Ben Shapiro dissects the "leftist culture of stupid," mocking USC’s rebranding of "field" as "that patch of grass over there" and Stanford’s failed "white paper" edict, while blaming media polarization for trivializing issues like Prince Harry’s frostbite ("Todger") amid 100,000+ lockdown-related deaths. He contrasts JFK’s Cold War pragmatism with modern leftist narratives—like Cuomo’s claim America was never "great"—and praises Kevin McCarthy’s House agenda to defund the IRS by $72B and investigate Hunter Biden, Swalwell’s spy ties, and Schiff’s Russian collusion lies. The episode ties media bias (CNN’s "Russian hoax" coverage) to eroding civic discourse, celebrates the Daily Wire’s vaccine-mandate legal win, and defends video games as art, arguing societal decay stems from neglect, not pixels—ultimately framing woke ideology as a tool to silence dissent under the guise of progress. [Automatically generated summary]
In a stunningly courageous blow against racism, or possibly just a pitiable but somehow hilarious waste of time, the University of Southern California's School of Social Work has decided to stop using the word field.
A notice from the school said, quote, we have decided to remove the term field from our curriculum because phrases such as going into the field or fieldwork may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign, unquote.
Now I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, oh, Clavin, you manic manufacturer of maniacal mayhem.
Sometimes your uproarious yet strangely seductive satire goes too far and becomes unbelievable by portraying leftists as subsisting at a level of amoeba-like stupidity virtually unimaginable in an even semi-sentient creature.
But no, I swear I am not making this up, and I didn't make that quote up either.
The dean of the USC School of Social Work, Dr. Suzanne Amoeba, made the announcement at a press conference this week between drooling and walking repeatedly into the same wall before figuring out a way to change direction.
Dr. Amoeba said, quote, from now on, instead of using the deeply racist word field, we will use benign expressions like that patch of grass over there, as in the sentence, I might as well go and lay me down in that patch of grass over there because I'm never going to get a job with a meaningless degree in social work from USC, unquote.
Another group working in the burgeoning patch of grass of language reform is Stanford University, a once respected institution of higher learning and now a pile of whitish stone with a sign on it saying Stanford University.
The Stanford denizens want to remove such flagrantly racist language as white paper because it implies that whiteness equals importance.
That phrase will now be replaced by the phrase very important paper written by Caucasians.
They also want to eliminate sexist language like you guys, which will be replaced by the inoffensive word it, as in the sentence, it puts the lotion in the basket or it gets the hose again.
Not wanting to be left behind in the great march of progress, we here at the Daily Wire are also striving to remove language that might be offensive to people who decide what is offensive to other people who are not particularly offended.
For instance, from now on, Daily Wire writers will no longer use the phrase mush-brained parasites who have contributed jack diddly squat to human thriving because it might offend administrators at USC and Stanford by describing them.
We will no longer use the word woesters to describe our political opponents, but will instead silently roll our eyes and point a thumb in their direction while mouthing the word morons.
When describing men who dress up as women and think they have therefore magically become women and want to force everyone to use the wrong pronoun to describe them so they don't have to face the truth, we will still use the term transsexual, but we'll try not to laugh when we say it and we'll stop sneaking up behind them and making crazy man faces while twirling our fingers next to our temples, unless we're really drunk and the urge is simply irresistible.
Finally, we will no longer use the outdated and sexist word ladies when referring to feminists and will replace the term with slovenly screech hags who ruin everything.
Now, since the work of reforming language is progressive, like Democrats and emphysema, and because all language has roots in ancient history where everyone was racist because there was no America yet, we would ultimately like to see words eliminated from our common life altogether so that humans can simply communicate by non-racist grunts and gestures, using sounds like To mean, I have a degree in social work from USC.
Or ga, ga, to mean, I sure hope I can pay off this loan I had to take out to get through Stanford University, after which I might as well go and lay me down in that batch, in that batch of grass over there, and mourn the fact that I've wasted my life listening to mush-brained parasites who have contributed Jack Diddley Squad to human thriving.
Hooray for Incognito Mode00:03:14
Trigger warning, I am Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, I almost made it through that.
And to be fair to Stanford University, I just read this morning as I was coming to work that they have pulled down their changed words things because they're so embarrassed by their own stupidity.
However, we are back in the vast right-wing conspiracy known as Clavinon continues.
We're going to talk about Prince Harry's wing wang and just how stupid our culture makes us.
Plus those hilarious classified documents of Joe Biden and plus video games.
Are they good or bad?
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We'll read it on the air because that's what we do here.
Matthew McCann leaves a comment today.
He says, I just overheard my son singing oh hurrah hooray, oh hooray hurrah.
He always asks if there is a new A Clavin show available, so I must be doing something right.
Oh, and now my wife is singing life is tickety boo.
See, we're all about the family here.
The family that listens to Clavin together, you know, becomes low life and horrible together.
But at least you're together.
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How Stupid Is America Becoming?00:02:45
So, you know, something that has been really bothering me lately that has been really on my mind is just how stupid America is getting, how stupid our national conversation is becoming.
And it's an axiom of this show.
We say it all the time that politics makes you stupid because politicians have a stake in inflaming your emotions over issues of the moment and it makes you get passionate about things and you forget the more important issues like limiting the power of the powerful and making sure we remain free from those wise elites who are going to make the world utopia if we just get out of the way.
You get so excited about the issue of the moment that you want to solve it by any means necessary.
And politicians like to do that to you and it makes you stupid.
So when everything becomes political, then everything makes you stupid.
And that, I think, is the state of America today.
And you can see it happening in the culture.
You can see it happening in the way that people have stopped doing their job in order to change the world and make the world a better place.
And the interesting thing is if you do your job, the world becomes a better place.
If you try to make the world a better place, the world sucks.
So let me give you an example from Showbiz, where I've worked from time to time.
Here's a story you might have missed while you were thinking, I know you were all thinking about Prince Harry's wingwang.
You know, the British call it a Todger, Prince Harry's Todger.
I don't know if you heard that.
You must have heard it.
Everybody's heard this.
He brought out this book, Spare.
It is the fastest selling book, I think, in history.
And he talks about among every, while he's slagging off everybody.
He's attacking everybody in the royal family.
He talks about how he got a frostbite during an Arctic expedition on his Todger and he healed it.
So listen, well, listen to it.
He reads it himself.
Let's cut one.
My penis was oscillating between extremely sensitive and borderline traumatized.
The last place I wanted to be was Frostnipistan.
I'd been trying some home remedies, including one recommended by a friend.
She'd urged me to apply Elizabeth Arden cream.
My mom used that on her lips.
You want me to put that on my Todger?
It works, Harry.
Trust me.
I found a tube, and the minute I opened it, the smell transported me through time.
I felt as if my mother was right there in the room.
And I took a smidge and applied it down there.
Okay, that didn't upset me at all.
I'm not a Freudian, but when you're using your mother's lip cream on your Todger, you might want to get on the phone to Vienna.
So that's what we're thinking about.
That's what everybody's really concerned about, Harry and his Todger.
And I guess, you know, they also call her a Willie in England, so I guess his brother is Prince Willie, and Prince Willie's Willie.
But anyway, you might have made, while you were paying attention to that, you might have missed this other story, another story.
This week, the Biden administration extended the COVID-19 public health emergency.
Late Night Humor Matters00:12:42
Did you know this?
That they extended the public health emergency with the excuse that a new Omicron subvariant called XBB.1.1.5 might cause more hospitalizations.
Now, I don't even know if you heard about this, right?
The state of emergency is now three years long because people are getting the flu, right?
This is why.
And that gives the government certain powers.
They can do things in a state of emergency they can't do normally.
This, by the way, is in spite of the fact that two people in the field of economics, a guy named Rob Arnott and another, Casey Mulligan, who's Trump's chief White House economist, published a study based on data from the Centers of Disease Control that found that non-COVID excess deaths during lockdown totaled nearly 100,000 a year.
And that's probably under, that's probably a lower number because they were counting people as COVID deaths when they had COVID, but might have died by being run over by a garbage truck, right?
So in other words, deaths from accidents, overdoses, alcoholism, and homicide all soared as did deaths from hypertension, heart disease, and diabetes, diabetes.
So it's very possible to argue that lockdowns and other health measures taken in the name of government or welfare by the government under an emergency actually cost us lives during the pandemic.
That they not only ruined our economy, they not only ruined our businesses, they not only ruined our lives, they killed us, all right?
So now there's a new variant of Omicron, what is it called, this XBB 0.1.5.
Here is how this was discussed on Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show, Cut 2.1.5.
Another friend of COVID-19 has arrived.
It's a new strain, but it isn't the same.
Sounds more like Evan lost his name.
It's XPV.1.5.
Not UB40 who sings red, red, wine.
Put on your mask when you're inside a facility.
It could be a robot from a Star Wars trilogy.
It's XPV.1.5.
Not OMT or MP3 or TCBY.
Or an eye chart made by a really high guy.
Sounds like the password of your parents' podcast.
It's XTV.1.5.
XPV.1.5.
That made me stupid just listening to it now.
I actually lost several IQ points.
However, here is the point about late night TV, right?
Probably most of you have at this point given up on late night TV because all they do is insult you.
And I'm delighted that my pal Greg Gutfeld is doing great.
His cable show is beating out network show, but that's not the point.
Greg Gutfeld is a political commentator who is very funny.
He's got a really good sense of humor, but he's still a political commentator.
The job of being a late night host, right, is not like the job of being a comedian.
Comedians have vision, they're artists, they stand up in nightclubs where you pay to see them.
You went to see Dave Chappelle or Bill Burr, and they can say anything they want because you're there to see them particularly.
But a late night host on a network has a specific job, which is to bring people together, basically.
Everybody is supposed to watch the networks.
The networks come under FCC rules, so they're public airwaves, that you are speaking to the whole public, right?
Now, the guy who invented, one of the guys who invented the late night host spot was Johnny Carson.
Now people have forgotten who he was, but for 30 years, between 62 and 92, he just owned late night TV.
He did the tonight show before Jay Leno and now before Jimmy Fallon.
And the show was originally created by a guy named Steve Allen, another guy named Jack Parr, two extremely important comedians, but who they've been completely forgotten.
But Johnny Carson, people still remember.
And he would come on and everybody watched him.
Everybody watched his monologues when he came on and he'd make some jokes and he'd joke about Democrats.
He was a Democrat, but he'd joke about Democrats.
He'd joke about Republicans.
Everybody laughed.
We laughed at each other.
We laughed at ourselves because we knew he was going to make fun of everybody.
Toward the end of his career, Mike Wallace asked him why he didn't get more serious about politics.
Here's what he said.
People say he'll never take a serious controversy.
Well, I have an answer to that.
I said, now, tell me the last time that Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Benny comedian, used his show to do serious issues.
That's not what I'm there for.
Can't they see that?
But you're not.
Why do they think that just because you have a tonight show that you must deal in serious issues?
That's a danger.
It's a real danger.
Once you start that, you start to get that self-important feeling that what you say has great import.
And you know, strangely enough, you could use that show as a forum.
You could sway people.
And I don't think you should as an entertainer.
That's amazing pride and humility at the same time.
He's proud of what he does.
He's comparing himself to the greatest comedians who ever lived, Jack Benny and people like that.
But he's saying that's not what we do as great comedians.
What we do is we make people laugh.
We entertain people.
Now, as our culture, you know, as he went along and he owns this, he owned the field.
Other guys who were inspired by him tried to compete with him.
Dick Cabot, who couldn't compete with him and ended up with a PBS show, was an excellent interview show.
And of course, Dave Letterman, who was very offbeat, and he could never beat Carson in the ratings, but he did make a stand on late night.
Guys like Andrew Breitbart loved them.
He was very creative and very original.
After 9-11, shortly after I returned from England after being out of town out of the country for seven years, 9-11 happened and Letterman had this moment which changed late night TV forever and it actually changed my life.
He actually went on, you can't find it anymore.
They've taken it down from the internet, which is really interesting because he's probably embarrassed by it now.
But people like to talk about it like it was a really important thing when he came on and he discussed the fact that we had been attacked by these Islamic extremists.
And I had just come back from England.
I'd been away.
And he said, I'm watching this.
And he said, he said, why do they, I have to think about why do they hate us?
And I thought, what has happened to my country while I was gone that a powerful, famous comedian would ask why fascists hate us?
They're supposed to hate us.
It's like saying, why does that nice Mr. Hitler hate us?
He's supposed to hate us.
Stalin is supposed to hate us.
Bernie Sanders is supposed to hate us and does, right?
We don't ask why.
We know why, because he's a communist.
This was an amazing thing.
And this suddenly gave late night people the idea that they were important voices in the culture.
Jay Leno also went on and made a speech.
Listen to him.
He was the guy who inherited from Carson.
He was in the mold of Carson.
And what he said struck me as so honest and so basic and true.
This was the beginning of my becoming an outspoken conservative because I said somebody has got to answer the culture and conservatives don't know anything about the culture and I do.
But it was David Letterman who did this.
But here was Jay Leno's response.
You know, in a world where people fly airplanes into buildings for the sole purpose of killing innocent people, a job like this seems incredibly irrelevant.
You know, normally I would be out here making fun of Democrats, making fun of Republicans, and you realize we don't have Democrats, Republicans anymore.
We only have Americans, and we have Americans united in one goal for one reason.
But you know, we still have a job to do.
And I don't pretend that this is an important job.
You know what this job is?
This job is like a cookie to those firemen.
That's what we do.
You know, we'll stand there with a cookie.
We're standing there with a glass of lemonade.
You know, when those people get home after a hard day, we're not trying to make anybody forget.
We're just trying to take their mind off it for a minute.
You know, you watch this horrible carnage on television, and I don't know, maybe a silly joke can help.
Maybe something a little funny can help.
Again, humility, right?
He's doing his job.
His job is to make jokes.
He's not a nightclub comedian.
He's not Lenny Bruce.
He's not Bill Burr.
He's on this huge network speaking to an entire country.
And if he makes us laugh at one another, he can also make us laugh at ourselves, right?
If he goes on there and he makes fun of Donald Trump, but he also makes fun of Hillary Clinton, right?
Hillary Clinton is certainly no better than Donald Trump and maybe worse, but all we heard was how evil Donald Trump was.
And Hillary Clinton is a feminist icon.
When that happens, then half the country knows that it's under attack from these people instead of being brought together.
Make fun of Donald Trump and make fun of Hillary Clinton, then we conservatives will laugh at Donald Trump and then laugh at Hillary Clinton.
And liberals, I won't call them that leftists, nothing liberal about them, but leftists will laugh at Donald Trump, but they'll also laugh at Hillary Clinton because they see, okay, America is a funny place.
Freedom is a funny thing.
Democracy is hilarious.
You know, it's all funny.
It all is funny.
Instead, what you get is egotistical, corporate, spineless corporate shills like Stephen Colbert and all these guys who are so rebellious, so amazingly original, so incredibly radical that they all agree with one another and the corporations and Hollywood and the big government.
That's how incredible resistance they are.
Making jokes like this about Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.
Listen to this.
A new Wall Street Journal poll says that in a hypothetical GOP primary matchup, DeSantis beats the former president 52% to 38%.
Yay.
Also maybe, boo, it's hard to know who to root for here.
It's like a poll between gonorrhea and a slightly more racist gonorrhea.
Now that's not even middle school funny.
You know, comparing people to gonorrhea, that is really, it's actually not like just literally not funny.
But sometimes Colbert has a million writers.
Sometimes he hits a joke that's funny.
But what is he doing?
He's making the world a better place by making us hate one another because you can't laugh if you know the guy that you're voting for is going to be called gonorrhea, but the other person is going to come on and do an interview while he fawns over her.
And that is a real problem.
By doing your job, like Jay Leno, like Johnny Carson, by doing your job, you actually improve the world.
You actually improve it.
By not doing it, you make everybody hate one another.
And that is the thing that is making us incredibly stupid.
You know, there's a comedian in, I think he's an Irish comedian.
His name is Andrew Doyle.
You probably know him as Titania McGrath.
He does this funny woke woman on Twitter.
And he's actually a very bright guy.
And he wrote an article saying the religion of critical social justice has spread in an unprecedented rate, partly because it makes claims to authority in the kind of impenetrable language that discourages the sort of criticism and scrutiny that would see it collapse upon itself.
The tactic of deliberately restricting knowledge produces epistemic closure, means you can't know anything.
It's a hallmark of all cults.
The elitist lexicon of critical social justice not only provides an effective barrier against criticism and a means to sound informed while saying very little, but also signals membership and discourages engagement from those outside the bubble.
This accounts for their hostility to debate.
The fact that they can demonize people, the fact that now they're just enclosed with themselves, we stop watching.
We're not watching Colbert because all he does is insult us.
Now he's surrounded by people who agree with him.
Only all his audience agrees with him.
So he's cut off from the fact that he's living in a big country with people who disagree.
He doesn't serve them anymore.
The New York Times is the same way.
All of these comedians, all of these guys are the same way.
And so ultimately, we begin to feel that there's nothing to debate about because there's no one to debate with because the other side is demonic.
And ultimately, we get things like this.
I mean, there are laws going on right now.
There are laws being made to protect women, I think, from transgender people.
People who say, I'm a woman, so I can go and use the women's bathroom.
Women's sports protect children from being butchered and all this.
They're debating these laws.
Some of them may be good, some of them may be bad in different states.
But on MSNBC, we get a trans reporter named Joe Yercaba who says even the debate is harmful.
Here she is, or he is.
Advocates in Texas have told me that they expect things to get a lot worse before they get better.
And so even if these bills don't pass, they say they still have an impact.
A recent national survey, for example, from the Trevor Project found that 85% of trans and non-binary youth across the country said debates on this legislation have negatively impacted their mental health.
So advocates have told me that, you know, these bills will continue to other trans people generally, including adults who are already face higher rates of violence, medical discrimination, and homelessness.
So even just the debate created by these bills has a negative impact, they say.
Why You Need Helix Mattress00:02:09
People become smart through the exchange of ideas.
They become smart by listening, because if you don't listen, you've just got your own mind.
You're just a rat caught in a trap in your own mind.
The left, by making everything political, the left has created a culture of stupid.
They're stupid and we become stupid too because we're not hearing anything that we can debate with.
We're just hearing that we're gonorrhea.
We're just hearing that.
If people do their jobs, if they have that meta sense that you do a job above your politics, above your opinions, you make the world a better place.
But when everything becomes politics, when everything becomes partisan, when you're making the world a better place, you make the world worse by making everybody stupid because you simply didn't do your job.
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it is.
Kevin McCarthy's Moment00:07:24
One of the things about getting stupid is you don't know any history and the left has made sure that people don't know any history, but the history that they want to tell.
And because of this, you have what the columnist of the Wall Street Journal, Gerard Baker, he was on the show a while back, what he calls the great inversion.
And this is what he says.
He says, not very long ago, college-educated professionals voted for Republicans in vast numbers, while blue-collar workers picked Democrats.
Now, a college degree is the most reliable indicator of Democratic preferences.
The proletariat is dependably Republican.
Liberals used to be passionate defenders of free speech.
Now progressives seek to shut down dissent wherever they find it.
The left once regarded domestic intelligence agencies as a threat to democracy and individual freedom.
Now they embrace them as essential weapons against their domestic adversaries whom they accuse of misinformation and sedition.
Democrats were traditionally suspicious of and hostile to big business.
Now on issue after issue, they are tightly aligned.
They don't even know that they have become their own enemies.
They have become the enemies of the generation of leftists before themselves.
This transition is because of the great stupidity.
The great inversion is because of the great stupidity.
Listen to JFK.
He was the hero of the left.
When I was a kid, the left loved this guy.
Listen to his 1961 inaugural address.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
Donald Trump could have made that speech.
I mean, he couldn't have made it as well, but he could have made that very speech.
And, you know, Kennedy was a tax-cutting, anti-communist, cold warrior.
Today, he would be a conservative.
There's no question about it.
However, that's not to say that presidents now can't be inspiring.
Here's Joe Biden as cut seven.
America is a nation that can be defined in a single word.
I was going to foot him.
Excuse me.
All right, maybe it wasn't as inspiring as I hoped it would be.
But the important thing about that speech was made announcing Katanji Brown Jackson's confirmation to the Supreme Court, a woman who told Ted Cruz on a form that she filled out that she did not have a position on whether people had natural rights.
Okay, a woman is now on the Supreme Court who does not believe in the Declaration of Independence and your God-given right.
She has no position on it.
Maybe you have a right not to be shot in the head.
Maybe you needed to be shot in the head.
Maybe you have a right not to be killed or robbed or penalized or oppressed.
Well, who knows?
I have no position on that.
I just happen to be on the Supreme Court.
What do I need a position on that for?
You have guys like this, like Andrew Cuomo, who used to be, who would still be the governor of New York if he hadn't played grab ass with a bunch of women.
That's the only reason he was not because he put sick people into old people's homes and destroyed them and wiped people out by the thousands.
He didn't lose his job because of that.
He lost his job because of me too.
But here's a speech that he made in response to Donald Trump, Cut Ape.
We're not going to make America great again.
It was never that great.
We have not reached greatness.
We will reach greatness when every American is fully engaged.
So never, right?
Never, until we have the dream of a leftist utopia.
We're not a great country.
We didn't win World War II.
We didn't destroy the Soviet Union.
We didn't free the entire world.
There's not a single person walking on this planet who has political freedom, who wasn't freed by American treasure and blood.
Not so great.
That's not so great.
You know, what we need is everybody has to be engaged.
Everybody has to be exactly equal.
This is stupidity brought on by not learning the past, by not discussing the past, by not having open discussion.
You know, it's funny, the Democrats loved Cuomo, and he's now disgraced.
They love Fauci.
He's now disgraced.
They love Michael Avenatti.
He's now disgraced.
If they're so in love with disgraceful Italian Americans, how come Michael Knowles can't get any love from these guys?
I don't understand that.
Anyway, all right.
The great inversion is a real thing.
But Gerard Baker goes on and says something that I disagreed with.
He says that the Democrat Party used to be in chaos, but now they're just absolutely focused.
He says they're the most ruthlessly organized and efficient political entity in the world.
The Chinese would be envious of them.
I think that's true.
But then he attacks the Republicans because of the Kevin McCarthy kerfuffle in the House.
And I disagree with that.
I think that the Republicans are having a moment of readjustment of figuring out what happens post-Trump, post-Trump's victory and post-Trump's presidency when he said the things that people weren't allowed to say and won.
And he was popular.
And if it hadn't been for the pandemic, he'd still be president.
So they have to deal with that, right?
And so the argument over McCarthy, it wasn't just an argument between Trump and not Trump, but it was an argument where the conservatives started to play hardball.
And I said this last week.
I told you Kevin McCarthy was going to win.
I told you that it would be okay if he won while they were making concessions, but they shouldn't push it to the point where they become paralyzed because there are things we want them to do.
And in fact, they've come out now with their list of the things that they want, the agenda.
And to me, it's looking really good.
They want to roll back the $72 billion in new funding for the Internal Revenue Service.
That is a good thing.
If those guys are just going to penalize the middle class and small businesses, you know that.
They want to investigate the FBI and the DOJ.
That definitely needs to be done.
They want to investigate Hunter Biden, all of those things.
And also, now, talking about banning debate.
Okay.
McCarthy says he's going to ban bad actors like Eric Swalwell, remember, who banged a Chinese spy, Bang Bang Fang Fang, Adam Schiff, and Ilhan Omar, who's a virulent anti-Semite.
So they're interviewing him, and they're covering the interview on CNN.
And he starts to explain his reasons and watch what happens.
Here's McCarthy 18.
Let me phrase something very direct to you.
If you got the briefing I got from the FBI, you wouldn't have Swalwell on any committee.
And you're going to tell me other Democrats couldn't fill that slot?
He cannot get a security clearance in the private sector.
So would you like to give him a government clearance?
You asked me questions about Santos.
You asked the questions about Swalwell.
Not only was he getting a clearance, he was inside an Intel committee.
He had more information than the majority of all the members.
Did you ever raise that issue?
No, which you should have.
You're going to tell me there's 200 other Democrats that couldn't fill that slot, but they kept him on it.
The only way that they even knew it came forward is when they went to nominate him to the Intel committee.
And then the FBI came and told the leadership then, he's got a problem.
And they kept him on.
That jeopardized all of us.
Adam Schiff openly lied to the American public.
All right, so we're listening into new House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy.
Stop, stop, don't say anymore, Kevin McCarthy.
Insurance Facts Matter00:03:32
We don't want our audience to see.
Adam Schiff openly lied to the American public again and again and again, and the press followed him and promoted him and built him up.
So the press was also lying again and again.
And then the press gave themselves Pulitzer Prizes for talking about this Russian hoax, this Russian collusion hoax.
You know, it's just an amazing, amazing thing.
Keep the people stupid, CNN.
That's why we love you.
That's why we watch you in Drove.
A guy named Fred Drove watches CNN.
Nobody else is watching CNN because we're tired of people who do not do their jobs.
And you know, the thing that is bothering me about this, the thing that's bothering me about this, is it makes everybody stupid because we too, conservatives too, need a place to go where we can get the news in a fair manner that sometimes makes us angry.
Sometimes our guys do bad things.
Sometimes their guys do bad things.
We need to hear it straight.
We need to just get the facts and then we can make up our minds.
Some people are never going to change their minds, but most people will.
And the way it is now, I keep saying this and people get ticked at me because they get so wrapped up.
Last week I was talking about ancient apocalypse and people were saying, no, I liked ancient apocalypse.
Wasn't my point.
My point was you can't tell who's right or wrong because both sides are only stuck in their own parties, their own camps.
And that is what's making us stupid.
The press, and I'm going to talk about this more in just a minute because we're going to talk about these classified documents they found on Biden.
The press is guilty of even, we can't blame them enough.
We blame them for a lot, but we don't blame them enough because they have stopped completely doing their jobs.
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You know, one of the things that's funny about this is it does backfire on the left a lot when the left doesn't do its job and the left politicizes everything and when the press is so slanted in one direction.
They say that the press gives like a 5, 10, 15 point advantage to the left, to the Democrats, by lying about everything and by being on the Democrat side.
But I'm not entirely sure that's true because I think that a guy like Trump got elected because we were tired of being lied to.
Policies Work: Gender & Media00:09:35
We were tired of being told what we could and couldn't say.
We were tired of being told the debate hurt people.
We're tired of the fact that every time, look, you know, all through human history, there have been men and women.
There have been male and female people.
You know, that that's a complicated issue, that the connection between your mind and your body is complicated, that gender is a complicated subject.
I think that's true.
I think that's a real thing.
But human beings are divided into men and women.
Human beings also have two legs.
That doesn't mean if you're born with one leg, you're not a human being.
It means you're an anomaly.
It means you are handicapped.
You don't have two legs like most human beings, because most human beings have two legs.
So just because somebody is born with intersex, that rare, rare quality that sometimes happens to people, that's an anomaly.
It's a handicap.
But most people, human beings, are male and female.
Suddenly, this changes.
Suddenly, you say, oh, no, you know, there's such a thing as gender.
Gender is different from sex, but it's actually the same as sex.
So gender can be different from sex, but if it's different from sex, you have to change your sex because it's the same.
And everybody goes like, I understand what that means.
It doesn't matter if you understand what that means.
We're cutting your testicles off.
It doesn't matter, right?
So now we say, excuse me, I have some questions.
What?
You're a transphobic.
You are transphobic.
And so you can't have a debate.
And again, you become stupid.
So the thing that makes this funny, I mean, it makes it comical, is when they get caught, when they get caught.
The DOJ, the FBI, raided Mar-a-Lago, the home of a former president of the United States, as if we were living in Venezuela at the worst moment of its governance.
This was like an absolute violation of every American practice to raid the home.
They could have gone to court.
They could have made a noise.
They could have done all kinds of things.
Instead, they sent a flood of FBI agents into the home of a former president, and then they found, oh my God, there were classified documents in there.
Now, of course, he's the president, so he might have just said, poof, you're not classified.
When he was president, nobody knows whether he did it or not.
But they have to appoint a special counsel.
And you remember, oh my God, there could have been the nuclear codes in there.
And finally, we found out there was nothing in there.
There was nothing that was really bad.
But there could have been the nuclear codes.
And if there were nuclear codes, then what?
Nothing.
Because by that time, the nuclear codes would have all been changed.
All right.
So what makes this hilarious is suddenly they start to find, and Joe Biden, by the way, goes on TV and he says, I can't believe anyone could be that irresponsible, right?
So now they find classified documents on Joe Biden's property.
Not once, not twice, three times, three different places, once in his garage.
He says the garage was locked, so it's okay.
Once in an office at the Penn Biden Center where Hunter Biden was probably there, plenty of people from the administration were probably there.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was there, Under Secretary of Defense for policy, Colin Cole.
So this was really unsafe.
It was something that could be penalized.
So now, you know, Merrick Garland has to appoint a special counsel to investigate this.
Not because he wants to, not because he's not a totally politicized, totally corrupt attorney general, but because now he looks like an idiot if he doesn't.
He's got to do it.
They're going to investigate this too.
But suddenly, you know, now, I have to say, now when I'm talking, as I'm speaking, suddenly the left-wing press has gotten tough about this because they realize if they don't get tough, they're walking around with their backslides hanging out.
So they have to get tough.
They have to ask questions about it, even CNN.
But when it first happened, CNN shamed themselves, be clowned themselves by rushing onto the scene and saying, oh, it's not the same thing because this was only 10 documents, but Donald Trump had lots of documents.
Yeah, but Joe Biden was also vice president.
He couldn't wave his magic wand and declassify these documents.
So it was different in that way too.
But even if you don't think about Joe Biden, think about Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton purposely, on purpose, intentionally put classified information on her cell phone, on her private server, and then when she was caught at it, destroyed the evidence.
And this is the thing that gets you, right?
We're told we're deplorable that we voted for Trump.
Not just the news tell, not just Hillary Clinton.
The opponent says we're deplorable, which is, I guess, part of her job.
The news media tells us we're deplorable.
We're worse than Hitler.
We're bigots.
We're racist for doing this.
Stephen Colbert tells us we're deplorable.
We're gonorrhea.
We're just walking gonorrhea.
Hillary Clinton, if Hillary Clinton was not at least as bad in every respect as Trump, and to my mind, much worse, you know, I don't know who was.
I mean, she was a career criminal and has certainly been caught out doing worse.
But even that now, even now, nobody is mentioning that.
Nobody is mentioning it.
And it makes us stupid because we get so ticked off, as we should be ticked off, that we can't even talk about the things that Donald Trump may have done something wrong.
He may say, oh, when you think about it, yeah, I like Donald Trump, but he did something wrong.
That's a perfectly rational way to be, but the news media makes us stupid.
Listen, politicians are not my heroes.
I don't have heroes who are politicians.
There may be the occasional politician like George Washington who's dragged into politics who becomes a hero, or like Abraham Lincoln, who comes at a moment when he has to become a hero.
But politicians are not my heroes.
Politicians have interests in gaining power, in using power in ways that I don't like, in obfuscating and lying and hiding things from me that they are not my heroes, right?
Now, that's all politicians.
I'm not saying there are no good politicians.
I'm just saying they're not people that I follow with my whole heart.
I follow, you know, poets and saints and people like that with my whole heart because they're in it for God and beauty.
But politicians are in it for power and they're in it for politics.
And so I admire some of them.
I certainly vote for some over others.
But when you expose them, I'm willing to hear that they're being exposed unless you're only going to do it to one side.
You know, I tell my Democrat friends, I have still a few remaining Democrat friends, not many, but some, and I tell them, you know, you're not wrong about Republicans.
Republicans stink.
You're wrong about Democrats.
Democrats stink and their ideas are worse.
And that's the thing that you're, you know, I told a guy just the other day, he's an absolute leftist.
He's always giving me stick about Donald Trump, this and Donald Trump that.
And I said, listen, I don't mind that you're a Democrat.
I mind that you're a sucker.
I mine that you're a sucker.
I mine that you think that your guys are somehow better than our guys.
It's all about ideas.
It's all about policies.
It's all about the things that work.
You only have to look at what is going on in the country to realize that leftist policies do not work.
Conservative policies work when they do them, but as you know, very few people are conservative.
Very few politicians are conservatives.
Most of the Republicans are not conservatives.
So we have to work with them.
We have to compromise with them.
But when you get a conservative policy in there, it almost always works.
That is the thing.
So all of this is making America moronic.
It is making America moronic.
Conversations about politics are no longer informed.
They're no longer informative.
It is all anger.
It is all rage.
It's all social media.
It's all insults.
And the problem with that is ultimately you lose your republic.
Ultimately, you lose your republic.
The one thing, the one thing that all the founders, one of the things that all the founders agreed upon is they agreed you needed an educated educated populace to argue the cases so that the politicians would be held to account.
That's what we're here for.
We're here to hold them to account.
I don't think there should be no government.
There has to be a government.
We know there has to be a government or else the strong just dominate the weak.
There has to be a government to protect everybody from one another.
But we will not find out who they are.
We cannot make good choices.
We cannot be wise in our choices if the media, if Hollywood, if all of the people who have a job to do do not do their job and instead just turn us into idiots.
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Divisions Over Founding Principles00:13:56
No ease.
I just make it look this easy.
There are no ease, anybody that way.
You know, we talk about the founding a lot because we want to stay true to the ideas that founded this country.
I really think the divisions in this country are the divisions between those who support the founding and those who don't.
I think it's more important than light, left, and right in America now.
And I just read this really good book called The Political Theory of the American Founding, Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom.
It is written by Thomas G. West, who teaches politics at Hillsdale.
Hillsdale, as I've said before, is just having a big moment, and Thomas West is part of it.
I really recommend this book because it gives, well, it's different.
We'll talk to him about it now.
Tom, thank you very much for coming on.
It's good to see you.
Good.
Good to be here.
So you have a really interesting thesis.
Most of the time when people are talking about the founders, they're talking about the ways in which the founders disagreed.
You know, Adams versus Jefferson and Hamilton versus Jefferson, basically Jefferson versus everybody.
But your book, The Political Theory of the American Founding, is about the things that they agreed on, which you think are almost everything.
Could you explain this a little bit?
Yeah, I think it's easy to get lost in the weeds.
You know, among historians, they have a term.
They have a term.
Lumpers versus splitters.
The splitters tend to be historians who are always looking for all the ways in which a group of people differ.
And I, as a political scientist who cares also about the later legacy of the founders, I'm a lumber, meaning what did the founders have in common that led to this country we had and to some degree still have?
They must have had something that they agreed on because how did that work?
And then, so, and that's the more I looked into the founders' actual views on basic, basic individual, like what did they think government was for?
What kinds of policies did they favor?
It turns out much greater agreements all over the place than you might expect from your normal, remember, your normal history.
So, give me an example.
What were some of the things they did agree about?
Well, for example, the Declaration of Independence itself, what is, we all have these natural rights and government exists to secure these rights.
Now, what, okay, that's an agreement.
Well, but then somebody might say, yeah, but what did that mean in foreign policy?
Maybe somebody thought we should be spreading democracy around the world.
Maybe somebody else thought we should not.
And well, then you start looking into that and you see, no, actually the basic features of the founding foreign policy were shared by everybody, which is we should mostly be focused on our own self-defense against the Europeans who are the great threat from abroad.
And then, you know, at home, we had to worry at that time very much about the Indians and were very powerful, were a serious challenge to American sovereignty in areas where they were dominant.
So that's just one example.
But you can go in domestic policy the same way.
You can find all kinds of cases where it's the consensus exists that once people notice it, once you point it out, it's easy to see, but it's often overlooked.
So I was mentioning Katanji Brown Jackson, who said she had no position on natural rights.
And once I was interviewing Alan Dershowitz, and I pointed out to him that Lincoln had sort of used the Declaration as the foundation of the Constitution.
And he said, no, Lincoln was wrong.
That was what he said.
He said Lincoln was wrong.
The Declaration is a political document.
The Constitution is a legal document.
They're totally different.
But you're saying something very different than that, it seems to me.
You're saying that every, you're saying Lincoln was right, that everything that's in the Declaration informs the Constitution.
Yeah, not only that, I would say Lincoln was right also in regard to the state constitution.
Again, a point that often tends to get neglected.
I mean, when people think about the founding, they tend to think about the Federalist Papers, the Declaration, the Constitution, all of which I'm in very, you know, I'm in favor of.
Yeah, you got to read those.
But what was going on at state government level?
That turns out to be an important part of the key to the puzzle, because the states, they were the ones doing domestic politics.
They were the ones who had to wrestle with the question of slavery.
Federal government had no power over slavery in the states under the original Constitution, but the states had power.
And there were a lot of discussions and debates about that, North as well as South.
Okay, so that is where you go find that.
And what you discover in the discussion of slavery at that time, in the states, state governments, is they were constantly referring back to the idea that all men are created equal and are born with the same individual rights.
Facing that fact, what do we do about slavery?
And so the question then turned into, can we do something about slavery right away?
Do we have to wait?
Is this something maybe the next generation needs to deal with?
But nobody disagreed, nobody prominent, I should say, disagreed with the basic idea.
Slavery is something that is not right because government exists to secure your rights.
And even though the slaves were not citizens, it still means you're not supposed to take away rights from people who are anywhere in the world, citizen or non-citizen.
So slavery was understood to be a problem throughout the country because of the principles of the Declaration, which were also the same principles one finds in the state constitutions.
It wasn't like this is just one document that declared independence, all over the place throughout the founding era.
And also, really, if you go into the later developments, you find this argument about individual rights throughout the 19th century, too, well into the 1880s and 90s.
And to some degree, of course, we know even today.
You know, one of the things in the book I found incredibly enlightening, which actually pointed out a place where I was wrong, book is The Political Theory of the American Founding by Thomas G. West, just highly recommended.
But one thing that actually changed my mind was I've always thought that there was a natural tension between equality and liberty.
I mean, if you're free, people are not going to be equal.
People are going to have higher talents than other people.
And I always thought that that was a natural tension.
But you point out in the book that if the founders had been talking about equality like that, they would have been making no sense, which was not their habit.
Can you explain what they did mean by equality?
Yeah, and I think this again is, again, it's a simple fact, often overlooked.
Equality means no one has the right to govern you without your consent.
And that doesn't mean anything more than that.
It means simply you are born free.
Now, maybe you're not free now because you live in a government, you have parents, you have, you're enslaved, whatever.
But the idea is that what human beings are by nature, meaning independently of their political circumstance, is free.
And they're equally free.
Sometimes the founders use the phrase equally free and independent or by nature free and independent.
Those phrases occur in two of the state constitutions.
And again, it's like that's all it means.
It doesn't mean, and what it means in practice, of course, is controversial, but one of the things it means is government should be based on consent.
Because if all are equal, equally free, then what else could justify rule of one person over another except that he agrees to it?
And so that was one of the basic meanings of equality in practice.
Another one was that you should be free in your personal life to do whatever, you know, to live as you think best, always within the confines of the limits of the natural law or what's naturally right.
So not harming others, not harming, not being aggressive, respecting other people's rights, things like that.
So those were two, those were the basic.
So there's a big conversation going on on the right of people saying like Patrick Denin saying that liberalism in the old-fashioned sense of the word has basically been its own gravedigger, that we need to enforce moral responsibility, moral ideas on people, which is a problematic idea, but also makes a certain amount of sense.
Where would the founders have come down on this?
What did they think when you say that people should be left alone in their personal lives?
How far did that extend?
Well, I'll add the caveat.
People should be left alone in their personal lives to the extent that it's compatible with the rights of others and with the moral conditions of the free, of the preservation of society.
So in my book, my book, Political Theory, I have a whole long discussion of how the founders, the fact that the founders did care about the moral character of citizens and what they did about it.
And this whole discussion, I mean, people like Patrick Denin, I find it very frustrating.
Whenever they write about the founders, they act like that whole picture, that whole side of the founding doesn't exist at all.
It's like it's gone, vanishes.
And I won't pick on him.
I mean, he's not the only one.
Many of the Straussian scholars that I respect in other ways have a tendency to very much demote the extent to which and the means by which the founders tried to promote. the basic moral conditions of a free society.
They all agreed, including even Jefferson, who was not much of a Christian, obviously, but they all agreed you need to have some kind of a moral foundation, and that probably also means a religious foundation for basic human decency and respect for other people's rights, but also responsibilities.
So, you know, one of the questions that Patrick Denin, Yoram Hazzoni, what these guys like to bring up is, what about the family in the founding era?
If everything's based on consent, if everything's based on you just choose, doesn't that mean you can have gay marriage?
Doesn't that mean same-sex marriage?
Doesn't that mean you can choose to be of somebody who's a different sex?
But for the founders, no, their idea was, no, there are limits in nature, in the natural law itself, that is, in their human reason that can conclude from thinking about what's good for human nature, limits on human conduct in various ways.
And those limits were very much involved in the formation of family policy, family law, marriage law, which led the founders then to take a very firm stance on that and to insist that marriage, in principle, indissoluble marriage, is the foundation of a decent civilization, including there.
And they made appropriate laws to back that up.
And again, it's like nobody, it's like we're, why don't our scholar friends who bashed on the founders at least talk about that, right?
Just try to explain how that somehow doesn't matter or doesn't count.
I think I feel like a lot of times there's just not there's not enough awareness of what the founders actually thought and did in the discussions we have.
I have to say, I've read a lot, but I found this book enlightening.
You know, there's a lot of things I didn't know because I'm reading other scholars.
Again, the book is The Political Theory of the American Founding by Thomas G. West.
When you look at things now, I don't think it's being too extreme to say we're kind of in a bad way and that some of the founding principles seem to be under attack.
I mean, there are people literally saying we should ignore the Constitution at this point.
If you could pick one thing that you thought was endangering the founding, one stream of things maybe, what would it be?
Well, I think freedom of association as both a constitutional principle and as a principle of natural right is fundamental to the founding.
That is, in order to have a free society, you have to be able to choose like who you're going to marry, who you're going to go into business with, what kind of a school you're willing to send your child to, what kind of a club you might want to have.
All of those things have been abolished by 20th century civil rights law.
Civil rights law, starting in the 1960s, has essentially transformed or more bluntly abolished the Constitution.
Christopher Caldwell's written about this very well on that topic.
Because what liberty meant in the founding was this right to live, for example, let's say you're a Christian.
The right to live a Christian life in daily life, not just to worship, right?
That's freedom of religion in the narrow sense.
Sure, we still have it.
What about freedom of religion in a broader sense?
Founders just took for granted.
The right, for example, the form of business in which you hire only fellow Christians or in which you hire, in which you discriminate on the basis of religion, in which you hire people you like, as opposed to people the government says you ought to hire because they're of this or that race or sex.
Those are considered by the founding to be absolutely essential to what liberty means.
And the same goes for foreign policy.
Like they, their idea was consent of the governed also means a nation has the right to choose what people from abroad wants to have move here and become citizens.
That too is freedom of association.
All that's denied today, right?
We're told, no, we have to accept everyone from abroad.
Freedom of Association00:03:21
And we're told we have to.
It's not enough to say that it's not enough to be allowed to talk about your beliefs, your Christian beliefs in private.
You have to be told that if you're in a workplace, you're not allowed to talk about your Christian beliefs.
And in fact, you have to say in many workplaces, I don't approve of the Christian idea of marriage because that limits marriage to heterosexual couples.
That's that you think about all the ways in which our life has been transformed by civil rights law.
I would say that would be the one thing I would say is the biggest challenge for today when we try to think about what it would actually mean to return to the original Constitution and the founders' ideas.
The book, again, Political Theory of the American Founding, the author Thomas G. Wessey has also written a book called Vindicating the Founders, Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America, which I have not read yet, but I will.
Tom, thank you so much for coming on.
It's a real pleasure to meet you.
And the book is just terrific.
Thanks a lot, Andrew.
I appreciate it.
I'll talk to you again.
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You know, one of the things I love about being here at the Daily Wire, don't tell Jeremy I said this.
I don't want him to know I said anything nice about the organization, but I love the fact that we are not just talking, we're doing stuff, we're making stuff and being a part of the culture.
And today, incidentally, is the anniversary of one of the greatest moments in Daily Wire history.
After months of leading the legal battle against the federal government and a national do not comply campaign, the Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration's outrageous vaccine mandate.
This mandate would have set a dangerous precedent, giving the unelected OSHA power over the personal medical decisions of American citizens.
The Supreme Court recognized this gross power grab and made the right decision.
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Engaging with Video Games Artistically00:15:08
Remember, do not comply for 40% off.
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Join the fight.
So while we're talking about stupidity, let's talk about video games.
Not because video games themselves are stupid, but because a lot of stupid stuff is talked about about video games.
Culture and the arts is one of the things that broadens our minds, broadens our soul, makes it easier for us to acquire information that we don't like because we've seen things that we don't like in art.
And so that makes us prepared to understand that the world has things we don't like in them.
And sometimes our heroes turn out to be villains.
And sometimes the guys we like make big mistakes.
And those are things that we have to learn.
And all of that takes a big soul.
You have to have a big soul to have an open mind.
That's the way that works, right?
And you hear a lot of guys, especially on the right, but you hear it on the left too.
The left tends to think, oh, the video games are bad because of their content.
They're violent.
They're manly.
They have men in them being men.
And they have girls with nice figures because a lot of young boys play them.
So they want to look at girls with nice figures.
We adults don't want to look at girls with nice figures.
We hate that.
But, you know, you get a lot of this stuff that, you know, men shouldn't waste their time playing.
On the right, you get this.
Men shouldn't waste their time playing video games.
Men should waste their time telling other men what to do.
And I don't agree with any of this stuff.
I don't agree with any of it.
It always makes me, I love the fact here at the Daily Wire, you know, they're always teasing me about being old because I'm 172 and they're 12.
But the funny thing is, is a lot of them, I listen to their opinions and I think like, they sound like they're 80 and I have the emotional intelligence of a 14 year old.
The thing is, let's start with this.
Are video games good or bad?
Because they come under a lot of flack from both the left and the right.
First of all, there's nothing wrong with having some kind of harmless entertainment that you like.
I do a lot of puzzles.
I love puzzles.
I play video games from time to time.
Obviously, you don't want that to take away from doing your job or fulfilling your responsibilities as an adult in your family and all those things.
But when I was in Afghanistan, when I was embedded with the troops, just before I got there, the day before I got there, in fact, I was supposed to be there a day earlier and I missed my helicopter, the people that I was with, the unit that I was being embedded with, got attacked, came under fire.
And I was immediately like, oh, I missed it because I'm an idiot.
And so I wanted to put that as part of the story I was writing.
And so I went around and interviewed the guys who had come under fire so I could hear their story.
And one of the guys was a gunner in one of the Humvees who had been hit.
Luckily, thank God, his armor had saved him, so he wasn't hurt, but he had been hit.
His shield had been hit by gunfire.
And so I went to interview him, and he was playing, I think it was Call of Duty.
He was playing war after getting shot at the day before he was actually playing a video game.
So manly men play video games.
Everybody has harmless things that they do to entertain themselves.
Now, recently, but it goes beyond that with me.
It goes beyond that with me.
Recently, we put out a video of me playing God of War, and I was looking at the comments on YouTube.
And there were a lot of comments.
I go, he's not really playing that.
He's too old.
He's too old to be playing that.
I don't know if you saw this.
I was amazed.
Isn't it nice that such an elderly gentleman could be playing God of War?
But, you know, I am the original gamer gangster, right?
I was there at the beginning while you guys weren't born.
And I saw, I was with video games from the beginning and went through their period of greatest development.
And it meant a lot to me because I'm an artist and because I care about the way people tell stories and the things that are beautiful.
You know, when I was a little kid, I used to love board games and things like that and puzzles.
I still love puzzles.
And I used to actually have dreams before I discovered girls.
You know, when I was 10 or 11, I would have dreams.
I would daydream about games that would run themselves.
So instead of just playing with figures on a game, the figures would be moved by mechanics, by electricity, which was what we had then instead of what we have now, which is magic.
But then we had electricity and I would have those dreams.
And when I first saw the first video game, which was Pong, when I was in college back in the 70s, it was like that scene in 2001.
Do you remember the scene in 2001 where the monkeys see the great Earthstone?
Do we have that?
Just play that scene from 2001.
So the monkeys are prototypical humans, right?
This evolution is taking place in 2001, a Space Odyssey.
And for some reason, this rock drops out of outer space and they start to worship it.
And that was my reaction to seeing Pong.
I thought, oh my God, this is actually happening.
And then, you know, my life began.
And so I stopped.
I wasn't playing Pong all the time.
And I didn't, I missed the development that was going on until one day I was a newspaper reporter in a small county outside of New York City.
And we used to gather around the pinball machine and talk about the day's stories.
I actually beat Adam Nogurney, who went on to be the New York Times top political reporter.
I beat him in a pinball contest and won a gigantic stuffed pink dog.
Somewhere a picture of me weighing about 40 pounds more than I weigh now and smoking a cigarette with that pink dog exists.
And Nogurney was a really sore loser about it, but I beat him fair and square.
And so we'd play pinball.
And then one day we walked into one of the restaurants in town and Space Invaders had come out.
And for me, again, it was love at first sight.
I used to come in there into that tavern with rolls of quarters.
And if you can picture them being depleted in quick motion, I would just put them in there until one day I woke up and I had a bump on the back of my wrist.
I know I've told this story before.
I actually, I was terrified.
I went to a doctor and I said, what's this bump on the back of my wrist?
And the doctor said, have you been making repeated pressing motions lately?
And in fact, I had been hitting this button.
I was the first person I knew to get Space Invaders wrist, which that very Sunday was in the newspaper because it was an actual phenomenon because everybody was playing Space Invaders.
So when I was married, which was right after I left the newspaper, I got as a wedding present.
I got an Atari.
I remember being just absolutely in love with the little airplane game in the Atari.
It looks now, it looks hilariously primitive.
But at the time, it was to me the same as flying a plane.
But really, the turnaround came, the time when I started to think this is important was Super Mario, because one day I remember, I think I was playing with my little daughter, Faith, and Super Mario had come out.
And I said, an Italian plumber fighting evil mushrooms while he goes off to rescue a princess has got to be one of the most creative and insane ideas I have ever heard.
No one would ever write that novel.
No one would ever write that movie.
No one would ever do it.
And yet it has some kind of like, I mean, I'm sure they were on drugs when they invented it, but I thought still, there is something about it that is so wildly creative, so wildly like new and modern that I just thought this is amazing.
Also, a great game.
And so this is something that I didn't realize that this was just going to get better and better.
You have to understand, when I was a little kid, products were always coming out that were new and improved.
And then you'd get them and they'd be exactly the same as they were before.
And you could read the ingredients.
They were the same as they were before, but they had new and improved on it.
So I never believed anything was new and improved.
One day I got a computer with floppy disks, the original computers and the floppy disks, and I was writing my first film, A Shot to the System with Michael Caine.
And I invented what are now called macros.
I invented combinations of keystrokes that would cause there to be a dialogue line and an action line.
And I actually invented, I programmed this into the computer.
And every time I would use it, the computer would stop like an old Jewish man who would go, and I'd be writing this exciting scene with guns and chases and fights.
Here we are.
And suddenly the computer would go, ah, wait, invade, wait a minute.
I can't write this scene.
And somebody said to me, you've got to go and get a hard drive because now computers are new and improved.
And I said, new and improved never means anything.
Then I got a hard drive and I thought, oh, and it really was like illumination.
I thought, oh, now when they say something is new and improved, it will actually be new and improved.
This is a new world.
And that's what happened to video games.
And because I was busy and because I had a life and a career that I was running, I'd only see them from time to time.
And every time they had changed so drastically.
You know, I'm a ghost story fanatic.
I was living in London and I got this game, Realms of the Haunting.
It was one of the early first person shooters.
And I was playing this game thinking, what a brilliant idea.
It's first person.
You can see if you're watching, you can see the candles being lit and you're in this haunted house and all these monsters are jumping out at you.
And man, I just thought, this is great.
Why?
Because, not because of the story.
I've never been able to understand a video game story, but because it was drawing you in to this thing by the gameplay.
So you were actually there.
And when I got Diablo, which came out the same year, I got it late, I just broke my mouse by playing that so much.
It was so amazing, so amazingly real.
And all of these I saw were drawing me into a world through gameplay, which was a new thing.
Nobody had ever done that before.
It hadn't happened.
The technology didn't exist.
It became a thing with my kids, with me and Spencer especially, my son, no relation.
We would play together.
And, you know, guys, women talk to each other, but guys have to have a thing that they talk about to have some football or something.
And we would play video games for a half hour every day.
And we would talk over the video games.
Now, ultimately, I have to tell you that ultimately I began to feel that the gameplay and the storytelling were in tension with one another, that very elaborate stories slowed down the gameplay to the point where it wasn't interesting, whereas intense gameplay didn't allow for a story.
And I found stories began to become very repetitive because there had to be battles in them.
It was still evocative.
I remember playing Resident Evil 3.
I was thinking of the third one, the zombie one, with my daughter, and we had to keep handing the controller back and forth because when you held the controller, it was just too scary.
This was the first game that actually had events happen, the first game I played that actually had events happen outside of your moving them.
So you would be moving along and something would spring out of a locker, and that had never happened before.
It was really frightening.
And so we'd have to pass the controller back and forth because when you were holding the controller, you were in the world.
And I understood this to be a new thing, but the stories were simply repetitive.
And now I feel that people are always saying to me, oh, have you seen The Last of Us?
What a great story.
It's not a great story.
It's still just killing zombies.
They're very repetitive stories.
And those stories can be a little bit more complicated than others.
But really, it's the gameplay pulling you in to an artistic world, a beautiful screen world, Game of God of War, which I'm still playing, just amazingly pulling you into this world.
That's the experience of video games, the one exception of these puzzle games, mostly indie games like Limbo and Braid and Inside, Year Walk.
Most recently a game called Goragoa that Spencer and I played separately in our separate homes, but we still played it together.
And it was just amazing.
And what these things do is they create an aura of mystery so the story doesn't have to be complicated.
You sort of add the story in your brain by filling in the mystery and by solving the puzzle you are sucked into these really elaborate and beautiful and simple worlds.
And that to me is where the art of video game goes.
So what does it mean if they're art?
See, a lot of people play video games and think, well, it's art.
It's art.
But art is an interesting thing.
Just because something's an art form doesn't mean everything in it is a work of art.
Like the crappy movies that aren't works of art.
And just because, and even if it is a work of art, doesn't mean you're using it as art.
The purpose of art is to enhance life.
That phrase art for art's sake, which has been around since at least the 19th century, that's not true.
The creator creates art for art's sake.
He does it because it's beautiful.
He does his job, right?
He's not trying to save the world.
He does his job.
But the beauty, as Dostoevsky said, I think, does beauty will save the world.
The beauty saves the world by enhancing your soul.
But it doesn't have to enhance your soul.
You have to open yourself up to it.
There are lots of college professors I have met in my life who have read absolutely everything, but they're bastards.
The Nazis who ran the death camp sometimes sat around and listened to Bach, but I don't think it was enhancing their souls or they wouldn't have been running death camps.
You have to engage with art in a certain way.
And the way you engage with art, in order for art to humanize you, you have to set aside your opinions and your values for just a moment and let the art wash over you.
It doesn't mean you have to watch things that you find disgusting or ugly.
It just means you have to find when you find something that's beautiful, you don't have to pass judgment on it until it's over.
Let it take you over.
Experience what it is like to be somebody you disagree with, someone you hate, someone you wouldn't associate with in real life, someone you disapprove of.
Experience what it is to live in a world of beauty that somehow is also strange.
I frequently talk to you about the Pieta.
I talk about the Pieta because it is the most beautiful statue I think ever made, and yet it's a depiction of the worst thing that can happen, losing a child, a dead child, and the worst thing that can happen to the world, the murder of God.
Obviously, it's Mary holding Jesus Christ, the dead Jesus Christ, and it's an amazing piece of beautiful thing, but you have to let the beauty wash over you so you understand that even in grief, life can be beautiful.
So, if you know, this is the thing I hate about this idea about this debate over video games.
A lot of times we debate stupidly in America, as I've been saying all through this show.
And one of the ways we debate stupidly is by using extremes.
We say, is it good to play video games?
This child played video games for seven hours and then went out and killed somebody, you know.
And the thing is, if he was playing video games for seven hours, if a child was playing video games for seven hours, he didn't have a father.
He doesn't have a parent looking out for him.
That's why he went out and killed somebody.
It wasn't the video games.
It's the fact that nobody was taking care of him and nobody was watching him and experiencing these things with him.
If you're playing video games for seven hours, if you're not paying attention to your life, to your love life, to your work life, to all the responsibilities that you have, if instead of talking at the dinner table and joining your family, you're sitting around playing Angry Birds on your phone, then, no, that is wrong.
Then you can go and listen to Matt Walsh tell you it's wrong because it's wrong.
You know, that is not what art is for.
That would be true, too, if you were reading books instead of paying attention to your family.
If you engage with video games as harmless entertainment and if you engage with video games as the experience of beauty, I think that they are a new thing, a new way of experiencing a world.
I think they are, in fact, what painting used to be.
I think they are an advance on painting, which is now a dead art form.
It doesn't mean no one will ever paint a good picture.
It simply means that most art, most modern art, is garbage.
Jackson Pollock is garbage.
Most of the art that sells for zillions of dollars is garbage.
That form, that visual art, is now in video games.
And if you experience it that way, I think it can really move you and it can really change your life.
All right, for subscribers, and you should be a subscriber.
You should be contributing to the fight we hear at the Daily Wire are fighting to retake the culture.
Staving Off Clavenless Week00:10:01
But if you are a member, you also get the members block, which staves off the Clavenless Week by 10 minutes at least, which I know is not much compared to Eternity, which is the Clavenless Week ahead of you.
But at least you get 10 more minutes to survive.
However, if you are not a subscriber, we will still solve all your problems for the next few minutes here with the mailbag.
My penis was oscillating between extremely sensitive and borderline traumatized.
All right, the Todd, the Todger clip, Never to be forgotten.
From just, I can't make the jokes that are going through my mind because all the ladies will leave.
From Justin, I am hoping for some advice.
I'm working on writing a novel.
I'm enjoying the process of working through my ideas, but some of my religious ideas, which I express in the book, are quite different from the ideas that my family raised me on.
I'm close with my family and never want to introduce conflict, but I'm fearful that if I publish my book and they read it, our relationship may be strained because I think differently than them in some ways.
I'm fine keeping my religious opinions to myself, but if they get out there on paper, I may have to answer for them with my family.
Am I right to be scared of this?
Should I publish under a different name?
What would you advise?
Thank you for your show.
I dread the Clavenless Week.
We all dread the Clavenless Week, except for me, because I'm Clavin.
This is the writer's life, pal.
This is it.
You have no secrets.
It's an amazing thing.
This is what a novelist's life is.
You say things that expose you.
You say things that expose other people.
You say things that people don't like.
You write characters that people see.
I can't tell you how many times people have seen themselves in a character I've written and gotten angry at me about it.
And it's really interesting because most of the time the character is in a position like theirs, like has their job or something like that, but the character was not based on them, but they don't realize that.
If the character looks like them or is in the same position, they get angry about it.
That is the job.
And if you don't want that job, don't do it.
And if, you know, the other thing I have to say, if it's your family and you have different religious opinions, you should be able to talk to them about that.
You shouldn't be living in fear anyway.
I mean, that's aside from the writer's life.
You know, you shouldn't be living in fear anyway.
And writing under a pseudonym because you don't want your mom and dad to know that you have different religious opinions, I'm sorry, but it's kind of wimpy.
You know, you got to be who you are.
I think the essence of manhood is to be who you say you are and do what you say you will do.
And you can't be who you say you are if you're afraid to say who you are.
But that is the writer's dilemma and the thing that comes up again and again for writers.
So there you are.
From Ray, Dear Lord Clavin, I'm asking all the Daily Wire hosts this question, but your advice in this matter I respect the most.
Well, obviously, look at them.
I have three sons and one daughter.
So far, we're Catholics, and they are all under five.
What advice would you give to a mother of five sons?
I want to teach them what is true and inspire them to be good.
I know they will choose their own way as adults, but I want to give them the best chance in life and toward heaven.
How would you advise me?
I love your show.
God bless you.
Well, thank you for that, truly.
And also, God bless you for having five kids and caring so much about leading them through motherhood.
You're doing the most important job on earth.
You're doing the most important job.
You are literally doing the most important job on earth.
We were looking for the person who was doing it.
It's you.
So here is what I say.
That, of course, you can teach them good from bad.
You can discipline them.
Your discipline, I think, should be moderate and it should be pointed at certain things.
You should not constantly be threatening them with punishment for acting up.
But when you say you are going to penalize them for something and they do it anyway, you have to follow through.
You should not make threat twice.
You know, there's the one thing my wife and I agreed.
We never made threats twice.
We said, this will happen if you do this thing.
And if they did that thing, it happened.
And so that was, you know, that was, they knew that there was no going to mom and getting out of it.
There was no going to me and getting out of it.
They knew that that was a real thing.
And so, so, yeah, discipline your kids, obviously.
But the most important thing, the most important thing is the way you live.
And that means two things.
It doesn't just mean that you act honestly, even when it costs you money, or even when it means doing something that's going to get you in a little bit of trouble with the authorities or something, that you act as an honest person, that you are responsible to your ideas of honesty, that you're responsible to your own ideas of morality, and that you do it with joy.
That your moral system should make you joyful.
It doesn't mean it's not hard.
It's sometimes hard to be moral, but it makes you joyful to be that person.
It makes you joyful to be a faithful wife.
It makes you joyful to be a decent human being.
It makes you joyful to take time out from what you wanted to do to help somebody else.
If what you are doing is walking around complaining about other people's immorality, if you're judging instead of doing, if you're taking the moat out of other people's eyes and removing the plank from your own, that is not teaching them anything except to be a crank.
You have to show people, you know, I was not afraid at times now and then.
I did not believe that my children needed to hear all my self-criticism of myself.
You know, that's ridiculous.
They didn't need that.
But if I made a mistake, I went, yeah, I blew that.
You know, I zigged when I should have zagged.
I did the wrong thing.
You know, I was honest about it.
But I'm a fairly joyful person and they could see that the life that I was living, which was a life of discipline, a life of hard work, a life of commitment to my wife, a life of commitment to my family, they could see that it was a joyful thing.
I was not sitting around going, you know, like, you know, I wish I could sleep with those other women.
Even though sometimes that was a temptation, I got joy from being a faithful guy and from having the love that I get from my wife and from knowing that she knew that I was the person that I seem to be.
So that joy, so being the person you want them to be, the kind of person you want them to be, and being that person with joy and cutting down on the yelling and complaining about other people's immorality is the way.
That's the easiest, best, most important way to teach your kids what you want them to know.
From Stephen, my name is Stephen.
I know your feelings on adoption and I agree with them, but I'm struggling, which is that adoption, that's a good thing.
But I'm struggling with my only experience years ago.
I was a lost soul.
To make my story short, I put myself in a position where my girlfriend gave up my child for adoption at birth.
I knew of the pregnancy, but was never told of the adoption until it was too late.
Took me a long time not to blame her.
But she was more lost than me.
She lost her life not even a year later.
I've come to the conclusion she made the best decision.
I've only ever met my daughter once at her birth mother's funeral, but we know of each other and get updates and pictures.
I've come to terms with the heartache and have become content with her happy life.
And I understand my culpability.
My issue is with the adoption agency.
Lawyers have told me they broke the law in order to profit off my daughter's life.
I'm consistently plagued with vengeful thoughts along the lines of legal recourse or civil rights violations.
I don't want them doing it to anyone else, but I also don't want to lose the trust I've gained with the adoptive family or ruin opportunities for other children.
I truly struggle with this.
How does a person gain peace in a situation like this?
Let it go.
Be a man.
Let it go.
You know, your daughter needs to be left alone.
Does not need you doing that in her life.
You're not going to solve anything.
Even if you were going to solve anything, it doesn't matter.
Your daughter, you're taking out your anger on the mother of this child.
You're displacing it and you're putting it on these lawyers.
Just walk away.
Walk away.
And if you can't live with that, if you can't do that, then there's something sticking in your head that you need to fix because you're only going to make your daughter's life worse.
You have got, you've got to.
You've got to let it go.
And if you can't do that, get some help because you're sticking on, this is not what you think it is.
This is a displacement.
All right.
From Amy, dearest Mr. Clavin, you read my mailbag question at the beginning of the pandemic last year.
My question then was, if my husband and I should postpone trying for our first baby due to the pandemic, your advice was to research how bad COVID really was in our immediate area, but more importantly, for us to pray about what to do.
We followed your advice and ultimately decided we were being led to the decision to not wait.
So one special day, my husband whispered rock auto into my ear.
Guys, this always works.
Rock auto.
You got to say it.
You got to do it right.
Rock auto.
One special day, my husband whispered rock auto into my ear.
And here we are expecting a little girl next month.
How happy are we to hear this?
This is what you get on the Clavin show.
You know, you're not just getting information.
You're not just getting, you know, the satire and all this.
You're actually getting babies.
Not from me, not from me, but from your, when your husband whispers rock auto, there's no resistance.
There's no resistance.
We're expecting a little girl next month.
Thank you so much for your advice.
It really helped us feel confident we were making the right choice for our family.
That is a great story.
I love that story so much.
And, you know, you don't have to name her Clavin.
Clavin, you know, it's kind of, that's not a really good name for a girl, Clavin, first name for a girl.
Clavinette, maybe?
Clavinia, something like that.
You know, I'm sure you'll think of something.
That is a cheerful, cheerful way to end this portion of the show.
We're glad to send you off with a laugh as you plunge into absolute darkness of the Clavinless Week, unless you're a subscriber, which is what you should be.
So subscribe to the Daily Wire.
You can become a member at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Use promo code Clavin for two months free off any annual membership.
Or you can use Knowles and they charge you for an extra two months.
No, I made that up.
But use Clavin for two months free off any annual membership.