Ep. 1133 – The Shame of Pride dissects Uganda’s death penalty for "homosexual child molesters" as a cynical tourism stunt, mocking Disney’s Little Mermaid remake and Target’s Pride Month displays while framing transgender ideology as a symptom of Kantian idealism and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Thomas Williams warns of escalating Christian persecution, from FBI raids on Latin Mass attendees to Pope Francis’ perceived weakness against China and Islam. The episode ties modern cultural decline—rising female depression, media bias—to a 500-year-old rejection of faith, culminating in a "moral tsunami" of lies shielding society from shame. [Automatically generated summary]
Disneyland has assigned a mustachio drag queen to play a fairy godmother at its princess dress shop for little girls.
And Uganda has passed a law instituting the death penalty for homosexual child molesters, making it almost impossible to tell which one is a savage hellhole and which is the happiest place on earth.
Politicians as far to the right as Ted Cruz and as far gone in dementia and vanality as Joe Biden have condemned the Uganda law, though they admit Uganda is cheaper to get into than Disneyland and the lines are shorter.
The government of Uganda, meanwhile, is hoping to feature images of Disneyland in its tourism advertisements and is testing out different slogans, such as, visit beautiful Uganda.
We may be oppressive and violent, but at least we put homosexual child molesters to death.
Or come to Uganda.
It may be the armpit of the universe, but at least you won't have to wait online two hours to have your children corrupted.
Or, why not vacation in Uganda?
Sure, our laws are intolerant and draconian, but at least we didn't ruin the little mermaid with a crappy remake.
The Uganda Tourism Board is also hoping to sign a deal with the NFL so that at the end of the Super Bowl, the winning quarterback will announce to the crowd, after this, I'm going to Uganda because I sure as hell don't want my kids anywhere near Disneyland.
Disney spokesman Pansy Groomer, don't blame me, that's the guy's name, Disney spokesman Pansy Groomer condemned Uganda's tourism campaign in a statement delivered to a 10-year-old boy in a Disneyland men's room, saying, quote, Here at Disney,
we remain deeply committed to using wholesome franchises created in the past by people with 10 times our talent to lure families into a cesspit of sexual deviance and disorder so that their children can one day grow up to live in a world where demons chase them through pits of fire for all eternity.
After all, that's what our founder, Walt Disney, would have wanted had he been an evil psychopath, unquote.
Mr. Groomer also defended the company's decision to cast black actress Haley Bailey as the formerly white Little Mermaid in the remake, saying he loved Haley's performances in Monster's Ball and Euphoria.
When Mr. Groomer was told that those performances were by two entirely different black actresses, he was so humiliated he decided to commit suicide by moving to Uganda.
To be fair, Disney is not the only American company that has taken upon itself the nearly impossible task of making Uganda look good.
Retail giant Target recently decided to celebrate Pride Month with a display of transgender children's clothing designed by a Satanist.
Facing a protest boycott, Target said the children's clothing was not for children when it was, claimed that customers were attacking store staff when they weren't, put the clothing in the back of the store where, strangely, it continued to be just as evil as it was in the front of the store, and finally said they'd remove the clothing altogether, though who can say, because they lie about everything and are evil.
Target spokesman Pansy Groomer, and again, don't blame me, Target spokesman Pansy Groomer released a statement to a 10-year-old boy in a men's room in Disneyland saying, quote, we at Target are deeply committed to pretending to give a rat's ass about our customers' values while we continue to look for opportunities to undermine and destroy them, unquote.
Reacting to the controversy, the Wall Street Journal ran yet another editorial calling for conservatives to end the culture war against American business in the same way Czechoslovakia ended World War II against Germany.
The journal editorial said, quote, it's time to remember that the business of America is business, and the business of business is sexually corrupting children, and the business of sexually corrupted children is being butchered by mentally ill adults, and the business of mentally ill adults is working at Disneyland, unquote.
On the positive side, there are still those of us who would like to see Americans of all different kinds treat each other with tolerance and kindness while still respecting and elevating the traditional family values that honor creation and keep free countries free.
Sexually Corrupting Children00:09:24
And in the hopes of rediscovering that nation of greater generosity and moderation and common sense, we're moving to Uganda.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoora.
All right, happy Pride Month.
We are back laughing our way through the tribulation.
This episode of the show is brought to you by Moink.
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So, wow, this is a good day.
We have had a really, really wonderful.
We had a dramatic night last night as we went on to celebrate a year's anniversary of Matt Walsh's film, What is a Woman?
A lot of suspense and drama going on.
But right now, the movie had something like 40 million views on Twitter.
But I will talk about that.
I'll tell you all about it.
And we will also talk about this month dedicated to the Queen of Sins and the Sin of Queens, which is Pride.
And we're going to talk about transgenderism in a way, I promise you, I know everybody's talking about it, but you will hear things on this show today that you have not heard anywhere else.
Plus, the delightful Faith Moore, who is possibly the world's greatest expert on Disney princesses, will be here to serve up the little mermaid with a parmesan crust and a lemon garlic sauce.
Faith will also explain how she can be related to both me and Spencer Clavin when Spencer and I are no relation at all.
Remember that from now on, we will be taking questions, not on the mailbag, but at clavinclapbacks at dailywire.com.
That's Clavin with a K-L-A-V-A-N and clapbacks, K-L-A-P-B-A-C-K-S, at dailywire.com.
There's an email address.
Send them there.
We'd like to hear some more comments on the show.
What you think of the show content, whether you think that I said something that's incorrect or you're more likely to be right by thinking I said something correct, let us know.
This is also a good time to subscribe to my personal YouTube channel, the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
You will get exclusive content thrown through your window tied to a brick, which, okay, that's maybe not the best way, but it's fast.
And if you leave a comment and the comment could be marked hateful on the old Twitter, we will read that comment on the air because we are as hateful as it's possible to be.
Today's hateful comment is from Michael Bovey.
He says, don't give yourself so much credit, Clavin.
The comedy writes itself.
Reality should sue you for plagiarism.
Michael, I could not agree with you more.
Every week, I think, how am I going to come up with another idea?
And then I open the paper and think, oh, never mind.
So unbelievable drama last night as we went to air on Twitter, What is a Woman?
I'll tell you all about it, the whole story about it, but just suffices to say, at first, we thought it was going to be completely suppressed.
You couldn't share it.
You couldn't retweet it.
You couldn't see it half the time.
Now, like I said, it's got 40 million views.
And that's as I'm talking to you.
By the time you hear this, it might have many, many more.
And the reason this is interesting is the reason it's interesting that they labeled it hateful is because What is a woman is about 95 minutes long, which may be the longest period of time Matt Walsh has ever gone without being hateful.
I think with a world Matt Walsh record of not saying one hateful thing.
He didn't say anything.
He just let people talk and the lie of the transgender movement exposed itself.
And that, I think, is the hardest thing for people to take.
That's why he's getting death threats and hate mail.
And, you know, that's just from me.
And I kind of like the guy, but imagine what he's getting from the alphabet crowd.
Because it's like I said to you last week, no one believes the lie.
They already know in their heart of hearts that these lies are untrue, that they're lies.
They've just convinced themselves that the lie makes them virtuous.
It makes them virtuous to say this, so they've convinced themselves they will believe the lie even when they don't.
This is all the lies.
Not just men can become women, but gay people are proud of being gay.
Fat people are attractive and healthy.
People are afraid of black males because they're racist instead of the fact that a minority of black males can commit an inordinate amount of the crime in this country.
What we didn't talk about last night, last week, I mean, was the wages of lies, where lies lead.
And the thing is, you know, slowly over time, and you've kind of watched this unfold, I've become convinced that there is something in the universe, something in the spiritual universe that acts very much like Satan, by which I mean a conscious force bent on destroying human happiness and decency.
And I don't know what this thing looks like to the eye of God.
I don't know what it is in itself, but I know in our lives, in human lives, it operates just exactly like a horned red guy with cloven feet and a forked tail.
And so that's the way I'm going to talk about it.
And this force, the devil, who is called the father of lies, operates, he always gets to you through your broken places, the places where you're in pain.
And he always tells you that something, he's going to give you something that's going to heal that break when it's really going to do exactly the opposite of what he tells you it's going to do.
So if you feel weak, he tells you that getting angry is going to make you strong when in fact getting angry just makes you easy to manipulate.
If you're in pain, he tells you drugs or promiscuous sex or money will ease the pain and mistreating women will make you feel more like a man.
But the most important thing he is usually telling you is if you live in lies, it will protect you from pain and from shame.
It will protect you from looking at yourself and seeing yourself as you know deep down that you are, as we all are, broken and sinful and kind of the disturbing people.
And that's what the people were trying to do last night.
Once you get wrapped up into that lie, the lie blinds you to the evil you're doing and the evil you've done, and it hides from you the fact that you have these things in you.
And so you become terrified of waking up.
You don't want to wake up and you have to double down on the lie to keep from feeling the terrible shame you will feel because of the evil you've already done under the influence of the lie.
And so you don't want to be crushed by shame.
So instead you double down on the lie.
You don't just say, oh, I regret my abortion.
You say, no, I shout my abortion.
Abortion is great.
You don't have destructive philosophy.
Even no matter how many people get hurt, you don't change your philosophy.
You don't apologize to your wife for the thing that you knew you shouldn't have done.
Instead, you explain to her why it's all your fault.
You double down and you get worse and worse and worse, which is what this fellow, who we will call Satan, plans.
That's what he wants.
He wants you to keep going down that road.
And when you look around, when we look around, all the evidence that we need is around us that something is terribly wrong.
Something in our culture has gone terribly wrong.
Women are increasingly miserable.
Three out of five high school girls experience persistent depression.
Three out of five, this isn't just passing mood swings.
This is three out of five.
If you Google the sorrow, the misery of women, the increasing misery of women, every headline that comes up says the paradox of female unhappiness.
How can it be that women have feminism and yet, and yet they're unhappy?
It never occurs to anyone to say women are happy because they have feminism.
And again, feminism identifies problems that are real.
I'm not denying that.
It comes up with solutions that are destructive and anti-female.
You know, right now, the gap between women's intended number of children, the number of children women want to have, and the women that they, the number of children that they're actually having, has widened.
Researchers have found that by the time women born in the late 1980s were in their early 30s, they had given birth on average to about one child less than they planned.
That's roughly double the size of the shortfall for women born two decades earlier.
So rapidly, the number of children is dropping, even though women would like to have the children.
It's not that they're saying we don't want children.
Some of them are, of course, but that's not what's happening.
It's that they are not, social forces get in the way.
Among those social forces, they can't buy a house because the economy gets worse and worse the more we keep giving things away for free, the more we go into debt, and they can't afford child care.
They can't afford childcare whether we're paying student loans, which are going to pay administrative people who just make colleges worse.
They don't do anything good.
These are the people who bring in equity and who cause riots when people like me go to speak.
It's not the students who spark that stuff off.
It's the administration.
And many men now lack the earning power to be providers.
And women who have greater education and economic status can't find men who are more powerful than they are, which is what they want.
So the central purpose of our incarnate selves is to make more selves, and yet feminism has made it harder and harder, and women are getting more and more depressed.
Media's Leftward Spiral00:03:08
And we can't admit that this is the problem because no one wants to admit the evil that we've done.
And the other perfect example of this is our lovable news media.
They have done so much evil, but they can't change.
Every week I get this email from the Washington Post.
We have these subscriptions that the Daily Wire gives us so we can read all the papers, and I do.
And every week I get this email from the Washington Post called The Weakened Ideas, which is like the weakened ideas from the Washington Post is like the weakened situational ethics from Darth Vader.
You know, it's like people haven't had a different idea.
But this week, the ideas email starts with a column by a guy named Perry Bacon.
And it says, seven news outlets that are reimagining political journalism in smart ways.
Okay, and I think, all right, I'll bite.
Here's how it begins.
Political journalism.
Listen carefully.
I'm just reading this word for word.
Political journalism is in crisis.
Over the past few months, BuzzFeed News, 538, Vice, and a number of other outlets that specialize in political news have substantially cut staffing and coverage.
Even CNN and the Washington Post have laid off journalists.
And the political media is struggling to cover an increasingly radical Republican Party without seeming to be on the side of the Democrats.
Now, of course, if you were paying attention, you realize all the journals he mentioned are far-left journals that nobody wants to listen to because they're far-left journals.
And when he then goes on to describe the seven outlets that are changing in smart ways, they are all just getting more and more left-wing.
Every single one of them.
There are no exceptions.
They're all left-wing.
And of course, he's talking about the Democrats, how radical the Republicans are.
Well, the Democrats are the ones who want to abort babies a second before they're born.
They send the FBI to raid the homes of people who protest those abortions.
They turned the invasion of Afghanistan into an opportunity to sell gay rights in a deeply Muslim country that was trying to fight off the Taliban, which may have been the stupidest piece of military strategy since the charge of the light brigade.
They not only want to ensure that children can be butchered in the name of this completely scientific, unscientific idea of transgenderism, but their media minions try to censor anyone who disagrees and they send the IRS to harass reporters who uncover the censorship.
But we Republicans, the right, are the radical ones.
He can't even see it.
He can't admit it because he's so steeped in the lie and the lies that the media tells, these left-wing media tells, have done tremendous evil.
The evil that these lies do by pretending to be telling the straight truth, but demonizing Republicans while hiding and censoring information that would be damaging to Democrats.
And that's what they do.
That is the business the Washington Post is in and all of these things are in.
The problem with that is it gives ordinary left-wingers, ordinary people who are not bad people, but they're left-wingers, gives them the freedom and permission to demonize their neighbors who are on the right.
That's what they're being told every day.
These people don't disagree with you because they have other ideas.
They disagree with you because they're evil.
And what does that do to the right?
Why We Left Twitter00:02:19
It makes us furious, right?
I mean, once you're being called by everybody around you a Nazi and a white supremacist and a phobiophobic phobe, whatever they call you, whatever phobia they call you, then you start to get angry and you start to hate on persons instead of battling the war of ideas.
And, you know, you get angry and you think the anger is going to compensate for your feeling of being attacked, but instead the anger drags you down.
So today, we're not going to do that.
We're going to talk about transgenderism, which I do think is causing tremendous evil in the world.
But we're not going to get angry and we're going to talk about something really different, which is the spiritual meaning of transgenderism, the spiritual meaning that is being perverted, a very beautiful spiritual thing that is being perverted to get at the evil that transgenderism is doing.
And because that's where lies always lead.
They lead to evil.
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So let me tell you about what happened with Twitter.
Most of you, many of you may have heard the story, and I'll just, I'll make it quick so I'm not repeating things.
But basically, the God King, Jeremy, and Josh from Legal, cut a deal.
I want to stop for just a minute and say I'm so proud of these guys.
I really am.
Jeremy and Ben and Matt and our legal team and Elon Musk too, who really came through in a big way and showed that he was as good as his word.
He is now really solidly on the side of free speech.
And I'll tell you what I think happened.
Some of this I don't know, but I'll tell you what I think happened.
But the God King and Josh from Legal and the rest of the team negotiated a deal with Twitter to celebrate one year of What is a Woman by releasing the film on Twitter for 24 hours for free.
And the deal was in place.
It was all worked out.
And then Twitter asked to see the film saying, we just want to be able to field protests.
We want to know what's in us.
We can field protests.
They watched the film and then they came back and said, it's hate speech.
We're banning it.
We're going to throttle it.
We're not going to spread it.
We're not going to let anybody share it.
Because, and the reason they gave was there were two incidents where someone, not Matt, someone called somebody else by the proper pronoun, which was, as it's called, misgendering, right?
Because they called, they call it misgendering because you're calling a girl Miss instead of Mr. I'm joking.
But anyway, it's like one of it was a guy calling his 14-year-old daughter she because she was his daughter and the other was a scene between a confrontation.
But it wasn't what Walsh did.
It was just something that was in this documentary.
So we complained.
We got back and forth.
They gave us the usual, when people are censoring, they know they're doing the wrong thing.
They know they're doing wickedness.
And so they never come out and say, straight, we're censoring you.
They always come up with all this stuff.
It's hate speech.
It violates our policy, which by the way, misgendering no longer does violate Twitter policy.
But what they said is, well, we don't list it anymore, but it's still hate speech.
So it falls under that category.
So Elon Musk came out and said, well, this is a mistake.
Several people have made a mistake.
But then when we went back to Twitter Trust and Safety, these are the censors, as a very Orwellian name, Twitter Trust and Safety.
They said, well, Elon didn't tell us that it was a mistake.
He didn't tell us to redo it.
So we're still going to cancel it.
We're still going to throttle it.
And so we all go in the air, and all of us, Ben and Candace, Knowles and Jordan Peterson, we're all there.
And we don't know what's going to happen.
But we just start talking.
And then out of the blue, as we're talking, Ella Irwin, the woman who heads Trust and Safety, which is the department that is doing this to us, we don't know.
She apparently resigned.
We don't know why.
We haven't heard the inside story.
But it sounded to me like she was at war with Elon Musk, who was trying to take this a little bit more lightly.
He wasn't completely supporting us.
He was just saying, you know, well, it's sensitive material, but we should release it.
We'll release it, but we won't sponsor it.
He sounded like he was trying to find a compromise with his people.
But Ella Irwin just walked out.
So we thought, gee, maybe we've won this fight.
So we released the film.
We were having a pre-film conversation.
We released the film.
It comes out.
It's throttled.
Just dead.
You can't find it.
You can't retweet it.
You can't share it.
It is gone.
And we don't know why.
And this is what happens last night.
This is when I went to bed.
This was the state of things.
And then as I'm coming in to work this morning, I see Elon himself tweet out the film with a note, every parent should watch this.
So my guess is that he hadn't watched the film.
You know, he's a busy guy.
He's got like 50 companies, right?
So he's a busy guy.
My feeling was he hadn't watched the film because like I said, the film is not hateful.
And I say that, it has Walsh in it, and yet it's not hateful.
I know that sounds like some kind of contradiction in terms, but still, still, it is absolutely true.
This is a factual film that just lets people expose themselves by asking them deadpan questions.
But this is a huge win for free speech because it means that Elon is as good as his word and it means that he is going to transform this site into something where people can actually have this conversation, actually debate things.
And that's an amazing thing in this current attitude because we've got this Maoist globalist system.
That's what woke is.
It's an attempt to make everybody a global slave, a slave to this global power base.
It is what it is.
And this is saying, no, we have a system in our country where people are free to say what they want to say.
So this stuff has turned everything.
This transgenderism is part of a moral tsunami, a moral fog that has fallen over our country.
I don't, you know, it's funny.
I don't, politics doesn't bother me.
A lot of people getting all upset about this debt ceiling thing, which I thought Kevin McCarthy actually did a good job.
It's a crappy deal, but it's the best deal he could get.
I thought good for him.
He got a, you know, this job.
And people are going, no, we've got to fight them.
We've got to get rid of Kevin McCarthy.
That's ridiculous.
That's just politics.
But evil is different.
Evil can really destroy a country.
Politics, you can survive a lot of bad politics and all politics.
It's pretty bad.
But now, Target Corporation, which is still putting up all this pride stuff that their customers don't want.
But according to Fox News, they also were partnering with a K-12 education group, which focuses on getting districts to adopt policies that will keep parents in the dark on their child's in-school gender transition, providing sexually explicit books to schools for free and integrating gender ideology at all levels of curriculum in public schools.
So when you go in there and buy a t-shirt or whatever you buy in Target, you are sending money to these people who are hiding their mistreatment of children, their grooming of children from their parents.
So I want to talk about how we got here and I want to talk about what I think it means.
And I know it's a little different kind of a show.
The news is the news, but this is evil.
And I think we really have to get our heads around this.
I believe very strongly that we are at the nadir, the bottom of an arc that started in the West 500 years ago, which is when there was a scientific revolution and people began to lose their faith.
And this was not evil.
This was not people going, you know, like, ah, once I get rid of God, I'll be able to sleep with anybody I want to.
They were sleeping with anybody they wanted to already.
They were human beings.
They were already sinning.
They were already doing all kinds of things.
It was painful for the West to lose its faith.
They didn't want to lose.
So many people, you know, you can read all this writing.
I was just rereading a wonderful poem by Tennyson called Immemorium about a friend of his who died.
And he's racked by the fact that all the science books he's reading are undermining his faith in the afterlife.
And he doesn't know if his friend is still with him somewhere.
And the reason the science did this was because it showed that the world did not work the way the people who wrote the Bible thought it did.
The sun can't stand still in the sky because the sun doesn't move in the sky the way the people who wrote the Bible in those days thought it did.
The world was older than the people who wrote the Bible thought it was.
And the fact that whole species had vanished from the earth made it hard to believe in God's goodness.
Tennyson in this poem says nature is red in tooth and claw.
And it was hard to believe in a good God who had built a system where entire species were wiped out in order to bring us forward.
Now, I read a lot of science books, a lot of popular science.
I'm not a scientist.
And I have faith, and I read the Bible, and nothing in the Bible makes me doubt my faith.
In fact, it encourages my faith.
But I was born into a world of these scientific discoveries.
They didn't come out of the blue and hit me from, you know, from out of nowhere and suddenly think, suddenly transformed the whole way I saw the world.
There wasn't that much difference between the way a guy in 1400, 1300 saw the world and the way the people who read the Bible saw the world.
There is a big difference between the way I see the world and the way the Bible people saw the world.
And remember, the Bible was written by men.
It was inspired by God, but it was written by men who wrote it in the knowledge that they had at the time.
So faith began to die, and it was not something anybody could help.
It was just people wanted to hold their faith, but they couldn't.
They were losing their faith.
And people start to think about what this meant.
And one of the earliest people to think about it, I've talked about him a lot because I think he's an extraordinarily important philosopher, but don't read him because he's pornographic and horrible.
But the Marquis de Sade, where we get the word sadism, said, oh, God is dead.
There's no morality.
Nature is all about power and therefore and power and sex.
And so you should just rape people because that's enjoyable and there's no God to punish you.
So what difference does it make?
That's basically what he said.
That's where we get the word sadism.
Now, other philosophers were not as honest as the Marquis de Sade, and they wanted to sort of keep the Christian moral system knowing that Christ was going out of the world, that their faith in Christ was gone.
And a lot of this, you know, this was especially true in Germany.
I wrote a book called The Truth and Beauty, which talks about how the English poets of that time dealt with this issue because I thought poetry got closer to the truth because it not only dealt with philosophy, the truth, but it also dealt with beauty.
And I think that you need both truth and beauty.
And the Germans thought that too, but their philosophers were more powerful than their poets.
In Britain, I think their poets were more brilliant than their philosophers.
And so in Germany, there was a philosopher who came up with a brilliant, brilliant insight.
When they started to realize that a lot of the things that we thought were true were not true, they started to realize that a lot of what we saw was in our own heads, was subjective.
And the philosopher Immanuel Kant had this brilliant insight that there are forms in the human mind that force us to see things in a certain way.
We have to see things taking place in time.
We have to see things existing in space.
What is space?
We have no idea.
Nobody knows what space is.
We don't know what there is between one star and another.
You know, we just have to see space.
We have to experience things in time.
That may not be the way things really are.
And so what Kant said is, look, there is an objective reality.
There is a way things are.
He calls it things as they are.
But we don't see that.
We only see things as we know them.
And so I say this often because I believe Kant was absolutely right about this.
And people say, well, you only believe there's subjective truth, but isn't that an objective truth?
No, I believe there's an objective truth, but we experience it subjectively, okay?
And that means the difference there is it means that not everything we experience subjectively is true.
We can play it off objective truth and see if it works, right?
We can make a formula, but the formula may tell us a rocket's going to go to the moon, but we may miss the moon, then we know the formula is wrong.
And in the same way, I may think I see a unicorn, but I don't see a unicorn, and that will not test out when I experiment.
I can think that I'm fat when I'm not, if I have dysphoria about my weight.
I can think I love someone, but it turns out I only have a crush on them.
I can tell myself abortion is right because everybody around me is saying it's right.
I can tell myself that slavery is right because everybody around me is saying it's right, but it's not.
Those are illusions.
Those are things that we see subjectively that aren't true.
And the whole trick to life is aligning your subjective world with the objective world so that you actually can start to react to things as they really are.
Now, Kant's thinking changed the world.
It changed the way people think.
But other philosophers came after him, guys, you may not have heard of, guys like Fichte and Schlegel, who said, no, wait, if reality really is only in our mind, maybe that's the only reality there is.
Maybe everything is us.
This was called German idealism, right?
And they said, really, the only reality is the self.
They called it the ich because they were German, so everything had to sound like ich.
Ich basically means I, the I. There was only the self.
And if we want to experience full freedom, we have to free the self, become who we are, who we want to be, and not be chained by social constructs and false beliefs and religion and gender inequality.
Many of them were actually in favor of gender equality.
And these people are the people who were very much admired by Judith Butler, an unhappy lesbian academic who's at the heart of the transgender movement.
She's the one who wrote this book that I have read.
It's called Gender Trouble about drag queens.
It starts by being about drag queens, saying essentially, well, isn't all gender really just dress-up?
Because the only reality is the self, and the self can, the purpose of the self is to be free of all constructs, all these false constructs, which are just society imposing itself on you.
The idea that sex has a purpose in nature, that objectively sex has a purpose, a telos, that one kind of person might be created for one of the jobs of sex, and the other person created for other parts of that formula.
All of that was lost when God was lost.
Now, you may think, oh, well, why are you sitting here talking to me about German philosophy that happened in the 18th and 19th century?
This is where culture comes from.
It comes from people thinking.
It comes from people thinking and then expressing those thoughts in books, in poetry, in plays, and now movies, and all kinds of video games.
That's how culture is born.
And culture makes you who you are without your knowing it.
The fact that there was a guy named Immanuel Kant and that Judith Butler read Immanuel Kant and read Ficht and Schlegel and was enamored of them and was unhappy about her lesbianism, that is part of what has made you who you are.
All right, so this is the state of thought around the 18th and 19th century.
And in the 19th century, there was a novelist, one of the greatest of all novelists, Fyodor Dostoevsky.
And he was an Eastern Orthodox Christian.
He had suffered a great deal and he had become a Christian.
And he understood why this sort of thinking was going to be a disaster.
He wrote a book called The Brothers Karamazov.
It's one of the great classics of Russian literature.
And in it, there are different brothers, one who believes in God and one who is an atheist.
And one of them says, the one who's an atheist says this, for every separate person who believes neither in God nor in his own immortality, the moral law of nature ought to change immediately into the exact opposite of the former religious law.
And that egoism, even to the point of evildoing, should not only be permitted to man, but should be acknowledged as the necessary, the most reasonable, and all but the noblest result of his situation.
In other words, if you weren't supposed to lose yourself in Christ, you didn't have to lose yourself at all.
And you would serve yourself, and you would become exactly what the Marquis de Sadd said you would.
You would become essentially a sadist, somebody who only served himself no matter how much it hurt other people.
Without God, the Marquis de Saad is right.
The ich you create for yourself is going to turn out to be an evil monster.
Now, we have reached that place.
We have reached the place where this idea that who you are trumps everything.
Male and Female Spiritual Parts00:14:47
There is no idea that you have a debt to society.
There is no idea that you have a debt to reality.
There is only the idea that you must become who you are.
And you can see that Ivan and the brothers Karamazov was right.
Everything is turned upside down.
Racism is fine suddenly as long as it's our racism, as long as it's hating white people instead of black people.
Hatred is fine, as long as you're hating the right people.
Abuse of power is fine, as long as you're abusing the bad guys.
If the FBI is coming to the home of an anti-abortion person, that's fine.
The New York Times has no problem with that.
Speak truth to power.
No, no, no.
Not as long as the power is doing the right thing.
Now, there's something else the Marquis de Saud understood, and that is that it will all come down to sex, and I'll explain why.
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Now, obviously, there are people with evil motives doing evil things, but that's not why.
This is a natural flow of human thought that's been taking place for 500 years, and this is where it's gotten to.
The big mistake the German idealists make, Marquis de Sade didn't make it, but the big mistake the German idealists make, is that when you get rid of God, you don't free the self, you kill the self.
Because if there's no spirit, if we're not created out of spirit, then we're created out of matter and we are matter and that's all we are.
We have no spirit.
We're only flesh.
That is what almost all of us, I think, believe.
That is why churches closed down during COVID, because they don't believe in the spirit anymore.
They think they do, but they really just believe in making the world a better place, which Jesus never said it was going to be.
He never said the world was going to be a better place.
When I say that culture shapes you, even though you don't know it shapes you, sometimes listen to the things that you say.
Listen to what your heart feels too.
If you say, I had an adrenaline rush, instead of, I got excited.
If you say, I had a dopamine rush instead of I felt happy, if you say, I have depression as if it were some kind of illness, instead of I'm depressed, I am a depressed person.
And if you take a pill and now, hooray, you're not depressed.
And you think, well, now I'm not depressed.
This is great.
I just have to keep taking that pill.
If you believe, if I say, if I talk about God and I get letters like this sometimes where people say, stop talking about God because it's not convincing because I don't believe.
But if I said the same thing and put it in genetic terms, if I talked about, well, genes do this and genes, everybody would go, ah, ooh, that's so life-changing, because we've stopped believing in the spirit.
We just believe in the flesh.
Here is autistic crazy person and Davos intellectual Yuval Harari.
Yuval Harari is not a bad person, but this is how he's affected by it.
He says, quote, according to the life sciences, happiness and suffering are nothing but different balances of bodily sensations.
We never react to events in the outside world, but only to sensations in our own bodies.
Nobody suffers because she lost her job, because she got divorced, or because the government went to war.
The only thing that makes people miserable is unpleasant sensations in their own bodies, which means that everything that you think is a spiritual event, like winning a sportings match makes you happy, is only just a physical event, the release of some chemical in your body.
That's all it is.
If I release that chemical into your body, if I inject it into your body, you'll feel just the same as you would have felt if you had won the baseball game.
Just the same.
So what's the dip?
What is the dip?
I once read an article in a conservative magazine.
I think it was the Weekly Standard.
It complained that young people were being deprived of the experience of romantic love because they were having promiscuous sex.
The idea was that romantic love essentially consisted of lust, of you not being able to get the sex you wanted with this girl, so you felt that you had to have her, and that was what you experienced as love, which means that romantic love is an illusion.
It's just an emanation of the urge to reproduce, which is felt experienced as lust.
It's like the world must be people.
The world must be people.
That's what Benedict says in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.
He has fallen in love with Beatrice, and so he says, the world must be peopled.
So I have an excuse to marry this woman that I've been arguing with.
Now, Shakespeare knew he called them Benedict and Beatrice because they were the blesser and the blessed.
So he knew that something else was going on, but he gave him that line.
In other words, all experiences are just physical experiences that we think are spiritual experiences.
And this is where you get Freud.
Freud is not, you know, just trying to destroy people.
He's coming up.
He's the next great mind in this arch, this arc of 500 years of thought.
And he's the guy who says, no, everything is just sex.
It's coming out.
Now, it's not just love that is sex, right?
It's not just love.
It's any kind of ecstatic experience.
Teresa of Avila was a saint, a nun in the 16th century, and she wrote her autobiography in which she described a mystical experience of ecstasy she had when an angel came to her.
And this is St. Teresa's description of the angel coming to her and giving her an experience of ecstasy.
I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire.
He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart and to pierce my very entrails.
When he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also and to leave me all on fire with the great love of God.
The pain was so great that it made me moan, and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it.
The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God.
And here's this famous statue, the image of the sculpture of Teresa Avila.
It's a sculpture by Bernini.
It's in a church in Rome, Santa Maria della Vittoria.
I have seen it.
It is a very beautiful sculpture.
But even at the time, people said, oh, she's having sex.
You know, because she splayed out, that doesn't describe her position when this happened in her autobiography, but she's splayed out on her back, and the angel is over her smiling with the spear, obviously this very phallic spear.
So the love, so basically, this is Freud saying, oh, this spiritual ecstasy you feel is actually just a sexual feeling being parsed, being explained to yourself as if it were as if it were spiritual.
So no God, no love, just sex, just the body.
Now, C.S. Lewis responded to this in one of his most brilliant essays.
It's an unbelievably brilliant essay called Transposition.
It's in one of my favorite books, not just of Lewis's, but of all time, called The Weight of Glory.
Speaking of sex, when I read this book, I was in a motel room, and I thought it was so great, I kept crying out, whoa, oh, oh, oh, my, oh, this is great.
And I suddenly thought the guy in the next room must be thinking, wow, that guy's having a great time.
But I was just reading C.S. Lewis.
What C.S. Lewis, absolutely true, what C.S. Lewis said in this essay, Transposition, when you have a symphony, but you have to play it on a piano, the piano has to stand in for all the different instruments, the strings, the wind instruments, the brass.
The smaller instrument becomes a vehicle that represents the larger orchestra.
It can't be those other instruments, but it has to represent them, has to kind of sound like them.
When you have a spiritual experience in a human body, the body is like the piano trying to play the symphony.
You hear beautiful music and you experience sensual pleasure.
You feel physical pleasure.
But it's not really sensual because nobody is touching you.
There's no sex going on.
That's the only way the keyboard of the body can play the symphony of beauty in your experience.
So in other words, it's not that everything is sex.
It's that we only have the body to play all kinds of things.
You know, you have to, if you only have 24 letters, right, you have to use those letters to have different sounds and use them in different ways, right?
So T-O-U-G-H can be tough.
You know, you have to use letters in different ways because you only have so many letters.
So we use our sexual feelings, our sensual feelings, in different ways to express different things, things that are other than, other than sex, like love, like the worship of God, like the ecstasy of God.
Now, when the Bible says that humans are made in God's image, male and female, it means three things.
One, it means that God is male and female.
God is neither male nor female, but he can be expressed in male and female terms.
And two, it means that he expresses himself in our creation in two different kinds of people, one male and one female.
But it also means one other thing.
If each of us is in the image of God, each of us has male and female spiritual parts.
Not physical parts, but spiritual parts.
We are each of us in the image of God.
And yeah, of course, in a man, there's going to be probably going to be more male feelings and all this.
But I'm not talking about being girly or being manly.
I'm not talking about, oh, you know, it's like a plug.
You know, when you have a plug and you put it in an outlet, an electrician will say, this is the male part of the plug, of the connection, the plug, and the outlet is the female part of the connection.
Those are the terms they actually use, right?
That doesn't mean the plug is hoarding the remote, and it doesn't mean the outlet is angry at you but won't tell you why.
It just means that one goes into the other.
So when I talk about the male and female parts of your spirit, I'm not talking about being a girl or being a man, a girl being a man or a man being a girl.
I'm talking to you about the things that it does, the uses that it serves.
So for instance, the Bible always talks about God as male, always talks about God as a father or a husband, and talks about people as the bride, right?
God comes down as a bride, as a bridegroom, and we are the bride.
He talks about all of us as female.
That doesn't mean that men are women or women are men.
It means that God comes into us and everything that good that comes out of us is born of God.
And the Virgin Mary is the model of this, right?
God comes into her in spiritual form and comes out, she brings him out in material form.
And that's what we all do when we're inspired and we create a work of art or when we're creative in our mind and we see things, see the beauty of things, when we experience beauty, when we're in love.
That is what we're doing.
Something is coming into us and what is coming out of us is from God.
Each of us is assigned by our creation to express that spiritual self, which is yin and yang, male and female in the sense that I mean, express it in one form or another, a male form or a female form.
And that is a beautiful thing.
That is why when people get married, they say, I found my other half.
I found my other self.
We are like one flesh.
How can that be if you are so different that you actually don't even fit together?
Of course you fit together, not just physically, but also there are things in you that mingle, that are the same and things that are different.
The differences between men and women are startling and exciting and beautiful, but they're not absolute.
They are not absolute.
All of us have male and female because we are all made in the image of a male and female God.
We ruin that.
We pollute it.
We break it when we reduce it to material, just like we ruin our experience of joy when we say, oh, it's just dopamine.
I can take some dopamine and then I'll be joyful.
No, you won't.
No, you won't.
You will just feel joyful, but you won't be joyful.
You take antidepressants and you will stop feeling depressed, but you will still be depressed.
Somebody I know said that to me once.
She said, I took these pills.
I'm still depressed, but I can't feel it anymore, right?
You ruin things when you try to treat spiritual things in a physical way.
It's as if you were eating the bread and wine in church to feel the body and blood of Christ.
And you thought, well, instead of doing this, I'll just eat a human being.
I'll just eat some real blood and some real body.
You pollute things when you make spiritual things purely material instead of understanding that the small instrument of the body is playing the great symphony of the spirit.
The letter kills, the spirit gives life, materialism destroys, spirituality completes.
What these transgender activists are doing to children, the reason they can confuse them is because, of course, a little boy has girl parts in him, you know, inside him, in his spirit.
And of course a little girl has boy parts in her spirit.
We've always lived like that.
We've always known that.
This is not a surprise.
It's only this angry lesbian, Judith Butler, and this angry society and this godless society that thinks you can take that spiritual beauty, that beautiful thing which marriage completes and which marriage expresses, you can take that and turn it into an operation and make it work.
But that's why people have gone so insane because it has a reality to it.
It has a spiritual reality to it and they don't believe in the spirit.
So they're trying to translate it into purely material terms and that pollutes it and it destroys it.
Now listen, I know, and I know this makes some of a very few of you angry, though you're always very loud about it, those few of you.
I believe that there are some people who are born gay.
Materializing the Spiritual00:02:07
And I believe that just like the rest of us, they're going to have to work out their salvation and fear and trembling, and God loves them, and God will take them by the hand and show them what he wants of that individual person.
That is what I believe.
I have always believed this.
This has nothing to do with my son, though I should point out that my son is one of the finest men I've ever met and he is gay.
And so I do not believe that I, you know, if I thought God was going to condemn him, I would risk my own salvation to argue for his, but I'm not going to have to do that because I don't think that's what God is going to do.
I understand that there are people who don't fit into the general system of creation, but it is a sin to drag somebody out of it.
It is a sin to convince a child who is ripe for confusion that he should leave it, right?
I don't want to hate gay persons and I don't want to hate persons who have gender dysphoria, but I am deeply, deeply opposed to people going into children who are just forming, just realizing what their assignment from God is, their individual assignment from God and creation's assignment from God and confusing them by telling them that this spiritual thing that is inside them, this beautiful spiritual thing, it's going to help them find a wife or husband,
and it's going to help them mingle with that wife and husband and become one flesh, is a material thing.
It just isn't, and you can't fix it with a scalpel.
It is butchery.
For them, for gay people, for people who have dysphoria, for all kinds of people, if you think you're going to find spiritual happiness by material means, you will fail.
Materializing the spiritual is a lie and in the end it leads to evil because that's not just what lies do.
It's what they're made to do.
It's what they're intended to do.
It's what the father of lies wants from us.
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So while we're talking about how bad culture has become, the new Disney remake of The Little Mermaid is out, and I had to choose between going to see it or driving a screwdriver into my forehead repeatedly.
But luckily, I had access to the person who may be the greatest expert on Disney princesses in America, Faith Moore, who is the author of Saving Cinderella, What Feminists Get Wrong About Disney Princesses and How to Get It Right.
She is a freelance writer and editor.
She has a novel coming out with the Daily Wire this Christmas.
Apparently, the jacket looks great, by the way.
And she is also the stay-at-home mother of two of the most attractive and intelligent boys ever to existed, I think, in the multiverse, as far as it is.
Faith, it's good to see you.
I'm also your daughter.
Hi, Dan.
Oh, my goodness.
That's so exciting.
I'm so thrilled to hear that.
I know.
Well, you know, I was thinking back.
We saw this.
I guess the original Little Mermaid came out when you were maybe seven or eight.
And I remember.
I was six, 1989.
And I remember we went with a friend of yours, and I was sitting next to her father.
And during the big fight scene when Ursula became, the sea witch became a giant, I turned to him and said, whispered, this is actually pretty scary.
And he was pinned against his seat with his wide-eyed look of terror.
How did you experience the original one at six?
That's actually the only scene I remember from that.
I remember that I was six.
We went with my best friend.
It was raining.
I was wearing snow boots or rain boots and Ursula became giant and Eric stabbed her with the prow of a boat and her skeleton came in a flash of lightning and it was absolutely terrifying.
And that's all I remember.
But then of course, after that, I mean, that was the summer of playing mermaids.
I mean, you know, this is how you play mermaids.
You tie a sheet around yourself.
You ask your friend to tie the other side.
So you're completely immobilized.
You sit on the floor.
You wave your arms around like this.
And everybody played mermaids that summer.
I mean, that was.
So we'd never seen anything like that.
I mean, we had never seen anything like that.
I mean.
So this had a major powerful effect on you.
You wrote a piece, I should have mentioned before, but you wrote a piece in The American Spectator reviewing this.
And I'm going to read just the first paragraph.
The new live-action remake of The Little Mermaid is just the latest stop on Disney's apology tour.
We're sorry they're trying to tell us for all the horribly offensive things we said in your childhood.
Please pay us a boatload of money so we can show you how wrong we were.
What did they do wrong?
I mean, we love that movie, all of us.
What did they do wrong?
Right.
Well, in order to understand this, you have to kind of take a little tour through what has happened between 1989 and now.
So, 1989 marks what is now called the Disney Renaissance.
In, you know, there was the golden age of Disney when actual Walt Disney was at the helm and they produced all kinds of amazing movies like Cinderella and Snow White and Pinocchio and all of those classics that we know and love.
And then for about 30 years, there was what we call the Disney Dark Ages.
They sort of started producing some dud.
They didn't have enough money.
They turned to other things like Disneyland was opening and they kind of stopped caring so much about their feature productions.
And then in 1989, The Little Mermaid comes out and the animation was amazing.
We'd never seen anything like that before.
It was the first movie to feature Howard Ashman and Alan Mencken, who were just coming off Little Shop of Horrors and they kind of reimagined what it meant to tell stories in feature-length cartoons for children.
And, you know, that marked the beginning of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, all of these movies from my childhood that you remember taking me to, I'm sure.
Maybe it's all blur at this point, but I remember.
And, you know, and critics loved these movies.
I mean, they came out, The Little Mermaid came out, and every, you know, it was universally loved, like Roger Ebert, the New York Times, you know, Daily News, everybody came out and said, this is an amazing movie.
And this is an amazing princess for a new era.
Here is finally a sort of more feminist princess.
Because even then, since Cinderella and Snow White, there had been sort of like, wait, but she, Snow White spends all her movie sleeping, and, you know, Cinderella is just needing to be rescued by a man.
And so now finally we have Ariel.
She's a feminist princess.
And on we go on to Belle, on to Jasmine, on to all of these people who we all loved.
Okay, seems fine.
Then the children that watched those movies grew up.
And while they were growing up, whatever wave of feminism was happening in the early, like, you know, in the 2010s or something, I've lost count of which wave we're on, but in the sort of 2010s, when people of my generation were suddenly grown up and becoming parents, they looked back at these movies because they wanted to show them to their children.
And they had gone through what one blogger calls a feminist click moment in which they suddenly realized these movies are actually horribly anti-feminist.
And, you know, they sleep through their movies.
They get kissed without consent because they're sleeping.
They, you know, Ariel gives up her voice just to be with a man, blah, blah, blah.
And they start blogging.
They blog and they get articles published in popular mommy blogs and on things, places like Huffington Post and all of these things.
And this idea that these movies and these princesses that we loved are so horribly anti-woke seeps its way into the kind of general consciousness of American culture to the point where several years later, like around 2018 or so, now celebrities are kind of saying, coming out and saying, like Kira Knightley, for example, says, you know, I've banned all Disney princesses from my house because Ariel gives up her voice for a man.
Or, you know, Kristen Bell, who actually herself played a Disney princess, says, you know, isn't it weird to her daughters?
Isn't it weird that the prince kisses Snow White without her permission?
Isn't that weird?
And suddenly now we all think, even those of us who loved the movies, everyone is like, oh, it's too bad that those movies that we really love are so anti-feminist.
Then Disney wants to make some money and they can't figure out why like Woke Arella part two isn't making enough money.
And they're like, well, everybody loved these movies in the past, you know, the Little Mermaid and Aladdin and all of these movies.
Everybody loved them.
Let's remake them in live action.
That'll be great because all these moms and dad that love these movies, they're going to come with their children.
But this is the best part.
We get to correct our mistakes.
We're going to address every single little problem that people have come up with in the years between then and now.
And we're going to fix these problems in these movies.
There's only one problem.
Well, two.
They were never anti-feminist to begin with.
And the fixes that they put into these new movies actually make them 100% more anti-feminist.
All right.
Give me an example.
Okay.
So this movie, The Little Mermaid, one of the main criticisms of this movie is that she wants to become human just because she saw a guy on a boat five minutes ago.
And now her whole, she's going to change her entire species.
And to do it, she's going to give up her voice for a man.
She's going to give up her voice.
And isn't that so awful?
Okay, so in the new movie, her voice is, well, let's back up.
This is not anti-feminist for this reason.
Her voice is a metaphor for, very obviously in the original movie, her voice is a metaphor for her inner self, right?
Like all fairy tales work by metaphors, right?
That's right.
So a fairy tale is not ever meant to be taken literally, which is kind of the whole, actually, this is kind of the whole problem, right?
Like that, that now it's sort of like, yeah, but, you know, she did this or said this.
It's like, right, there's also talking animals, witches, fairy godmothers.
Those things don't even.
She's a mermaid.
She's also a mermaid.
Yes.
Wait, those aren't real.
Sorry.
I'm sorry.
I should have told you before.
Yeah.
Yeah, thank you.
What is wrong with you?
Okay.
All right.
So she gives up her voice, which is herself.
Okay.
Which is her true self.
And we know this because even though the whole deal is she's got to get him to kiss her within three days and otherwise she's doomed forever, she actually doesn't.
She fails.
And the reason that she fails is because she doesn't have her true self.
And the true self is the thing that the prince fell in love with to begin with.
He hears her voice and he falls in love with her.
And now she has no voice and so he doesn't recognize her.
And it's only at the very last minute when she gets her voice back after the, you know, she's already succumbed to the curse, she gets her voice back.
And that's the moment when the prince says, oh, it's you.
I knew, you know, I didn't know you without your voice, but now your voice is back.
It's, it's you.
So this actually was never a problem to begin with.
It's just that we don't, we didn't understand how to read fairy tales.
So so that's amazing.
In other words, the evil witch takes her voice away from her because she knows that without herself, the guy is not going to actually fall in love with her.
She's just a body.
Right.
Well, think about it.
I mean, she could have taken her looks away.
If we want to make it literal, she could have taken her looks and made her ugly.
I mean, that would be the most literal thing to do.
And that would make sense, literally.
If what she has to do is win him with her body, she's going to take her looks so she can't.
But instead, she takes her voice because her voice is the thing that it's most difficult to win the guy without because it really truly is.
So in the new version, right, they have to answer this.
So no, she gives up her voice for a man.
What does this mean?
So they make her voice literal.
They say, okay, well, it's because her voice is an actual siren song, like the thing that lures sailors to their death when they're sailing through the ocean.
So she, now her voice is a literal siren song.
And that is why, first of all, Eric fell in love with her.
That's why.
And so we have to take that away because otherwise he would just fall for her immediately.
Which begs the question.
Does he actually love her?
Or has she put him under some sort of horrible spell?
Yeah, which is more symbolic of sex, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then at the end of both movies, the original and the new one, Ursula actually uses the voice to do this exact thing, to entrap Eric into marrying her to sort of get Ariel out of the picture.
Ursula sort of uses her voice to pretend to be somebody and uses it magically to sort of entrap him and bewitch him so that he forgets about Ariel.
So that's bad in the movie.
So if that's also what Ariel did to him, that's bad, I think.
So now it's like, well, this has solved the problem because it's not, you know, she's not giving up her voice.
She's giving up her voice.
I mean, you know, it isn't.
Yeah.
You know, we're talking to Faith Moore, the author of Saving Cinderella, What Feminists Get Wrong About Disney Princesses and How to Set It Right.
The interesting thing to me is in the New York Times, there was an article about this saying the same thing.
This is an apology to her, except in favor of it, saying this is very important work that must be done.
But he complains that it reeks of obligation and noble intentions.
Joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor, kink, they're all missing.
And so in other words, it's not enough.
It's never enough to make the and by the way, Wokerella is hilarious.
They should actually make a movie, Wokerella.
I think that would be great.
Okay, have your people call my people.
Yeah.
But the thing is, you can never be Wokerella enough.
So they're not going to get anything out of it.
That's right.
I mean, they're also basically saying, like, so you, yes, thank you.
We needed all this correcting, but please correct.
But it didn't work because the movie, so the movie's bad, but please correct it some more.
Well, that's leftism in a nutshell, right?
It doesn't work, so do it some more.
Just keep doing it.
Just keep doing it.
Yes.
Also, I don't, maybe we probably shouldn't discuss on your show, like what the kink would be.
Like, I don't, I don't know.
I don't want to know what fish do when they're getting kinks.
I mean, is that what he's actually taught?
I don't know.
What about just as a movie?
How is the star, Haley Bailey?
Hallie Bailey is, she can sing, but she can't act.
I think the movie, I think if you've never ever seen or actually heard of the original movie and it happened to be playing under the rock where you live, then you might be so glad to receive some form of entertainment because you're living under a rock that you are fine with it.
You know, like it's okay.
Basically, all of the joy and the humor and the fun have been sucked out of it.
It's filmed in this kind of very dark, with this sort of very dark filter, except for these really weird moments that look like those kind of Lisa Frank folders that they used to have in the 80s, those big folders with like multicolored like dolphins and stuff on them and your trapper keeper or whatever.
And suddenly it'll be that and then back to like very dark, somber.
I mean, all of the kids in the audience were very bored and quite bored.
And then at the very end, there's a scene where all the mermaids come out of the water and everybody started laughing because they look wet.
So, you know, I think, I think it's like fine.
It's not terrible.
There's nothing like, there's nothing like really, really objectionable unless you kind of do the deep dive that I'm doing here.
Christianity Under Siege00:16:30
But why?
You know, it's no good.
And also, I mean, this thing about taking everything literally and humorlessly in a fairy tale is in itself so indicative of what the left does with all of human life.
You know, they take all the romance, all the glee, all the symbolism out of life.
And so they miss everything that life is about.
And so they do the same thing with a fairy tale.
It makes perfect sense.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
And, you know, we can't tell stories if we can't figure this out.
All right, we got to stop there.
The author is Faith Moore.
I met her once before, but I can't remember where.
She's actually related to Spencer Clavin, although Spencer Claven, she's related to both me and Spencer Clavin, although Spencer Clavin and I are totally unrelated.
The book is Saving Cinderella, What Feminists Get Wrong About Disney Princesses and How to Set a Right Faith.
Always nice to see you.
I'll see you soon.
Yeah, good to see you too.
Thanks for having me on.
So there's one more point I want to make about this Twitter battle.
It was just, it was really dramatic.
I mean, I have to say, it was one of the more dramatic things that has happened to me since I've been here.
It was a fight for free speech, and we won.
You know, not only are the restrictions on the film removed, and Elon has personally recommended the film What is a Woman to his 140 million followers, saying every parent should watch this movie.
It really was amazing.
So you ask yourself, why would we give away one of our most successful movies of all time?
And the reason is because freedom of speech and the right to be heard on these issues are essential.
And now we need your support.
We always need your support.
This fight isn't free and we have more films to make, more battles to win.
Help us out.
Join us.
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One of the things that always amuses me when I talk about religion or tweet about religion and or people react to YouTube on YouTube and leave a comment.
And they have these kind of half-clever ways of attacking religion that the culture has put into their heads.
And they think they're incredibly smart.
And they always remind me of kind of brainy adolescents.
You know how adolescents are smart enough to see through reality, but they're not wise enough to look it in the eye?
You know, that's what some of these people say, well, which religion is the right one?
How can there be religion if everybody has a different one?
Well, one of them's right and the rest of them are not as right.
You know, they'll say, well, which whose morality?
You know, mine.
That's whose morality we're going to have.
And, you know, so they have these things that they've been taught to say that the culture has inculcated in them.
But one thing that's very hard to explain is why is it so many people who do evil want to destroy the Christian church, Christian churches?
Why is it that they turn to Satan?
Why is it that they want so desperately to stop churches from doing what they do?
Why did they work so hard to close churches during the pandemic?
The left worked so hard to close churches during the pandemic, but not Target and not bars and not liquor stores.
I'm going to talk, well, actually, this is a conversation I recorded a little bit earlier, so I'll be wearing different clothes if you're watching.
But this is a talk I had with Thomas Williams.
He's an American theologian teaching at St. John's University, a former priest.
He serves as Breitbart News' Rome Bureau Chief, and he's written a book called The Coming Christian Persecution, Why Things Are Getting Worse and What You Can Do About It.
And we talked about these attacks that are increasing against the Christian church around the world.
Thomas, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Andrew, it's great to be able to talk with you.
It's a dire, kind of a sad and sober topic, but an important one.
Yeah, it's a scary one.
Before we get to the book, The Coming Christian Persecution, I want to ask you one question about your own personal story, because when I went to look you up, you were repeatedly referred to as a disgraced priest.
You had been a priest and you were no longer.
And so I looked your story up.
And to be honest with you, I mean, we make mistakes.
We all are sinners and we fall.
But I thought you handled your situation with enormous courage and honesty.
And I just would like to give you a chance to address it before we talk about that.
Can you explain to the audience what happened?
Sure.
I mean, I messed up in a big way.
I broke my vow of celibacy.
I fell in love with a woman.
We had a child who has Down syndrome.
So I left the priesthood.
We got married and we're married and we're raising the child who's actually now 20 years old.
He's a young man.
And I just did what I thought at that moment was the responsible thing to do and tried to man up, if you will, to what I had done.
But it was a real mistake.
I'm not trying to whitewash that either.
And I don't think because of that, you have to question all celibacy rules.
I don't use that as kind of a lever to try to blame institutions.
It was my own mistake and I'm trying to make good with it.
Yeah, listen, like I said, everybody makes mistakes.
Not everybody owns up to it and does the right thing.
So you're not disgraced here, I'll tell you that.
Thank you.
So let me ask you, you're Bright Bart's Man in Rome, and you've written a book on the coming persecution.
And where are we now with this?
When you say the coming persecution, is Christianity highly persecuted or is it still fairly strong and safe in places?
Well, it's a great question because obviously the title suggests that it's a future thing, but actually it's a present thing.
The reason that I used coming in the title is because I firmly believe that things are getting worse.
So what we're going to be seeing in the next 10 or 20 years is worse than what we're actually experiencing now.
But things are very dire in lots of parts of the world right now today.
And if you go around the world in a number of nations in Africa, number of nations in Asia, the Middle East, we're very familiar with the last seven years or so with the rise of the Islamic State and all that happened there.
But also, I think particularly your viewers and your listeners are very familiar with what's going on in the United States right now in the West, the post-Christian West, where we see an accelerated persecution of Christians, something that starts in a very, you know, it starts as ridicule.
It starts as, you know, just kind of pushing people off, ostracization, if you will.
But then there's a demonization.
Then there's, oh, you're a bunch of bigots.
You're haters.
You are part of the problem.
You're obstructing progress.
You don't like women.
You don't like gays, whatever it might be.
And then all of a sudden, you know, to paint Christians as the enemy, there's only one step between that and much more active hostility, as we're starting to see in places as well, both in terms of aggression and in terms of government persecution.
Look at the FBI and its targeting of Latin mass goers or people who protest and pray outside abortion clinics, et cetera.
So I guess the first question I would like to ask is, how did we get here?
Because in my lifetime, this was a very safely, sturdily Christian country.
So how did that fall apart so fast?
And then why do you think it's going to get worse?
Well, it is, I think, scary.
It honestly bothers me more to see what's happening in the West than in places where Christian persecution is kind of a historical fact.
It's something we can look at.
It's terrible.
It's real.
But at least it's understandable in a way.
In the West, it's very scary because this was the great bastion of religious liberty.
This was the Christian West.
This was Christendom until not that long ago, as you say.
And Christians were assumed to be good citizens, solid citizens, trustworthy.
You wanted them.
It wasn't a situation we have now, like we have now, where if you were up for a district court and you happened to be a member of the Knights of Columbus, you're going to get grilled and raked over the coals, specifically because of your religious affiliation.
Or as Dianne Feinstein said to Amy Coney Barrett, the dogma lives loudly in you.
This kind of overtly religious baiting of people and the suggestion that you are not going to be a good citizen.
You are not going to be able to adjudicate in an unbiased way because of these strongly held religious beliefs.
And that is a flip-flop from where we were even 20, 25 years ago.
You know, there's a line in the Brothers Karamazov where the atheist, I think it's the atheist brother says, you know, if you stop believing in God and immortality, not only will morality go away, it will actually reverse and the things that were once evil will be good.
It does seem to me like that's happening a little bit here.
Why are we losing that fight?
I think we're losing the fight because there has been, I think, since, at least since the 60s, a very strong progressive agenda, a very patient one, but that's been building block by block, first with the education.
I remember even as a kid, watching what was happening, especially in public schools and attempts to control the curriculum, rewrite history, to rewrite the situation also historically between different peoples and different belief systems, and kind of an undermining both of the American project and of the Christianity that kind of was the backbone of that project.
Even among the founders who were more deist, they assumed a Christian worldview about a creator God, a good world, brotherhood of man.
Even these ideas, the Enlightenment ideas of human rights, fraternity, and equality and things, these were all based fundamentally on a Christian worldview.
These were not based on some ancient Chinese worldview.
These were not based on some atheist worldview.
These were Christian concepts.
And now I think what they've tried to do is unmoor those concepts from their real grounding to be able to cut free the Christian aspect because Christianity fundamentally is seen as holding back the project.
In other words, we don't necessarily fully embrace gay marriage.
We embrace gay people.
We don't believe in doing wrong to people, but we don't think that that's God's plan for mankind.
We don't embrace the culture of death.
We believe in the inviolable dignity of unborn children.
I mean, there are a lot of things that are looked upon now as, no, those are the last bastions.
And that's why they call us obscurantists.
They say that we have a Bronze Age morality based on this ancient book that really needs to be updated.
And I think that that project has gained momentum over the years.
So it's now that idea of tolerance makes Christianity look intolerant because we won't budge on fundamental issues.
Again, it's not a question of hate, as you and I both know very well, but it's easy to paint as hate the fact that you won't budge on fundamental moral concepts.
So why do you think it's going to get worse?
I mean, why do you look at that situation and think this is, we're on the downhill slide?
The reason is I think that the two fundamental aspects, the drivers of Christian persecution worldwide and in the West and in particular way, are growing stronger by the day.
And the traditional defenses and the traditional those who actually stood up for the ideas of religious liberty and the value of Christianity are getting weaker by the day.
And so those two things together spell out to me that the situation is simply going to continue to get worse.
And we've seen it again, as I say, in a very, very accelerated way in the last few years.
Part of it has to do also with the downgrading of religious liberty, which was always considered America's first freedom.
This idea, it's there in our First Amendment of the Constitution.
It was something that was considered to be special and a part, the inviolability of religious faith, by the way, both in private and in public practice, in being able to speak and to live according to religious belief.
And now, first of all, it was downgraded to be on the same level as other human rights.
So if you're talking about LGBTQ rights and you're talking about religious liberty or conscience rights, we're going to first put them on the same level.
And then we're going to start saying, well, you're actually using this idea of religious liberty as kind of a tool to discriminate.
You're using as an excuse, a justification for your discrimination.
So actually, that right loses value.
It actually is less of a right because you're using it in an evil way.
And this is the way, at least, that I see this unfolding.
And once you've done that, you undermine it and you make it look like this is just a tool for doing bad things.
And then people, it sounds more and more suspicious every time you invoke religious freedom for anything else you're doing.
So you're covering Rome and the Vatican for Breitbart.
Your stuff is good, by the way.
I really enjoy it.
I highly recommend it to people.
Also, the book, The Coming Christian Persecution, Why Things Are Getting Worse and What You Can Do About It, which is I want to get to in a sec.
When you look at Rome, when you look at the Catholic Church, which is such a mighty voice for Christianity, really of all kinds, what are you seeing right now?
Is it standing firm?
Is it weakening?
Where do you feel they are?
No, unfortunately, it's a really tough beat for me right now, I have to say, covering the Vatican, covering the Pope.
You know, I don't dig into motives and don't dig into people's consciences, but I can just say that externally, in terms of policy decisions and in terms of particularly things like with China, I think the Pope has been terrible on these issues.
And I think that he undermines the church's position by, for example, not standing with the underground church in China, by making it look like the Patriotic Association, which we know is state-run, which has always been contrary to Rome, is something on a par with that ancient church, the underground church that's always been faithful to Rome and to the Pope.
Now, these are very, very dangerous things.
And I think that this Pope has played a little fast and loose with some of these basic principles.
And he wants to be accepted.
He is very progressive, I think, in his worldview.
And so I think that he ⁇ the same is true, honestly, with the question of radical Islam.
He said a few years ago, and he's repeated now on several occasions, there's no such thing as Islamic terrorism.
And we know that there is.
And he said that, well, if we talk about Islamic terrorism, we have to talk about Christian terrorism because they both exist.
And, you know, where you can find, I mean, Christians do a lot of bad things, but usually they don't do it in the name of Jesus.
You don't get people saying, praise be Jesus Christ, as they slit somebody's throat on a beach.
It just doesn't happen.
It's not part of the world that we live in, at least not right now.
And if you want to go back and say, well, you did terrible things back in the Crusades or back in the wars of religion, whatever, this is not about history right now.
This is about the world we live in and the way people are behaving and recognizing calling out the reality that is.
The subtitle of your book, The Coming Christian Persecution is Why Things Are Getting Worse and What You Can Do About It?
Pope Benedict had this great line where he said, where he kind of envisioned a church getting smaller, kind of pulling in on itself to get the faithful basically into a cluster and then moving out again.
Is that what you see?
What can you do about this?
Well, that was, yeah, that was a great analogy.
That was, he used that in his book, Salt of the Earth.
And he really believed that the salt is never the majority.
You don't eat like bars of salt.
It's, you know, a little bit adds a lot of flavor.
And he really believed that a more purified, radicalized church where people are true believers and live out the faith would do more for the world, the transformation of the world than just a numbers game where you've got masses of people who barely practice, barely know what they believe and why.
That's certainly, I think, part of it.
Although, even, you know, when Benedict said that, and I don't think he was saying this is our project, it was more forecasting where he thought things were going.
So I don't think we should try to be sloughing off numbers or driving people out, just recognizing this is very probably the way that things are going to be looking.
I think other things, and what I really get at in the book is it's a call for living out Christian virtues, things like courage, things that have been forgotten, memory, looking back to the martyrs, looking back to the example of those who shed their blood for Christ in past centuries.
Clavenless Call for Courage00:03:40
And all the different virtues that come into play in persecution.
And I think also the other very, very important thing that Christians have to do is stand side by side, shoulder to shoulder with their persecuted brothers and sisters.
Maybe you don't feel it.
Maybe I don't feel it in our day-to-day life.
Maybe it doesn't impinge too much on our existence, but there are many who do.
Do we pray for them?
Do we make known their plight and their situation?
Are we with them?
And I think that finally we have to be champions and warriors for religious freedom.
We have to bring it back to the forefront as something which is really, really important, that everyone should have the ability everywhere in the world to be able to worship God as they understand that to be, you know, according to that faith.
And this isn't obviously a pass or a license to do horrible things.
I'm not talking about biting off the heads of bats.
But to be able to live and worship in a way that serves the common good and that that is a basic fundamental human right.
And again, America's first liberty.
And I think that that needs to be rediscovered.
The book is The Coming Christian Persecution: Why Things Are Getting Worse and What You Can Can Do About It?
Thomas Williams, thank you.
I really have enjoyed your work and I appreciate your coming on.
It was a really interesting conversation.
Thanks.
Andrew, such a pleasure.
Thank you.
Now, I talked so long about transgenderism that I don't have time to do the mailbag, but we do have time to do the mailbag scream.
So here it is.
Now, this is symbolic.
The reason I did that is symbolic.
It symbolizes the fact that everything is going to change next week.
Most of you won't be here because you're not going to survive the Clavenless Week.
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We're going to change everything about the show.
What we're going to do is we're going to make the show an hour long on Fridays, and then we're going to release the interview midweek.
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Just whether you think what I said was brilliant or extremely brilliant.
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