's in.
Seeing the Truth00:14:58
She can't have a conservative thought because she'll lose her job, you know, and she, so she doesn't want that to happen.
So she doesn't allow herself to think that, oh, maybe there's a whole other set of solutions.
She just sees the problem all the time.
She sees that feminism hasn't worked.
She sees that the sexual revolution hasn't been good for women, but she's not allowed to say it because she's on the page in the New York Times.
So she has a piece that's headlined, White Lotus didn't care about toxic masculinity after all, as if that were his job as opposed to depicting stories, life in an entertaining and original way.
That's an artist's job, depicting life in an entertaining and original way.
That is what artists do for a living.
It is not to secure leftist orthodoxy.
But Michelle Goldberg notices that no moral framework determined who won and who lost.
She's talking about the second season.
She says, if the white lotus is a cultural harbringer, then in 2023, we'll see a rash of movies that try to transcend politics rather than comment on them.
And this is the thing, what that is, is that's art.
That's what art does.
An artist should have a vision, but he shouldn't have an opinion, okay?
I give you an example from some of my own books.
I get a complaint.
I don't get it a lot, but when I get a complaint, this is the complaint I get where women, mostly, because it's not men because they understand what I'm doing, women will say, why are you always describing whether women are attractive or not or what women look like?
I mean, I describe what everybody looks like, but they take issue to the fact that if I'm speaking from a man's point of view, the first thing I'll do is describe whether a woman is attractive or not, because that's the first thing every single man, including your husband sitting next to you, telling you it's not true.
That's the way every single man reacts to a woman first.
And the way women look is a central part of a woman's sense of herself in a way it's not a central part of a man's sense of himself, and it's a central part of the way the world reacts to her.
In a way, it's not a central part of a man's.
It's just different.
It is just different, and it's just true.
That's a vision.
That's what I see when I look at things.
You can say you see something different and other artists see something different.
That's fine, but that's one of the things that I see.
I don't have an opinion about it.
If I did have an opinion about it, I wouldn't put it in my books.
I wouldn't say, and this was terribly wrong that he reacted in such a way.
He was toxic, you know, that he reacted to her looks.
I wouldn't do that because that ruins the story.
The story is supposed to be a vision of life.
And yes, different artists have different visions of life.
And my vision of life is a highly sexualized, highly gendered vision of life because that's what I see.
That's how I see life works.
That's how I see life works.
Now, on the other side, the audience, right, has to bring some of the same things.
To enjoy art, you have to accept the artist's vision.
You don't have to, while you're in the story, you don't have to accept it later on, but while you're in the story, you have to accept his vision.
You don't have to accept his opinions.
And if you feel his opinions are overriding the story, there's a little button on your TV that's called On Off.
Press that button and turn it off.
If you're reading a book and it's just propaganda, close it.
If you're reading a book and it's so out of touch with humanity, for instance, if it says that a man can actually become a woman, then you know you're reading dishonesty.
You're reading, unless it's a magic book.
If you're reading, if you're watching a TV show and a woman is in a sword fight against a man and wins, turn the show off because it's not representing reality, right?
But if his vision is a vision of reality, because all of us have a version of reality, right?
Reality is just there.
Reality is a silent thing just sitting there.
All of us have a version of reality.
As I've said before, I have a version of reality that has a moral order in it.
And so I have to believe in God.
I don't believe you can have a moral order without God.
I've thought this through for 35 years and I could not find a way to do it.
That's why I believe in God, because I see a world with a moral vision.
But the Marquis de Saud wrote violent pornography saying there is no moral order and there is no God.
And I think that's fair.
As long as you're saying there's no God and there's no moral order, that is a version of reality, okay?
It's not my version of reality, but I will read that and accept it as long as I'm reading it and then put it aside and say, no, that's not the world that I want to live in.
You appreciate art by experiencing art in the same way you appreciate life by experiencing life.
You don't put your opinions over life so it can't teach you anything.
And that's what the left has been doing for all this time with their theories and their ideas and their politics.
They silence the artists by putting their ideas over it.
You know, I don't have time to get to knives out and the glass onion, but what I was going to say about that is the right does it too.
The right does it too.
We say, if you don't have the right political opinion, if you don't say the right thing, we're not going to enjoy your art.
But we should.
We should enjoy the art.
And then we can say, I'm not accepting that vision, but at least have that vision in because it expands your world to have other people's visions inside it.
That is the way to love.
That is the way to include more of humanity inside your own soul and so that you understand more of the world.
It doesn't stop you from seeing the truth.
It helps you to see the truth.
It broadens your idea of the truth.
And you can still have your own opinions.
All right.
If you are a Daily Wire Plus member in the member block, we're going to be talking about Andrew Tate.
You should be a member because then the Clavenless Week does not come on you with the same kind of violent suddenness.
You have 10 minutes, 10 extra minutes in the member block before the Clavenless Week destroys you.
But even if you're not a member, just to show you what a lovely person I am and how generous we are here at The Daily Wire, we will solve all your problems before I go with the mailbag.
That's the worst thing about the White Lotus after you watch it.
You walk around constantly.
All right.
From Paul.
Dear Andrew, you may be able to advise me on a heavy issue.
The Lord brought me a wonderful wife from Japan, and we love each other and are together until the end.
I'm 65 and she's nine years younger, so she's 56.
We are both, English major is a little slow.
We are both in good shape and look young for our ages.
That said, the thing that matters most to me matters least to her.
I've always enjoyed love, sex, romance, and deep emotional connection with a woman.
She sees these as unnecessary and is somewhat repelled by physical intimacy, saying that she feels like she's having sex with her grandfather.
Ouch.
She was warmer and more intimate until we had our kid together, and then her interest fell off a cliff.
When we have sex now, it is perfunctory and with some complaints, so not much joy.
She's devoutly Christian, so am I, but we seem not even to be able to have any useful discussion about this.
I have brought up seeing a counselor, but she believes it's a waste of money.
We're at an impasse.
It crushes me that she does not desire me sexually, and I'm truly depressed that it may remain this way for the rest of my life.
Man, I would love to hear any advice you have on this.
Well, yeah, listen, sex is important to a marriage.
It is a key part of a marriage.
You know, a lot of times when you say something like that, people say, well, what if you can't have sex?
What if one of you is ill or something and you can't have sex?
Well, that's sad.
There are sad things that happen in life.
worse than being in a marriage where you can have sex because sex is an important part of a marriage.
I mean, I think sad things happen all the time.
And it's like deaf people who say, deaf is my identity.
No, it's not.
It's an affliction.
It is a handicap.
It is worse than being able to hear.
But that doesn't mean we don't love you.
It doesn't mean you can't have a full life.
It doesn't mean things can't go well.
But to voluntarily cut sex out of your life is, you're right.
It's insulting.
It's hurtful.
But it also separates you.
And it is core to a marriage and should be part of a marriage, if it can be.
So you say you love one another, and you say, you start off by saying, God brought you this wonderful wife.
This is an urgent, important issue.
And so you have to sit down and you have to communicate that to her.
You should do it lovingly.
You should not do it aggressively, but you have to sit down and say, I have to have an important talk to you.
This is urgently important to me.
I am very, very unhappy.
You know, this thing about sex is very important to me.
And I'm just, I'm so hurt.
You have to be honest.
You have to say, I'm so hurt.
I'm so, I feel so separated.
The whole marriage is, you know, hurt by what is happening between us.
And we need to work it out.
We need to get to a better place.
And I think you're going to need therapy.
And I think you just have to convince her that this is something that she has to do.
I feel that she's being withholding.
I feel that she's avoiding you.
I feel you have to break through that.
And I feel that that has to be done with some help.
But you got to sell it.
You've got to do it kindly.
Do it lovingly.
Do it gently.
But you've got to sell to her the importance of this thing because this is one of the things that happens in marriages.
One day somebody walks out and the other person says, where did that come from?
Because nobody ever said, this is major.
I need help.
This is a red flag alert.
So you've got to do it.
From Zachary, I've recently been listening to Dennis Prager's Rational Bible series.
Dennis is great.
Jordan Peterson's biblical commentary, also great.
A similar theme between them speaks about the mistranslation of the Bible from its original context to English.
I believe I've heard your son Spencer comment on this as well.
You have.
I find this really disturbing as I listen to them speak to more accurate translations and how it changes the meaning of a verse completely.
With this in mind, do you think there is a need for a more accurately translated Bible?
And could that lead to a reformation of the Christian faith?
No, to the answer of your question.
King James Bible is a good translation.
It's very close.
I mean, it's very close in meaning to things.
However, however, all language is a translation.
Language is a translation of silence, the silent truth, into words, right?
It is an imperfect tool for communicating truth.
All language is imperfect, right?
I mean, to say, I love you does not communicate, I love you.
You have to do that in a million different ways.
You know, all language is a metaphor and it's a rude tool for doing something.
Now, the fact that you can translate the Bible is a beautiful thing because it speaks to the fact that Christianity is not a rigid religion.
You know, in Islam, and I don't want to knock Islam for those people who truly find God in Islam, but you can't translate the Quran, the Quran, the words themselves are the words of God.
That's not true of the Gospels.
The words are God-breathed, but they're written by human beings.
And that's why nothing human beings do is perfect.
Nothing.
An angel of the Lord could come down right in front of you on camera and whisper in my ear, I would still get some of what he said wrong.
And even if I didn't get some of it wrong, a thousand years from now after I spoke it, the words that I use would no longer mean the things that they use now.
So the fact that you can translate it speaks to the fact that there are truths there to communicate, and they can be communicated to everybody in different languages.
Christianity is a world religion, and it is open to anybody who speaks any language because the ideas can be communicated.
Now, that means you have to study the words and what they meant in their moment.
And that's a task that preachers should perform for you and theologians should perform and you should read about.
It's really important.
A classic example that I use all the time is that sin, a martyr, means to miss the target.
It doesn't mean you're a naughty boy.
It means that you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing.
You're not doing what you were made to be doing.
And sin means you have missed that target, the telos, which is the end to which you were made.
And so that's an important way to understand sin and not understanding as I was a bad boy.
But you have a goal, that you have a goal.
There's a positive thing that you're trying to do.
It's not all thou shalt nots.
The shalt nots are to get you to the shalls.
What shall you do?
And so those are important things that you study the Bible for.
And so what you're asking for is an injection of truth.
You're not asking for a communication of truth.
And that's why Jesus was born to make the word flesh, so you could just see it in front of you, so you could experience it.
And the Bible is a record of that event.
And so it's a good thing that it can be translated, but it takes work.
Then you have to understand it.
But that's true of everything.
And it becomes more true as the language ages and becomes out of date and has to be updated into new language, which happens to every language all the time.
So there can't possibly be an everlasting translation.
And that is one of my objections to the way you think about the Quran, is that if you can't translate it, you actually can't understand it anyway because you'll be translating it in your mind in some sense anyhow.
All right, from Ron, I'm a secular Jew who's come to faith in Christ.
Stop me if that sounds familiar.
In great part due to your influence.
In fact, I was even baptized a few months ago.
Despite this, I've struggled to define myself between Judaism and Christianity because I don't feel it is correct to let go of the former to live truly in the latter.
I'm writing this letter a few minutes before I need to leave to bury my mother, God, rest her soul, and sitting Shiva with the rest of the family.
That's the Jewish ceremony for the dead.
I wanted to ask for any advice you could give me on this issue specifically and in general, how do you see the issue of what is expected of us as people from the Jewish people who are followers of Christ.
Okay, say, I can only give you my personal take on this.
You know, it's like each person has to decide this for himself.
I consider myself a Christian.
I always remember Stephen Crowder when I first met him.
You know, Stephen Crowder was just kind of giving me stick all the time and Bill Whittle was reading a newspaper and Crowder was like, so you're a Jew, but you're a Christian.
Do I call you a Jew?
Do I call you?
What do I call you?
How do I call a Jew who becomes a Christian?
And Whittle, without looking up from him, saves him, just call him a Christian.
And I said, let's take this guy out in the parking lot and kick the crap out of him, which I should have done.
I missed my opportunity.
But anyway, so I just consider myself a Christian.
However, I was born a Jew.
That makes me racially Jewish.
That is another way of using the word Jew, a different way.
And my people, my racial people, have been oppressed and attacked and destroyed.
And I would never turn my back on them and never try to tell somebody I was not something that I am, namely a Jew.
If you're going to come and kill the Jews, come for me first, okay?
Because that's the fight I want to be in.
I don't want to walk away from that fight.
I'm happy to be in that fight.
But as a matter of faith, I'm a Christian.
And so I follow the Christian faith, which means I believe in Jesus Christ, which means I believe in his version of the Jewish religion that comes out of Christianity and the rights of Christianity.
You know, if you said, come to my temple and celebrate my bar mitzvah and you'll have to wear a yarnca, I would plop that thing on my head in a second, and I would be there to celebrate your bar mitzvah and to rejoice with those who rejoice.
But I myself am a Christian, so I'm not going to have my kid bar mitzvah, and I'm not going to sit Shiva to deal with deaths.
But I would show up if someone I loved died and the family was sitting Shiva, I would show up, and if they asked me to wear a yarmulke, I would put on a yarn.
But that's not what I celebrate.
I am a full believing Christian.
And so that's what I do.
But I don't leave my heritage behind, and I certainly don't leave my people, my racial people in that sense behind.
All right, I got to stop there with the mailbag, but there is a member block coming up if you are a member.
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