Ep. 1123 dissects TikTok’s role as a CCP tool, exposing CEO Shu Chu’s evasive congressional hearings on child deaths and data privacy while contrasting China’s strict content controls with U.S. platforms promoting grooming videos like Jeffrey Marsh’s. The episode ties institutional decay—from Alvin Bragg’s politically motivated Trump prosecution to Stanford Law’s suppression of Judge Stuart Duncan—to a broader collapse, citing Biden’s border policies (20K→250K monthly crossings) and progressive NGOs profiting from migrant chaos. Using King Lear, it warns of generational failure, comparing Lear’s disinheritance of Cordelia to modern flattery of leaders like Biden, and frames Edmund’s rebellion as a parallel to progressive rejection of tradition. The conclusion urges rejecting systemic complicity, positioning conservatives as outdated defenders of a crumbling order. [Automatically generated summary]
On this show, we are never afraid to examine the insights and ramifications of leftist theory, because there's only so many times we can watch the movie Sausage Party and we need a good laugh.
Today, we'd like to take a look at the theory of systemic racism, the left's attempt to explain why American blacks fail to thrive even though Democrats have done everything they can to destroy them.
To begin with, let's use the term in context.
Let's say you're a sleazy Democrat con woman.
who's the president of the American Federation of Teachers, only not named Randy Weingarten because we don't want to get sued.
And this low grifter, let's call her Wendy Ramsbottom, uses her sinister control of the Democrat Party to keep schools closed for two years so her teachers get paid while poor children sink into incurable ignorance.
Now Weinie Garfinkel has created a situation where many black children, who weren't getting much of an education from Barfi Weinfartle anyway, can't read or write, so employers won't hire them and the only job they can get is starting fistfights at McDonald's.
Systemic racism occurs when employers privilege reading and writing because that's what rich white people do because they don't go to schools controlled by low sleazy Democrats like Farty Weincandy.
So, how exactly is systemic racism defined?
Well, let's take each word in turn.
Racism is a meaningless noise you scream in a harsh, repetitive voice that sounds something like a seagull being chased by a jackhammer.
And systemic is a multisyllabic nonsense meant to make the screeching seagull noise sound like it means something.
Put the two words together, and systemic racism means someone has noticed that Democrats have destroyed the lives of black people, and you have to drown them out by screaming systemic racism.
Now, here's what makes the theory of systemic racism so much fun.
Once Democrat unions have abandoned public education in black neighborhoods, once you've installed Democrat welfare programs that encourage fatherless children among the poor, once Democrats have taught black people to feel that everyone is against them and they have no chance of success, once Democrats have defunded the police so that criminals can terrorize black neighborhoods which have been destroyed by riots incited by Democrats, just about everything Republicans do is systemic racism.
Here are some examples.
And as God is my witness, every single one of these is a real example from a left-leaning news source.
The Philadelphia Inquirer says picnics are racist because white Democrats used to have picnics at lynchings.
Personally, I think the Inquirer may have missed the actual racist part, namely the lynchings.
Seems to me you could have picnics with like sack races instead.
But then maybe that would go against an old Democrat tradition, namely lynchings.
The Los Angeles Times says white people driving cars is racist because white drivers pollute the neighborhoods they drive through but don't stop to buy things in the black neighborhoods because there's high crime there, because Democrats have abandoned the schools and defunded the police.
So white drivers are racist.
The Democrat California State Assembly says Skittles and jelly beans are racist because candy is bad for you and many black people eat it to get a little sugary pleasure in their lives which have been destroyed by Democrats.
Mother Jones says that eating three meals a day is racist because colonial settlers ate three meals a day but indigenous natives kept a less rigid eating schedule and so the colonial settlers associated less rigid eating schedules with living in mud huts and being conquered by colonial settlers.
And finally, AFRU magazine says coffee is racist because coffee used to be harvested by slaves.
Okay, they kind of have me there because I don't care as long as I get my damn coffee.
As you can see, systemic racism is all around us, like fairies or those invisible aliens who send messages into your brain telling you Jesus is coming back, so you should sell everything you own and move into the desert.
Only by being illiterate and skipping lunch can we break the chains that hold black people down in Democrat-run cities where there's no education or police.
After all, if we can't end systemic racism by giving up jelly beans and picnics, it's just really, really hard to imagine what possible solution there could be to dysfunction in black neighborhoods caused by Democrat policies.
Give me a few seconds and maybe I'll think of something.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray.
It makes me want to sing.
Ho, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
Hooray-hurrah.
We are laughing our way through the collapse of Western civilization.
I want to credit the Twitter feed Casually Greg, Casually Greg, because I got a lot of the list of things that are considered racist off his very funny Twitter feed, Casually Greg.
Today we're going to talk about our failed institutions, which the show is going to go on for about five hours.
We're going to talk about how we're losing the Cold War to TikTok, how Saurus prosecutors are destroying the rule of law, and the rule of law is also being destroyed at the border.
And also, I will tell you what the greatest work of literature in the history of literature is telling us about this very moment.
Sign up to my personal YouTube channel, the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
You will get exclusive content there.
We're still running that AI thing that's pretty funny.
I think a lot of people are enjoying that.
But if you ring that bell, there's a little bell underneath, and you ring that bell, someone you don't know will die, but you will get exclusive content brought directly to your house.
And then when we leave, you won't have any more silverware.
Plus, if you leave a comment and the comment is absolutely immoral and despicable, especially if it degrades minorities and calls for the extermination of Indigenous peoples or something like that, we will use your comment on the air because that's our content.
Patricia Horgan says, I thought that Jeremy the God King announced that Daily Wire is going to make a TV series or movie of Atlas Shrugged.
I take it, Andrew, is not keen.
No, why would I not be keen about making the content of a godless abortion-loving psychopath?
I think that's just where the Daily Wire should be.
It's going to be great.
When we do it, it'll be, it's, all right.
I got a note on Twitter.
I enjoyed my time here.
So I got a note on Twitter that really was kind of interesting.
It said, Andrew, I haven't watched your show since 2020.
You moderately disappointed me back then because you brushed off the election contention.
I have always said that I've never been convinced that the election was stolen.
He says, you were right, and I knew it then too, but I thought we needed encouragement at the time.
Anyway, I'm putting you back on my watch list.
Well, first of all, I'm thrilled to have you back.
I'm really delighted to have you back, but I want you to know I want to encourage you, but I'm not going to encourage you by lying to you because ultimately, if you're encouraged by lies, you're going to walk in to the buzzsaw of the truth.
So I will try to encourage you as much as I can with the truth.
But today, I mean, I will have to talk about something troubling, which is why this particular moment seems so particularly difficult and dangerous.
A Different Kind of Fear00:05:55
You talk to people, and there's something about this moment that just seems different, and people are getting afraid.
And I don't think it's because, you know, Dylan Mulvaney is trans, and I don't think it's because AOC is an ignoramus.
Believe me, there are always stupid people doing stupid stuff and trying to sell it to the populace.
And there's always a certain amount of the populace who are willing to buy into it.
So that's nothing new.
But what we're seeing now that's different, and I have talked about this a little before, is the hollowing out of our institutions.
Our establishment has shut down.
Our establishment wants to be in on the latest thing.
So government, you know, corporations, the academy, they are all have lost their reason for being, and they're not doing their job.
Our banks don't do sober and responsible investment.
They gamble and do virtue signaling and then they ask for government welfare.
The news media doesn't do news.
They do mind-controlling propaganda for the regime.
The regime isn't running the government.
It's not acting with the consent of the governed to preserve our rights.
That's why they're there.
Instead, they're trying to censor us and control us so we won't kick them out on their ear where they belong.
The law doesn't treat people equally.
It's trying to act with political motives to try and reshape society.
The universities don't teach our traditions and wisdom for young people.
They teach them an ideology that makes life worse for everyone.
So all these things have happened before and we have survived, but it does call for fortitude and action.
It is a real thing when the institutions are not doing their essential job.
And the reason we're seeing this, and I know I've talked about this a lot, but this is a change in the guard.
This is the end of a moment in history, end of an era.
A vain, preening, spoiled generation, which just happens, you know, to be my generation, has been in power too long.
And they haven't left, trained the next generation in the things that made our lives so great, in the traditions and the ideas that made our lives so great.
So the next generation, when we let them govern like the Clintons and the Obamas, we get this kind of mediocre, not definitely pro-American form of government, this kind of globalist, vague, you know, ideology, leftist ideology that's supposed to save the world.
They are not doing their job.
It's not up to the president to save the world.
It's up for him to be the executive of a free country, America.
And they don't know how to do that.
They simply don't.
And they think their ideology is more important than their job and they want to blow themselves up into big figures.
And when they inevitably fail, they then try to disappear in this fog of ideology and misused words and they accomplish nothing except to make us less free.
Because as the institutions are failing, they don't want to lose their power.
So they turn to coercion.
That's what the institutions are all doing.
Coercion, mind, you know, brainwashing, lies, tyranny, and ultimately that's a recipe for violence and destruction.
And it's frightening, and that's why we're all so worried and upset, because you can sort of see that these guys have to go.
Now, I tend to be an optimistic person, but optimism doesn't mean that anything's going to go well.
It's just an attitude.
It doesn't mean things are going to go well.
But pessimism and despair almost guarantee that things will go badly.
Despair is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it's not just bad theology.
It's bad strategy.
I grew up in the top echelon of the strongest, freest country in the greatest moment in the history of the world.
It was just, I had a lucky star.
But we did see some really bad times along the way.
There is no question about it.
We saw the upheavals of the 60s.
We saw a Cold War that nearly ended in nuclear disaster.
The last time the left had control of so many institutions was the 1970s, and it looked just like this, amazingly like this.
I was struggling, I was struggling to start a writing career.
It was going badly.
And things were so much like today, it's really hard to explain.
The Soviet Union was on the march.
People forget this.
It was taking over countries in Africa.
It was spreading.
Inflation was huge.
The economy was stalled.
We were being humiliated in the Middle East.
And Jimmy Carter, I know he's about to die.
And so we're all trying to say nice things about him.
He was not good at doing his job.
And then, too, people were talking about the suicide of the West.
That was a phrase that was going around.
And, you know, you wonder why people my age kind of honor Ronald Reagan.
It's because he led the way to a revival, and he became the symbol of that revival.
But the revival took place in people's homes and in people's businesses.
What Reagan did is he set people free again by lowering their taxes and by cutting back on regulation and getting government a little bit out of their lives.
And we all, including me, we all then were free to try and better ourselves.
And when we bettered ourselves for all our flaws, we actually bettered the nation.
And the suicide of the West was put off for 25 years, really until 2008.
We were doing quite, quite well.
That revival has now ended and leftism, which is really another word for decay, has returned.
And that's a tough break for you guys, you know.
But you have to remember when you go back and you look at the greatest generation, you say, well, weren't they wonderful?
No, I knew them.
They weren't that great.
They were no better than you are.
They're no better than I am.
The way they were defined by was the greatness of their ideas and the greatness of their challenges.
The fact that their challenges, like the Depression and World War II, were so big is what made them great.
It wasn't that they were nice people and there are no nice people.
It wasn't that they were great people.
That's not the point.
It's that they still had the traditions in place and they had these challenges and they faced them and they won.
Now you're stuck with it.
You are stuck with great challenges.
You are.
And like, you know, we can only see the future through a glass darkly, but you will live to see it face to face.
And in the meantime, there abide three things, hope, faith, and love.
Don't let go of them because those are your tools.
That's what you're going to need to win through for yourselves and make your lives better and to make America better.
So let's start looking at these failed institutions, beginning with the war on TikTok.
Selling Poison to Children00:14:54
All right, spring has sprung, and the last thing you need is those pesky sunspots on your skin when you're outside soaking up the sun.
For the first time ever, our friends at Genucell are including both the ultra retinol and dark spot corrector in their most popular package at genucelle.com slash clavin.
Genucell's ultra retinol contains a powerful retinol alternative that is safe for your skin.
Their dark spot corrector will help with those sunspots.
Plus, you'll still get Genucell's world-class under-eye bags treatment with Genucell's immediate effects.
You'll see results in 12 hours, guaranteed, or your money back.
And you know I've told you my talent manager, Tessa, uses this.
It's just, I mean, it's embarrassing the way guys follow her around.
The woman is just gorgeous.
And she was gorgeous before, but she's even better with Genucelle.
She says she loves it.
Don't wait.
Visit genucelle.com slash clavin to save over 70% off their most popular package.
Plus, every order subscription includes a luxury gift box with two free springtime essentials.
That's two free gifts, plus free shipping.
Go to genuicelle.com slash clavin, genucelle.com slash clavin.
You will not only be better looking, you'll know how to spell clavin, which is K-L-A-V-A-N.
So, a new Cold War is beginning.
There's simply just no doubt about that.
Russia and China are getting together and China is coming out of their COVID lockdowns and they have a new confidence and they think they now are big enough and strong enough to put their fingerprint on the way the world works.
And because of our failing institutions, we are not ready to meet them.
The military, of course, is first Biden's new budget doesn't fund the military anywhere near enough.
And Qi and the Chinese are building up their defenses, especially at sea.
And they're meeting, you know, Putin and Xi are meeting and they're kind of casting themselves as the peacemakers in the Ukraine battle, which as I've said, you know, I disagree with anybody who is absolutely sure what we should do about Ukraine because I don't think anybody can be absolutely sure.
I think we stumbled into it by making a lot of mistakes, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't finish it.
We certainly shouldn't let it drag on the way we are doing it now.
These two guys, Xi and Putin, are authoritarian gangsters.
And what they do is they say that they are being oppressed by Western imperialists who are selling decadence to the world.
And the problem we have is that we are Western imperialists selling decadence to the world.
The Chinese have a version of TikTok.
It's called Duyun.
I think that's how it's pronounced.
And they limit the time that children can be on.
Age of 14, you know, you have to get your name authenticated.
They make sure who you are.
They turn it off for you after 10 p.m. between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
Young people can't use it.
Government regulators have banned minors from playing online video games on school days.
State-run media has slammed online games as spiritual opium.
And, you know, the other thing is that they've banned sexual deviants on TV.
If you're an entertainer with a strong, gay, you know, appearance, you're done.
They will not let you on.
But meanwhile, here, not so much.
This TikTok, it's owned.
A little bit of it is owned by a Chinese company, but it's what's called a golden percentage, where they have a place on the board, which means they are simply a funnel to the Chinese Communist Party.
It is a tool.
TikTok is a tool of the Chinese Communist Party.
And so this is what we're getting on TikTok.
Here's this guy, Jeffrey Marsh, who I think should, I don't understand why he's not in prison.
He's CUP 15.
It's that time of year again when you start thinking about going no contact.
I want to encourage you and say something you may not have heard before.
You're going to love it.
I know right now all you have is a world and a wall of guilt.
And every time you think about going no contact, you just feel this thing in your chest and in your stomach and you don't want to be that person.
And how could you?
But she's your mother and all the stuff that culture tells you.
In three months, six months, one year, the joy that your life has will make everything not only worth it, but it'll make you content, happy, calm, and in love with life.
So he's telling you not to talk to your parents if you think you might be gay or trans, if you've been talked into this transgender thing, which is a psychological fad a little bit.
You know, I mean, there's only, it's very rare in real life, but it's spreading, especially among girls.
He's telling you not to be out of contact with your parents.
He's a groomer.
He is a groomer.
And that should be against the law.
But China, you'll notice, is doing nothing to keep that from getting to our kids at three in the morning, like our kids don't turn off their stuff when Chinese kids do.
So in what had to be the comically worst appearance before a congressional committee, TikTok's CEO, his name is something like Chu Zi Shu, comes up and is questioned.
And here is Georgia's buddy Carter talking to him.
He's asking him about challenges that have killed kids.
They'll have these challenges to drink stuff like called Borg, which is a mixture of alcohol and other stuff and take Benadryl and so on.
And children have died.
And so the first thing Buddy Carter, ask him, Congressman from Georgia, asks him is how do you establish what age someone is when they go on TikTok?
Here's their exchange.
We're talking about children dying.
Do you know how many children have died because of this?
Do you have any idea?
Can you tell me?
Congressman, again, it's hard to get.
Can you tell me how many children in America have died because of challenges like this?
The majority of people who use health platform use it for positive experiences.
That's not what I ask.
I ask you, tell me the number of children of U.S. children who have died because of these challenges.
Congressman, again, the majority of people who come on our platform get a good idea.
I'm not talking about the majority of children.
I want to know a number.
Dangerous challenges are not allowed on our platform.
If we find them, we will remove them.
We take this very well.
Obviously, you found one today and you removed it.
We had to bring it to your attention, and I know I'm out of time.
Thank you for being here.
Welcome again to the most bipartisan committee in Congress.
They all hate him.
They all hate him.
But here's the problem.
I mean, everybody just was obviously hiding the fact that this is, China is pumping this garbage into the minds of American kids.
They know what they're doing.
I mean, they're doing it on purpose.
They like us decadent and falling apart.
So here's the problem.
The House is also looking at a Republican-backed bill called the Parents' Rights Bill, right?
And all it really says is that parents should be allowed to know what their children are being taught, to know what books are in their children's libraries, and should have the absolute right to go before a school board and voice their complaints.
Listen to AOC's response to this, Cut 14.
They are asking the Republican Party to keep culture wars out of classrooms.
Our children need urgent and aggressive educational solutions.
The American Library Association coming out against this Republican proposal.
When we talk about progressive values, I can say what my progressive value is, and that is freedom over fascism.
All right, so she's negroamous, and why does she dance around when she talks?
Why can't she stand still when she talks?
What does she got like a, you know, plugs in her ear playing disco?
I mean, it's ridiculous.
All right, anyway, so it's fascism for parents to want to be able to know what their children are doing.
And we know there's a reason for that.
You know, she calls it a culture war because what they want to do is win a culture war by terrorism and stealth.
They want to be in our schools with a guy like that, Jeffrey Marsh, teaching our children, but they don't want parents to know about it.
That's the only, that's what's fascist about it.
It's fascist if the government is not in control of our children.
So that's what they're selling.
Now, here is a woman named, one of the witnesses here testifying about all this, was a woman named Nadine Farid Johnson, who's from PEN America, which I actually used to belong to a long, long time ago.
Very, very left-wing defender of writers' rights, but only left-wing writers.
So this is the exchange she has with Wyoming Congresswoman Harriet Hagman.
Ms. Johnson, I just have a real quick question for you.
Do you believe it is censorship to prohibit teachers from exposing first graders to Penthouse Magazine?
Do I believe it is censors?
I'm sorry, ma'am.
I believe it is censorship to you.
Do you believe it is censorship to prohibit teachers from exposing first graders to Penthouse magazine?
I don't know of any instances in which age.
That is my question.
My question is, do you believe that it is censorship to prohibit teachers from exposing first graders to Penthouse Magazine?
I believe that it is important that we have parents, teachers, and educators.
You are not going to answer my question then.
Is that right?
I believe it is important to have parents, teachers, and educators involved in understanding what is being presented to students.
Do you believe that it is appropriate to present penthouse to first graders?
Of course not.
Thank you.
I yield back.
She couldn't get the words out.
She couldn't say, yeah, no, we should not be doing that.
They think it's censorship.
It is absolutely true.
When you put literal gay porn in an elementary school, never mind gay porn, any porn in an elementary school, they think it's banning books when parents say, take that stuff out of my kids' schools.
So the Chinese are pumping this decadence into our lives in the person of guys like Jeffrey Marsh and all the rest of the people who come flowing through TikTok without being censored and with no hold on how old the kids are who are watching it and what time they're watching it and whether their parents know that they're watching it.
Nothing whatsoever about that.
So all that stuff is flowing through.
And the Democrats are doing the same thing in our schools.
So what does it matter to us who owns TikTok or not?
Where is the Cold War here?
There is no Cold War.
a bunch of Republicans who the guys are calling MAGA Republic, evil MAGA, you know, culture war fascist Republicans who are basically saying what the hell is going on and do not realize, do not realize how badly the institution of our schools has collapsed.
They don't understand how terrible this is.
So they think that's a bipartisan committee, but it's not.
All the Democrats want from TikTok is they want the information that the Chinese are getting instead of giving it to the Chinese.
They want to pump the poison in instead of the Chinese.
So what the hell is the difference to the rest of us?
Because this is an institution that has collapsed.
It's the school and the Democrat Party, which has absolutely collapsed as well.
Same thing with spying.
You know, this is a great cut.
Shu Chu gets asked if the Chinese are spying on us by Neil Dunn of Florida.
The project assigned this to a Beijing-leaded team, and they were going to follow individual American citizens.
I ask you again, Mr. Chu, has bite dance spied on American citizens?
I don't think that spying is the right way to describe it.
This is ultimately, we can differ on this.
This is something that any TikTok or bite dance data that is viewed, stored, or passes through China is subject to the laws of China, one-party authoritarian state hostile to all American standards of privacy.
So, okay, they're spying on us.
And this means that every time somebody signs on, they can take your keystrokes, they can take everywhere you go.
You know how this works because Google uses it to sell you ads.
You're sitting in your living room talking about, gee, I need a new pair of shoes, and suddenly shoe ads show up on your computer.
I mean, we know they can do this stuff, and they do do it.
And so now it's the Chinese doing it, and the Chinese collecting this kind of information on American citizens.
But we also know, we also know that the Democrat Party was collaborating and colluding with all of the social media sites to silence any information that went against what the regime was selling.
Vaccines, lockdowns, transgenderism.
I still, I can say things about transgenderism right now, right here, and YouTube will shut us down.
They will demonetize us.
They'll censor us.
Why?
Again, not because YouTube has any information about this, but because this is what they are selling us.
So basically what they're saying is we don't want the Chinese to be in control of information.
We want to be in control of information.
And the Republicans, again, are just playing defense all the time on a team that doesn't exist.
It's a team that doesn't exist.
If all of our corporations, if our business world, if the Better Business Bureau essentially has gone woke, then that's an institution that has also broken.
We don't understand how empty these institutions are and how much we have to start again and how much we have to start them again.
All of us, everybody, has to start to insist that we are not going to do this.
We are not going to play along.
How do we fight a Cold War if we're as bad as our enemies say we are?
The government, which screwed up COVID, which can't defend us or win a war or float the banks, is trying to protect us for what?
So that they can sell us the same garbage that the Chinese are happy to sell us.
All the Chinese want, the Chinese want the money, the government wants the money.
The American corporations want the money.
All these guys are wrapped up.
All of our government people are wrapped up with Meta, Facebook, and Alphabet that owns Google.
They're all colluding together.
We know this from the Twitter files.
So what is the difference?
They have got to fix themselves before they can fix China and before they can beat China.
But the problem they have now is they have abandoned their purpose, which is to defend our rights, and they've abandoned the rule of law.
And I'll take a look at that in a second.
According to leading industry sources, grocery stores across the United States are worried about food shortages.
I don't blame them after what we've just been through.
And as a result of this crisis, survival food is more important than ever.
If you don't take action or if you stockpile the wrong foods, you could be setting your family up for hunger in a time of crisis.
That's why you need 4 Patriots survival food.
You can create your own stockpile of the best-selling 4 Patriots survival food kits, each hand-packed in the USA.
The kits are compact and stack easily.
They offer breakfasts, lunches, and dinners that are good for 25 years.
Five-star reviews are raving about the flavor and the taste.
Right now, you can get 10% off your first purchase with 4 Patriots survival food when you use the code Clavin.
Just head over to 4Patriots.com and use code Clavin at checkout.
Prosecuting Trump: Misconduct and Context00:13:29
That's 4Patriots.com.
Promo code Clavin.
If you are going to survive a disaster, you have to know how to spell Clavin.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No Ease in Clavin.
A real problem that we have is I don't think that the Republicans specifically and conservatives in general understand how completely empty these institutions are now.
Like I said, I think they're fighting a war that's already over and it really has to be a different kind of war, a revolution.
As I've said before, we're the counterculture now.
We are the revolution.
And so we have to fight like revolutionaries, not like we're defending anything, not like we're conservatives, because that's not what we are.
We're not conserving anything.
These institutions are gone.
Perfect example.
All this week, we had these rumors that Donald Trump was going to be arrested by the Soros DA in Manhattan.
We should just call him Soros because that's what he is.
Bragg, his name is, in Manhattan.
And there were these rumors that he's, you know, he's got a grand jury going on.
They're looking into payments that Trump is accused of making to the porn star Stormy Daniels to silence their affair.
Okay, so he's going to be arrested and he's going to be perp walked and all this stuff.
And suddenly this has gone away.
Nobody knows exactly why.
There are reports that Bragg has been hiding exculpatory material that's material that shows that Donald Trump is not guilty, not culpable, and that he's been hiding that.
And he's not allowed to do that.
That's actual prosecutorial misconduct.
There's a Supreme Court decision called Brady versus Maryland.
This is called Brady information.
You have to give exculpatory information.
And if that's true, it could be Bragg who gets perp walked.
But here's the thing.
All this week, until it vanished, the New York Times was running stories, you know, a former newspaper, right?
And they're running stories.
This is serious.
This is important.
This is an important case.
This is a case we have to look at.
And then suddenly they just stopped.
It just disappeared and it kind of went down into other stories buried away because it wasn't important and it was not a case.
Listen to the charge.
Listen to this charge, all right?
$130,000 in hush money was paid by Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohn, to Stormy Daniels in 2016 because she was probably his former mistress and they wanted to silence it.
Mr. Cohn initially said he wasn't reimbursed for the payment and then he said that he was.
Remember, Cohn is a guy who has been convicted of perjury, right?
So he's not going to be a witness in a trial, or at least if he is, he's going to be torn to pieces, right?
So he wants to say that, so Bragg now wants to say that Trump falsified business records because he sent in, he's paid Cohn back with a label of legal expenses, all right?
So he falsified business records.
That's a misdemeanor.
And the two-year statute of limitations has run out on that misdemeanor, right?
So he can't prosecute for that.
So what he's saying instead is, no, it's a felony because It means that the Trump organization somehow broke campaign finance laws by doing this, okay?
That too, on that too, on the payment itself, the statute of limitations has run out.
So that's what he wants to charge him with.
He's got to twist this into an argument to get this charge.
And people are debating this.
People on the right are debating this.
Jim Jordan is trying to overstep his bounds, his powers, and investigate and call in Bragg for an investigation before Congress.
But as Andy McCarthy said on Fox, he hasn't got the power to do that either.
Here's Andy.
The simplest way for people to understand this case is if the defendant or the prospective defendant had any name other than Donald Trump, he would not be a prospective defendant.
There's no way Alvin Bragg would bring this case against anyone else.
And that ought to have everyone's hackles up.
That said, you know, I think it's inappropriate for Congress.
This is not a Justice Department prosecution.
This is a sovereign state.
It's a municipal prosecutor.
They don't have oversight authority over him.
They don't have any business subpoenaing him to come explain himself.
So criticize him, yes.
Cut off the money from the states.
I don't think they should be giving money to progressive prosecutors.
That is the answer.
Cut off any money you can to them.
But still, they don't understand that this is what the Democrats do now.
I mean, these guys are basically moving into Paraguayan, Central America, banana republic territory where they're prosecuting.
They're trying to prosecute a former president of the United States on a misdemeanor on which the statute of limitations have run out because they think if they perp walk him, this is being a good thing.
One of the things I think has happened to Bragg is that he's this provincial New Yorker who thinks everybody's going to love it if they arrest Donald Trump and didn't realize, no, that half the country actually disagrees with him.
But here's the other thing.
Remember that crime?
This is this two-year, you know, this misdemeanor where the two-year statute of limitations has run out.
Since his inauguration, I'm reading this from Matthew Rice writing in the New York Sun.
Since his inauguration, Mr. Bragg has overseen a significant increase in crime rates in Manhattan.
According to data from the Crime Prevention Research Center, Mr. Bragg declined to prosecute 35% of the seven major felonies, murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, grand larceny, and grand larceny auto that were brought to him by investigators.
Mr. Bragg made the decision to not prosecute these felonies 1,119 times during his tenure.
He also downgraded 52% of felony crimes to misdemeanors, which under his predecessor never occurred more than 40% of the time in one year.
That Mr. Bragg has downgraded felonies to misdemeanors a majority of the time highlights the fact, obviously, that he's apparently preparing to elevate President Trump's alleged misdemeanor charge to felony crime.
So you can rape a woman in New York now and get away with it and get off with no bail and disappear into the night.
But if you have a consensual affair and try to hide it from your wife with a payoff, it's perp walk time.
That's how bad, that is how bad this situation is.
This is the rule of law.
We've always prided ourselves.
We're a country of laws, not of men.
That means everybody is dealt with the same way.
So people are sitting around going like, well, no one is above the law.
But obviously, obviously, you have DAs constantly use their judgment on which crimes to prosecute.
This guy's using his judgment to not prosecute rapes and murders and to prosecute Donald Trump.
It is absolutely banana republic time.
And, you know, there's no point in investigating that.
Shut him down.
Do everything you can to shut him down.
Don't pay for him.
But you haven't got the, you know, you haven't got the power in the federal government to bring this guy in.
Now, the thing about Bragg, though, is that kind of lawyer is being trained up by our institutions.
There was an incident at Stanford Law School.
And you have to understand, Stanford Law School is one of the theoretically, supposedly best law schools in the country.
And you got to listen to this.
This is important.
A fifth circuit court judge, federal judge, Stuart Duncan, went to Stanford Law School.
He was supposed to be, he's supposed to give a speech on how circuit courts interact with the Supreme Court during times when the law is unclear, all right?
He went in and here's his description, all right?
And this is backed up by video.
It's all on video.
When I arrived, the walls were festooned with posters denouncing me for crimes against women, gays, blacks, and trans people because he's conservative.
Plastered everywhere were photos of the students who had invited me and flyers declaring you should be ashamed with the last word in large red capital letters and a horror movie font.
Some hundred students were massed outside the classroom as I entered, faces painted every color of the rainbow, waving signs and banners, jeering and stamping and howling.
As I entered the classroom, one protester screamed, we hope your daughters get raped.
This is, of course, the party of love and compassion.
Now, they shouted him down.
You could not hear him.
And he was giving it right back to him.
He was calling him names.
He was saying there were thugs, you know, all that stuff.
But they're shouting him down.
He could not give a speech.
So finally, there was a dean, an associate dean of what?
Diversity, equity, and inclusion in the room.
Her name was Tyrion Steinbach.
And so finally, he appeals to her and she gets up and she sides with the demonstrators who are shouting him down.
Here she is.
I'm uncomfortable because this event is tearing up the fabric of this community that I care about and I'm here to support.
And I don't know, and I have to ask myself, and I'm not a cynics, is the juice worth the squeeze?
Is this worth it?
It isn't aesthetic.
But for many people in this law school who work here, who study here, and who live here, your advocacy, your opinions from the bench land as absolute disenfranchisement of their rights and Gusland.
Let me give her a hurry!
And she's cheering him on.
She says she agrees with him.
She wrote a completely dishonest op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying, no, you know, you can have diversity in free speech, but is the juice worth the squeeze?
You know, which means is the turmoil that they're causing worth the effort of having a federal judge come to a law school and make a speech about how the Supreme Court and circuit courts interchange.
That's not worth it because these protesters have used their heckler's veto.
Now, Stanford issued an apology, but this woman hasn't been fired.
And I have to explain to you, well, let me play this first because I want to show you how the right gets this wrong, all right?
Here's an interview on CBN News with a lady named Alex Murray, who is the director of campus rights advocacy for FIRE, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Great group, wonderful person, terrific values, right?
She's out there fighting for free speech rights on university campuses.
Terrific person.
This is what she says about this incident.
It's definitely unusual for, I dare I say unprecedented, for a dean at this high level to come into a shout down as it's happening and effectively encourage the hecklers.
Now, of course, protesters are always able to peacefully protest other places on campus, but when you are in a speaking event, it's effectively a closed forum and you cannot be shouting someone down and just saying as the protesters here are doing that it's just counter speech.
It's censorship.
Now, that is just factually untrue.
I mean, listen, again, lovely person, great values, fighting for the right things.
She's just not correct about this.
I have given speeches where there were riots.
I have given speeches where there were all kinds of disturbances and heckling and all this stuff.
And every single time, it was the administration that started it.
These kids don't know who the hell I am.
These kids don't know.
You know, I guess they sort of know who Walsh is at this point, but they're getting this information from the administration.
The deans of diversity, equity, and inclusion are the people spreading this information because they have six-figure jobs with big titles and nice cars, and their job is to start trouble and say, oh, see, you need me here because there's all this trouble.
There wouldn't be this trouble if it weren't for them.
They started every college I go to, I sit down with the students and say, where's the trouble coming from?
And they all say the same thing.
It's the administration.
The administration passes out pamphlets with your words taken out of context to make you sound like a terrible person.
Knowles saying that the idea of transgenderism should be exterminated.
Oh, now he wants to exterminate transgender people.
It's the administration that does it.
It's the deans.
Now, I said that nobody had been fired.
This woman, Tyrion Steinbach, has been placed on leave.
I don't want her fired.
I want her position eliminated.
I want all the deans of diversity, equity, inclusion eliminated.
These people are the problem.
It's the institution.
It's not the kids.
You know, the kids, look, I know the kids are radicals and the kids are going to make trouble and the kids are going to do what kids do.
It's the administration that doesn't expel them.
It's the administration that doesn't discipline them.
And it's the administration that encourages them and feeds them the information that stirs them up and makes them angry.
It's the institution that's collapsed.
You know, we spend too much time attacking the people.
Obviously, you have to attack the people because it wouldn't be happening without the people, but we spend too much time on that.
You know, these people, you know, again, Dylan Mulvaney and people like that, they're going to be there.
It's the people who taught AOC to be an ignoramus.
It's the people who taught her that she doesn't, that she, the things that she thinks who are to blame.
And these universities, if we don't come back and start to invent universities and invent locales that do the job that they're supposed to do, that deliver the news, the facts on the news.
You know, it's something even here where we are as honest as the day is long, we can't, we don't have the reporting power of the New York Times.
It is reinventing these institutions that have to, that has to happen.
That means an establishment means older people who are willing to seem out of date and out of touch and are willing to be called irrelevant and all those things that establishment people have to be willing to be called.
That's where my generation failed.
That is where my generation failed.
We didn't want to be those guys because we wanted to be hip forever.
Reinventing Institutions00:04:41
We said don't trust anybody over 30.
And so when we got to be 30, we just stayed 30.
And I accept myself because I'm blessed.
But everybody, because I'm on a mission from God.
But the rest of my generation did this and they abandoned the generation down.
And now these institutions are empty and we've got to stop.
You know, conservatives do this thing where they attack the New York Times, but they want to be interviewed by the New York Times.
They attack Yale, but they want to send their kids to Yale.
It's got to stop.
These institutions are gone and they won't come back unless we rebuild them from the ground up.
And another one is the border and we're going to be talking about that with a terrific journalist coming right up.
If you're watching the news, and you probably are, you know that U.S. pharmacies are running out of antibiotics right in the middle of the worst flu season in over a decade.
It is a helpless feeling.
I know this feeling when someone in your family is sick and the supply chain issue keeps you from getting the life-saving medication you need.
Thankfully, we have Jace Medical to help.
Jace Medical's mission is to empower you to be better medically prepared, even in the worst case scenarios.
The JACE case is a pack of five different courses of antibiotics that you can use to treat a whole host of bacterial illnesses, including UTIs, respiratory infections, sinusitis, skin infections, and more.
All you have to do is fill out a simple online form and in some cases, jump on a quick call with one of their board-certified physicians.
From there, you can ask your physician treatment-related questions on an ongoing basis.
This is a new way of receiving antibiotics.
I think it's such a good idea.
I've always thought doctors were stingy with antibiotics.
The Jace case helps me take the safety of my family into my own hands.
Go to jacemedical.com and enter code Clavin at checkout for a discount on your order.
That's jacemedical.com, promo code Clavin.
When you get the flu, the first thing you will ask yourself, how do I spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
One of the things that appalls me most is the situation at the border.
And more than the idea of people coming in and the danger and all this, what just appalls me is the complete disregard for the rule of law.
This is what I mean when I say institutions being emptied of their purpose and meaning.
What is the purpose and meaning of our executive and of our executive branch of not to enforce the laws passed by Congress?
And if Congress doesn't like those laws and they're not serving us, what is their purpose but to change those laws?
And none of that has been done.
Todd Bensman has been doing some fantastic reporting.
I've been watching videos of him and I have to watch through my hands because he really does take incredible risks.
And he's now written a book.
The second book on the subject is called Overrun, How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.
Todd, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Great to be here.
And sorry that you have to watch me like this.
Well, it said on the promotion for the book, it said you risked your life to write this book.
And I have to say that's true.
Can you talk about that a little?
What is going on down there that you have to risk your life just to report the story?
Well, you know, listen, I typically don't like to, I do mention that in the book.
There are a couple of incidents.
The book is not about me so much as about the border circumstances, the situation down there.
I spent a lot of time with the immigrants.
And when you go into northern Mexico, you know, you have to, you know, think about risk and how to mitigate it.
And there are cartels down there that you want to avoid.
And there are certain rules that I follow to kind of get through it and get in, get my material and get out.
It actually, the worst case for me happened not in Mexico, but in Costa Rica on the Nicaraguan border.
And I recount an episode there where because of some of the reporting that I was doing, having to do with corrupt Nicaraguan soldiers who were in on the smuggling, that I was, I did have a credible, you know, murder threat and had to flee, literally flee this town immediately with all my belongings, you know, for my life.
And, you know, I kind of recount that one.
But again, you know, the book's not about those kind of adventures or anything so much as just as a way to kind of get into the story of what was going on and what's happening down there, how the smuggling works and how and who all's involved in it, the extent of all the different characters that are involved in the smuggling.
Numbers Game00:08:34
Well, you mentioned Joe Joe Biden, how Joe Biden unleashed the greatest border crisis in U.S. history.
That's the subtitles of the book, Overrun.
But, you know, there are a lot of people who are angry at Trump.
Ann Coulter comes to mind because he ran on this build the wall, build the wall.
What was the state of the border when Trump left?
And he didn't build the wall.
That's why they're angry.
But what was the state of the border when Trump left office?
Sure.
Well, Trump had a, there was a mass migration event under his watch in 2019.
About a million people got in.
But what was typical about Trump, which is typical about any and every U.S. president up until Biden is that he worked as hard as possible to get his arms around it and wrestle it down and was able to successfully wrestle down his mass migration crisis by the time Biden entered office.
And just to give you an idea, I think at the height of that, there might have been maybe 100,000 a month coming in, 150,000 a month, which was stunning at that time to those of us.
But by the time he left office, he had it down to 20 or 30,000 a month with this kind of cocktail of policies.
So he bequeathed, and also, you know, the pandemic played a role in that in the final months because he had Title 42, where 100% of everybody was being pushed back into Mexico that we caught.
Very deterring, that thing as well.
When Biden came in, however, he opened up these vast exceptions to Title 42 for family groups and unaccompanied minors and pregnant women and certain nationalities.
And within a week, we had hundreds and hundreds of thousands just pouring through the breach.
By the time the second month was up, we were pushing 200,000 a month.
By the time we got into further six months in, it was a quarter of a million a month, 50,000 a week, and it's never let up.
It's been like that for two years straight.
So we went from 20, 30,000 to 200,000 every month.
And we've probably let a very significant portion of them into the country, which is why it's happening.
By my calculation, about 3.5 million of those foreign nationals were actually let in.
And they send selfies home and to the home village and they come.
And that's how it works.
It snowballs.
Wow.
Wow.
So obviously there are all kinds of problems with this in terms of not having control of our own population and who comes to live here and all this.
But what are you seeing when you go down there?
What about, you know, what are the dangers that we're facing?
Well, you know, I see the world turned upside down.
And so has anybody who's ever spent any appreciable amount of time on the border, where you just had for months and months, for really years, these kind of D-Day invasion craft landings constantly over Over the Rio Grande, four, five, six boats abreast, just coming all day, all night, and dropping their loads to the Border Patrol and to the National Guard.
It was a handoff situation with the smugglers right there in front of them.
They all knew each other by first name and how many more you got, Jose, over there.
And I mean, it was really an amazing, like the cat and mouse cops and robbers thing was over.
And it just stayed like that because it was a fiat from Washington that, you know, you're going to just let, we're letting all these people in and we're going to, within a day or two, you could see the conveyor belt, this roaring conveyor belt into the country that was Border Patrol buses would drop them off at an NGO on the border, and the NGO would arrange for them to get on commercial buses to anywhere in the country they want.
Seven days a week, all day long, every day for weeks, for months, and now for years.
This conveyor belt just roaring busloads and plane loads of people into the American interior, millions.
That's what it looks like.
And if you've watched my videos, you can see me right in the middle of these.
I don't know if you've seen those particular ones of the Border Patrol buses pulling up to the Greyhound bus, letting everybody out.
They process in the building, and then there's a whole leather line over here to the Greyhound bus.
That's what it looks like.
So the motivation for the Democrats are always telling us, oh, these are poor people trying to escape bad situations.
Who are they?
Who are these people coming over?
Well, they're everybody because what I just described to you are what we call the give up traffic because they know that they're getting in.
So they're coming in and they're presenting themselves for processing.
But the processing caused such a labor demand on Border Patrol for administrative work that it left vast swaths of the rest of the border unguarded completely.
And that gave rise to the people that did not want to give up because they had criminal histories or knew that they were not going to be allowed in for one reason or another, that they'd be pushed back under Title 42.
And so you have this runner gotaway traffic that has brought in at least a million and a half people right through the gaps in the walls and in the Border Patrol.
And all of those hundreds of thousands of people, we don't really know how many.
I heard the Border Patrol chief, Raul Ortiz, last week in a hearing tell Congress that the numbers that are commonly bandied around are actually 20% lower, at least, 20% lower than what he knows.
So, I mean, the numbers are stupendous.
And all of these people are total strangers.
I often went down there.
I don't know if you saw those videos with a grocery bag or a plastic bag and you can just fill it up in 10 minutes with IDs, passports that are discarded.
They don't want the Americans to know who they really are, where they've been.
And you can just, it's a strangers from 150 countries from all over Africa, every nation of Africa.
I've met almost every kind of African you can meet on the migrant trail from the Middle East, Afghanistan, from Somalia, from Pakistan, from Iran.
I've met them all.
They're all coming.
The whole world is coming for this on the strength of these selfies from the people that are just getting in and being bussed anywhere they want to go and they're here forever.
That's the really the source of that is the cause of this.
It's nothing much more complicated than they're letting us in to get in.
So they could be anybody.
Who are the smugglers?
Well, the smugglers, there are different groups and types from South America all the way to Mexico.
They're all different.
But in the end, they have to pay the Mexican cartels to either cross.
A lot of them in a lot of the areas have to pay the cartels to actually cross.
But they also pay the Mexican cartels to bring them that far.
Some from Central America all the way, but there are smuggling groups like the ones that threaten me in Costa Rica, Nicaragua.
They're just locals, local organizations that move them on a leg.
And it's very often, and there's another leg through the Darien Gap, which is the passage, the jungle passage from Colombia into Panama.
That saw in 2022, usually there's 10,000 a year or less that come through that.
250,000 last year, and we're looking at 300,000 for 2023.
I mean, the numbers coming from around the world are just astronomical.
We've never seen anything like any of these numbers like in any of our lifetimes.
Voting Base Shifts?00:02:45
And I think that's why I wrote the book, because that is a historic event for America.
Why not write a book about a historic event?
I'm surprised I'm the only one.
It is amazing.
It is amazing, the lack of coverage everywhere but Fox News.
We're talking to Todd Bensman, who has written a book called Overrun, How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History and has been on the ground covering this.
You know, there's so many theories on the right about why this is happening and what's the idea.
Are they trying to bring in a new voting base?
Are they trying to change the makeup of the country?
What is your thought here?
I mean, why is this happening?
So I dedicate chapter four to that question.
It's called the New Theologians.
I'm not subscribing entirely to the master plan voting block, although I do believe that a lot of Democrats would see that as a cherry on top.
But what happened here is that a fringe sliver of the Democratic Party coalition became empowered in the 2019, 2018, 1920 election cycle and became critical to whoever was, whichever candidates were going to emerge from the 15-candidate Democratic field, if you remember that.
It turns out that it was Biden and Biden Odom and gave them power inside the White House.
The fringe progressive liberal far, far left were given the immigration portfolio.
Well, those people have an ideology.
I call it a theology, kind of almost like a cult, kind of like a church-based something.
It's almost religious in what it is.
And the regular Democrats have always kept them at bay as just way too crazy for prime time.
But the crazies took over the insane asylum completely in this case and are still in charge at this point.
And those people come primarily from the NGO, the non-governmental organization, migrant advocacy.
I call it an industrial complex.
There is money in the hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts that they are receiving now to help with the crisis that they fomented.
And so my belief is that at the very least, I'm an old journalist.
I come from the old school of, as a journalist, is, you know, follow the money.
Follow the Money00:02:59
That is going to be one of maybe several motivating factors here.
Let's create this massive wave of people and then somebody's got to go in there and get paid to take care of them.
That's what's going to be us.
I got to stop you there, unfortunately.
Todd Bensman, the book is Overrun, How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.
Really strong reporting.
Todd, thank you so much.
I hope to get to talk to you again about this.
It's really interesting stuff.
Thanks.
Anytime.
And thank you for having me.
I appreciate it.
A pleasure.
Thanks.
According to a recent poll, almost two-thirds of Americans do not have a will.
That is absolutely nuts.
It's like being afraid your house will burn down, but not having homeowners insurance or being afraid of drowning, but refusing to wear a life jacket.
You might not drown.
Your house might not burn down, but you're going to need a will, whether you're a first-time parent or a recent empty nester.
It's never too early or too late to write your will.
And with Epic Will, you can get it done in as little as five minutes.
Have you ever considered who will care for your kids when you pass away?
How about who will speak on your behalf if you're ever in a situation where you're unable to make health decisions for yourself?
Who do you trust to handle your financial obligations if you can't?
These are some of the hardest questions we face in life, and Epic Will is here to help you through every step of the process.
Epic Will's team of estate planning attorneys has done all the legal legwork so that you don't have to.
All you need to do is fill out their step-by-step form and they'll help you create your last will and testament, living will, healthcare, and financial power of attorney.
Don't put it off any longer.
Head over to epicwill.com slash clavin to save 10% on Epic Will's complete will package.
That's epicwill.com slash clavin.
And I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, 10%?
How?
Oh, how?
Please tell me how.
Do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N, something like that.
Some recent and very alarming statistics show that more than one-third of millennials approve of communism.
It's either because they don't know any actual history or they believe that it wasn't communism because real communism hasn't been tried.
But it has been tried.
And if you watch the first two episodes of the new Daily Wire Plus series called What We Saw, Cold War, you'll see just how horrific it really was.
Here's a clip from Cold War.
Every night, the door to those cells were opened and a list of names were called.
Every night, the persons named would step out into the hallway and then be led down an unpainted, unplastered corridor where Russian martial arts tunes were being played on a photograph at ear-splitting levels, not so much to cover the gunshots as to suppress the sound of the screaming.
The doors were there to prevent ricochets from clipping the executioners.
And so it went.
Night after night, year after year, the enemies of the people met their revolutionary justice.
King Lear's Naked Truth00:15:05
That obviously is Bill Whittle.
Bill and I worked together for many, many years.
He is one of the worst people.
No, I love Bill Lyon.
He and I have been after each other forever.
He is a great storyteller, terrific writer, and this is what he does best.
He will take you back to the beginning, just after World War II, when the struggle between communism and freedom began.
It's actual history where verifiable facts come to life.
Cold War comes out today.
We're making the first episode available for everyone to see.
So go to dailywire.com slash cold war now to watch it.
If you want to keep watching, you'll have to become a member.
So go to dailywire.com slash cold war today.
All right, the culture section.
Today I'm going to start a two-part cultural section on plays, two plays by William Shakespeare that speak into this moment of transition when institutions fall apart.
There's no question that they speak directly into this moment.
Today I'm going to start by talking about King Lear.
Now, King Lear is the Sistine Chapel of literature.
It is the greatest work by the greatest practitioner in his field, right?
It's like the Sistine Chapel, like your first kiss.
It is one of the very few things in life that is every bit as good as people say it is.
And I'm going to give it a reading here.
I'm not going to tell you what King Lear is about, because Shakespeare is much more complex than that.
I'm going to talk about something that I see in King Lear, right?
And that is the story of our time.
So the story of the end of an age and the dysfunction and horror that arise when the next generation has not been trained up to take control of the leadership, right?
When the old king is standing down, just like now, but a generation is standing down, but the young people are not trained in the traditions that they need to become the leaders.
Now, a lot of people read King Lear and they say it's a nihilist play because every bad thing that can possibly happen happens in it.
So it depicts life without hope.
It's really depressing.
But Shakespeare is a lot more interesting than that.
He depicts specific situations and if terrible things happen in them, it's largely because of the choices and the actions people take and the characters of those people.
So he's not saying, in my opinion, he's not saying life is a nihilist tragedy.
He is saying if this happens, then life is a nihilist tragedy.
So, you know, people want their stories to have redemptive endings.
King Lear does not have a redemptive ending.
It is a very, very sad, depressing play, but it is also one of the greatest plays.
And it's about the end of an age.
And it was written toward the end of Shakespeare's relatively short life.
He only lived till about 52, I think it is.
And the Elizabethan age, when he wrote King Lear, this is the best dating we have, the Elizabethan age was ended.
And it ended on a down note.
She was a great queen for part of her reign, but she kind of lost her grip.
Sir Walter Raleigh called her a lady surprised by time.
She had gotten old and she had lost her grip and her court began to devolve into factionalism and corruption.
And because she'd been the virgin queen famously, there was no descendant to replace her.
They had to bring in the king of Scotland.
And that ultimately, at first that was a hopeful thing, but ultimately led to disaster.
So the story of Lear is based on a legend.
It takes place in England, but centuries before the birth of Christ.
So it takes place in kind of like the unknown past, right?
And the 80-year-old King Lear decides that he is going to step down and spend the rest of his life.
He says he's going to crawl toward death without the care and worry of being king anymore.
But he's going to divide his kingdom among his three daughters, right?
And in order to give his daughters this kingdom that they're desperate for, he calls on them to express their love for him.
Tell me how much you love me, and that's how much land, part of my kingdom, I'm going to give you.
He wants to be flattered as if he is king because he's giving up his kingdom, he's giving up his power, but he wants them to just say how much they love him.
So two of his daughters, both married, Goneril and Reagan, get up and they just say, oh, we love you more than love can possibly, we love only you.
Our only pleasure is loving you.
That's all we love.
And he gives them each a part of his kingdom.
And like I said, this comes from a sort of a fairy tale type legend.
But his favorite daughter, his youngest daughter, Cordelia, is too honest.
And she says, I love you like a daughter loves her father.
You've raised me, you've loved me, you've nurtured me, and I love you as a daughter, as a father deserves.
And Lear, who is living off this flattery, just explodes with rage and he disinherits her.
And she's only salvaged by the fact that the king of France is a noble guy who sees what a valuable person she is and marries her even without a dowry because now she has nothing and she becomes queen of France.
But Reagan and Goneril divide King Lear's kingdom between themselves and they are now supposed to take care of their father while he lives out his retirement.
Now, when I say this is the story of our times, I don't mean like in an easy way.
I'm not being simplistic about it.
But I have to say there are some kind of comic similarities between Lear's world and our own.
The king is 80.
He is described as a very foolish, fond old man.
Fond means silly.
And obviously Joe Biden is a foolish, fond old man about the same age.
The gender roles are out of joint throughout the play.
The wives are bossing the husbands around and manipulating the husbands.
And the men are suffering from what was called hysterica posio, which was a kind of panic attack, which was said to be caused by the womanish vapors of the womb rising toward the heart.
And that's happening to Lear.
And the play even contains, I swear this is true, I couldn't make this up, it contains a murder to cover up a massive conspiracy where they hang Cordelia in prison and pretend it's suicide.
So like Jeffrey Epstein, Cordelia didn't kill herself.
But more seriously and generally, it's this moment of transition when an age comes to an end and what that means and what happens if the next generation is corrupt and unwilling to do the job of being leaders and reigning in an honest way.
And so the idea, you know, it's funny, this idea was actually, you know, putting King Lear aside for just a minute, this was actually in that movie Ryan Johnson made, Knives Out.
It was the same story.
It was a kind of King Lear story where a generation of people who were living off the father's wealth had become corrupt and wanton and decadent.
And so the big house had to be turned over to the daughter of the illegal immigrants so she could bring the old values in in a new way, right?
That's what you're looking for.
You're looking for old values brought in in a modern way.
And King Lear is in a similar predicament that his daughters have been spoiled and they're corrupt and they're decadent sexually and they're bullying their husbands around and now he's given them power over him.
So he wants to continue to behave like a king and he wants to be flattered.
And when he gets rid of, when he exiles Cordelia and disowns her, his friend, Kent, stands up and stands up for him as the Earl of Kent and they're old friends and listen to the way Kent speaks to him.
This is from the Anthony Hopkins Amazon Prime version.
Hopkins is great in this.
And Kent speaks to him like an honest man speaks to another man, even though he is the king and King Lear banishes him.
It's cut seven.
I'll talk about it afterwards.
Be Kent unmannerly when Lear is mad.
What wouldst thou do, old man?
Thinkest thou that duty shall have dread to speak when power to flattery bows?
Kent on thy life no more.
My life.
I never held but as a pawn to wedge against thine enemies.
Out of my sight, Jesse, for better.
See better, Lear.
Now by Apollo.
Oh, now by Apollo.
Oh, king.
Thou swearst thy gods in vain.
I tell thee, thou dost evil.
Hear me, recreant.
Unthine allegiance!
Hear me!
So he says, Kent says, I will be unmannerly when Lear is mad.
And this is something we're familiar with, right?
That the truth has now taken second place to good manners.
It's not good manners to tell the truth.
It's not good manners to say that a transgender person is mentally ill or that a black family, black neighborhoods have too much crime and that's not the police's fault.
It's unmannerly and so you don't say it.
And that's what has happened.
The truth is banished and everywhere the truth is banished.
And so you have people, when the truth is banished, people go blind, and blindness is one of the themes of the play.
You have the Earl of Gloucester who has a bastard son, Edmund, and Edmund is bitter because the sexual social constructs make him less powerful than his brother who's legitimate, right?
And he says, so why am I a bastard?
By nature, I'm just as good as anybody.
And he says, nature will be my goddess.
Here's that.
Thou, nature.
Art my goddess.
To thine all my services are bound.
Wherefore should I stand in the plague of custom and permit the curiosity of nations to deprive me?
For that I am some 12 or 14 moonshine's lag of a brother?
Why, bastard?
Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact, my mind as generous, and my shape as true as honest madam's issue, why brand they us with base?
So basically he's saying, nature will now be my goddess because I'm as good as anybody.
These social rules are bad.
And this is a big theme of the play.
Should man be stripped down to his basic self?
This is what happens throughout the play.
Now, he plots against his brother, whose name is Edgar.
His name is Edmunds, and his natural brother, his legitimate brother, is named Edgar.
And so you can tell they're basically two parts of the same person.
Edmund wants to live in nature and just have no social or civilizational restraints, like transgender people say, and all the sexual deviant things that are now supposed to be absolutely fine.
And there's not supposed to be any social restriction.
Everybody's supposed to be natural.
And Edgar still remembers what it means to be a civilized person, constrained by civilized ideas.
But what happens to Edgar is he strips off his clothes and he runs off naked and pretends to be a madman because Edmund has set him up to be killed.
And Gloucester is blind to this plot.
And this is the thing, blindness and nature, right?
So as Lear goes to his daughters, his daughters start to turn against him.
And Lear is an annoying character.
He's your father.
He shows up with his hundred knights and he makes a mess and he bosses your servants around.
And so these two corrupt women start to strip him of his knights.
And that is the symbol in the play of being stripped down.
He has 100 knights, they take away 25, then they take away 50, then they take away all of them.
They take away all of them.
And one of his daughters says to him, Reagan says to him, why do you need even one knight?
Why do you need any knights?
And this is Lear's response, cut nine.
Oh, reason not the need.
Our basest beggars are in the poorest things, superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs.
Man's life is cheap as beasts.
Thou art a lady.
If only to go warm or gorgeous, why nature needs not what thou gorgeous wearest, which scarcely keeps thee warm.
So what he says is reason not the need, which means don't ask me why I need it.
We need more than nature gives us.
We need more than nature gives us, or we become beasts.
He says, you're a lady because you wear things that don't even keep you warm.
They're just beautiful.
It's just a luxury.
The civilization has added things to it.
What do you become when all that is taken away?
Nature is not so good, right?
So this takes us into the basically Lear runs away.
He runs away from his daughters and he runs out onto a heath where there's a big storm.
And this is maybe the greatest scene in all of literature.
It is one of the, you can just almost see inspiration hitting Shakespeare like a lightning bolt, right?
He's out there in this storm, which is nature, right?
Nature doesn't care about us.
Nature just will wipe us away like that.
There is no morality to nature.
And he's out there shouting at the storm as if he has some control over it.
And he finds himself, he's out there with his fool, who is the only person who can speak the truth to him because he turns his truth into jokes.
And the only way Lear can hear the truth is in the form of jokes.
So basically, Lear is listening to this show.
So Lear, Lear, I knew I had a role in this play somewhere.
Lear is out there with the storm and he runs into Edgar, who is hiding out as this naked madman, right?
And Lear looks at him, this naked man in the midst of the storm, and he stops and Lear says, is man no more than this?
He says, here we are.
We're all sophisticated people, but thou, speaking to this naked man, he says, thou art the thing itself.
Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.
And Lear strips off his clothes.
So now Lear is naked in the middle of the storm and he says, Leave me alone.
I want to pray.
Now this scene is frequently cut.
You know, there's a long play.
It's frequently cut.
I believe it's the moral center of the play.
It's literally the center of the play.
I mean, this is the moment when Lear is stripped of everything.
He was a king a couple of scenes ago, and now he's out on a heath naked, right?
And he prays.
And this is what he prays.
He suddenly realizes that he's cold and it's raining on him and he's naked.
And he says, poor naked wretches, wheresoever you are, wherever you are, that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, how shall your household, houseless heads and unfed sides, your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you from seasons such as these?
What happens to the poor when they're out in this weather and they have no clothes and they have no houses?
What happens to them?
And he says, it's a great line.
He says, I've taken too little care of this.
He suddenly realizes as king, he didn't pay attention to the poor.
And he says, take physic pomp, which means heal yourself, the high-born people, the luxury people have to heal themselves.
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel and thou mayst shake the superflux to them.
These are liberal lines.
This is saying the state should give some money to the poor, should pay attention to the poor.
So stripped of everything, stripped of everything, he is basically talking to Jesus.
This is before Jesus has come to earth, but basically he has discovered the philosophy of Jesus.
And he says we should make sure that the poor are taken care of to show the heavens more just.
What he is saying here is that nature is merely nature, but we are that part of nature that communicates God's will and charity and justice into the world.
Lear's Tragic Revelation00:04:50
That is what civilization is meant to do.
And that is why you don't strip civilization away.
And that is why civilization is better than indigenous life, than native life, than savage life.
Civilization is where God's will is created in the world.
We are the part of the creation that creates.
And this is what happens.
People say that Shakespeare is not a religious writer, but I just think what he does is he pours religion out into the world.
He takes it away from the churches.
He takes it away from theology.
And he just shows you it operating in the world.
Now, the tragedy just gets worse and worse in this play.
It just, everything gets worse and worse.
Gloucester, who was blind to the conspiracy, literally has his eyes put out.
What happens in the play is all the metaphors become real.
So he was blind, and now his eyes are put out.
It's a horrific scene, any way you play it, because it's right on stage all the time, but it's a horrific scene because it is the opposite of Christianity.
When you get to the nadir of the play, the bottom of the play, it's the opposite of Christianity.
Christ gives sight to the blind.
Now in a state of nature, man goes blind, takes out other people's eyes, right?
Lear, who has been talking about being mad, goes mad.
The sisters who have dominated their husbands are suddenly swept away, dominated by their own lust.
In the end, there's a moment when Lear and Cordelia are sent to prison, when Lear has this kind of revelation of what life could be like if we lived in a godly way.
And he says to her, come, let's away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds in the cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down and ask thee forgiveness.
So we'll live and pray and sing and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies and hear poor rogues talk of court news.
They'll talk about who's up and who's down.
And we will talk upon the mystery of things as if we were God's spies.
So it's a brief vision of the life of wisdom, seeing the passing emergencies in the passing world, the people rising and falling and seeing them through God's eyes, right?
And so it reminds me of a line in the mystic poet William Blake who said, all throughout eternity, I forgive you and you forgive me.
And that's basically what they're talking about.
But it's too late.
Things have gone too bad and everybody winds up dead, right?
And the last part of the play, Lear comes in with the dead Cordelia in his arms, hanging like Jeffrey Epstein, and he can't believe she's dead.
And this is the part about whether Shakespeare is a nihilist or not.
He's shouting, he can't believe she's dead.
And he screams, no, no life.
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all?
Thou't come no more.
He says, never, This whole speech is filled with negatives.
He says, and then he says, pray you undo these buttons because he starts to have a heart attack.
He basically starts to die and he asks somebody to open his shirt and he starts to look at Cordelia and think he sees life.
And he says, do you see this?
Look on her.
Look, her lips.
Look there.
Look there.
Now, this scene can be played in two ways.
And I've seen it played both ways.
He's either looking at her lips and thinking that she's coming back to life and that he dies.
And so he's deluded.
And so the resurrection is deluded.
But I've also seen it played where he's talking and suddenly he looks up in front of him and he says, look there, look there, as if he sees her waiting for him on the other side.
So we just don't know.
We don't know what Shakespeare was saying in that moment.
It's impossible to know.
But the last line of the play goes to Edgar because Edgar comes back and sets the state aright again and begins the new regime finally.
This man who has held onto civilization, even in his nakedness, even as the institutions collapse, he has held on to his ideas.
He says, the weight of this sad time, we must obey, speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
So the truth is coming back into the world.
And he says, the oldest has borne most.
We that are young shall never see so much nor live so long because they have had this long regime like the baby boomers and now it's over and now they're going to have to rebuild.
And rebuilding is a happy task, but it is a hard task and there's going to be trouble and they probably won't live as long as Lear lives.
So the question becomes, is this moment of transition that we are in right now, it is, we are in a Lear-like moment of tradition, is it doomed to Lear-like tragedy?
And so next week I want to look at Lear's twin play, which is The Tempest, which in many ways is the same story as Lear, except it has a happy ending.
It's what's called a comedy of grace.
It's a story in which tragedy could happen, but somehow it doesn't.
That's like the story of the crucifixion.
The crucifixion is a comedy of grace because it's tragic, but through God's grace, somehow, it has a happy ending.
And hopefully the story of these times we're living in now will be a comedy of grace.
We'll look at the Tempest next time.
You know, sometimes when you fly into Washington, D.C., where all our empty institutions are, because of all the restricted airspace, you have to land really fast.
So I went a little long on the Lear segment.
So you're going to drop into the Clavenless Week, just like that.
Respecting Her: Healthy Hedonism00:05:16
It's going to be like a rock falling off a building.
Smash.
It doesn't have to happen that way because you could become a member by going to dailywire.com slash subscribe and use code Clavin at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.
You'll have to look up how to spell Clavin because I haven't got time to tell you now.
Because first, I got to do a quick mailbag and solve as many of your problems as I can with the mailbag.
I'm so fing sick of cis people.
I feel the same way, I got to be honest.
And gay people, everybody.
All right, from Isaac, dear bald-headed master, I have a helicopter mom who's been significantly involved in my and all my siblings' lives.
She's done much to sacrifice for us, stayed home with us to teach us about Jesus, which I greatly appreciate.
But as we grew older, tensions, the tension of making our own decisions against her desires began to grow.
I've moved to the great state of Texas.
She remains in New York.
She holds this over my head and says she disapproves of my girlfriend who is Hindu.
She goes as far as to say that I'm unsaved and she's the only Christian in the family.
My mom married my dad, a Muslim, while she was a Christian.
I dread visiting home because it's like walking on eggshells with the possibility of a fight.
If you disagree with her on anything, she sees a sign of disrespect.
What is your advice for someone in my position?
Yeah, so that's really sad because it's probably not going to change.
But he says for context, I'm a 32-year-old attorney.
It's probably not going to change.
So, you know, you're going to have to deal with it, basically, maybe for the rest of her life, certainly.
And so the answer is that you have to respect her.
She's your mom.
And maybe when they're grandkids, that's the one thing that might change it if you have grandkids.
But call her.
Don't share too much with her.
You know, listen to her rant and rave and be polite and nice about it and don't get in arguments with her.
Marry your girlfriend.
I have a lot of time for Hindus.
I like the Hindus.
Marry her, get her pregnant repeatedly as often as you possibly can.
Have a good life.
And you'll be sad about this.
You'll be sad that your mom can't be as big a part of your life.
The only restriction I would put on this is she's not allowed to disrespect your girl, whether she's your girlfriend or your wife.
If you can't go home with her, visit with her without your mom insulting your girlfriend or your wife, then don't go home and tell her.
You know, I can't come home because you're insulting me.
That's your life.
Your life now is her, not your mom.
Your mom is the past.
You have to respect her.
You have to honor her.
You have to talk to her and call her and all that stuff.
But her opinion just doesn't matter.
And you can't, you know, you just can't deal with it.
That's the way it is.
It's sad.
I had this experience myself.
And it's just, you have to protect yourself.
You have to protect your new life.
She gave you enough wherewithal for you to become an attorney and get a nice girlfriend and all that stuff.
So you're grateful to her.
Have respect for her.
But, you know, you don't have to take her seriously.
Just listen to her rant.
From Cassandra, dear sensei, Master Sensei Clavin, I approach you seeking the wisdom that runneth over from your shiny cranium.
First, I'm wondering if you could talk about healthy hedonism.
My mother was, I grew up in a rigidly Christian household.
My mother was angry, violent, and a hoarder.
I experienced a lot of fear and neglect.
The result has been a masochistic moral compass.
Anything that feels good is shallow and selfish.
Acting morally means being in pain.
Pleasure and happiness are pointless.
My therapist says I have to find a healthy level of hedonism, harmless things that give me pleasure, but I usually feel existential guilt and anxiety.
Can you please describe a form of hedonism that could be healthy?
No, it's not hedonism you want.
What you want is pleasure.
Those are different things.
Hedonism puts pleasure at the top of the list of values.
What you want to do, God gave you good things for you to enjoy them.
He gave everything that God gave you in the world is there for you.
He made it for you.
He made it to serve you.
He made it for you to enjoy and to love.
I mean, and only because we're used to it do we not see how beautiful, how terrific it is.
So enjoy it.
I mean, you know, alcohol is there to be enjoyed, but not overused.
You know, an occasional cigar is there to be enjoyed, but not overused.
Sex is there to be enjoyed, but not without responsibility.
All of those things are to be used with responsibility and enjoyed in a good, godly way.
They are put there by God for you.
So you just have to relearn that.
There's a great book by Thomas Trahern called Centuries, which you might read as a devotional.
Read a little bit of it every day.
And just understand that these are good things.
Don't abuse them, but use them and enjoy them.
And that's it.
That's my time, right?
I'm out of, am I out of time?
Yeah.
Maybe I have a little bit of time.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, I got it.
I'll stop.
Because if you're not subscribing, if you're not helping us out fighting this fight, then you just don't deserve to go into the wonderful member block we're about to have about trad wives.
You could be there if you would listen to daily, if you would subscribe at dailywire.com slash subscribe and use code Clavin at checkout for two months free on all annual plans on OK, just because I love you.