Ep. 1124 – No Common Ground dissects America’s fractured identity, from Alvin Bragg’s Trump indictment to Nashville’s school shooting, where media narratives—ABC’s trans shooter framing and NBC’s Daily Wire blame—expose ideological warfare over guns and gender. The episode contrasts Shakespeare’s King Lear (human helplessness) with The Tempest (Prospero’s controlled reconciliation), arguing transgender ideology misreads Shakespeare’s unity of opposites. A mailbag rejects biblical "pornography" claims while urging Christians to disengage from toxic debates, closing with Utah’s porn ban as a reminder: true transformation starts within, not in culture wars. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, when things in America get genuinely upsetting, I sometimes like to take a step back, sidle unobtrusively to the door, slip out, run to my car before anyone notices I'm gone, drive to the airport, and catch a plane to one of the isolated islands of French Polynesia where I can while away the hours with my bare-breasted native lover to Helmana while dining on luscious local fruits and drinking the milk of coconuts, preferably laced with vodka or possibly LSD,
whichever is more likely to transform this shrieking hellscape into a colorful star-speckled hallucination, something like the album cover of the Magical Mystery Tour, except without Paul being dead.
But if that option is not available because of airplane schedules or short supplies of really good drugs, sometimes instead I remind myself that periods of insanity and disorder like this have been a reoccurring feature of American history.
Just this week, Michael Barone, the brilliant political analyst, unless it was the Michael Barone who sells ice cream from that big white truck near Central Park, that's probably the political guy, right?
Anyway, he wrote a helpful article in the New York Sun pointing out that, quote, America goes crazy every 50 years or so, unquote.
Barone begins with discussing the War of 1812, when the British burned Washington, D.C. to the ground before Andrew Jackson defeated their forces at the Battle of New Orleans.
And that really was crazy when you think about it, because the British had just finished burning Washington, D.C. to the ground.
So defeating them at New Orleans was incredibly ungrateful.
We should have strewn their feet with roses and asked them to come back every few years to make sure no one built the place up again.
I mean, sure, who wants the British here when they all talk like homosexuals?
That's why we had a revolution.
A lot of good that did us.
Where was I?
Oh yeah, 50 years later, we went crazy again and started killing each other in the Civil War.
Now, don't get me wrong, the Civil War was fought over the very important issue of women's rights.
How is Scarlett O'Hara supposed to hold down a job when she had to wear a skirt with the circumference of a helicopter pad?
Fortunately, Clark Gable was able to smuggle her out of Atlanta as the city burned down around them, so the war was won and everything went back to normal.
But for a minute there, I thought we were in real trouble.
Crazy time arrived again like clockwork, 50 years later, with the election of Woodrow Wilson.
Now, Wilson did establish some beloved and long-lasting American traditions, like blacks voting for Democrats who hate them and Americans getting killed in wars that have nothing to do with us.
But he did go overboard with the 1917 Espionage Act, which gave the government power to silence and imprison its political enemies.
50-Year Political Cycles00:07:05
Luckily, nothing like that could ever happen today, or if it could, I wouldn't be stupid enough to say so out loud because you know what happens.
Then came the 60s, when American socialists burned down cities, encouraged spiking crime, destroyed the relations between the sexes, and gutted our institutions.
Then came the 2000s, when American socialists burned down cities, encouraged spiking crime, destroyed the relations between the sexes, and gutted our institutions.
But no matter how ravingly insane American socialists became, some things in this country remained dependably consistent, like Bernie Sanders.
So my message to you today is that no matter how much the flaming wreckage of our country begins to look like the inside of Bernie Sanders' mind, except without all those women who enjoy getting tied up for some reason, you should never lose hope.
Or if you do lose hope, you should never lose faith that you could have hope if you hadn't lost your faith.
And if you lose both your faith and your hope, you shouldn't get that look on your face where your lower lip starts to tremble and your cheeks get all red and puffy.
Unless you're a girl, then it can be kind of cute.
But don't overplay it.
Because whatever happens, you can always just remind yourself that every 50 years America goes crazy, then we get over it in like 49 years or so.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boom.
The birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped, hip-sy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, the vast right-wing conspiracy known as Clavinon continues.
Today we're going to talk about murder and evil and political corruption, but I don't want to spend all my time on the Democrats.
So we're also going to talk to Greg Laurie about his new film, The Jesus Revolution, hopefully before Jesus comes back and gives us all what we deserve.
And I'll finish my cultural section on Shakespeare by talking about the insanely beautiful play, The Tempest.
I want to mention, you know, I never work for free.
I never do anything for free because I feel it's unprofessional.
I don't speak, I don't write, but I am doing something for almost free on Tuesday, April 11th at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, because it is a center where they talk about art and spirituality, which is my gig.
And so I really wanted to do at 7 p.m., go to sheencenter.org.
If you can be there in Manhattan, Tuesday, the 11th of April, sheencenter.org.
You can get tickets.
They're about 25 bucks.
I'm not getting anything, so you ought to give them the money.
Also subscribe to my personal YouTube channel, the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
It has exclusive content there.
If you press that little bell, someone you don't know will die, but you will get exclusive content.
And if you leave a comment, and a comment is really just nasty and derides people of color, minorities, women, anybody who's vulnerable if you attack them, we will read that comment on the air because that's part of our natural content.
Today's comment is from Savannah Desiree Holler.
She says, I have to say, I think I am the ultimate trad wife now.
I am chopping vegetables while barefoot in a dress with my six-month-old in one hand and listening to Andrew Clavin.
I don't know that it can get more trad wife than that.
I guess if I was pregnant, that might make it better.
Well, Savannah, I can't help you with that, a married man, but keep it up.
You're doing great, and I completely support you.
All right.
We're going to talk about the Tempest, Shakespeare's The Tempest, because it's going to be here when all this nonsense is gone and its truths will be true after everything we're talking about turns out to be false.
So let me open with a quote from The Tempest.
There's a line in The Tempest, hell is empty and all the devils are here.
In other words, all of the devils have left hell and they've come to earth.
And that's the way I felt.
I'm sure a lot of you are feeling this week, a genuinely crappy week in the political sphere.
And, you know, I'm feeling it.
I think we're all probably feeling it.
They had two really big stories.
I want to mention this latest one, but I'm not going to linger on this.
This obviously Punch Bragg, the New York DA, I call him Punch because he's a Soros puppet.
But for the first time in 230 years of American history, he indicted a local prosecutor, basically.
New York's a big city, but he's still just a local prosecutor.
He indicted a former president, President Trump, and we don't know what's in the indictment.
It hasn't been unsealed.
Trump is supposed to come in Tuesday and surrender, and then they'll read out the indictment.
But obviously, if you're going to break 230 years of precedent, if you're going to endanger the Republic, add more rage into an already rage-filled country, it's got to be something of tremendous consequence.
It must be indicted for something really important, like maybe misrepresenting a payment to his lawyer in order to collect false information to pass to the FBI under false pretenses so the FBI can spy on American citizens and paralyze the country with an investigation into non-existent Russian collusion.
Oh, wait, no, I'm sorry.
That was Hillary, and she paid a small fine for doing that.
So that can't be it.
It must be something way, way bigger like that, like taking bribes from China when you're going to be the president of the United States and have to deal with China.
And no, that's Biden.
So it's got to be something else.
But it even must be bigger than that if you're going to violate a precedent and really act like the guy in a small country in Central America.
Maybe it's like colluding to destroy people's free speech rights to protect your son's influence peddling operation, something like that.
And normally, you know, you talk about these things, and the next thing you're supposed to do is you're supposed to talk about what's going to happen now.
Will Trump win?
Will Trump lose?
Is this going to hurt Trump?
Is this going to help Trump?
You know, people angry.
Do they want Trump to run and all this stuff?
But you know what?
This is going to come as a big shock to you, but actually, I don't know the future, and neither does anybody else who's talking to you about the future.
It's just a way of filling space.
And, you know, all I can tell you is this.
This reckless little puppet guy, Punch Bragg, he doesn't know how the indictment is going to turn out, right?
So it's obviously, we think it's over something like Stormy Daniels paying her off to be quiet or maybe a Playboy model.
And, you know, this is a guy, Punch Bragg is a guy who's let murderers and rapists go free.
So it has to be that he doesn't care about what happens.
He doesn't care if this hurts the country.
You know, a lot of times listeners will say to me, Hillary Clinton should be in jail.
Joe Biden should be in jail.
And I always say, you know, you don't actually want your political opponents in jail because that's bad for your country.
And the reason I say that is because I love the country and I love the radical founding of this country.
And I know how delicate that founding is.
And I think we have to go easy on the way we treat it so that we preserve it because it's new in America, in political history.
It's the only new idea, political idea anyone's ever had, right?
But the progressives, see, they have something better.
Power Corrupts Politicians00:15:30
They want to progress forward.
They want to go forward back to the days when the government took care of us, like when Pharaoh took care of the Egyptians or the kings of Europe took care of the people of Europe.
They want to progress back into the past.
And I don't want that to happen, right?
So I don't want this petty and reckless little man to destroy the country.
But obviously, they don't care.
He doesn't care.
And the people who support him don't care.
And I think that that's the problem.
We have no common ground.
There's no common ground between those of us who are in favor of the founding and those of us who are against the founding.
And that came out so dramatically, so dramatically, in this other event that's happened this week.
And I don't want Punch Bragg's little nonsense to take this off the front page after the headlines.
Maybe that's what's partly intended to do, which of course was the shooting in the Daily Wire's hometown of Nashville.
A 28-year-old woman, under the delusion that she was a man, walked in with a rifle to an elementary school, Covenant Christian elementary school, Covenant Elementary School, and murdered three nine-year-old children, three nine-year-old children, and three adults who had dedicated their lives to teaching children in a Christian way.
And before I even talk about that, I want to just send out a salute to our friends at Nashville Metro Police.
I'm sure you've seen these videos we're playing now.
The killer came into the school at 10-11.
The cops got the call at 10.13.
12 minutes later, they shot the killer dead.
That's an amazing dedication.
Obviously, we all thought of Vivalve, Texas, where people got stood outside and these guys charged in.
You can just watch them, the incredible bravery of officers like Rex Engelbert and Michael Calazzo.
They were identified, but we ought to salute police chief John Drake too for his entire department because the body cam films of them running in from room to room, they look like they're off TV.
You know, my wife, when I watch cops on TV, she always jokes about them charging into rooms every 15 minutes, shouting clear, clear, clear.
Well, these were real people charging into real rooms where they might meet a real bullet to the head, and they were doing it with absolute courage.
And if you don't think the human heart is prone to idolatry, just pause for a minute and consider the fact that if you were an actor who never did anybody for anything for anybody, plain, pretending to be one of those officers, you could make $250,000 per episode of your TV series.
If you were in a TV series about police charging into rooms, risking their lives, and you were pretending to do that in a Hollywood set, you could make $250,000 an episode.
If you were the star, these officers probably make about 25% of that a year, as opposed to per episode.
They make 25% of what those actors make an episode.
And of course, we give these guys golden statuettes.
We give them Emmys, and they become celebrities, and women follow them around.
And of course, the cops get called racist by our corrupt media and the corrupt politicians that they serve.
So to Nashville Metro Police, God bless all y'all.
You're going to get paid for what you do on this earth.
And we also hear from witnesses that the staff of the school made these children vanish versus they had trained very hard for this sort of situation and very quickly got the children out of the way.
There was a lady who came forward, the head of the school came forward and apparently confronted the killer.
There was a custodian, Big Mike, who everybody loved and did the same thing.
And all week long, I was asking myself, you know, what's the telos of my coming here and talking about this?
How do you serve the dead?
Because, you know, I tell you all the time that anger is the devil's cocaine.
That's, you know, what I constantly say.
And every time I say that, somebody says, no, my anger is righteous.
Almost every time somebody writes to me and says, no, anger is righteous.
And that's right.
Sometimes in a moment like this, your anger is righteous, but you're not righteous.
I'm not righteous.
That's my point.
And one of the chief motivations of human life is to cover up our unrighteousness.
It's to hide from our own shame so we don't feel that painful, painful shame.
And if you listen to the way people talk, they tell you what a good person they are.
Almost every 15 words, they tell you what a good person they are.
They're trying to cover up that sinfulness and that shame.
And so what the anger does, it feels righteous because the anger is righteous and it gives you that feeling of righteousness.
So you start to hold on to that like a drug and you just follow that anger down and down.
And before you know it, you look around at the country, you look around at our corrupt news media and our corrupt government and our corrupt businesses and our corrupt universities.
And then you look on social media and you see our corrupt selves, our corrupt selves and the words coming out of our own corrupt mouths and our corrupt thoughts and our own corrupt hearts.
And you think hell is empty and all the devils are here.
And it's hard to stop.
It's hard to stop the rage.
It's hard to stop it.
This is the way the devil, you don't have to believe in the devil.
You don't have to believe in the devil.
This is the way evil works in the human mind.
You can naturalize it.
This is the way evil works in the human mind.
It says, I'm going to make you strong and it makes you weak.
I'm going to make you free and it makes you a slave.
And you hear people on the right, for instance, they say, well, the left is vicious and they don't care about the Constitution.
So if we're not vicious and if we don't care about the Constitution, we don't throw the law aside and go after them, we're going to lose.
We're tired of pussyfooting around.
We've got to go after them.
They abuse our legal system to indict a president they don't like.
So we have to use the legal system and abuse it to indict them or else we're going to be weak and we're going to lose.
You hear it on the left, you hear them saying, well, whites are racist, so we're going to be racist against blacks, or otherwise the whites win, or men treat women like objects, so we're going to do the same thing.
And otherwise the men win and nobody ever asks themselves, well, if they're evil and we're evil, who cares who wins?
I don't care.
I don't care if the Nazis or the communists take my freedom.
I want my freedom.
I want that founding to stay in place.
And I'm saying all this, I know I'm taking a long time to get to this central point, but I'm saying all this not because you're angry and not because people on Twitter and Facebook are all angry.
I'm saying it because I'm furious.
I'm really angry.
And I'm not angry at the killer.
You know, by the time that killer walked into that school, she was nothing but a vessel for the evil inside her.
She was gone.
What was left of her is now before the throne of God, but she was gone.
And I already know, we all know that evil is the king of the world.
Evil runs the world.
C.S. Lewis said this.
We live in enemy territory.
He said, enemy-occupied territory is what the world is.
And he says, Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage against evil.
And that's what I'm trying to find my way for here.
I'm stumbling in the dark toward here because what I am angry about, what I am angry about, is that in our country now, three nine-year-old children and three Christian adults can be blown off the face of the earth, can be shot dead.
And before their bodies hit the ground, we are at each other's throats wrestling over the narrative like buzzards.
You know, we're wrestling who's going to win the narrative.
And no one can win the narrative because there's no common ground between us.
You know, we're based on different, we're working off different premises of what reality is about, different theories about what reality is about.
So there's nothing left between us now but rage.
There's nothing left between us rage.
Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
And I go after the left.
I go after the left because they have the power, right?
They hold the high ground.
They have the government, the press, business, the academies, and power corrupts.
So we're a little less corrupt because we have less power, but that's all.
We all know, we know our hearts are just as corrupt as theirs, but we don't have the power.
But what they do makes me furious.
I cannot, I cannot tell you that I'm not furious when I see what they do.
Just some examples of what they do when they talk about this killing of three children, three adults, three children.
And here's, let me show you Terry Moran.
This is cut one.
We're going to play Terry Moran on ABC reporting this story.
The police chief also said that the shooter has been identified as 28-year-old female Audrey Hale.
He said she's a former student of the school and confirmed that Audrey Hale identified herself as a transgender person.
State of Tennessee earlier this month passed and the governor signed a bill that banned transgender medical care for minors, as well as a law that prohibited adult entertainment, including male and female impersonators after a series of drag show controversies in that state.
So good going, Terry.
At least we now know she had a reason for killing those nine-year-olds.
So thanks to Terry Moran of ABC News.
Terry Moran of ABC News, you can go to the parents' house and you can tell them their children didn't die in vain because you got revenge for a law in Tennessee that you don't like, Tennessee where you've probably never been.
Benjamin Ryan, independent contributor to NBC, blamed the Daily Wire because Matt Walsh has pointed out that transgenderism makes no sense and Knowles.
And so that's how you can tell how violent we are at the Daily Wire because now we need security all the time to protect us.
So we must be very violent people.
Mostly, of course, they want our guns.
And why won't Republicans ban guns?
And this is what I mean about no common ground.
Listen just for a minute to Congressman Jamal Bowman of New York talking to Thomas Massey of Kentucky outside of Congress.
This is cut two.
I'm talking about gun violence.
You know, there's never been a lot of people.
I'm talking about gun violence.
Carry guns?
You think we're going to go?
More guns lead to more death.
More guns lead to more death.
Look at the data.
You're not looking at any data.
You're carrying the water for the gun lobby.
Look at the data.
More guns lead to more deaths.
Guns, states that have open carry laws have more death.
In every school.
States that have open carrier laws have more deaths.
See, the thing about this is, obviously the guy's an idiot, but that's not the point.
The thing is, banning guns might cut down on these mass shootings.
It might cut, you know, a government monopoly on violence is going to cut down on the violence among the people.
But some of us want to protect the founding, and the founders gave us the right to bear arms for a very specific reason.
They didn't want the government to have that monopoly, the federal government.
They wanted states to be able to quickly assemble militias so that states could protect their rights against federal government overreach if the government overstepped its power.
So I'm against all political violence, almost all political violence, right?
There's very, very rare that political violence does anything good.
For every American revolution, there's a thousand oppressive slaughters.
I am not in favor of political violence at all.
But the principle of armed sovereign states to make the federal government pause in their overreach is important, right?
We know that the Biden administration colluded with META and Twitter and YouTube to silence speech about COVID, even when that speech was right.
We know they did it with Hunter Biden's laptop to protect the Biden crime family from the bribes they were taking from those coming out in the news.
We know that when Matt Taibbi, the left-wing reporter, testified about that censorship on Twitter, the Twitter files before Congress, while he was at Congress, the IRS showed up at his home.
They showed up at his home and started harassing him about his tax returns and trying to frighten him into silence.
We know that when protesters illegally gathered outside the homes of Supreme Court justices to intimidate our Supreme Court justices into not overturning Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Marshals sent by corrupt Attorney General Merrick Garland to their homes to protect the justices were told not to arrest or disperse the protesters.
They were given those instructions.
The same DOJ that has kept the January 6 kerfufflers in solitary confinement without trial.
So if you want us to give up our guns, right, if you want us to not to say, okay, the federal government can have a monopoly on violence because that'll cut down on violence among the people, which it may well do, first it would be nice if the federal government would stop overreaching and trying to take our rights away.
So on guns, we have no common ground, whether there's people who support the founding and the people who are against the founding.
As always, it's not about right and left.
It's about pro-founding and anti-founding.
And those who believe in the radical premise of the country that government should be restrained in its powers.
We are not going to give up our guns because you guys will not give up your power.
And, you know, we have no common ground.
So these children are dead.
These children are dead.
And we end up screaming at each other about something that we are not going to agree on.
We are not going to agree on this.
We have no common ground about this.
And so hell is empty and all the devils are here.
And then there's the narrative.
This is the narrative thing is the thing I think that makes me angrier than any other thing.
And again, again, they have all of the media except for our little corner of the media.
So they commit most of the atrocities, but we would do it too, I think.
This is the problem because of this lack of common ground.
If a conservative shoots somebody, it's because conservatives are violent.
And if a Christian prays outside of an abortion clinic, it's because Christianity is violent.
But if some kind of anti-founding, anti-Westerner goes nuts, a radical Islamist or a Bernie bro or some kind of sexually anomalous person like a gay guy or one of the four transgender persons who has been in a mass shooting in the last five years, either the story disappears from the news media like this story has rapidly disappeared, or it's still the conservatives' fault.
A woman goes into an elementary school and murders three little children, three teachers, and they make a martyr out of the murderer because it's still conservative's fault.
See, she had motive.
She was okay that she killed these three children.
It was okay.
It's sad, you know, a little sad when the children die, but it's okay because she, you know, really the victims, when you think about it, when you think about the victims of the transgender people who we are angry about because they are not talking about reality.
Here's White House spokeswoman Corrine Jean Identity Hire.
Just a brief clip, clip 12.
Our hearts go out to the trans community as they are under attack right now.
You know, in Kentucky, where they're trying to keep children from being butchered, there was a trans die-in days, days after this event happened.
And we thank you to Corine Jean Identity Hire for expressing her sympathy with transgender people when three children are dead in a Christian school.
Nobody said anything about Christians under fire.
I mean, this woman, I don't think she even knew this was a school she had apparently been to, but she just went there because she said they didn't have enough security.
So places where the teachers were armed, she didn't go.
A radical transgender group said the transgender Nashville shooter felt no other effective way to be seen.
Why Silence Equals Insanity00:15:07
No other effective way to be seen.
So where's the common ground?
Where's the common ground when they have a stranglehold on the narrative and all we can do is react?
All we ever do is fight back.
You feel like you have to fight back.
You get so angry.
You get so angry when they do this, when they lie like this.
You know, when Black Lives Matter burns down cities and Antifa terrorizes Portland and Seattle, oh, that's mostly peaceful.
But when a bunch of right-wing idiots storm the Capitol, we never hear the end of it.
And we get so angry about that that we fight back.
And again, again, it's just this rage battle.
And here are the this, the thing about it is, I just keep thinking about the victims, right?
I keep thinking about the victims.
You know, in terms of the narrative, in terms of generalizing from these things, I think that there are some ideas.
There are no types of people who are prone to violence, in my opinion, necessarily prone to violence.
But I think there are ideas that spark violence.
And I don't think being a transgender adult who all his life has thought, you know, really, I would feel more comfortable living as a woman and in his adulthood makes the decision to live dressed up as a woman, pretending to be a woman, because that's what it is, because you're still not a woman.
We don't have that.
You just don't have that technology.
It just doesn't exist.
I don't think that person is prone to violence.
But I think when the narrative tells people that you can literally change your sex, and anyone who tells you you can't is themselves, by speaking, getting in the way of that transformation, that narrative causes violence.
That narrative causes violence.
You know, I saw an ABC fact check.
I love this.
ABC fact check that said some people, Donald Trump Jr., I think said this, are pointing out that there have been four transgender shooters in the last five years.
And he says there's an upsurge in transgender shooters, but most shooters are cisgendered male, says ABC.
And you know what?
That's true, of course.
But cisgender males are 50% of the population, at least 45% of the population.
So there's going to be a lot more of them.
That is a lot of transgender people for in the last five years to be mass shooters.
But again, it's not the transgenderism I don't believe that makes people violent.
That doesn't make any sense to me.
It's the narrative.
It's them.
It's the power, the power selling this narrative to them that's false.
If the whole world has to agree with you before you can live out your reality, that's not reality.
That's not what reality is.
You can't demand that the world agrees with your delusion or else, right?
I mean, tomorrow in Washington, D.C., there's supposed to be a day of trans vengeance.
I'm sure they've changed the name by now, but that's what it was originally called.
But if you went on Twitter and you mentioned that that was true, you were banned.
You were banned.
Because the narrative is that if you interrupt the delusion, it's your fault.
You have shattered this fragile, delicate, beautiful thing that is the delusion that you can change sex.
It's amazing how much anger can be dispelled by honesty if we speak honestly with one another and shout at one another and reason with each other.
In Auckland, New Zealand, I mean, I know, I'm angry, you can tell, so I'm letting it get to me, but it does get to me.
It does.
I want to say something to serve those children, to serve those dead teachers and the custodian.
But I have to get this off my chest because they have the power.
They have the power.
We have so little power, except the truth.
That's the only power we have.
The truth and decency.
If we have decency, then we have power.
But if we get as angry and as vicious as they do, then it doesn't matter who wins because the devil doesn't care.
The devil doesn't care who does the hating as long as the hating gets done.
In Auckland, New Zealand, there was a let women speak rally.
It's just about women coming out and saying, hey, we are women.
We are real women.
We want our rights.
We want our privacy.
We want our private spaces.
We want to live our sports.
We don't want people saying that they're women and winning all our sports.
And they were attacked by men pretending to be women or transgender people as they're called.
They were attacked physically, violently.
Posey Parker was doused with juice.
And of course, you know me, I'm a terrible sexist.
I agree that women should not have opinions.
Or if they have opinions, they should at least have the decency to be men who are secretly pretending to be women because we don't want actual women having opinions.
But that's appalling.
And nobody's appalled.
Nobody's appalled.
Even the people who attacked Posey Parker were being praised by the government there.
And that's where this anger is coming from, because you cannot rewrite reality.
It ain't going to happen.
There was a wonderful moment when a bearded pro-powerlifter just in Canada went into a women's weightlifting competition, broke the record, which was held by a trans woman, but it was held by a man pretending to be a woman, and just said, okay, now I've broken the record and walked away.
And it's funny, but this is part of the real reason why we have no common ground.
We don't actually agree on what reality is.
This is the core of it, the core of it.
They have a theory that what we call reality is a construct of power.
And I can trace this theory back to the death of God, you know, when in the 19th century, it begins, 18th century really, begins with German philosophers saying, you know, there is no reality separate from our consciousness, which is true.
But that doesn't mean there's no reality.
And that doesn't mean you can't have a consciousness, an imagination that is in tune with outer reality.
You can't separate your consciousness from reality.
But what they said was ultimately, there is no moral reality.
This is what Nietzsche said, and this becomes what guys like Foucault say and all the French philosophers.
It's all a construct of power.
It's just a reality that what you think is your reality, what you think are your morals.
That's just a construct made by powerful people to maintain their power.
The good of family, the good of marriage, the good of freedom, everything.
It's just a construct of power.
The only moral reality is that power infringes on your infinite right to be whatever you feel yourself to be, because otherwise you're being shaped and therefore oppressed by someone else's narrative, right?
That's what they think.
They think if you change the narrative, you can change reality.
That's why we're having this fight.
They do believe this.
If they can just get complete control of the narrative, they can knock you off Twitter, if they can destroy the Daily Wire, if they can destroy and demonize Fox News, if they can just stop people from disagreeing with them, then reality will change.
They actually believe this.
This is a theory.
And sure, are there cynical people using those stupid theories for their own power?
Of course there are.
Sure, there are.
But many of these theorists actually believe this thing.
You can sit in a room alone and theorize reality right out of existence.
And when you go out there and people say, no, that's not real, they become offensive.
Now, the problem with us on the right is that most of us have this defensive attitude toward that.
We say it's not true.
You're not a woman.
You have a penis.
You're not a woman.
You were born with a penis.
You're not a woman.
You can lift weights over a woman because you're a man.
That's a defensive position.
We're just saying, no, you're wrong.
But we don't tell them what we believe because most of us don't know what we believe.
Most conservatives, I'm sorry to say this, but it's true.
Most conservatives, their only thing is they don't want anything to change.
And that's a losing proposition because everything changes all the time, right?
So we just, but I have a position.
I have a philosophy.
I have an idea which is in keeping with reality, that our imagination is in collaboration with outer reality, and you can be right about that or wrong.
There's wiggle room, right?
It doesn't matter whether you wear a beret because you're French or a sombrero because you're Mexican or whatever.
That doesn't matter about moral reality, but it matters whether you speak about things that are real or not, whether you say, it's not dishonest to say I'm a man who feels feminine.
That's not dishonest.
It's dishonest to say that makes me a woman.
And then you have to basically shape the narrative even by violence.
And this is the terrible thing.
So we have nothing to say to one another.
I mean, it's just appalling that children should die and we start arguing on Twitter instantly.
And you can't help it.
You can't help it.
All I can do is stay off.
All I can do is not speak because what I want to say is, no, that's untrue.
This is what's true.
We have nothing to say to one another.
There's no common ground.
Hell is empty.
All the devils are here.
So let me end this just by throwing something out there.
And do I have any illusion this is going to make a difference?
No.
But I have to say it.
I feel compelled to say it.
I feel called to say it.
What if we put our anger aside, even if it's righteous, even if it's righteous?
Clever points, counterpoints, you know, wow, I own the libs, own the cons, whatever.
All of that falls silent.
And we think, is there anything?
Now forget about the left, right?
And forget about the right, the far right.
I don't care about that.
I mean, to the rest of us, is there anything we can all agree on?
Let me just put forward one proposition that maybe we can agree on.
There can be no good reason to murder a nine-year-old child.
Could we start with that?
Could that be like the beginning of a conversation?
There can be no good reason to murder a nine-year-old child.
Not anti-mutilation laws in Tennessee, not Matt Walsh's existence, not the existence of guns, whatever it is, there can be no good reason to do that.
No good reason to murder anybody at random that you don't know, right?
No good reason.
There can't be a good reason to do that.
So if we agree on that, right?
If we agree that a person who does that is acting outside the borders of reason, that there is no narrative that includes that as a reasonable act, then they're insane.
They're insane.
If you are outside the borders of reason, you are insane.
And when you look around, we find that in America, we have no system for dealing with that.
An insane person obviously shouldn't have guns, but shouldn't be free, should be under constraints and forced to take medication and forced to take treatment.
A person who is even entertaining the idea, you know, if your child, if you read your child's diary and he's writing down, oh, you know, I sometimes think I have to go and kill people and that'll solve my problems, and you report to the police, there's not very much they can do about that.
They can take them away for, you know, 42, 72 hours for observation, but they can't put people away anymore because we have lost those facilities because we don't know how to cure it.
We have better systems for curing it than we did, but we have nothing.
So why is it, why is it, if we could agree on that, if we're not going to give in on guns and they're not going to give on guns, and we're not going to agree on whether a person can change sex or not, and they're going to tell their lies and we're going to tell the truth, there's no common ground.
Can we not have common ground that this is insane, that it is insane to murder a child?
No, really?
It's insane to plan to murder a child, to think about murdering a child, to talk seriously about murdering a child, that that is a hint of insanity, and can we not start to sit down, just that, just that.
I mean, instead of doing nothing and screaming at each other.
You know, every single shooter in the world, transgender, right-wing, left-wing, every single one, has been insane, has been mentally ill, has been the walking definition of insanity.
And yes, there's evil involved.
Evil gets into us through our broken places.
They're insane.
Can we not sit down and say, all right, let's have a system to deal with this, to take these people off the street, to keep them from getting guns?
I know we have some laws for that, but not enough, obviously.
Obviously.
And I understand there's all kinds of possibilities of abuse.
I understand there's the possibility of the left saying, well, if you believe in God, you must be insane.
I get it.
I get it.
But are we not still men?
Are we not still men and women who can sit down and have that conversation and say, how are we going to avoid those abuses?
How are we going to build that system?
How are we going to force people who are insane off the street?
Really, really, is there nothing, nothing we can talk about if we cannot talk about the fact that killing, you know, if Terry Moran of ABC News is going to rule the day with his motives, if Karine John Identity Hire is going to rule the day by sympathizing with the killers, then how can we even move forward at all?
How can it not all be killing, all be rage?
Can we not agree that this is madness?
Can we not agree that this is madness?
Forget the guns.
I know they're passionate about the guns.
I know we're passionate about the guns.
Forget it.
Forget it.
It's not going to happen.
Nobody's going to move on that.
It would tear the country to pieces.
So it's not going to happen.
Can we not agree that the insane can be taken off the streets?
Can we not sit down with the people we hate?
Can we not sit down with the people we disagree with about everything else and start to figure out what we do about the people in our society who are insane?
There are a lot of them.
They're on the streets.
They are on the streets.
They end up in prison, which is Victorian in its atrocity in putting insane people in prison.
Can we not get them off the streets and drug them?
Can we not take away their guns?
It's just amazing.
Amazing.
You know, I watched this all week long.
I watched this all week long.
And I realized there is no common ground.
And I realize that that is the seeding place for violence, for war, for civil war.
It's the seeding place when there's no common ground.
But there is common ground, I think, between most of us.
It is the power.
It is the power that keeps us apart.
It is the narrative that keeps us apart.
It is the people in charge of the media, the universities, the Hollywood, all of that power.
And if it were us, we'd do the same thing.
All of that power that keeps us apart.
I have to believe.
I have to believe that most, vast majority of the people in this country believe that someone who shoots a nine-year-old child is insane and that we should have a system for dealing with that.
Again, I don't expect this to make the difference.
I just have to say it because I cannot, cannot live in this tunnel of anger that's just going to suck me down into it too.
And I don't want you to live in it either.
And that's why I'm going to talk about the things I'm going to talk about today about Jesus and about the Tempest and about ways to live outside of that because I'm not going to live like this.
I am not going to do it.
Even if it means stepping back, I'm not going to do it.
We have got to start to find the things that normal people agree on and start to find a way that we can put the devils back in hell.
Awakening to Anger00:17:15
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So obviously a good week to be talking about Jesus.
We have Greg Lorry with us here, the senior pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship.
He's authored a lot of books, but one of them is called Jesus Revolution, How God Transformed an Unlikely Generation, which is basically the story of his coming to Christ and the movement that came with him.
It has now been made into a hit film that I watched last night.
Here is just a clip of the trailer.
Hey, square.
I am not a square.
I think we should invite Greg this weekend.
What's this weekend?
The mountain is high in Southern California.
These people are hippies, rebels against old-fashioned authority.
I think these kids need help.
The need is a bath.
You're passing judgment on people you know nothing about.
Maybe that's why your church is so empty.
When God walks in here, brings me a hippie.
I'll ask him what it's all about.
Because I do not understand.
His house has a very good vibe.
That's Jonathan Rooney, who plays, obviously, Jesus on what's that show, the iPod show, The Covenant.
Greg, thank you so much for coming on.
I watched the film last night.
I have been very loud about talking about how much I dislike Christian films, but I found it enormously moving, especially the Jesus scenes, the scenes of Christianity in action, which is always moving to me, but it was really well done.
How'd you like it?
I was very happy with it.
You know, I'm pretty apprehensive when someone says they want to make a film about your life.
But John Irwin, the director approached me and he had a copy of a Time magazine.
You may remember this kind of a psychedelic image of Jesus with the words, Jesus Revolution.
And three years earlier, Time magazine had another cover.
It was black cover, reversed out red letters asking the question, is God dead?
So you wonder what happened between is God dead and Jesus Revolution.
And what happened was a spiritual awakening.
So this excellent film director, John Irwin, said, I want to make a movie about this movement.
And someone told me you were there.
And I was.
That's when I came to faith in 1970.
But then I was sort of surprised when he made it about the story of my wife and my life together, sort of a love story.
And then also the story of a pastor, Chuck Smith, and this hippie evangelist named Lonnie Frisbee, how it all came together.
It was sort of like peanut butter, met jelly, nitro-met glycerin, Lennon, Met McCartney.
Those two guys just had an explosion together and this movement happened.
And I walked right in the middle of it as a kid using drugs, lost, not knowing where I was going in life.
And my life was transformed.
So I really liked the movie, I have to say, and I'm not a fan of Christian films in general, but I feel the success of this movie is due to the fact that Christians are not the only ones showing up.
People who are not Christians are coming and connecting to the story of this film as well, because it's a story of love.
It's a story of hope.
It's a story of how conflict can be resolved.
It's a story of how Christians make mistakes even after they believe that none of us are perfect.
And it's a story of the last great awakening.
And the director and I had this hope that maybe this would inspire this generation to pray for their own Jesus revolution.
You know, that was one of the things that actually did touch me about the film that it made me a little heartsoar.
The movie, just so people understand that this is about the hippie movement, which we all know what that is, but a segment of the hippie movement basically found that they had been, one of the lines in the film is they're looking for all the right things, but they were looking in all the wrong places.
And they found that Jesus actually was a better answer than some of the things they were trying.
And so that became a movement.
Now it seems almost unthinkable that such a thing could happen.
Do you have any feeling like that?
Or do you disagree?
No, I think it could happen.
I pray it will.
In fact, I'll take it a step further and say, I think it has to happen because I don't know what else could change culture.
Let me just take myself as an example.
I was a 17-year-old kid.
My mom had been married and divorced seven times.
She was an alcoholic.
I started using drugs.
I was smoking weed every day, taking honesty.
My life was going fast in the wrong direction.
And I heard about Jesus Christ in a way that I understood as a kid when this hippie evangelist came on our campus, played by Jonathan Roomi in the Jesus Revolution film.
And it rocked my world.
And so I changed.
Our whole generation changed.
My values changed.
In fact, I really started to develop a worldview after that from reading the Bible and learning about so much more.
I became a patriot.
I became someone who loved America, which I, like many other kids, would have just parroted the speech we would be using in the day, you know, cops were pigs and the government was bad.
I began to change, and the government can be bad, obviously, many times, but my whole life changed and then my mind changed.
My views changed because of Jesus.
And so I think this is the way we reach people is, you know, we can get on our political sites and debate all day, but people need a change of heart.
And so our hope is that we can build bridges.
This movie is a great way to do it to people who would never enter into a conversation and ask them questions like, what is the meaning of your life?
What's going to happen to you after you die?
Why do you exist?
That's more the space I'm in, Andrew, trying to address and calling people to a relationship with Christ, no matter what their background is, no matter what their political persuasion is, because I think the gospel can change anyone.
It changed you.
I mean, I've heard your amazing story, the most unexpected conversion with your background, your upbringing, your childhood, really the deck stacked against you ever becoming a Christian, but God got a hold of you.
And God can do that for anyone, anywhere.
And it's a rolling blessing.
I mean, it just continues and gets deeper and deeper.
An amazing, amazing experience.
Totally unexpected by me, as I think it was by you.
I want to raise my biggest criticism of the film.
I want to raise it in the context of my really enjoying the film, of finding it very moving, finding it overcoming a lot of the Christian things that make Christian films sink.
Jonathan Rumi is really good in it.
He's just funny.
He catches the humor of it, but also the torment of this guy, Lonnie Frisbee, who is this hippie who comes and starts and helps start this movement.
And it shows you how he starts to go off the rails.
And I don't want to spoil too much of it.
But it doesn't talk about the most controversial thing about it and in terms of the truth, which is that the Jesus Revolution, the Jesus Freak Movement, as I used to call it, was a socially conservative movement.
It was actually included ideas about sexuality that were very traditional.
And yet Rumi was secretly gay.
I mean, he died of AIDS ultimately.
And that's never touched on in the movie.
And the only reason that disturbed me is because it's such a central point right now of Christian conflict.
I mean, there are many churches with gay pride flags outside and many other churches that think this is a complete disaster.
And of course, a tremendous amount of pressure from the culture to conform to this.
I guess what I want to ask you is where do you stand on this question, A, and B, what did you feel about that being left out of the story?
Well, first of all, it wasn't left out of the story because it wasn't in the story.
Here's the reality of Lonnie Frisbee.
And there's some information out there that's incorrect.
And you can read his own books to get his own account.
Lonnie Frisbee himself said in a book that he knew homosexuality was a sin.
He never was an advocate for it.
He never identified as a gay man.
He was molested when he was a little boy.
He did experiment sexually before his conversion.
But after he came to Christ, he was married.
And there was no incidence of this kind of activity during the entire time that this movie was made, the Jesus movement period.
Therefore, we didn't feel a need to address it.
Now, later, by his own admission, Lonnie Frisbee, played by Jonathan Rooney, fell away.
He was upset because of the way his life had gone.
He got into drugs.
He got into promiscuity and he got AIDS.
And he knew AIDS was the result of his bad decisions.
And I actually went and visited him in hospice care when he was literally on his deathbed.
And he knew what he had done was wrong.
He asked God to forgive him.
But he knew he was paying a price for that.
And of course, myself, you know, I believe what the Bible teaches.
And the Bible teaches that homosexuality is sin.
Bible teaches a lot of other things are sinful as well.
Extramarital sex, premarital sex, and the list goes on.
But 100%, you know, we hold to what scripture teaches.
So, you know, but we did try to show in the film, Andrew, the struggles that Lonnie faced.
For instance, in an early conversation he has with Chuck Smith, played by Kelsey Grammer, he says of his old life, we did everything and we did every one.
And then later in the film, there's a scene where Lonnie is praying in front of a fire.
He's in anguish and he says, God, help me.
So we wanted to show the struggle that was there.
But look, here's the reality.
God uses flawed people and he uses broken people.
And Lonnie was a flawed, broken person.
But yet he, along with Chuck Smith, were used by God to, you know, touch the world.
And he looked at the Bible and there's so many instances of broken people being used by God, people that had moral failures, but then returned to the Lord as well.
Samson, David, Simon Peter openly denying the Lord, the list goes on.
So that's why we dealt with it, the way we dealt with it in the film.
It's a great question.
And I've written an article about it called The Long, Strange Trip of Lonnie Frisbee, where I very honestly deal with the issues, but also give the timeline, again, emphasizing during this time this film was made or the story was happening, and that's what the film is about, about a two-year period, there was none of this going on.
He was not secretly gaining.
That's a fair answer.
When you look back on this, you know, is it part of your history, not just part of American history?
When you look back on it, obviously each person who is saved is an eternal, an infinite victory.
But as a movement, as a movement in American history, do you think it has a lasting effect?
Or do you think these are things that come and they go and fade away?
I think it's had a lasting effect.
Some historians, there's been four great awakenings in American history.
The first was before we were a nation led by an evangelist from the United Kingdom who preached the gospel all around our country.
And then the most recent before the Jesus movement was the prayer movement in New York City that happened right before the stock market crashed and so forth.
The preacher was named George Whitfield from the first movement.
And the most recent was the Jesus movement.
Many historians believe not only was it the last great spiritual awakening, they believe it was the greatest spiritual awakening.
You know, there were things that were born in this time, what we call contemporary Christian worship and music was born at that time.
But there were great things that were happening where all of a sudden the church was permeating culture.
Prior to that, it was like the church was so disconnected from culture.
But I think in many ways we've caught up and now we're making a difference.
The church is flawed.
It's filled with flawed people.
It always will be.
But the only organization Jesus ever started when he walked this earth was the church.
And he said, the gates of hell will not prevail against her.
And so our objective as Christians is not to isolate from culture.
It's to permeate culture.
It's to influence culture.
And so I do believe the effects of the Jesus movement are still resonating in the church today.
And I've even seen some promising signs here and there that we might see another spiritual awakening, most notably what happened recently in Asbury on the college campus there.
That to me is like, wow, could this be a sign of something to come?
You know, when I walk outside with my wife, I'll say it's raining.
She'll say, it's not raining.
She has very thick hair.
I said, no, it's raining because bald men always know when it's raining first, Andrew.
And, you know, so it's a great gift we have.
It's like, it's like prophecy.
We just sense these things.
But in the same way to me, like what happened in Asbury and other places, could that be a drop of rain here, a drop of rain there?
Hope of a spiritual awakening.
Because after this horrible tragedy in Nashville and this act of pure wickedness and the murder of these innocent people and children, our hearts are just broken.
God needs to change human hearts.
And, you know, we were very, things are very divided back in the late 60s and early 70s.
And even people on the left, what we would call today, but on that side, they were rioting.
They were setting bombs off.
They were, you know, they were getting more militant.
And many people just thought there's no way we can bridge this divide.
And God sent a spiritual awakening.
It wasn't a moral awakening.
It wasn't a political awakening.
It was a spiritual awakening.
And I think that needs to happen again.
That's great.
Well, I really enjoyed the film, Greg, and I thank you so much for coming on.
It's very nice to meet you.
I hope I get to meet you in person.
Yes, Andrew, nice to meet you.
And I'll be watching you.
So thanks for having me on your show.
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The Bible, as you know, has had a profound impact on literacy and has influenced all aspects of society, including literature, art, culture, government, and individual lives.
No other book has had so great an impact.
So join Jordan Peterson in his special Logos and Literacy series, where he traces the Bible through history to show you the impact it had on the Western world.
Here's a clip.
I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump-started the development of literacy across the entire world.
Illiteracy was the norm.
The pastor's home was the first school.
And every morning it would begin with singing.
The Christian faith is a singing religion.
Probably 80% of scripture memorization today exists only because of what it sung.
This is amazing.
Here we have a Gutenberg Bible, Bible printed on the press of Johann Gutenberg.
Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case.
Now the book is available to everyone.
From Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself.
It is the most influential book in all of history, and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that.
If you weren't watching that, it just looks beautiful as well as being interesting.
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So I genuinely agree with Greg Lorry that the trick here, the secret here, is the transformation of the spirit.
I am not a preacher.
I am not running a church.
I am an artist and I love the arts.
And so that's why I want to talk about The Tempest, which I consider the twin play of King Lear.
And as before, I said about King Lear, this is a reading of The Tempest.
It's not the meaning of The Tempest, which can be seen in a lot of different ways because Shakespeare was such a great artist that his plays are like life.
You can interpret it in different ways.
So you remember that King Lear is a total tragedy.
It's the tragedy of a regime ending before the people, the next people, are ready to take it over, which is why I compared it to this time when the regime of the baby boomers is basically coming to an end.
The lives of the baby boomers are coming to an end, but there's no one to replace them because no one has been taught the way to go forward.
And if you remember that what we saw in this was that as the regime crumbled, the culture fell away and people were reduced to a state of nature.
And we found out that that's not a good thing, that culture is an expression of the human soul.
And so what happens is that King Lear, who tries to hold on to his daughters, his three daughters love, insists that they love only him and tell him that they love him above all things.
And he tries to hold on to his kingly power.
Even as it's slipping away, he is slowly reduced to nothing, to the state of nature.
And the center of the play, as I pointed out, the kind of moral center of the play, if you will, is where he has finally lost all his power, lost all his loves.
He is nothing.
He is standing on a heath in a storm, impotently pretending, thinking that he is controlling, that he is giving orders to nature when obviously nature is completely indifferent to him as a human being.
So I'm just going to play that scene, which I didn't play last time.
Here is Lawrence Olivier playing King Lear out on the heath in the storm, one of the most famous scenes in all of literature.
This is cut for.
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!
Rage, blow, you cataracts and holocenos!
Spout and you have drenched our steeples round the cocks, you sulfurous and torture executing fires, for purgators to a creaming thunderbolts, singe my white hand, and thou, all quaking thunder, strike flat the thick rotundity of the world.
Strike flat the thick rotundity of the world.
He's given orders to nature, which of course we realize nature could care less, and he is just an old man out in a storm.
So now the tempest starts, and where does the tempest start?
It starts with a storm, right?
And it's a terrible storm at sea on a ship, and on that ship is a king, the king of Naples and his counselor.
And they are arguing with the boatswain who's trying to keep the ship together.
And the boatswain says, get away from here.
He says, what cares these roarers, the waves that are going to take the ship down?
He says, what care these roarers for the name of king?
And he says, if you can command, he says to his counselor, if you can command these elements to silence, then I'll stop working the boat.
In other words, we have to do the practical stuff.
You have no power over nature.
So it's the same scene, essentially.
And it's as if if you think about it, the plot line of Lear, which is going through, you know, the plot line goes through event and event and event and is heading off to this terrible tragedy.
It's as if suddenly the plot line had gone off into the multiverse.
Another version of this plot, an alternative version of this plot, had gone into the tempest.
I have to pause here for just a minute, just out total tangent.
My favorite line in the storm scene is when somebody compares a boat, says a boat is as leaky as an unstanched wench, meaning a girl who's having her period but doesn't have anything to stanch it with, doesn't have a sanitary cloth to stanch it with.
And I always love this in Shakespeare, is in the midst of this high poetry, is always this incredible earthiness.
And I just think of what will the sensitivity editors who have destroyed Ian Fleming and destroyed Roald Dahl and want to destroy Agatha Christie, what would they make of an unstanched winch?
You know, it always makes me laugh in the 1936 movie of Romeo and Juliet, which is after the Hayes office, the censors come in.
There's a line in that, and I'm quoting this from memory, so it won't be right, but there's a line where Mercutio says something about a woman, her quivering thighs, and the domain adjacent thereto.
In other words, her sex.
And I always think, well, the Hayes office probably didn't understand the Elizabethan English there.
So I always love those moments.
All right, but that's my own little grotesque tangent.
So, same point as the King Lear scene.
It opens with the Heath scene, the storm scene, except it's different.
So we've gone off on a multiverse tangent into an alternative version of this.
And what happens?
The ship goes down and we cut to the magic island that they're near, where is the magician who's the lead of the show, Prospero.
And we find out that he is doing it all.
He's controlling the storm.
He's made the storm.
He's made the ship sink.
He's made the people on the ship make it to safety when they otherwise would have been killed.
So everything we've learned from King Lear and everything we've learned on this ship, that the king has no power, that man has no power over nature, that man can't control the elements, that man can't control life.
Life is out of his control, suddenly it's untrue.
We have a magician who is controlling it all.
And so we realize this alternate multiverse King Lear that we've gone into is the world of art, that this is an artist.
We are living in his imagination.
And that means that when we see all this story that plays out, it's really unfolding in some way in his mind, right?
It's what's called a psychomache, which is a battle between the psychic elements and the single human mind.
So it's a story about people, but at the same time, it can be read also as something that is going on in his imagination, because everything that an artist creates comes out of his imagination.
All his characters, men, women, good guys, bad guys, they're all him or her in some way.
And this is why the tragedy, The Tempest, is not a tragedy like King Lear.
It's what's called a comedy of grace because it takes place out of the world, which is a tragic world, and it takes place in the artist's imagination.
So to tell you the story very, very briefly, Prospero, the magician, is an exiled duke of Milan.
While he was reading in his books, he got so hooked on the liberal arts and so focused on the liberal arts that his brother, Antonio, stole his dukedom and became the Duke of Milan and had him exiled with the power of the King of Naples behind him.
And they sent him off and he wound up by Providence on this island living for 12 years with his daughter Miranda.
And he's angry about it.
Now his daughter is in her teens, very beautiful, lovely maid, and he is angry about this.
And now by Providence, all his enemies, his brother, the king of Milan, have come by in the ship, and so he has shipwrecked them and brought them all to his island.
And he's living there where he controls all these spirits.
There are two key spirits that he controls.
One is named Ariel, who is a kind of creative sprite, and one is named Caliban, which is an anagram for a cannibal, who is a hungering monster, right?
He's the child of a witch, and he's this hunkering monster.
And so you can almost think about it.
This is a little simplistic, but you can think of Ariel as his spirit and Calaban as his flesh, right?
These are all parts of things in his mind.
And Prospero and Miranda treated Calaban kindly until Caliban tried to rape Miranda.
He said, if I had succeeded, I would have peopled the island with Calibans.
He wanted to just make more of himself because that's what the flesh wants to do.
And so Prospero uses Ariel to control all the people on the island.
And they're plotting against him.
Caliban finds two drunkards and convinces them to kill Prospero.
These other guys, the king of Naples and the Duke of Milan, his brother, are the people the Duke of Milan is plotting against the King of Naples.
So there's all these plots going on and Ariel is using spirits and effects and music and all this to control them all because they're all taking place in the imagination of the artist.
One of the people that he controls is the king of Naples son, the prince of Naples, who is named Ferdinand, and he comes to see Miranda.
Prospero brings him to see Miranda and the two of them fall madly in love with each other on the spot.
So if we know that nature is not our friend, but culture is man acting for good, basically is bringing morality and justice and mercy into the world, what do you expect Miranda's father to do when she meets the man she loves and he approves of him?
That's what he does.
He takes Ferdinand prisoner and begins to force him to work at slave labor in order to understand what Miranda is worth.
So he doesn't want him to take her lightly.
He wants to teach him, to train him in the cultural norms and restrictions that make marriage work.
So he said, do you remember Mr. Miyagi in the Karate Kid?
He makes him wax the car, wax on, wax off, and that movement of the hand becomes the first move of his karate.
And the kid keeps saying, why am I waxing your car?
And he just says, just wax the car.
That is what Prospero does to Ferdinand, the Prince of Naples.
He forces him to carry wood.
He's carrying wood.
And Ferdinand doesn't like this.
He's a prince.
He thinks he's the king because he thinks his father has drowned.
And so he talks to Miranda.
He's carrying this wood.
And he says, I am, in my condition, a prince, Miranda.
I do think a king.
And he says, I would no more endure this wooden slavery than to suffer the fresh fly to blow in my mouth.
Hear my soul speak.
The very instant that I saw you, did my heart fly to your service.
There resides to make me slave to it.
And for your sake am I this patient logman?
He is learning that love is worth serving.
He is in service of love.
Now, ultimately, when Ferdinand has learned this lesson and he's ready, Prospero says, here is my daughter, and I want you to love them.
Love her.
And he says, so he does the opposite of King Lear, King Lear, who wants to hold on to all his daughter's love.
He surrenders his daughter's love.
But he says to Ferdinand, if thou dost break her virgin knot before all sanctimonious ceremonies may with full and holy right be ministered, then their marriage will be cursed.
So stay to the culture.
Keep in the cultural norms that enforce morality.
And so he agrees to this.
He's not going to have sex with her before marriage.
And he's teaching him, wax on, wax off.
This is how you have a moral marriage.
So to celebrate their betrothal, he summons his spirits and he puts on a show.
Now I have to explain something about marriage in a psychomache and something that's going on in his head.
It's not just two people getting together.
It is also the male and female part of an individual human being coming together, the yin and yang.
This is one of the things that transgenderism gets all wrong.
We do all have part of the other sex in us.
Of course we do.
Men are ambitious and aggressive, but they want to have that restraint on them.
And Shakespeare understands that this is what Christianity is.
It is bringing those things together.
That's why in The Merchant of Venice, the person who makes the quality of mercy speech is Portia, a woman dressed as a man.
And Shakespeare is saying there is an element of bringing the self together, the yin and yang of a man together in Christianity.
It's a huge subject, but just it's something that happens in real life, that marriage gives you, as a marriage, the two of you have that yin and yang together, and it helps you see the world in three dimensions instead of only two.
And that's why we love one another instead of fight with one another and bring each other's ideas into our lives and not keep them out.
So he puts on a show bringing the spirits together, and he has the goddess of marriage, Juno, and the goddess of fertility series all are portrayed, and Venus is there in absentia because she's described, but she isn't there because they're not ready to have sex yet, so they don't have Venus there.
Bringing Spirits Together00:11:17
And when the mask is over, he sends the spirits away, and this is what he tells them.
This is a very famous speech.
It's sometimes referred to as Shakespeare's Goodbye to the Theater because The Tempest is the last play he ever wrote on his own, as far as we know.
And this is what he says after the show.
This is cut five.
Our revels now are ended.
These are actors, as I foretold you.
We're all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air.
And like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, your which it inherit shall dissolve.
And like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
Beautiful, beautiful speech, like I said, sometimes called Shakespeare's Goodbye to the theater.
What he's saying is, everything you just saw before you, this performance, is vanishing just as life will vanish, because this thing is taking place in his imagination, and he's saying that life also lives in your imagination, which is what I keep telling you, that the stone you knock your foot on, the love that you feel, the beauty that you see, all of those are yours.
They are yours.
They are in collaboration with reality.
They can be deluded and then you go astray.
But if you see them right and if you train your mind to them, they are a creation of your mind, everything, all of the world.
And the beautiful thing about this is when you get it right, when you get it.
That's why Coleridge felt that Jesus was the model for this.
This was what he was showing you.
This is how you get it right.
And when you get it right, you have this beautiful life, even in sorrow, even in tragedy.
And where does this all lead?
He says, we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with the sleep.
And as we know, we do not know what dreams may come after we sleep.
But also, if we are dreamed, then someone must be dreaming us.
We are such stuff as dreams are made of.
So someone must be dreaming of us.
We are living.
We are part of the creation of another mind, a greater mind than ours.
And that is the mind we are trying to imitate as we live.
So what does that look like?
Well, all these villains who have ruined his life come finally into Prospero's camp.
And what does he do?
He forgives them.
And it's an amazing act, amazing act.
Ariel says to him, you've got them charmed so strongly that if you saw them, your affections would become tender.
And Prospero says, do you think so?
And Ariel says, mine would, if I were human.
And Prospero says, and mine shall.
I shall.
I will not punish them anymore, not one frown further.
And he forgives them.
He lets them go.
And now the play comes to an end, you know, with all the people reconciled and Prospero heading back to Milan to become Duke again.
And he puts off all of his clothes and he approaches the audience and he says goodbye.
And this is that speech.
It's cut seven.
Gentle breath of yours, my sails must fill, or else my project fails, which was to please.
Now I want spirits to enforce art to enchant.
And my ending is despair, unless I be relieved by prayer, which pierces so that it assaults mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set me free.
What he's saying at the end is that if you don't accept this play, I'm stuck here on this island because the play is over now and I'll never get off the island because the play has ceased unless the play continues in your mind.
And he asks you to applaud and then he'll know that he has pleased you and the play will go on living with you.
And he compares this to the forgiveness that he has shown.
If you have taken his message of forgiveness and unifying yourself and taking all the different parts of yourself and making them into a unity, if you have taken that message in by bringing the play into yourself, then you become a creative person.
The arts are there for you.
They are there to school you in bringing all the disparate parts of yourself together, all the anger in yourself, all the people that you can't forgive, like your father and mother who become enemies in your mind, who are yelling at you in your mind.
If you can let them go and bring them into a unity of self, you will be free.
And he says, he compares this to forgiveness.
Bringing yourself together is an act of forgiveness, just like forgiving the people outside.
And he says, as you from crimes would pardon be, let your indulgence, which is the Catholic means of getting forgiveness, set me free.
And he wants you to set him to keep living in your mind.
The tragedy of King Lear is still going to unfold in the outer world.
History will remain tragic.
Politics will remain tragic.
But you are not a tragedy.
Your inner life is not a tragedy, even in tragic circumstances.
Your inner life is a journey through forgiveness and mercy into an inner life that looks like God's.
It looks like yours specifically, your version of it, but it looks like God's.
If you travel through truth and beauty and forgiveness, you will reach what is called in Christianity the kingdom of heaven.
And mercy itself, he says, prayer pierces mercy itself.
Mercy itself is God, and God is the one king whose reign never ends.
And that's what the Tempest is about.
And it takes place in an alternative version of history, of tragic history, which is you.
All right, I only have half time, the time I usually have for the mailbag, so I'm only going to do A-I-L-B, the Elbe part of it.
The rest of you will then, those of you who are not subscribers, will be plunged into the Clavenless week where there is great wailing, gnashing of teeth, darkness, climbing over broken glass.
I think we have a backstage this week, so maybe that'll get you through, but probably not.
But you could just become a member.
You could go and use code Clavin at checkout from Daily Wire.
What is it?
DailyWire.com slash subscribe and use code Clavin at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.
That would give you at least some more of the members block, which is also coming up.
But right now, at least, we have a very brief Elb, the mailbag.
I came down because I heard there was chocolate chip ice cream.
Yeah!
Oh, Lord, we're doomed.
All right.
You know, I'm going to do some more mailbag questions in the members block.
But right now, we'll do a couple of quick ones.
From Joe, simply asked, does the Bible contain pornographic material?
In 2022, a new law was passed in the state of Utah that made it much easier to ban pornographic material from public school libraries.
We must have done something right because the woke cult is now accusing the Bible of having pornographic material and has submitted it to be reviewed.
Also, should the Bible be available in public school libraries?
Thanks for the laughs, best show on Daily Wire.
That goes without saying.
No, the Bible does not have any pornographic material.
It has many, many base and unpleasant and human things happen.
It has incest in it.
It has rape.
It has murder.
It has child killing.
It has all kinds of terrible things in it.
But pornography is specifically written to titillate without humanity.
That is what pornography is.
It is the movement of shapes to stimulate either written shapes or visual shape to stimulate you sexually and do nothing else and connect you in no other way to your humanity.
And there's nothing in the Bible like that.
The Song of Solomon is very sensual, but it is filled with love and filled with humanity.
And so it's not like that at all.
From Dan, he says, I have a question concerning friendship.
I've had a friendship for the last five years.
He's an ardent atheist and sort of lefty.
I've realized that we have virtually nothing in common.
Our relationship is built upon me trying to have a friendly debate and him trying to have an argument for the sake of an argument.
My question is, being a devout Christian, I know God calls us to love our enemies and to evangelize.
I feel like I would be abandoning a friend and not holding to God's word by cutting off the friendship.
But on the other hand, I recognize there's a lot about this friendship that is kind of toxic.
Should I bear this cross and continue to try and be a light in his darkness and bring him up?
Or should I jump the sinking ship to avoid being pulled down by him?
Thanks for reading.
Yeah, no, I think you're reading the situation wrong.
I think that a relationship can get toxic and a friendship can simply die, simply go as far as it's going to go.
There's no reason to say, I renounce thee and I banish thee from my life.
But you can simply let it go in its natural direction and let it die.
Don't call as often.
Don't hang around as often.
Don't let those arguments start.
And eventually it'll just go away.
I mean, I think that friendships do have a lifetime.
Some of them have a lifetime as long as your lifetime, which is a very beautiful thing.
But some of them are good for a season and then they end.
It is not necessarily Christian act to continue, especially if it's getting toxic, which it sounds like it is.
And I mean, I think that that's that, you know, that's the real problem is the toxicity of it.
And it sounds like you're on a kind of little train track that's not going anywhere.
All right.
I have two questions from women, and I want to address something about women that I read about.
I'm going to put those in the members block.
A really interesting article that was in the American Mind called, it's something like, I'm saying from memory, but it was something like Thwarted Mommy Mind.
And it goes along with some of the mail-bag questions, so we're going to answer them there.
But for the rest of you, it is the Clavenless Week.
The Clavenless Week is upon you.
This has been a tough week politically, but it does not have to be a tough week inside.
That is the point of, you know, as I always, as I've told you before, Jesus didn't come to save the world.
He came to save you.
Art is not there to save the world.
Art is there for you.
You are the one who can change so that every day is joyful.
And by that, I mean every day is lived with gusto, even when there's tragedy and heartbreak all around you.
It's a tough thing to call up in yourself, but you can do it.
And we all can do it.
And we all should do it.
And until next Friday, I will see those of you who are not subscribers.