Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 1117 skewers "wokeness" through a satirical "State of the Union" parody, mocking Biden-era policies on abortion, LGBTQ+ issues, and historical revisionism while contrasting it with Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ conservative pushback. He ties Disney’s reparations push, Sam Smith’s Unholy, and Hunter Biden laptop censorship to a coordinated cultural takeover, warning that capitulation—like Chick-fil-A’s values shift—accelerates moral decay. The episode links rock’s Satanic roots to modern deepfake porn and materialist feminism, arguing classical wisdom (Plato, Aristotle) is the antidote to postmodern power struggles. Clavin urges conservatives to reclaim art with prizes, not just criticism, while exposing media disinformation (NYT, WaPo) as tools of ideological control, framing the fight as a spiritual war against hedonism and institutional lies. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, as you know, the State of the Union was delivered this week by the President of the United States, a doddering old wreck sinking into oblivion through a fog of lies and self-delusion, which by some strange coincidence is also the State of the Union.
If you missed the speech because you were doing something more enjoyable, like getting a colonoscopy or repeatedly sticking a pin under your toenail, we here at the Daily Wire are happy to be able to present you with this transcript, which I will read aloud as clearly as I can, so you'll have to pretend I'm incomprehensible to get the full sense of the original experience.
President Doddering said, quote, Good evening, my fellow Miss Platin.
I come before whoever you are today in this historic house or possibly somewhere else to say words written on the glass thing in front of me, whatever it is.
They didn't have those when I was a boy growing up in Delaware or some damn place or other.
What will they think of next?
And that's who we are as a nation.
But there's still more to do.
As I look out among you in the hopes of communicating a measure of sentience, I want to say to each and every American tonight, where am I?
But the state of the union is strong.
Our people are strong.
I'm strong.
Yesterday I moved a chair from the head of the table over to the side and I didn't even get out of breath.
And every Republican in this room opposed that policy because of January 6th, when they stormed this house and cut Social Security, who still hasn't recovered from his wounds.
He's in a hospital bed this very minute, next to democracy.
Stand up, democracy.
Oh wait, he can't stand up.
He's in a hospital bed with Social Security.
God knows what those two are getting up to.
And sure, when I was a kid, that sort of gay boy stuff was looked down upon just because it happens to be disgusting.
But today we have to pretend to like it, and that's a good thing, even if no one knows why.
Heck, we can even cut off people's sex stuff now and turn them into make-believe women instead of what everyone knows they are.
And I pledge to you tonight that I will not let the Supreme Court stop us from killing all these babies women get pregnant with all the time.
Otherwise, they just come out and crap all over everything and wake you up crying in the middle of the night.
I hate that.
And you know, I've been criticized for ruining everybody's life and making it so you can't buy a dozen eggs without taking out a second mortgage.
But let's face it, you'd probably get shot on the way to the store anyway.
So my policies are saving lives as well as lowering cholesterol.
And some say this administration has lost the consent of the governed.
Well, we have to change that.
In fact, we should just cross that whole consent of the governed line out of the Declaration altogether.
Stupid document.
It was written by Thomas Jefferson, and he was bad because he slept with his slaves.
And okay, I have this fantasy about being a sultan where something similar happens, but Jim won't play that game, so I'm better than Jefferson, and the consent of the governed line has to go.
But there's still more to do.
Hell, we may never get home.
What about resort fees?
I hate those.
You're sitting there in your lounge chair trying to enjoy your pina colada and suddenly you find out the drink costs $20 and they don't even give you one of those little paper umbrellas where if they do, it isn't one of the yellow ones I like.
That's got to stop.
And my administration will get this done or my name isn't whatever it is.
And in conclusion, I just want to ramble incoherently about my father for a moment and then grin in a way that makes you wonder where the hell I bought my teeth before walking off stage with that stiff gait that's a symptom of dementia so the media can get started praising my performance.
And also in conclusion, let me just say to every American, whoever he is, and whoever you are, or I am, good night.
And where am I?
Unquote.
The rebuttal to the president's speech was delivered by Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Unfortunately, I can't give you that transcript because the entire speech consisted of Governor Sanders staring wide-eyed into the camera with her mouth open and then moving to Switzerland.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing ooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Okay, the vast right-wing conspiracy known as Clavinon continues.
And speaking of Clavinon, we're going to have Spencer Clavinon, no relation, to talk about his genuinely excellent new book, How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom from Modern Crises.
Some leftists on Twitter tweeted, wisdom, oh, wisdom from goat herders who lived over a couple of thousand years ago is so relatable to today's problems.
And then he had a bunch of laughter emojis.
So I think we should ask Spencer, who has a doctorate from Oxford University, to defend himself against this moron because that will make us laugh.
We'll also talk about sex and what it has to do with Satan.
Why is Satan always connected to sex?
And the state of the union, a little bit, we're going to talk about that a little bit, but we'll talk about Twitter, all kinds of stuff.
This is an excellent time for you to go and subscribe to the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
This is my YouTube channel, not the Daily Wires, Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
You will get exclusive content there.
If you ring that bell, you'll develop tintinitis and ultimately just die in your room screaming and tearing at your ears.
But you'll still get exclusive content.
And if you take time off from tearing at your ears to leave a comment and the comment is racist and sexist and hateful, we will read it on the air because that's what we do here.
That's the kind of content we love.
Today's content is from HEB, who says, I'm genuinely unhappy about laughing as hard as I did about the babies desperately calling 911.
You should be unhappy at that.
That was a horrible, horrible joke to make.
And you should just be ashamed of yourself.
But that's the thing.
There's a joke about abortion and evil is funny until all the killing gets started.
You know the old expression, if you don't know what the product is, the product is you.
That is what companies are selling today, especially tech companies.
They enrich themselves by taking your personal data.
They grab your web history, email, metadata, and video searches to create a detailed profile on you and then sell that off to the highest bidder.
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They can legally sell this information without your consent to ad companies and tech giants who then use it to target you.
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Protect Yourself with ExpressVPN00:03:15
It's k-l-a-v-a-n.
There are no easing funny back.
So, you know, I'm not going to really talk a lot about the state of the union.
I have to, I will tell you this because you couldn't see it.
It was off stage.
But when we were doing backstage, we were watching the state of the union.
I just cracked up.
I was afraid that when the camera came back to us, that I was not going to be able to talk because I just lost it.
I was laughing so hard because the entire experience was like, I don't know if you saw it, but the entire experience was like if you've ever sat at a bar and had a drunk next to you start ranting at you about politics, I tell you another thing, the Congress would be right.
And you have to nod politely, you know, just to be a decent human being, but you don't understand a word he's saying.
That was exactly what it was like.
It was all socialism and lies.
He's going to fund everything, electric vehicles and Medicaid.
He's going to ban resort fees.
He's going to cap the price of concert tickets.
He's going to be in complete control of every aspect of your life.
And he's got, oh, and he cut the deficit, even though the deficit doubled in the first four months of this fiscal year.
So it was all lie.
So you couldn't understand what he was saying.
And when you could understand what he was saying, it wasn't true.
And everybody hates him.
And so often, but that doesn't matter.
We do have to play one clip of the media reacting to the speech.
Here's cut 11.
This was the best speech I have ever heard him deliver.
He was passionate.
It was extremely well written.
He clearly had practiced it.
And he delivered a powerful message to the American people.
This was Biden, I think, at his best in terms of his public performance.
He was a little rowdy, right?
He was a little fun.
This speech was long in word count, but it was delivered with a lot of energy and a lot of pace and a combativeness and sort of liveliness that I'm not sure that I've ever seen in this particular type of presidential address.
It's funny because that's the same review I gave to the drunk in the bar.
You know, I came out, he said, Ready, I'll tell you another day, my car is ready.
And I came out and said, you know, he was lively, he was lovable, he was masterful and passionate.
You know, and there was, I don't know, there's no point in talking about it.
We all know what it is.
They sit and they tell you it was bad manners when the Republicans booed him for saying they wanted to cut Medicaid and Social Security, but it wasn't bad manners when Nancy Pulsey ripped Trump's speech apart.
And by the way, they should reform those programs.
Trump was wrong about that.
DeSantis is right about it.
Anyway, all I want to say about it really is one thing, because I just want to get to the subject of the show, which is very different than this, but it's impossible to do a good job answering the State of the Union.
That's always just a thankless job because you're sitting in a room, you look kind of dopey.
The president of the United States has just been talking to the entire Congress and the Supreme Court and you're just sitting there in your room and it just looks bad.
Sarah Sanders Huckabee, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas, did a really good job, as good a job as she could do.
And she was really smart because she talked about the issues, she talked about the economy, she talked about China, but she kept coming back to the culture.
And this is one of the best things she says, is cut one.
While you reap the consequences of their failures, the Biden administration seems more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day.
Woke Fantasies vs. American Values00:12:17
Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace.
But we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn't start and never wanted to fight.
Every day we are told we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols.
All while big government colludes with big tech to strip away the most American thing there is, your freedom of speech.
That's not normal.
It's crazy and it's wrong.
That's right.
It's crazy and it's wrong and it's the most important fight we're in.
And I know I keep saying this.
I know I keep hammering at home, but I'm going to tell you something about the culture, stuff that happened this week in the culture that you won't have heard anywhere else.
It's going to be different, different kind of commentary, because I think we really have to understand this.
We can't just pound our Bibles.
We can't just say, oh, condemn things and all this.
I'm going to tell you why we can't do that.
But this is a genuine cultural war, and it's not a cultural war.
It's a cultural revolution.
And I will tell you what I mean by that in just a second.
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So we're always hearing this country as an idea, and that is right.
And the idea centers on one thing, which is liberty, individual liberty, the liberty, the freedom to do, say, think, worship how you please, okay?
When the founders said all men are created equal, they meant equal in their right to liberty.
They obviously didn't mean that I'm as good of a basketball player as LeBron James.
They obviously didn't mean that a smart guy is not smarter than a dumb guy.
They didn't mean we were equal.
They meant that we were equal in the fact that we all had the right to liberty.
And they said that.
We have unalienable rights.
Life was first because obviously that's the basis of everything else.
But then comes liberty.
When they said that governments are formed among men to ensure those rights, they were talking mostly about liberty again.
The opposite of liberty is woke.
The opposite of liberty is wokeness.
It takes away your individuality, replaces equality of the right to freedom with equity of results.
It utterly, obviously, destroys your free speech.
I will talk about that more as we go on.
So fighting wokeness is the most important, is the country.
The country is on the line.
There was a congressman from Indiana, Jim Banks.
He has recently announced the formation of an anti-woke caucus.
Every Republican should be in that caucus.
Every human being who calls himself an American should be in that caucus.
And in the American mind this week, two scholars, John Fonte of the Hudson Institute, he's a guy I know.
He's an absolutely brilliant guy, and Thomas Klingenstein of Claremont, who may be the only conservative in America I haven't met, I don't think.
They wrote a manifesto for this anti-woke caucus saying, and it's called, it's in the American mind, it's called woke revolutionaries versus Americanists, because obviously woke and America are the opposite.
And this is what they say.
They say National Socialism, Nazism, and Communism were the challenges for prior generations of Americans.
Wokeism is the challenge of our generation.
America is in the middle of a cold civil war between woke revolutionaries who believe America is and has always been systemically racist, evil, so that it must be deconstructed, delegitimized, i.e. destroyed, and those who believe that America is good and that its principles are the greatest antidote to racism ever created, and that preserving America and its principles is the highest and most urgent political calling.
Now, they are absolutely right about this, and they give the caucus some very good advice, but they're wrong about one thing.
They are wrong about one thing.
The woke people are not the revolutionaries.
We are.
They already own the culture.
They own every part of the culture.
They own the businesses.
They own the movies.
They own the academies.
They own the show biz.
They own just about everything.
They are just solidifying their victory.
Now that they've won the victory, they're now bringing in the big guns, the real things.
And like the Nazis take over France, and then they start rounding up the Jews.
They're rounding up the Jews, basically.
And the Jews are you and me.
Anybody who disagrees with them, they're big business, they're the government, their academy.
We, we are the revolutionaries, and we have to learn to fight like revolutionaries fight.
Now, that's what I'm going to talk about.
Disney, I mean, just an example.
Disney, once the fullest expression of American values and innovation, it is now a body-snatched zombie of wokeness.
They have taken it over.
They reissued their old proud family show, I think, from the 90s.
Here's a snippet of what was in it, Cut 3.
This country was built on slavery, which means slaves built this country.
Tilled this land from sea to sea to sea.
First there was rice, tobacco, sugar cane.
Then Whitney did his thing and cotton became king.
And we were its soldiers.
Four million strong.
Fighting for America's freedoms even though we remained America's slaves.
Built this country.
The descendants of slaves continue to build this.
Slaves built this country.
And we, the descendants of slaves in America, have earned reparations for their suffering.
And continue to earn reparations every moment we spend submerged in the systemic prejudice, racism, and white supremacy.
Now, it's incredible.
Everything in that is a lie.
I mean, you know, slaves worked in this country.
They worked in a lot of countries, but they didn't build this country.
This country was built in very different ways.
But still, it's hateful.
It's a hate, anti-American hate being fed to your children by a corporation that was made in America, by America, for America, by a deeply American guy, Walt Disney.
So they have won.
They have already won.
And, you know, Disney, the Disney CEO, Bob Iger, just announced that he's cutting 7,000 jobs and $5.5 billion in cost.
They had a bad 22.
But if you think that, you know, go woke, go broke is going to save you, if you think capitalism is going to save you and the market will stop these guys, you're wrong.
You are wrong.
First of all, their quarterly earnings and their streamer losses were not as bad as they thought they were going to be.
And you're still going to watch Star Wars.
You're still going to watch stuff that they, even though Luke Skywalker is going to be retconda's gay, you're still going to go back and watch those films because you love them.
You'll be sending them their money to give that crap to your children because money, and they don't care because money is secondary.
This ideology is a virus and the people who have it have so much cultural power that people are simply falling over to support them and back them up.
This is what happened in the Soviet Union, what happened in China.
People will follow the crowd around them.
They will follow the crowd around them, even if they don't want to.
They find themselves saying things.
Things come out.
I mean, you ever tell somebody you liked a movie because they liked it, but you didn't really like it, but you don't want to say it.
That's the way this works.
This is a glitch in the human system.
Now, at the same time, there's a full court press going on to stop or damage the release of the new Harry Potter video game because J.K. Rowley won't bend the knee and she won't say that men can be women.
She's not anti-trans.
She's not transphobic, a state of mind that does not exist, a word that has no relation to anything in the truth.
She just says the truth, that men can't become women.
We don't have the technology.
It can't be done.
It's like saying, you know, if you're a man saying you're a woman, it's like saying you're standing on Pluto.
We can't get you there.
Too bad.
That's it.
That's reality.
So the game is going to come out.
That's going to be hugely popular.
I'm going to play it next week.
I'll do a Claven Plays video and we'll release that on YouTube.
And people are saying, oh, they can't stop Rowling because she's a billionaire and they say her books make too much money and all this stuff.
Doesn't matter because the next person, the person just starting, the new author of a new Harry Potter, can't get going.
Even I've taken flack for this, by the way.
And I won't bend the knee either.
But again, if I were just starting out, would I?
Probably not because I'm me, but somebody else will.
And remember Chick-fil-A?
The president of Chick-fil-A said he opposed gay marriage and gave money to Christian charities.
And then when they attacked him, he stood up to them and Chick-fil-A became the most popular fast food restaurant in the country because people were supporting him.
Doesn't matter.
Chick-fil-A has stopped funding those charities and announced that they stopped funding those charities because every time they went to open a restaurant, the activists were there shutting them down.
What do you think they're thinking in Colorado when they go after this baker every time when they destroy his life?
He's a strong Christian man.
He's standing up to them in faith.
But what do you think about the next baker who just thinks, I just want to sell my cakes if somebody wants a gay wedding cake, so it's against my principles.
I don't care.
Capitalism will not protect you.
The Constitution will not protect you if the culture loses the values that make them work.
You know, they're just papers.
Money is just paper.
Everything is just paper except those values in your heart.
That's what matters.
If God's values aren't written on your heart, they ain't in operation.
So they are the government.
They are this power.
We are the revolutionaries, and they have a strategy for making it seem like they aren't.
That's how they fool you.
They make it seem that they're the revolutionaries.
They're the upstarts.
They're the ones.
You could see it.
You know, there was a House Oversight Committee about how Twitter at the instigation of the FBI blocked the Hunter Biden laptop to help Biden win the election over Trump.
I've told you that this Twitter story is the biggest story of the decade.
It is one of the biggest stories of the decade.
It's so important because it is about big government and big industry colluding to strip you of your right to free speech and to rig an election.
That's what the story is.
That's what's happening.
So AOC just hates that she's there and she's in this thing.
And she's got woke warrior Yoel Roth, who used to be on Twitter, used to be their head of censorship before Musk came in.
And she's talking about Libs of TikTok.
Now, remember, Libs of TikTok, who we love on the show, we play them her stuff all the time.
All she does is show the left talking.
She doesn't have any content except their content.
She shows you what they are saying.
And she kept getting kicked off Twitter for that.
Now she's not.
So here is AOC talking to Yoel Roth about what she saw on Libs of TikTok.
Are you aware that from August 11th to August 16th, that account posted false information about Boston Children's Hospital, claiming that they were providing hysterectomies to children?
Yes, I am aware of that and other claims from the account.
And are you aware that this lie was then circulated by other prominent far-right influencers?
Yes.
And are you aware that all these claims, which I have reiterated were false, culminated in a real-life harassment and ultimately a bomb threat to the Boston Children's Hospital?
Yes, I am aware.
And this account is still on that platform today, isn't it?
Regrettably, yes, it is.
Now remember, Libs of TikTok doesn't put out content.
It only puts out content that the left is there.
So I went on the Boston Children's Hospital website.
Here is what they say.
As the first pediatric center in the country dedicated to the surgical care of transgender patients, we take an interdisciplinary approach.
Our skilled team includes specialists in plastic surgery, urology, endocrinology, nursing, gender management, and social work who collaborate to provide a full suite of surgical options for transgender teens and young adults.
That's what it says on their website.
AOC, now maybe they don't do hysterectomy specifically.
I don't know.
It didn't say, but it's a lie.
It's a lie.
Unholy Celebration00:07:02
They are not, you know, and this is the thing.
I'm talking about the strategy that the woke people have for convincing us that they're the revolutionaries instead of us.
They're the power.
They're the power.
Twitter is a powerful place.
The FBI is a powerful stuff.
They colluded to bury Hunter Biden's laptop so that Biden would help Biden win the election.
AOC is telling us that this lie, and they all do it, right?
This is what they do.
They lie and they lie.
They're not teaching CRT, but it's good that they are.
They're not sexually grooming our children, but it's good that they are.
Do you remember the movie, The Usual Suspects, where Kaiser, they're talking about Kaiser Sozi, the master villain, and nobody knows who he is.
And the guy says, channeling Baudelaire, the poet Baudelaire, this is what he says, cut five.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.
Right.
That's the greatest trick the devil ever pulled.
And it is the same trick that the woke people are pulling.
It's not happening.
It is not happening.
And if you say it's happening, you're a bigot because it's happening and it's good.
That is what they keep doing.
They don't exist.
It is exactly what the devil does.
And that is no coincidence.
You know, a lot of people on the right got upset about the Grammys and this song by Sam Smith and Tim Petrus, a gay guy and a make-believe girl guy.
And they did this song called Unholy, which is a celebration of adultery.
Here's a quick video.
The guy is dressed as the devil, and there are scantily clad girls with whips dancing around him and bowing down to him.
Here it is.
So they get a standing evasion sponsored by Pfizer.
You know, I may be many things, but I'm not shocked by this.
Remember, in the 1980s, Iron Maiden did this stuff.
They had the number of the beast and all those metal bands had it.
But then it was transgressive.
Then they were the revolutionaries.
Then they were shocking people.
And people were shocked.
Not now.
Joe Biden gave a speech at the Grammys.
The people cheered.
They said, they sent out a tweet.
We're all worshiping now.
They are not the counterculture.
We are.
They are the culture.
Satanism is the culture.
Worshiping Satan is not shocking to anybody.
If it were, Jill Biden would not have been at that show.
The point about this, this is important.
It's important to the mentality of how you fight back.
This is not a siege where we are protecting the glory of America.
This is a conquest.
We have to take it back.
We have to go in and take it back.
They've got the citadel, not us.
We can't huddle and play defense and complain.
We have to attack and replace.
Let's talk about this music for a minute.
Let's talk about how we got here with this music.
Satanism was inherent in rock from the very beginning, from the Beatles singing yeah yeah.
I'm not saying they were Satanists.
I'm not saying they were bad people or anything like that.
But when you go back to the beginning of rock and roll, it's interesting.
When you go back to the beginning of rock and roll, it was shocking to everybody because the music was so different, but it was really inherently decent.
It was love stories.
It was nice.
Even if you take The Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger, Sympathy for the Devil, right?
Sympathy for the Devil was based on a Christian novel written by a Soviet dissident called The Master in Margarita.
And he says in the song, he says, he talks about how he was there.
The devil was there when Jesus Christ died.
And he says, I stuck around St. Petersburg when I saw it was time for a change.
I killed the Tsar and his ministers, and Astasia screamed in vain.
So he was the Soviets.
And then he goes on to say he was the Nazis as well.
And he says, I hope you guessed my name, but what's puzzling you is the nature of my game, right?
And that's the thing.
So the old rock had a certain decency, a certain actual Christian foundation.
It was just a different kind of music roll over Beethoven.
You know, it was a different kind of music.
But in that music, inherently, it was going in this direction.
I'll tell you why, all right?
There was a book written, a famous book written in 1987 by a guy named Alan Bloom called The Closing of the American Mind, about the left's takeover of the universities.
And in it was an attack on rock music that to this very day is ridiculed by the right.
It's ridiculed by the left just dismisses it, but it's ridiculed by the right as ruining the whole argument because it made conservatives look like old grumpy grandpas who didn't like rock and roll.
They was kids today.
You're listening to the wrong music.
Here's what Alan Bloom said.
Young people know that rock has the beat of sexual intercourse.
It is built into the music.
He's absolutely right about this.
In alliance with some real art and a lot of pseudo-art.
So he's saying it is art and some of it's not, but there is art.
He says, an enormous industry cultivates the taste for the orgiastic state of feeling connected with sex, providing a constant flood of fresh material for voracious appetites.
Never was there an art form directed so exclusively to children.
So he was absolutely right about this.
Why did it make him sound like an old grump to say it?
And I will tell you why.
Because art always reflects pop art.
Popular art always reflects something that has already happened or is happening in the heart of the people.
I think that modern abstract art is trash.
I think Jackson Pollock is absolute garbage, but it is an absolute expression of what the world, what reality looks like when there's no God.
You lose the sense of that things have shape, that things matter, that things have meaning.
It just becomes splat on a page.
So it is art.
It's just bad art because the culture is bad.
So when you say that something that is truly art, and rock and roll is truly art, and rap truly art, when you say that something is art, is bad, you are saying that the culture is bad and nobody wants to hear it.
Nobody wants to hear that their cultural moment is low and degraded and it sucks because they're part of it and they like that music.
So that's how you get to be called, what did Vanity Fair call me, an old crank?
That's how you get to be an actual old crank because art is prophecy.
The counterculture becomes the culture.
And if it represents the tenor of the times, and that has real life consequences, but people like it, even as it's cutting out the ground from underneath them.
We're going to talk about now the real life consequences of an art form, which is the main art form of the latter half of the 20th century.
We're going to talk about the consequences of that art form, what it saw coming, and what it made you believe in, and what it made you a part of.
Sleep, Power, and Disorder00:14:41
We'll talk about it in just a sec.
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Why is the devil associated with sex?
Why is it that something that is inherently sexual, like rock and roll, ultimately leads to the devil?
Sex is great.
I love sex.
Sex is one of my favorite things.
If I had back the time I have spent having sex, I could have earned like a degree in nuclear physics.
You can do it without getting pregnant.
You can use birth control.
You can do it so you don't get a disease.
You can use a condom.
It's tremendous fun.
It's fun for everyone who's doing it.
It's a lot of good.
It is not that God hates sex.
It is his gift to us.
But there are two ways of looking at the human body.
There's the normal way, the natural way, which is that, and then there's the Christian way.
Those are the two ways, right?
Which is not natural.
Because the normal way is that, oh, sex is fun.
Let's have sex.
The Christian way is saying sex is beautiful.
Sex is a gift of God.
But the gifts of God have been broken and something has gone wrong with who we are.
There's something disordered and it's gone wrong for all of us.
It's not the guy next to you.
It's not the horrible, hideous, gay person who shocks you so much.
It's none of that.
It's not that.
It is everybody.
The sexual urge in man is disordered.
That's the Christian thought, right?
You never hear me scold people for the silly things they do in bed or even the icky things they do in bed.
It's none of my business.
We are all disordered.
That is why when they wanted to stone a woman for committing adultery, Jesus said to him, great, go ahead, but let he who's without sin, let him who's without sin, throw the first stone.
And all the men went home.
Not because they'd all committed adultery, but because what Jesus said was, if you lust after a woman in your heart, you have already committed adultery in your heart.
What he was saying is you are in a state of sin.
It is not the thing you're doing.
You are in a state of sin.
So everybody has a disordered sex drive.
Every single person.
We all know what you're thinking.
You're not hiding from anybody.
You may be doing everything right, but we all know that inside there's something not quite right about our sex drive.
That's the Christian thought.
So two ways of looking at the body.
Either everything is a secondary emanation from the body.
The body is who we are, and everything is a secondary emanation, right?
But the body is who we really are.
That's our authentic self.
You may say, oh, you may fall in love, but really that love is just eros.
You may want to create art, but that's really just a sublimation.
This is Freudianism.
It's a sublimation of Eros.
Really, the physical drives come first, and then we kind of gussy them up.
But your real self, you know, you say you love your wife, but you're looking at the girl down the office and you just like to get her in the broom closet for 10 minutes.
You know, that's who you really are.
That's who you really, that desire is who you really are.
And Christianity says, no, that desire is a broken part of your sex drive, right?
The Christian way of thinking about it is the body is the emanation of the soul that it expresses.
The same way the word is an attempt to express an idea.
You can't see the idea, but the word expresses the idea.
The word doesn't express the idea personally, perfectly, but it gets it across.
It gets the idea across.
Now, if the Christians are right, and sex is beautiful, but disordered because it is expressing something from the soul.
It's not just expressing something from the body.
The body is a word speaking the soul, and sex is a word speaking something about the soul, like for instance, love.
And so what the Christians are saying, we want you to live out the beautiful part of your sex drive that expresses your soul.
Put the disordered stuff aside, even though it's difficult.
It's a difficult discipline, but it trains you to hone your body to the love of your soul, right?
That is what it trains you to do.
You can't really use your body to express love in the bathroom of a bar on cocaine, right?
It's fun, it's fun, but it's disordered and sinful, right?
So, and by sinful, I mean it misses the target of your soul.
Now, the problem with following the natural way of your body, that this is who I really am, so why don't I do it?
Why do I lie?
Why am I a hypocrite pretending I love my wife and I really want to go down to grab that girl off out of her cubicle and drag her down the hall?
Why aren't I, you know, why should I be a hypocrite?
I want to be my authentic self.
Yes, I've lived with this woman for 20 years, but now I've fallen in love with an 18-year-old.
Why shouldn't I leave my wife and live out who I really am, right?
The problem is, is that because all our desires are disordered, they are all linked to disordered material things.
And the urge to sex is linked to power.
Everything is linked in some ways to power.
This is one of the things that the postmodernists have taught us, that everything is about power.
And that is true in a way of the disordered human mind.
You look at monkeys, in monkey groups, like the macaque monkeys, they show submission by what's called presentation.
And if you look this up, they won't tell you what presentation is.
Presentation is where you present yourself to have sex.
You bend over.
It's literally bending over.
That's what presentation is.
So if you watch macaque monkeys, the dominant male, the less dominant males, the submissive males, go to the dominant male and to show them that they're no threat, they bend over.
Now, the dominant male does not have sex with the other male monkeys, but it's just showing them.
It is basically saying that the submissive, the less dominant male is as weak as a woman.
That is what it's saying.
Take note of the fact that in that unholy video, the women had whips, which seems like a gesture of power, right?
Because if sex is connected to power, then the sadist is more powerful than the masochist.
But notice they're all worshiping the man.
They are actually worshiping the dominant male who is the devil.
They kneel down to him.
They bow down to him.
He's on a throne.
So they're whipping the less dominant males, but they're slaves to the dominant male.
They're the slaves of Satan.
And if you'd think this monkey stuff doesn't exist in human beings, listen to the way we talk.
When we use the F word and we say F you, that is the same thing.
That's like saying you're a woman.
You're a F you, you're a woman, right?
You say, you're my bitch.
That's the other one.
50 Shades of Gray is an emanation of this monkey self that we have, that is our disordered self.
When men have sex with someone, they call it a conquest, all of those things.
And that's why sadomasochism is so often associated with the devil.
That is why you see the women with a whip because an idea follows itself out to its highest level.
So if sex is connected to power, the ultimate sex is causing pain in someone else.
And Marquis DeSade said it.
That's where we get the word sadism.
So in this state of mind, to be female is literally to be a toy, is to be a bitch, right?
It's to be less.
And that's why materialist feminists are always telling women to be strong like men.
Don't be a bitch.
Don't be the weak one.
And here's a movie where you punch a man and he falls over, where you fight with swords and you win a sword fight.
None of which is going to happen in real life.
It's not going to happen in real life.
You punch him.
That's how a lot of women wind up in the hospital.
They slug their husbands and the husband slugs them back.
And the guy doesn't feel it at all and she goes to the hospital.
The Christian idea is not that you can get away from that monkey self.
The Christian idea is that you can transform that with the love that comes out of your soul.
That is the Christian idea.
It's not that you change.
That's why they tell in the Bible, they say that a wife should submit to her husband's authority and a husband should love his wife.
And if you were in a marriage like that, you find, oh, wait a minute, I actually have more power than I would have.
It's not that you can't have power as a make-believe man, but now you have power as who you are, a woman.
You are a woman, but your husband is dying to make you happy, wants to build a world for you, wants to do all the things, wants you to have the life that you want to have.
And so you have power as a woman, which means you have power as being yourself, not as you're being told to be, which is only going to make you unhappy.
What happens when you live out the disorder?
Well, this brings me to something that happened.
We were talking about this on backstage.
I have to tell you, I so rarely get angry at anything anymore because I know what the world is.
But this actually blew my head off.
I mean, you know how people are always saying, if this guy gets elected, I'm going to Canada.
I saw this and I thought, I'm going to Mars.
I'm leaving Earth, okay?
This is this Twitch gamer who I'd never heard of before named QT Cinderella.
She's a pretty lady.
She's 28 years old.
I don't watch Twitch, but she plays games.
And she found out that there was video deep fake porn of her, which I've never seen any of this, but I hear it is absolutely great.
I've seen deep fake of people speaking.
They did a funny one of Ben saying all this filthy stuff.
And it really does look real.
So it's really frightening.
So her face is on the body of a porn, you know, someone doing porn.
People are sending her this picture.
And she put out, she was shattered by it, obviously, and she put out this video.
I want to go live because this is what pain looks like.
This is what it looks like.
Okay.
This is what it looks like.
F the fing internet.
F the constant exploitation and objectification of women.
It's exhausting.
it's exhausting atrioc for showing it to thousands of people F the people DMing me pictures of myself from that website.
F you all.
Okay.
Now there were conservatives laughing at her, people laughing at her, and shame on them.
I mean, it reminded me of an old Kirk Douglas movie called The Paths of Glory, where Douglas says, there are times when I'm ashamed to be a member of the human race.
This made me ashamed to be a member of the human race.
This is obviously, I mean, it's obviously not rape, but it's mental rape.
When Jesus said, if you lust after somebody in your heart, that's adultery.
You've already committed adultery in your heart.
This is rape in your heart.
You know, and obviously, I hope she sues them.
I hope she sues them to absolute dust.
Okay.
The evildoers, the people who did this, are the ones to blame.
And I don't want to hear this garbage the left spews about blaming the victim.
It's not blaming the victim to talk about doing unwise things.
I had a friend who walked down a dark alley and got mugged.
And I said, look, the muggers are to blame, but you don't walk down the dark alley because evil exists, because the devil's biggest trick is to convince you that he's not there, but he is.
And so if you'd say, oh, well, I should be able to drink with men and get black out.
A girl should be able to get blackout, drunk with fat boys and not wake up with a stranger next to her.
Yeah, it's his fault for raping you, which is what that essentially is, but you acted unwisely, okay?
So when you hear this lady, the language she uses, this girl who was put in this porn thing, it's F this, F this.
She's using the monkey language.
She is participating in the monkey language.
The reason women didn't used to use that language is not because they're clean and fluffy and pink and perfect, although the best ones are, my wife is, but it's not because they're so delicate and they don't know what sex is or they've never heard a bad word or anything like that.
It's because they understood they had a stake in humanizing the body, that they were the ones who are going to be used and abused if they didn't do that.
You know, they didn't want to walk down the dark alley of men's disordered sexual drives.
You remember that line from No Country of the Old Man, the Cormac McCarthy, the movie in the novel?
The novel's great, even better than the movie.
I love the movie.
But he says, he says, when people stop saying sir and man, ma'am, all the rest of the social decay will follow.
When people start talking like that, they are basically acknowledging that we are in this material world.
We're just monkeys.
Sex is just about power.
And the pop songs that treat sex animalistically, you and me, we're nothing but mammals.
So let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel.
They become songs like blurred lines where women dance around subservient and naked, basically, not basically naked.
While a strutting rapper promises, this is one of the lines from Blurred Lines.
I will give you something big enough to tear your ass in two.
Now, I've been thinking a lot about this for a long time.
Obviously, I've been talking and thinking about the culture for a long time.
But I believe we're at an inflection point.
Their art is bad.
Unholy is bad.
It's boring.
It's the thing about the devil.
He's interesting a little bit because you want to hear who's operating against you, but he only has one thing on his mind.
So after a while, it becomes boring.
And it's also morally bad.
It may be art, but it's morally bad art.
But you can't fight it because it's what's in the souls of the people.
That's what art is.
Art is an expression of the souls of the people, the conscience of the race, James Joyce said.
That's what art is.
So you can't fight it by telling the people that they suck because they're not going to believe you.
They're dancing around to the music.
They don't know their souls are being stolen because the devil has convinced them, just like the woke people want to convince you, the devil has convinced them he doesn't exist, right?
Even when you talk about the devil, they think, what are you talking about?
Plato's Moral Questions00:16:06
You sound like you're nuts.
You're crazy.
That's not a real thing.
Unfortunately, I wish, I wish it weren't a real thing.
So how do you fight back?
Well, the only way to fight cultural rot is with cultural rebirth.
That is why it's we're the revolutionaries.
We have to remake the culture.
And we have to do it in our everyday lives.
We have to do it in the way we speak to one another.
We have to do it the way we treat our women.
And we have to do it in the way our women behave.
All of it, all of it has to be done.
It has to start.
We have to have, and in order to do that, you're going to have to start thinking of what's in your heart.
You know, that commercial, what's in your wallet?
You're going to have to start asking yourself, what's in your heart?
Because what is in your heart is who you will become.
And they have done everything they can to supplant that.
You think that Disney stuff doesn't work?
You know, if you're 30, you may have once heard that America was a good place.
If you're 20, you've never heard it.
No one's ever told you.
No one has ever told you about the wonderful things this country has done.
And so you've got to recover things that are lost.
I know that's hard, but it's not impossible.
It can be done.
It's been done before.
It will be done again.
We have to do it at this moment when they're actually down on the mat, but they don't know it yet because they've got all the power.
We're the revolutionaries, and we're going to talk to Spencer about that and then come back and talk some more.
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All right, so we were talking about the fact that we don't, that we're the revolutionaries.
We need a rebirth of culture, Renaissance.
The way the last Renaissance started was a poet named Petrarch discovered the personal letters of Cicero.
He discovered basically the classical world.
And so I thought I would bring in someone who knows a lot about the classical world.
He's absolutely, we are absolutely unrelated, and yet we have this, really strangely, we have the same last name, Spencer Clavin.
He has written a book, coincidentally, called How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises.
Now, I want to read you, we posted a little talk we had about this book on Twitter, and I want to read you the reaction, one reaction from a left-winger who kind of dogs me on Twitter.
You're right.
This is already going great.
Reading the comments is really advisable for any media enterprise.
Yes, usually.
You don't want to miss the rage.
You always scroll through YouTube just to find that choice story.
Yeah, go on.
He wrote, this is on Twitter.
He wrote, wisdom from goat herders who lived over a couple of thousand years ago is so relatable to today's problems, followed by about five or six laughing emojis because we've advanced so far, we no longer have to use words.
We have little yellow.
So, but, however, it's an idiotic thing to say.
But since there are a lot of idiots out there, and most of them are in my office.
I was going to say, who else are we talking about?
My face.
Some of my best friends are idiots.
What is your answer?
Why do we need to talk to ancient goat herders?
Well, I mean, who needs Petrarch when you've got, you know, user guy 5673 emoji, emoji, emoji.
No, but I actually, I have a fair amount of time for this question because not because I think it's true, but because I think it's very pervasive, this idea.
And you get it, for instance, in like the paleontologist G.G. Simpson said something to the effect of all good answers to the question of man's place in the universe were discovered after Charles Darwin.
And we should just ignore everything else because this was the Big Bang.
This was the intellectual genesis of the world.
And all this other stuff is outdated.
It's superstition.
It doesn't have anything to say to us.
Hitler would have agreed.
I think, you know, there's a lot of people who agree.
Yeah, you can't go wrong with it.
They're going to clip that in media matters.
But no, I mean, so this is a pervasive idea that people have.
And my book is basically the radical proposition that exactly the opposite is true, that the past has something to say to the present.
And here's why.
The digital revolution has totally remade the world.
It is in the process of remaking the world.
The technology that we have in front of us is reshaping how we relate to one another, how we think about ourselves, how we think about our purpose and our nature and all of these really fundamental issues.
And so it's easy to think that what that means is we're up against problems that nobody else has ever faced.
But in fact, what has happened is we've just been thrown back on the basic fundamental questions.
What is man?
What is his purpose in the universe?
And those questions never go away.
They've been there since humankind was walking the earth.
And the answers that we have come up with over the centuries have enormous power and richness for the present day.
They become more urgent, not less, as we get down to these urgent philosophical basic questions like what is truth and how do I seek God?
Is there a God?
Those are the kinds of questions that actually mankind has been wrestling with at a very sophisticated level for a very long time.
And what that means is we're not alone.
And we don't have to be alone.
We've just been sold a bill of goods that says we need to think about ourselves.
I mean, the egotism and the loneliness that comes along with an attitude like that.
Goat herders have nothing to say to me.
How's that going to work out for you?
You're going to charge into the digital age using only the resources of your smarts and your emojis.
Like, I just don't think that's going to work.
And I think there's a better way.
And that's why I wrote the book.
So I was talking on the show about the kind of puzzle that faces conservatives or people just who aren't insane at this point.
That an art form comes along like rock and roll.
And Alan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind writes, oh, this is clearly a sexual rhythm that is teaching orgiastic attitude toward life to children.
And he's obviously right.
It obviously plays out until we're watching the Grammys and they're worshiping Satan.
All of that, I think, is inherent in the music.
And I think Alan Bloom was absolutely right.
But when he says it, he's just a crank because rock and roll is an art.
And an art does reflect the soul of a people.
And our souls have been sold to Satan.
Perfectly.
A cheery prognosis.
So how do you respond when the hip new thing may not be the best new thing?
Well, this is a perfect example of a question in which ancient categories, ancient ways of thinking can actually help us to bring clarity to this very modern problem.
You're looking at Sam Smith in the Grammys.
What could be more modern than this guy wearing a little Satan top hat dancing around, right?
And yet, in fact, the issues that it raises are these very profound ancient issues, as guys like Alan Bloom knew.
I mean, Bloom was a great scholar of the Greek philosopher Plato, first and foremost.
He wrote a beautiful translation of Plato's Republic, and it's from that book that these ideas kind of come, that music can somehow influence the soul, right?
That it has this profound imprint on our ethical lives.
And the basic idea behind this is the Greek word mimesis.
And that is a word which we actually still use all the time in a different form when we say meme, when we share a meme online, that's a mimema, which is a Greek word for a thing that is replicated or shared or reproduced, right?
Something that if I look at a tree and then I take a stick and I draw the tree in the ground, that's a kind of imitation.
I'm kind of doing this imitative act that we all do all the time.
Kids in preschool, we learn things by singing songs that our teachers sing back at us.
We imitate one another.
Aristotle, one of Plato's great disciples, says that mankind is the most mimetic animal, that it's built into our very DNA to do this kind of monkey-see-monkey-do sort of thing.
And so this is an idea which it didn't take Charles Darwin, actually, to figure out that we have this innately within us.
And when you're looking at a piece of art, what you're looking at is the product of the highest possible product of that imitation, that relationality that we have with the world, that when we look out at things, we don't just see, you know, despite what the materialists would have you believe, we don't just see, you know, bare physical objects.
We actually see form, we see shape, we see truth, and we experience things like love and desire, which brings us into the whole universe of morals, the moral universe, the universe of ethics.
And so what conservatives are reacting to when we freak out about stuff like this is the fact that art is not just morally neutral.
It's not just anything goes.
You actually are depicting the world with a moral language, as if there were such things as moral truths, because there are.
And so I don't think conservatives are wrong to freak out about this stuff.
But I think that we sound like cranks because we typically tend to react to what's being depicted rather than how and how truthfully it's being depicted.
And this, I think, is the key concept that we get when we start thinking about mimesis in this way, right?
Game of Thrones comes on and there's sex and violence in it, right?
And a lot of conservatives have a lot of real concerns about making kind of spiritual contact with these bad things.
And what's interesting, if you watch Game of Thrones, is there's actually a difference between the sex and the violence.
The violence takes place within a very carefully observed moral universe.
And it's telling you something about this world.
Saying this is a cutthroat world.
You're seeing some image, somebody's idea about the world.
The sex is just titillation, and it's not actually telling you anything.
In fact, it's lying to you about sex.
It's telling you that sex doesn't mean anything, that it goes on in the background.
And that's the kind of thing that makes, for instance, WAP a bad song.
It's not that it talks about sex.
It's not that sex is a part of life.
People experience it, right?
And so we should be able to make art about it as conservatives without feeling like fuddy-duddies over it.
And yet, we know that WAP is a degraded piece of art.
And it's for this reason.
It's not that it talks about sex, it's that it lies about sex.
She gets up there and she shows you promiscuity is great, you can exchange it for money, and there are no consequences.
Well, she's got her team of a gajillion-dollar makeup artist to clean up basically after this operation.
And that's an act of deceit because art has moral power.
And we ought to be thinking carefully as conservatives how we want art to depict the world truthfully.
So in the Republic, Plato basically wants to ban the poets.
And I've never quite known whether he was being ironic a little bit and controlling us a little bit.
Yeah, you're not alone.
Nobody.
Nobody really.
And I'd think they were just so annoying.
Well, here's the thing.
Yeah.
In the old days, the actors came to town and you locked up your daughters.
Totally.
So they were disreputable people.
You didn't let, you know, Shakespeare and Shakespeare's Day, they didn't let women on the stage and all this stuff.
Now we interview them and ask their opinions.
And so you've got a guy with an IQ of four, and some of them are pretty bright.
There are some intelligent actors, but that doesn't mean they know anything.
We don't know what they've read.
They don't know what they've studied.
We don't know whether they have the capacity to shape abstract ideas.
The lines they speak.
As they point out in the movie All About Eve, they forget the fact that the lines they speak were written for them by somebody else.
Does Plato have a point?
I mean, is there something that we can take from that without losing the First Amendment, without losing our freedom?
He totally has a point.
And I think the serious answer to the kind of is heing ironic question is he's forcing us to confront this point by pushing it to the extreme.
And actually, Socrates in the Republic says, I wish that I didn't have to exile the poets because I recognize how lovely art is.
And then he goes on to kind of make a sort of art of his own, which is the dialogue form.
But I actually think that there's something we can definitely take from this that's practical that doesn't mean shutting people up.
And that is, you know, in another dialogue of Plato's, the Ion, Socrates is interacting with an actor who is having exactly this confusion.
He doesn't, he's forgotten basically that the lines he says when he recites Homer, the great Greek poet, are an act of inspiration.
The musai, the muses, right, are where we get our word musike, music.
And this is the whole system of arts, which Plato basically depicts as a form of divine inspiration.
And elsewhere, for instance, in the Apology of Socrates, he tells us that when people do this, they think that they know stuff.
When actually what they're doing is they're giving you a kind of vision.
Artists have a vision to contribute.
It doesn't actually mean that they are great politicians or that you should listen to them about the tax rate, right?
And so the key for us is not going to be, are we going to outlaw or ban certain movies or whatever?
But what we're really having a fight about right now is what are we going to honor in our society?
Here's a concept that we've kind of lost that comes down to us from the ancient world: what are we going to celebrate?
And when those guys stand up at the Oscars, they're able to talk the way they are because they're receiving public honors.
They're receiving a kind of, and one ironclad rule of society is you get more of what you honor, what you attribute honor to.
And so, you know, if conservatives want to really remake the culture, what they ought to be doing is establishing prizes for truly good art.
It ought to be, you know, these sorts of things would be actual ways to flourish and make good art rather than just telling people no, no, no, all the time.
I've been banging this drum for 20 years because I think this, you know, artists like to be honored and they like to be loved.
I mean, they want, I made this thing.
Look, I made a hat.
They want you to love it.
It's this childish aspect to it.
And we have no system for that.
We have no infrastructure for it whatsoever.
We have no one who can review us and understand us.
There's nobody on the right who can really review a book well.
Whereas the left, who are very smart about this thing, they shower these people with praise and adulation because they know that they'll mouth the thing that they, you know, I mean, the reason Ricky Gervais was never invited back is because he gave this speech that kind of exposed all of this.
And this is like, yeah, the left is very, very canny about this, and it's the reason why they do it.
It's not because they're so invested in this or that like action movie.
It's because they know that these people have enormous emotional power over us, that art is a kind of hypnotism or a kind of weapons-grade emotion that gets put in front of us.
And so they give honor to the people that say the things that they like, and then they keep, you know, they get more and more of that.
And Hollywood basically becomes a factory for leftist lies.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, we're running out of time, but we're going to go do another 10 minutes on video games and what Aristotle said about he was a big gamer.
Epic Help and Clownish Pockets00:04:53
Oh, totally.
Actually, on Twitch a lot, I think.
Yeah, yeah, no, they called him the Aristotle means incredible thumb.
That's the Greek, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Thumbos, incrediblis.
Yeah, yeah.
The book is How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises.
I read it in manuscript form, actually.
It is absolutely wonderful.
It's not this big, so you don't have to worry about carrying it.
It will fit in your purse or your incredibly loud clownish pockets, large clownish pockets.
But it is, but it's important.
I mean, this is the thing.
They have made people, the left has made people ignorant.
They've taught them ignorance.
They have taught them not to pay attention to the things that they were given and where they come from and the ideas that they come from.
And they have cut those out from under them.
And we on the right or whatever we are at this point, I don't even know where to put myself.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
But right, there is this.
I say this in the opening of the book.
The opinion that ancient thinkers are purely primitive tribal shepherds is an opinion that can only be sustained by never opening a single book written by one of these guys.
And what that means is that the narrative that these guys aren't worth reading is designed to keep you from finding out that they are.
Exactly.
All right.
We'll come back to you at the end of the show in Member Block and talk about video games.
Excellent.
All right.
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There are no ways in to celebrate President's Day this year.
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The big guy got 10%.
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Take advantage of our president's for sale sale today.
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You didn't hear from me, but a signed book or two could be thought of as a proverbial life raft or at the least an illusion of hope in the abominable hellscape of the Clavenless Week.
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Go to dailywire.com slash shop today.
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You know, finally, before we get to the mailbag, I want to talk about the fact that the satanic strategy of pretending things don't exist or that they're other than they are or that the world is as we want to lie ourselves into believing is obviously not just about the culture.
Disinformation Campaigns Unveiled00:08:04
It's also about our politics.
There was a column in the Wall Street Journal this week that I would have said was a lunatic conspiracy theory if I did not follow this columnist closely.
Holman Jenkins Jr. I know he's one of the best and sanest political writers in America.
And he's been saying over and over again, remember the UFO scare a couple of months ago?
You know, suddenly they were releasing videos and we were all supposed to say, hmm, maybe they're UFOs, you know, the stuff flying around that the Air Force had seen and all this.
Holman Jenkins Jr. has been saying, no, this is a purposeful distraction and disinformation campaign by the government to distract Americans from something else.
But he didn't know what it was.
He kept saying this over and over again.
They're doing this on purpose.
This is a disinformation campaign.
So now he writes this, and I told you, if he came from anyone else, I would have said he was nuts.
For those who couldn't figure out why I devoted four columns to the Pentagon UFO debate, this is why.
It became clear that whether from serendipity or design, national security agencies were using UFOs to hide something they didn't want us to see.
That something it has slowly dribbled out since last May was Chinese surveillance in U.S. airspace.
Suspected Chinese drones have been in sometimes daily presence in U.S. military training sites going back perhaps a decade or more.
We learn now of multiple balloon incursions too, right?
This is the balloon.
He says the Biden administration had apparently decided the UFO smoke screen was no longer compatible with the heightened geopolitical moment.
And now they're telling us about the balloon, or as I like to call it, since it's a Chinese balloon, it's a baroon.
So the whole UFO story was a cover-up for our inability or our unwillingness to deal with the Chinese drones.
And now they feel they can't cover it up any longer.
Holman Jenkins Jr. goes on to say, the story has two parts.
The U.S. government has become bad at investigating things, finding and sharing truths.
And he goes through the things they haven't found out, who leaked the Supreme Court Dobbs decision.
The IRS hasn't found out who stole and leaked a decade of tax data.
The FBI never examined the Democrat National Committee server allegedly hacked by the Russians.
It was forensically precluded from recovering Hillary Clinton's missing email.
They can't find things out anymore.
And here's the first part.
And the second part is as its truth-finding skills apparently atrophy, the federal government has become increasingly adept at using false information to solve problems.
The FBI said objectively false Russian intelligence.
The Justice Department's inspector general used objectively false Russian intelligence.
The Justice Department's Inspector General tells us to justify its improper acts in the Clinton email matter.
It used false steel dossier evidence to obtain a warrant on a minor Trump campaign associate.
It used the same false information to stir the media's collusion pot.
The U.S. officials again promoted false information about the Hunter Biden laptop in 2020.
And father and son are now at odds, the dad having told the voters it was a Russian job, but the son actually admitting that it's famous.
So now, the New York Times runs a story yesterday, the day before.
Steve Bannon's podcast is top misinformation spreader.
Study says the Brookings Institution put out this list of misinformationists.
Who was it?
Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk, Rush Limbaugh.
The guy's dead.
He's still spreading misinformation, which at least makes him powerful.
Michael Savage, Brett Weinstein, Conservative Review with Louder with Crowder, the Sean Hannity show, Mark Levin podcast, Rudy Giuliani's Common Sense.
Now, for obvious reasons, I was disappointed not to make this list, but I comforted myself with the fact that it wasn't an accurate list because it didn't include the New York Times.
I mean, this is incredible.
So why are they doing this?
I mean, the government and the Time, the New York Times, the Washington Post have been filled not just with misinformation, but disinformation being planted by anonymous sources in the intelligence operations.
51 people saying the Hunter Biden laptop was simply Russian disinformation.
It had all the earmarks of Russian disinformation.
And then when they challenged them, well, we just said he had the earmarks.
We didn't say it was a Russian.
Why are they doing this?
Because it is part of a campaign, some of which is government-funded, to hunt down disinformation, information that goes against the narrative that the government is trying to sell and censor it.
George Soros is funding an anti-misinformation campaign called Good Information Inc. that will identify misinformation and destroy it and basically come out.
They're going to come after our sponsors.
They're going to come after our platforms.
They're going to come after everything.
This is the plan in operation.
And remember, this is not the revolution.
This is the government doing it.
This is the power.
They've got the power.
We're the ones who have to take it back.
If you think climate change, if the climate change hoax is a hoax, that's misinformation.
If you think Joe Biden is corrupt, if you think Pfizer lied about its vaccine, if you think Black Lives Matter is a Maoist organization targeting American freedom, or that the 1619 project is distortion and lies, all of that is misinformation and you're the problem.
Let's go back to that Twitter here.
And again, I've told you this Twitter story is the story of the decade.
It is an important story because the revelation, it is the revelation that the FBI used this massive platform that we all use, right, to censor information in the middle of an election.
This laptop is real.
Everything that's come out of it is real.
It shows real corruption in the Biden family, including the fact that Biden was getting 10%, the big guy was getting 10%, and including the fact that Biden, our president, when he was not yet president, met with some of these people to help Hunter get the business deals that he got that he would only have gotten if, in fact, he had a connection to Joe Biden.
That's the only reason he was getting it.
But there was more in this.
There was also the stuff about the vaccine.
So Nancy Mace, who's a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina, she got the vaccine.
The second shot gave her asthma.
It gave her other disorders, trembling, a heart problem that she's had, that she feels certain came from this vaccine.
Twitter censored doctors who said simply, all vaccines have possible side effects.
This is not new stuff.
Anybody can get hurt by a vaccine.
You inject something into your body.
It might hurt you, right?
That is why many doctors said only old folks should get it.
Only old folks and their caretakers should get it.
Certainly not children, certainly not young men, certainly not young people.
Congresswoman Mace is, I don't know, 40, 45, something like that.
No reason for her to get it.
And now she has medical problems that are probably going to last for the rest of her life because of this vaccine.
The people who said that you should only give it to the old folks were censored, knocked off Twitter.
So she's questioning ex-Twitter official Vijaya Gaddi, cut 10.
Where did you go to medical school?
I did not go to medical school.
I'm sorry?
I did not go to medical school.
That's what I thought.
Why do you think you or anyone else at Twitter had the medical expertise to censor a doctor's expert opinion?
Our policies regarding COVID were designed to protect individuals.
We were seeing you guys censored Harvard-educated doctors, Stanford-educated doctors, doctors that are educated in the best places in the world, and you silenced those voices.
She's the one who suffered from it.
They silenced people trained at the best medical places in the world because they didn't toe the government and big business line.
Remember, Pfizer's big pharma, so they didn't toe those lines.
Now, so we just heard that that's a huge piece of information that goes along with the fact that the FBI also got them to silence Hunter Biden during the election.
Here's AOC again, cut eight.
A whole hearing about a 24-hour hiccup in a right-wing political operation.
That is why we are here right now.
And it is, it's just an abuse of public resources, an abuse of public time.
We could be talking about health care.
We could be talking about bringing down the cost of prescription drugs.
We could be talking about abortion rights, civil rights, voting rights.
But instead, we're talking about Hunter Biden's half-fake laptop story.
I mean, this is an embarrassment.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.
It's no big deal, says AOC.
Tennis of the Mind00:03:48
It's not even a thing that happens.
It's half fake.
It's half fake.
It's all true, but it's half fake.
The devil doesn't exist.
Woke doesn't exist.
CRT isn't being taught in schools.
Sexual groomers aren't, they're not sexually grooming your children.
Why?
Oh, it's a culture war.
Why are you starting this culture war with us?
Why are you doing that?
Men in dresses are women.
Don't you know that women, if they're not women, you're phobic.
If you don't say they're women, you're phobic.
And if you don't say it's true, if you don't say all the lies are true, you're canceled.
You're censored.
You're off social media.
But the devil doesn't exist and the woke people aren't here.
The biggest purveyor of misinformation in the country is the American government and the legacy media and the corporations who carry the water of this woke censorship that is the opposite of liberty.
It's the opposite of what America was made for.
It is the opposite of America.
They sell it as Americanism, but it is the opposite.
Everything about it is against the liberty that is what this country was founded to ensure.
You know, there's a movie.
I've talked about this once before, a long time ago.
A wonderful kind of foundational movie of the 1960s called Blow Up by Michelangelo Antonioni, an English language movie made by an Italian director.
And it's about a photographer.
It's been so the plot's been stolen a million times, but it's about a photographer who takes a picture that reveals that there's been a murder.
And by the end of the, and he's living in swinging 60s London and everything is free sex and everything's great and all this stuff.
And he starts to try and track this murder down and he cannot find the truth.
And by the end of the movie, he can't tell what's true and what isn't.
And the last scene of the movie becomes a kind of just commentary on the whole film.
A group of clowns go by in the park and they get out of like a truck, I think it is, or a car, and they start playing a game of tennis with an invisible tennis ball.
And the photographer watches this game.
He's now totally confused about what's real.
Did he ever see the body?
Does any of it really exist?
And he's watching them hit this invisible make-believe tennis ball back and forth.
And after a while, he starts to hear the tennis ball going back and forth because he's fallen into this imaginative world that these clowns have created.
And finally, finally, they hit the ball.
The clowns hit the ball and they say, you can't see it, but they say it has rolled at the photographer's feet.
And they say, pick it up and throw it back.
The clowns tell him, pick up the tennis ball and throw it back.
And there is no tennis ball.
And finally, in the last frame of the picture, he picks up the tennis ball and just at really the last moment, he vanishes.
He vanishes.
When he becomes part of the empire of lies, when he becomes part of the culture of lies, when he accepts the culture of lies, he disappears into that culture.
And that's what they want to happen to you.
That is what they want to happen to all of us.
And the ones, those of us who keep saying it's there, who keep calling it out, who keep saying things that are different, they want to silence us.
George Soros wants to silence us.
The government wants to silence us.
Pfizer wants to silence us.
The FBI wants to silence us.
That is what this is about because they are the power because they have the power now that they have acquired over the last 60 years to sell this lie until finally you are watching these clowns play invisible tennis and you start to hear the tennis ball fall and you start to think maybe it's me.
Maybe it's me.
You know, in Christianity, they talk about the temptations of life and they call them the world, the flesh, and the devil, right?
Well, now we know, right, the flesh and the devil are the world.
This is what, you know, these guys, these churches that put up their gay pride flags and their Black Lives Matter things, it's not because I'm against gay people, certainly not against black people, that I won't go to those churches.
It's because they don't understand that we're not here to make the world a better place.
Why We're Here00:11:21
We are here to bring our souls to fruition.
You do that easier in a free country because people don't crucify you and throw you to lions, but you have to do it.
It is the thing you are here to do.
You don't set aside some of your desires to torture yourself and become a pitch small person.
You set aside those desires to free yourself for greater pleasures still.
You set aside certain pleasures in life to get greater pleasures still, the pleasure of coming to fruition as the person God made you to be.
That is how we got to the point where we started to think about individual freedom, thinking about Christianity.
That is how we got to the part.
We started thinking about individual freedom.
Why wouldn't the people who want power sell us the devil's line that we're just bodies?
Why wouldn't they?
Why would they not do it?
Do the things that make you a slave.
All that sex feels so good, but it makes you a slave.
Drugs feel great, make you slaves.
That's what they want.
They own this culture.
We are the revolution.
And I'm going to be talking about specific things that we have to do, but it's something we have to really think about how you fight when it's no longer a siege.
It's actually a war of conquest.
All right.
In a few minutes, the show is going to end and you're going to be plunged into the Claven list.
If you're not a subscriber, there will be a subscriber block and we'll talk more with Spencer in the subscriber block.
We'll talk about video games with Spencer and what the ancients can tell us about video games.
But, you know, if you're not a subscriber, you're probably saying, oh my God, I'm going to be dropped into eternal darkness and there'll be wailing and gnashing of teeth and I'll probably never make it back.
I don't want to die with all these problems.
Well, just to show you, we're nice guys here, even if you're not a subscriber, we will now solve all your problems with the mailbag.
The Andrew Clavin Show is brought to you by Pfizer.
Yeah, that's God.
I knew I loved that horned guy.
All right, from Chelsea.
Dear Lord Clavin, thank you so much for all the wisdom you have to offer to all your listeners.
I'm hoping you might help me with my dilemma with my husband.
My husband and I both work full-time trying to make ends meet.
We don't have children, but we plan to in the near future.
When we are not working, we try to relax and enjoy our hobbies.
I like to refurbish antique furniture.
I sell a side hustle on Etsy.
But my husband has always struggled with finding a hobby he can commit to, and he ends up just playing video games.
I have no issue with video games per se, but my problem comes in when he doesn't live up to doing his assigned chores each week or not cleaning up after himself and just leaving messes.
I'm not sure how to approach him on this because I don't want to make him feel guilty over the one hobby he finds some enjoyment in, but I also don't want to have a husband who is lazy as a future father and role model to our children.
Should I be worried?
What should I do?
All right, so this has nothing to do with video games.
I mean, obviously, this is about your marriage, I think.
I mean, the first question that popped into my head as I'm reading this, as you said, he doesn't do his assigned chores.
And my first question was, who assigned the head of the household chores?
Who can assign chores to the head of the household other than himself being the head of the household?
If it was you, that's your problem.
He is hiding away in his video games from a humiliating and emasculating relationship.
If that's the problem, I can solve that problem for you.
I can definitely at least give you the one solution that would work.
Here's what you should do.
And I'm absolutely serious about this, and you might want to get a pencil and pen and pad and take notes and write down what I'm going to tell you so you can get it word for word.
However you have discussions with your husband, if you go for a walk, if you sit around the table, have this discussion.
Say, look, I've got some problems with what's going on in our house, and I need you to solve them for me.
Here's the state of play.
You are my husband and the head of this household.
I completely submit to your authority.
You make the rules of this marriage, and I will follow them, but I need to know what they are.
Okay?
Now, how do you want this marriage to look?
I need to know, because you are the head of this household, and I will submit to your authority, but I need to know what this marriage is supposed to look like.
Am I supposed, do you want me to give up my job and spend all my time building a home for you and for your family and making sure that it is in good shape and making sure that it's a warm, loving place where you get meals when you want them and where the children will be happy and we can start having children?
If you want to do that, I will do that because you are the head of the household and I will submit to your authority.
If you want us both to work and you want me to do all the chores still, I'm going to be honest with you, I will feel that that's unfair, but I will still submit to your authority because you are the head of this household.
You are my liege lord.
And if you're taking notes, it's L-I-E-G-E, that's how you spell lie.
On the other hand, if you want us both to work, but you want to split the chores, tell me the division.
And that is what the division will do.
If you think it would be more fair, I think it would be more fair.
If you think it would be more fair to do them, tell me what the division is, what you are going to do and what I should do.
And that's how we will live.
And that's what I will do.
And see what he says.
I think you have a good chance, a solid chance, that he will take you up on that, gratefully.
He will set some fair rules.
And because he set those rules, as is right, he will do, you know, he will follow those rules because he said them.
There is some chance, I think a lesser chance, but there's some chance that he won't step up.
In that case, you have a bigger problem.
And none of this, again, is about video games.
Then your problem is you married a boy who doesn't want to become a man.
Okay, you married Peter Penn.
And that's something you're going to really have to think about because you don't want to have children with Peter Penn.
But if in fact he says whatever he says, you then have to do it.
If he says, yeah, I want us both to work, but you have to do all the choice, you have to do it.
It'll work itself out, but still, but still.
The other thing you might want to think about is doing your side hustle a little bit more and spending more time praising your husband, making love to your husband, letting him know how much you care about him and how attractive he is and why you want to be with him.
And I think a lot of those problems will get better.
And as I say, if they don't, then you have a different problem.
From Kat, dear Mr., again, it's L-I-E-G-E.
From Kat, dear Mr. Andrew Clayman, my boyfriend and I have been together for 19 years on and off with me dealing, 19 years, with me dealing with serious illnesses for the first 10 years of our relationship.
I just found out that he has been unfaithful to me more times than he can count.
I'm spiraling because he's the only one that I've ever been with since I'm Catholic.
I only slept with him once.
I was sure he was ready to commit.
I'm upset and frustrated with him.
He has called off our wedding because he's unsure if he can be faithful to me and fulfill his marriage vows.
We are still trying.
We are still together, but we're trying to force him to be celibate.
I'm praying that he will be able to find a way to be faithful to me.
I believe that he has a sex addiction that is being treated.
Am I wrong or naive to have faith in him?
Yes.
Dump him.
Yeah, he'll never stop.
He will never stop.
And by the way, together for 19 years, for other ladies who were thinking, yeah, no.
You want to know whether you're getting married pretty quick, a lot quicker than that, a lot quicker than 19 years.
From Troy.
Dear Clavin, I've heard you talk about the story Huckleberry Finn on several occasions.
I loved the novel, yet finished the story and thought, what a great adventure and missed all of the metaphors and his struggles.
The only reason I ever recognized them was because of listening to you talk about them.
I love reading classical literature, but I feel like a child watching an animated movie where a bunch of references are made that only adults understand.
It may be a good movie, but I'm missing so much.
This becomes even more pronounced when it comes to poetry.
I want to enjoy it, but I usually find it dull at best.
My wife loves Yeats, but I cannot relate.
How can a very literal person teach himself to think more abstractly and gain a deeper appreciation for the arts?
Your thoughts are appreciated.
Well, actually, I don't think that should be your goal.
I think your goal in enjoying the arts should be enjoying the arts.
The first thing you want from the arts is to be delighted and to be taken into an experience.
And just because it doesn't mean it can't be a tragedy, but you are delighted by the depth of experience, what Aristotle called the catharsis of the experience of going through the story.
A work of art is supposed to be an experience.
Now, think about experiences in your own life.
You drive to work, you get stuck in traffic, you get angry, and you go and you think about it and think, how can I get to work every day so I don't arrive that I'm angry?
You start to think about how can I use that experience to make my life better?
That's the way you can think about art.
Now, if you want to find references that you think will deepen that experience, you go to writers who know about art and they can explain it to you.
You don't have to know about it.
You have to enjoy it.
You have to learn to enjoy it.
Now, I think it helps enjoyment to know a little bit about things.
I think it does help enjoyment to know after you finish it.
I never read the introduction to novels.
I always wait and go back and look at it to see if there's any insights that are useful to me, but I don't read it beforehand because I don't want it to tell me what to be thinking about.
I just want to be in the story.
So, for instance, I wrote a book, The Truth and Beauty, that talks about some of the great poetry in the English language.
I wrote it for people who have never read a poem.
The point of the book, The Truth and Beauty, is that if you've never read a poem, you might want to read this book because it will explain a lot of things.
But your job is not to understand.
That's what professors tell you.
That's not how you address art.
You address art for joy.
And great art gives you a deeper experience.
Star Wars is not going to give you as deep an experience as Hamlet.
It's just not.
It's not going to take you into the real reaches of the human soul and the real reaches of the human experience.
Hamlet's hard to read because it was written a long time ago.
That's the only reason it's hard to read.
It's written a long time ago, and the language has changed, so that makes it tough.
But it was a crowd pleaser at the time.
It's got ghosts and sword fights and sex and murder.
You know, it was a big, big old story, and it was supposed to be fun to watch and exciting and cool.
And that's what you want.
You want, and this is true of all art.
When people, you know, I once heard Toni Morrison, I think, somebody said to her, an interviewer, maybe Ellen DeGeneres, I'm trying to remember, said, you know, sometimes I find it hard to understand what you're saying.
And she said, well, that's called writing.
And I thought, no, it's not.
It's called bad writing.
And Toni Morrison is an okay writer, but she's not a great writer.
But the point is being obscure is not the point of art.
The art is supposed to communicate with you to give you an experience.
It may be an intellectual experience like Ulysses.
If you're not an intellectual, you don't want to read Ulysses because it's an intellectual experience.
But you want to have that experience.
And then if you want to know more, go to people who know more and think about it and see if maybe their explanation won't resonate with you.
Maybe you'll think, no, I don't think that's what it's about.
But it's just like an experience in life.
You think about it afterwards and sort of think about what does it mean to me?
How does that improve my life?
What does it do?
Or you don't.
You just enjoy it at the time.
It will still be good for you.
It'll still work on you.
I got to stop there.
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