Andrew Klavan’s Be A Man! dissects modern masculinity’s crisis—male suicide rates, opioid overdoses, and plummeting birth rates—while dismissing feminist critiques as overblown, tracing the decline to leftist gender ideology. He contrasts Andrew Tate’s toxic hyper-masculinity with Kirk Douglas’ Spartacus defiance, arguing true manhood demands purposeful work and moral integrity, not performative aggression. The episode pivots to Daniel Penny’s indictment for restraining a violent homeless man, exposing systemic hypocrisy where criminals face no consequences while heroes are prosecuted. Klavan frames individual accountability as the antidote to institutional failure, urging listeners to "live the truth" despite censorship and backlash, whether in politics, faith, or personal conviction. [Automatically generated summary]
Former President Donald Trump was arraigned in federal court this week by a Justice Department led by Merrick Garland, who was arraigned in federal court this week on charges of covering up the corruption of Hunter Biden, who was arraigned in federal court this week for sniffing cocaine off a hooker's backside, or vice versa, while soliciting bribes from Ukrainian oil executives who were arraigned in federal court this week for paying off President and venal house plant Joe Biden,
who was arraigned in federal court this week for accepting $5 million in bribes in an influence peddling scheme that was uncovered by former President Donald Trump, who was arraigned in federal court this week.
Legal experts say the charges could result in at least 35,000 members of the federal government being convicted in federal court and locked together in a federal prison where federal inmates routinely engage in violent, sadistic, and animalistic homosexual activities, which the federal government celebrated this week in a Pride Month ceremony at the White House where federal officials illegally raised a rainbow flag above the American flag and were then arraigned in federal court, along with a transgender activist who took off his shirt at the federal event,
revealing what I have to say were the best pair of knockers I've ever seen on a guy.
So at least someone at the Pride ceremony actually had something to be proud of.
White House spokeswoman Karine John Identity Hire said President Biden was not concerned about his arraignment on bribery charges and was planning to spend a relaxing weekend in the crumbling ruins of his Gothic castle continuing his scientific experiments trying to turn boys into girls while the thunderstorm outside drowns out their pitiful screams.
By Monday, the president should be back in the Capitol where he's scheduled to engage in a running gun battle with police while speeding down K Street in a 1925 roadster firing his Tommy gun out the window and screaming, you'll never take me alive, John Law.
Miss Identity Hire said this will in no way detract from the pride the president plans to feel when he's committing sodomy in federal prison.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, reacted to his arraignment by praying with supporters, telling them God would prevent his conviction or else God was a big fat loser.
Then, grunting wordlessly, he abducted a local woman and carried her to the top of the Empire State Building, where he swatted away the World War I biplanes trying to shoot him down, causing his approval rating among Republicans to rise to 73%, nearly 50% higher than his nearest rival, the actual King Kong, although only the one from the black and white movie, not the one who couldn't even manage to knock off those necklaces covering Jessica Lang's breasts, which reportedly are almost as impressive as the ones on the guy at the Pride event.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, meanwhile, gave a speech to 17 supporters in a Tallahassee gas station, revealing his 15-point plan to undress Jessica Lang.
Now, after a week like this, there are some people who say our government's corruption, sexual deviance, international malfeasance, personal childishness, ceaseless lies, sexual deviance again, and did I already mention corruption have reduced this once great country to the level of a banana republic, only without the cool uniforms, unless you happen to really be into studded leather.
But no, I'm not going to say a single bad word about our government because damn it, I still believe that I can avoid being indicted on some ridiculous politically motivated charge.
Government Corruption and Masculinity00:12:07
Despite our troubles, I can always lift my eyes to the flag and say, what schmucky freak hung a rainbow flag on the White House and how come he's got such a nice rack?
After all, this country has seen bad times before, and sure, that was back when it was worth fighting for, but still, God is in his heaven, and I can always turn to him and say, listen, God, if I can find 50 righteous people in this country, do you think you could keep from destroying it with fire and brimstone until my plane lands in Zurich?
So just remember, no matter how unscrupulous our officials become, no matter how degenerate our sexual relations are, no matter how criminally our law officers behave, no matter how dishonest our news media is, no matter how twisted, degraded, sick, and evil.
I forgot what I was saying.
Anyway, I got to catch that plane.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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He says, we are conservatives.
That means we conserve traditions.
The hunky donkey song is the most basic of Clavin fan traditions.
So I am officially launching the movement, Conserve the Hunky Donkey.
Once the song is reinstated, life will be tickety boo once again.
You know, I understand your concern.
I have to say that you have to think of it more like in Christian terms.
You know, God gave the Jews the law so that the logos could become imprinted on their hearts over time, and then the logos could become incarnate.
It's the same with the hunky donkey song.
It should now, the hunky donkiness should now be imprinted on your hearts.
And so hunky donkey-ness can become, I have no idea what I'm talking about.
Let's start today's episode, Be a Man.
You can act like a man!
What's the matter with you?
What's the matter with you?
Father's Day is coming.
So I thought this would be a good time to talk about what it means to be a man in today's society, which will include actual instructions on how to be a man, a look at Trump's arraignment, Daniel Penny's heroism, and a look at movie manhood over the years.
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All right, let's begin with chapter one, Where the Boys Are.
Where the boys are.
Someone waits for me.
A smile on the face.
Anyway, that's actually a good song with music by Neil Sadaka.
The current Consensus seems to be, I forgot to bring Joe Biden's teeth with me.
That's why I can't speak.
The current consensus seems to be that where the boys are is in trouble.
More men are out of work.
More men are living at home.
Men earn less than their fathers did.
They're doing badly at school.
By one count, only 20% of eighth-grade boys have age-appropriate reading proficiency.
Boys hang out too much, play too many video games, watch too much porn, and then no surprise, they get depressed.
Male suicide has gone up more than 25% since the turn of the century.
Drug overdoses are up 250%.
So boys are in trouble.
That's the narrative.
I'll tell you a couple of reasons.
I'm a little bit suspicious of this narrative.
And one thing, one reason is that girls aren't doing that great either.
They are diagnosed with depression at least twice as much as men.
They try to commit suicide between one and a half and two times more often.
They're just not as good as it, good at it, as we are because we use guns and guns are more efficient.
That leads me to think, I know girls are doing better in school, but that's still, that's still a lot of depression and suicide.
And it leads me to think that maybe the problem isn't boys per se, but boys and girls and the way they interact with one another because we're supposed to get together.
Boys and girls are supposed to find each other and make more little boys and girls by a fun process known as sex and a sometimes less fun but perhaps more meaningful process known as marriage, which they're not doing.
U.S. marriage rates have declined 60% over the last 50 years.
Birth rates have fallen 20% since the Great Recession in 2008.
So another reason I distrust this narrative that boys are the problem is because there have been complaints about declines in manhood since time began.
I mean, you remember the Bible story, Eve eats the apple, gives it to Adam, Adam eats the apple, and God accuses him of having eaten the forbidden fruit, and Adam immediately starts to whine.
This is the first man.
He starts to whine, oh, the girl gave it to me, and you gave me the girl.
You know, he doesn't take any responsibility at all.
And you all remember God the Father's response.
You can act like a man!
What's about with you?
All right, that may have been not God the Father, but it's close enough.
You know, it really has been happening all through history.
Spartan men, when they came home from battle, if they lost the battle, but they came back alive, the women used to lift their skirts and invite them to climb back into their wombs.
Late Republic Romans complained about the fallen Roman masculinity.
Same thing in Victorian England.
Basically, whenever societies become secure and peaceful and there's less war, people complain that men have lost their purpose.
Shakespeare's Richard III said, when wars end, a man, instead of mounting barbed steeds to fright the souls of fearful adversaries, he capers nimbly in a lady's chamber to the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
All that said, there can be no question that the rise of leftist feminism, which is socially toxic, which tried to shove women into a manly role they weren't made for and don't really want.
They've just gotten more and more unhappy over the years since the leftists took over feminism.
They've made men, in order to make women's second-rate manhood seem better, they've tried to make men less.
And they've denigrated men and called manhood toxic.
And that's debilitating.
It truly is.
So not only do men not know how to be men, they think they aren't supposed to be men.
Here's a liberal girl on TikTok this week complaining about the results.
Got three.
Do you want to know one of the saddest realizations I recently had was that as a liberal woman, it is really hard to find a man who is willing to play the more traditional masculine role in the relationship in today's day and age.
Who is not a conservative?
A man who wants to pay on the first state, who wants to open your door, who has that want and desire to take care of you and to provide.
Who is not a conservative?
And obviously, as a liberal woman, I do want to be respected for my independent.
And I do want to have my own autonomy in the relationship and not be confined or conform to the traditional female homemaker childbearing role.
And most of the men that I've dated who do have that more natural provider masculinity about them are normally conservative.
So I don't really know what to do because I don't want to compromise my morals and values just to find a man.
But am I asking to have my cake and eat it too?
So let me translate that.
She needs a real man to tell her to stop being strong and independent and embrace her femininity and have children and build a home for people, which is an important thing, really the only important thing people ever do as far as I'm concerned.
But she doesn't want him to do that because she wants to keep the values that are making her miserable and lonely.
Great.
So on the conservative side, since many conservatives tend to be reactionary, they're told they're toxic.
And you get this kind of reaction to that, which is this blown-up idiot idea of what it means to be an alpha male, sometimes instantiated by Andrew Tate.
Here's Tate, cut four.
There has not been in the history of humanity across any culture, any book, any story, any fable, there has never been across the history of humanity any respect put on the name of a promiscuous female ever, ever.
You name the biggest conquerors that you can possibly name from history.
Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, all of them.
They all had 100 wives, bunch of children, Big G conquered the world.
Normal.
That is normal evolutionary biology.
That's how men are designed to be.
There has never been a single female who's been celebrated for a promiscuity ever in history.
It's always been frowned upon and disgusting.
I totally understand why if some feminist witch is calling you toxic, that sounds really cool and manly.
Genghis Khan raped an entire subcontinent.
He's said to have 16 million descendants.
So that sounds really macho-y, although to me it sounds not only cruel, but kind of tiring.
Senator Josh Hawley has a new book out called Manhood, and the left is making fun of him because he ran for cover when the January 6th people broke into the Capitol.
I don't know what he was supposed to do.
Was he supposed to get like a rifle or a baseball bat or something?
But anyway, they're making fun of him.
But I was looking at the book, and it actually has some pretty interesting things to say.
It bases this idea of manhood on Hawley's reading of the Bible.
And he says the Bible shows that the job of a man is to build God's garden out into the world.
And I actually share that idea somewhat.
I think it gets rid of a lot of the nonsense talk of being a conqueror or a rapist or a fighter.
And it actually makes sense that the purpose of man is to humanize nature, starting with his own nature.
So compare Andrew Tate, keep that clip in mind, as we play another version of masculinity from the 1960 movie Spartacus.
This is Kirk Douglas, one of the manliest of actors, playing the gladiator slave, and he's in this cage, and the Romans toss him Gene Simmons, very beautiful actress, to have sex with him.
And he's never had sex before because he's been a slave.
So he's never had a woman before.
And Gene Simmons dutifully takes off her clothes and stands before him naked.
And the Romans are laughing at him, saying, go ahead, we want to watch.
And he shouts at them and says, I'm not an animal.
And here's the result, cut five.
Direct your courage to the girl, Spartacus.
I'm not an animal.
Neither am I. Beautiful scene. Classic movie scene.
He Gives Her Clothes Back00:02:28
He gives her her clothes back.
She takes her clothes off to do what she feels she has to do because what choice does she have?
He says, I'm not an animal.
She says, neither am I.
And he gives her her clothes back, and they begin to fall in love.
And in taking control of himself and living by his values instead of by his nature, he defeats an entire empire.
The empire is trying to get him to do this thing, and he says no.
And he's still locked in a cage, and he's already defeated the Roman Empire.
When a man uses his strength to turn himself into a human being, he can begin to turn the earth into a place fit for less strong human beings like women and children.
And that's a task fit for all kinds of men, fighters, farmers, husbands, poets, garbage collectors, carpenters, and nerds.
And it gives us our first hint about how any man can become a real man.
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All right, chapter two, do your job.
Doj's Corrupt Context00:11:46
You don't have to make those noises, but you do have to get a job.
I have said often repeatedly that I think a woman's highest calling is homemaking and motherhood.
And that doesn't mean that a woman has to choose to do that.
It just means that I respect and admire those women more than any other.
They do a woman's most important job, probably a person's most important job.
And the interesting thing to notice is if they do the job right, it makes them more womanly.
Women become more womanly when they raise children and make a home.
This is a key piece of wisdom, and it can take you anybody too long to learn it.
You can't advance in life by waiting to become the person you want to be.
You take on the task you need to do, and if you do it right, it turns you into the person you want to be.
This is key wisdom.
Write this down.
You don't wait to become a person who gives up porn.
You give up porn.
And then by dealing with the struggle, you become a person who no longer watches porn.
You don't wait to become the person who can support a family.
You start a family and you find a way.
It's risky.
It's scary.
It is a man's work.
Because women have this built-in, essential job that defines a large part of their life.
It's simpler for them to find their calling, at least if they have the sense that God gave a goose, which many of them don't.
But a man has to do the job of finding out who he is and what he's supposed to do.
And you find that by finding the work you do.
Fatherhood, supporting a family are central and important.
But how?
How do you do it?
You have to find out what you want to do, what you can do, what you have to do.
I've done everything.
I've worked construction.
I've driven a cab.
I've been a security guard, a reporter, whatever I had to do to keep body and soul together and get to the place where I could do what I wanted to do, which was right, which was what I was made to do.
Whatever I did, whatever I did, I always wanted to take pride in the work of my hands.
This was a very, very important thing, no matter whether it was menial work or not.
I always wanted to take pride in it.
And the way to take pride in it is you ask yourself, what is the job for?
What's the telos of my job?
So this is the thing.
When people start talking about manhood, you'll notice they always start using these big words, courage, integrity, fidelity, things like that, that they think define a man.
But courage for what?
Integrity and what?
Fidelity to what?
You have to know the purpose of your occupation.
You do a job to support your family, so the pay is important, an important part of it, but that's not the purpose of the job.
Nobody pays you to do a job because you're doing a job.
They pay you because the job has a purpose, has a use.
If you're a cop, the purpose is to protect the community and arrest criminals.
You can't just do it for the pay because then you start skimming the money that you take off drug dealers and you become corrupt.
And this is true of people who start businesses too.
Yes, you have to make a profit.
Yes, you have to pay your employees, but if you just work for the money, your company begins to mean nothing and you will not be a man.
And deep down, you will know it.
You may get rich, but you'll still be a nothing.
So let's talk about something that happened this week.
Our government, its job is what?
It's written in our documents.
Its job is to ensure the people's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Is that what they're doing?
Are they doing anything that a government should be doing?
Last week, Donald Trump had just been indicted on these federal charges, and I hadn't had a chance.
I had to come on and talk about it, but I hadn't had a chance to read the actual indictment.
And now I have, and it's really interesting.
The most damning part of the indictment is a very carefully done indictment.
It's not like the New York indictment.
This is a professional job of work at something that Trump was actually doing, about something that Trump was actually doing.
And part of the indictment is a taped conversation made with Trump's permission, where Trump is talking to a writer, a publisher, and two of his staff, so people with no clearance whatsoever.
And he's obviously Trump-like, waving around a document that reveals an American attack plan on what sounds like it's Iran.
And he says, this is a quote, look what I found.
This was a senior military official's plan of attack.
Read it.
And it's interesting.
And later he went on to say, as president, I could have declassified this, but now I can't.
But this is still secret.
So he's revealing sensitive information to people who should not know it.
He admits it's still classified.
It's stuff that could endanger our plans, could endanger our military.
And there are also charges that seem to come from his own lawyers that he instructed them to destroy documents and lie to the DOJ that the documents existed.
Now, I'm not a lawyer.
Speaking legally, I don't understand even how you can prosecute him for an . They're prosecuting him not for classified documents.
They're prosecuting him under the Espionage Act for unauthorized possession.
But there is another act called the Presidential Records Act, which basically allows the president to declare what his records are, what are his personal records.
So I don't understand how anything he has can be unauthorized.
But who knows?
I'm not a lawyer.
It also seems like this is going to take forever.
So by the time the trial actually goes to trial, the election will be over.
And if he's won, he can just pardon himself.
But because we're talking about being a man and because we're talking about the telos of your work and because the telos of my work is telling you the truth as I see it, not supporting some guy here that I like or some guy there that I like.
It's just telling you the truth as I see it.
I have to be frank and say when I look at this indictment, I don't think about the legal jeopardy because I just, we don't know.
He's innocent until proved guilty.
We don't know if they can prove him guilty.
I do think that he's behaving badly.
Is he doing what he should be doing?
Is he fulfilling the telos of his role in our society?
I don't think he is.
You know, I don't think, you know, we always, you know, I said that when you put money first, money takes over the purpose of your job and you start to do your job badly because all you're thinking about is the money.
One of the things we all loved, including me, about Trump, was that he fought.
He fought against the people who denigrate the country.
He fought against the people who say a boy can become a girl.
He fought against the people who destroy our society while Republicans look on and say, well, we don't want to deal with that.
We just deal with business.
He fought against them.
But fighting wasn't the purpose.
It was what he was fighting against.
And for a long time, he was fighting for us.
And ever since he lost the election, it seems to me he's been fighting for himself and for his butthurt.
So, you know, Bill Barr came out and said that if any half of this indictment is true, Trump is toast.
And Trump responded on Truth Social with a tweet or Truth Social that said, virtually everyone is saying that the indictment is brought about, is about election interference and should not have been brought except Bill Barr, a disgruntled former employee, a lazy attorney general who is weak and totally ineffective.
He doesn't mean what he's saying.
It's just misinformation.
Barr's doing it because he hates Trump for firing him.
He was deathly afraid of the radical left when they said they would impeach him.
He knows the indictment is bull.
Turn off Fox News when that gutless pig is on.
Now, all that's false.
Trump didn't fire him.
He quit.
And he was not a gutless guy, and he's certainly not a gutless guy.
He's spoken the truth as he saw it every single time I've seen him, sometimes, oftentimes, in Trump's defense.
But Trump is disloyal.
Trump does not give loyalty to the people who served him.
He doesn't treat people with respect.
And I feel that Trump is not fulfilling his role in our society.
The role that we love them for, the role that made me vote for him twice.
I do not feel he's doing that.
I feel he's disgracing himself, disgracing the movement he led.
I feel that he is behaving badly.
So look, that's on his side.
I don't think he's doing his job.
But let's look on the other side.
Merrick Garland defended Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted Trump.
Here's what Merrick Garland said, cut seven.
Mr. Smith is a veteran career prosecutor.
He has assembled a group of experienced and talented prosecutors and agents who share his commitment to integrity and the rule of law.
Well, here's the thing.
I don't know anything about Jack Smith.
That may be true.
He may be doing his job with integrity, but he's doing it in a context of corruption.
So it's Merrick Garland who is really the person responsible here.
And is Merrick Garland doing his job?
I don't think he is.
His job is not just to enforce a law.
It is to enforce all the laws and to do it in such a way where the American public can feel that everyone is being treated fairly, both the people they like and the people they dislike.
He's indicted Trump when Trump is the main rival of the sitting president, who is the executive and therefore runs the Department of Justice.
He doesn't run it, but he oversees it because he's part of the executive branch.
He's indicting him when Hillary Clinton was not indicted for very, very similar violations.
He's indicting him when, as I say, it looks like he's being persecuted, but he's also indicting him where they have been investigating Hunter Biden now for five years.
Five years they've been investigating.
They have an entire laptop of evidence against him showing that he did these things.
It is clear, it is clear that they are slow walking this when they're not absolutely mishandling it.
They have a guy the FBI paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, a whistleblower, so they trust him as a source.
And he says that they're hiding.
He says that they've got tapes.
They've got tapes of Joe Biden that involve him in a bribery scheme with Ukrainian officials.
Here's Senator Chuck Grassley talking about that.
The Foreign National who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly has audio recordings of his conversation with them.
17 such recordings.
According to the 1023, the Foreign National possesses 15 audio recordings of phone calls between him and Hunter Biden.
According to the 1023, the Foreign National possesses two audio recordings of phone calls between him and then Vice President Joe Biden.
These recordings were allegedly kept as a sort of insurance policy for the foreign national in case that he got into a tight spot.
The 1023 also indicates that then Vice President Joe Biden may have been involved in Burouge Man employing Hunter Biden.
So obviously Merrick Garland and the DOJ are doing their job when it serves them and not doing their job when it doesn't serve them.
So we could say, yeah, this indictment of Trump is explainable.
I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if it's a good indictment or not.
A lot of lawyers are saying it is.
It's a pretty solid indictment.
They're doing it when it serves their turn, but they're not doing their job when it doesn't serve their terms, so they're not doing their job.
Now, let's think about this.
Think about your own job.
You do your job when it's easy and when it's fun, and you do your job when it's not easy and when it's not fun, when you have to do something that you don't like, when you have to do something that's going to make people dislike you, when I have to come on here and talk about Donald Trump doing something wrong, knowing that a lot of people are switching off their devices and throwing it across the room and saying, ah, you sold out because you don't like Donald Trump.
No, I'm doing my job.
That is one of the things that turns you into a man when you do your job, no matter what the situation is.
You don't become a man by sitting around reading books about courage and integrity and strength.
You do your job by knowing what the purpose of your job is and then doing it no matter what, right?
No matter whether it's going to cost you, no matter whether your boss is going to like you, no matter whether the people are going to like you, no matter whether it's going to cost you money, you just do it because you have integrity.
Now you have integrity.
You didn't have integrity when you were talking about integrity.
You didn't have integrity when you were reading Josh Hawley's book.
You didn't have integrity when you were listening to Andrew Tate talk about how many women you were allowed to sleep with before people would find you disgusting.
You had integrity when they came for you and said, don't do this, even though it's the right thing to do.
Do It With Integrity00:03:05
And you did it anyway.
I feel the same way about Trump.
You know, it's totally possible for both things to be true at once.
What the DOJ is doing is excruciatingly bad.
It is far worse than anything Donald Trump has done.
Donald Trump did not anywhere near the damage to this country and any mistakes he might have made as the DOJ is doing by not being the DOJ.
And that is the thing.
It's like everybody at the top levels of our government, everybody who is seeking to be at the top levels of our government, are only showing up when it's good for them, but they're not showing up when it's tough, when the going gets tough.
And this is a moment when I think we really need to look around for the people who do their job, even when they come under fire.
And we need to remember that all of this stuff, even though it comes, whatever happens at the top comes down and lands on the rest of us, what happens at the bottom comes up too and comes after those guys.
If you're living in a country where everybody does his job, where the media tells the truth whether they like it or not, where police enforce the law whether it's hard or not, where DAs convict people whether it makes them look racist or not, when you're living in that country, then the people at the top respond to that and they start cleaning up their act as well.
That's not the country we're living in.
That's why we have to do something else that is conducive to manhood, which is living the truth.
And I'll talk about that in a minute.
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Chapter 3, Live the Truth.
So what does that mean?
Well, first of all, it means knowing the truth, looking the truth dead in the eye, and then it means acting on the truth and not on what people say is the truth or what you want to be the truth or what everybody you know thinks is the truth or what your wife wants to be the truth.
Acting On The Truth00:06:27
You act on the truth as you know it, as you look it dead in the eye.
I cannot tell you, I cannot tell you how many people I know who have sold their souls for money, for fame, for advancement, and they did it always while lying to themselves and often lying to me, looking me in the eye and saying, this is what I had to do.
This is what has to happen.
You have to know the truth.
You know the truth already.
You all know it.
Everybody knows it deep down in his heart.
They know what's right.
They know what's wrong.
You have to then find that truth, stare it in the face, and then live it.
And the consequences are what will turn you into a man.
This is what I'm saying.
You have to take the action.
You have to take the action.
Do your job according to its telos.
Live the truth according to how you see the truth.
And that will turn you into a man.
Let's talk about Daniel Penny, a guy who's constantly referred to as a former Marine.
I'm not sure what his job is.
I think he was a bartender for a while.
Maybe he's still taking some time off after college.
He has now been indicted.
We don't know what the exact charges are, but he has now been indicted for an incident on a subway in which a homeless mentally ill man named Jordan Neely was apparently threatening other passengers.
Daniel Penny put him in a chokehold.
Neely died.
I'm sure you've heard about this already.
And now he's being indicted for that.
He was charged with manslaughter, second-degree manslaughter, and we're not sure if that's what the grand jury brought in.
Our grand jury indictment is pretty easy to secure.
We know that the New York district attorney is a bad one.
We know he's a Soros guy.
So this is one of the things that happens when the police are not allowed to do their job.
A city becomes lawless.
People have to take the law into their own hands.
Now, here is a place where no one was doing their job with one exception, Daniel Penny.
And he was doing his job as a man and as a man who was trained.
He's a former Marine.
He's fit.
He's in good shape.
He did his job as a man.
This guy, Jordan Neely, the media is not doing their job.
They're putting out pictures of him as a Michael Jackson impersonator, which he was apparently before he became a disheveled guy with his pants hanging around around his knees.
They're putting out very sympathetic pictures of him, photographs of him.
They're quoting anybody who's saying what a wonderful person he was.
But this is a guy who has been arrested 44 times for criminal conduct.
At the time of his death, he had an outstanding warrant for federal assault.
According to Daniel Penny and other witnesses, he was threatening passengers, repeating the phrases, I'm going to kill you.
I'm prepared to go to jail for life and I'm willing to die.
And that was when Penny took action.
Here's his description, cut nine.
There's a common misconception that Marines don't get scared.
We're actually taught one of our core values is courage.
And courage is not the absence of fear, but how you handle fear.
And, you know, I was scared for myself, but I looked around.
I saw women and children.
He was yelling in their faces, saying these threats.
I couldn't just sit still.
Some people say that I was holding on to Mr. Neely for 15 minutes.
This is not true.
I mean, between stops, it's only a couple minutes.
So the whole interaction lasted less than five minutes.
Some people say I was trying to choke him to death, which is also not true.
I was trying to restrain him.
You could see in the video, there's a clear rise and fall of his chest, indicating that he's breathing.
I'm trying to restrain him from him being able to carry out the threats.
And then some people say that this is about race, which is absolutely ridiculous.
I didn't see a black man threatening passengers.
I saw a man threatening passengers.
And a black man came to his aid, and some of the people who were being threatened were black.
You know, it should go without saying before you accuse somebody of racism, you should have a reason for it, but that's not the society we lived in.
This is a guy, Jordan Neely.
And listen, he was mentally ill.
The officials aren't doing their job.
There should be a system for putting mentally ill people away and forcing them to take the medication they need.
They shouldn't be living on the street.
You don't then blame the guy who had to fight him because all of these people at the top weren't doing their job.
Penny had to do a job that wasn't his.
And you could say, oh, well, he didn't do the chokehold right.
That's because he's not a trained cop.
He was acting in an emergency.
This is a guy who socked a 67-year-old woman as she came out of the Bowery station in the East Village, broke her nose.
From January 2020 to August 21, he was arrested for public lewdness after pulling down his pants and exposing himself to a female stranger, misdemeanor assault for hitting a woman in the face, criminal contempt for violating a restraining order.
All of these cases were dismissed as part of his plea, part of a plea deal.
In June 2019, he attacked a 68-year-old man on the platform, the West 4th station in Greenwich Village.
These are all places I know very well, punched the guy in the face.
For both of the 2019 cases, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault and was sentenced to six months in jail.
This is a system that is broken down where no one is doing their job.
So now you have Daniel Penny step up, and he's in this situation where he could have said to himself, I'm going to get in trouble if I do this.
He could have said to himself, I don't have the training to do this.
He could have said to himself, I'm afraid.
He said he was afraid.
Of course he was afraid.
Of course he was afraid.
Nobody's immune to fear.
Nobody is immune to fear.
An important point, in doing what he did, he brought on that fear.
He brought on the fear and doing what had to be done and living in the truth of the moment that he was the guy responsible.
He did what he had to do.
He lived in the fear.
And as he was taught as a Marine, courage is not a matter of not feeling fear.
It's a matter of feeling the fear and doing it anyway.
So now Penny had to do a lot of things as he lived in the truth.
He had to become brave.
He had to speak the truth afterward.
He has to have integrity.
He has to be brave now as he faces prison because all the people who didn't do their job are blaming it on him.
It's like that poem, if if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, that is what has happened in New York City.
And he is playing the part of the man and he may pay a big, big price for it.
This could ruin his life.
It could destroy his life.
It could send him to prison.
He did it anyway.
That is what a man is.
ZipRecruiter Simplifies Hiring00:02:26
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Oh, yeah, man.
I take over Mongolia and I sleep with all the women.
I'm sorry.
B.S. I call BS.
This is a man.
This is what a man does.
Nobody wants to have courage.
I don't want to have courage.
I never want to be in that situation.
In those times when I have exhibited anything like courage, it was because I had to.
And same with integrity.
I don't want to lose money for telling the truth.
I don't want to lose audience for telling the truth.
I don't want to lose jobs for telling the truth.
You do all those things because you are doing your job according to the truth and you're speaking the truth according to the truth.
That's how you have, that is how those qualities are imbued in you.
You have to do them in order to follow the telos of your job and to live in the truth.
If you do your job with a commitment to the telos and seek the truth, you will find that every quality of manhood is eventually required of you.
You don't need to pound your chest.
You don't need to talk about big words like courage and manhood.
You don't have to boss your wife around.
You shouldn't boss your wife around.
Do your job, live in the truth.
You will need the qualities that make you a tough guy and a man because the world is a corrupt place.
This is a dishonest place in which people don't do their jobs and they will come after you.
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John Wayne's Morality00:15:19
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Hire the guy who knows how to spell that because he knows the secret of life.
Final chapter, the image of a man.
I've written a lot, especially in my memoir, The Great Good Thing, about how the arts schooled me in manhood.
I didn't find anywhere around me a man that I could model myself on or felt that I could model myself on.
And so I looked for such men in fiction and in the movies.
And I found it in American tough guy fiction, like by Ernest Hemingway and Dashel Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
And I found it in the movies in characters played by guys like Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne.
Now, the most important character in my young adulthood or my adolescence, I would say, was Raymond Chandler's private detective, Philip Marlowe.
He was a man who carried the ideal of chivalry into a corrupt modern society.
Raymond Chandler wrote an essay about him in which he said this, and this became something when I read this for the first time as a kid of maybe 13, 14 years old, I said, yes, that's the kind of man I want to be.
He wrote, down these mean streets, a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.
He is the hero.
He is everything.
He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.
Now, whether I succeeded in that is not for me to judge.
I know I did sometimes, and I know I didn't sometimes, but that was the model I set for myself.
And so I want to take a look at a couple of figures in the arts, especially in American movies, and look at the way manhood has changed and what the movies have been telling us about manhood all this time.
It's a good thing to look at the arts because the artist captures something about the human experience in his time.
And once that thing is spoken aloud, it becomes part of the time.
It has an effect on the time.
There's a new book out called The Last Action Heroes, The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood's Kings of Carnage.
It's by Nick de Semlian.
And it charts what I think is one of the most interesting developments in the way men are presented in the culture and have been presented in my lifetime.
I noticed it when it was going on, but it's interesting people are writing about it now.
The old movies, see, I grew up watching old movies because there were no recording devices.
There were no VHS machines or streaming.
So a movie came to the theater and it left.
The only movies on TV were old movies.
The movies my mom and dad would watch in the theater.
The same movies they saw in the theater were the only movies on TV.
So I saw a lot of old movies.
And in these old movies, a man, an action man, a man of action, was ready for action, but he didn't necessarily want to go into action.
Action was not a good thing.
It was just something he was ready to do when he had to do it.
Here's just a quick famous scene of John Wayne in a movie called McClintock, which is kind of a Western comedy.
A guy has been hitting Wayne in the stomach with a rifle, hitting him again and again, bullying him.
And eventually, Wayne takes the rifle away from him.
It's cut 10.
Now, we'll all calm down.
Boss, he's just a little excited.
I know, I know.
I'm going to use good judgment.
I haven't lost my temper in 40 years.
But Pilgrim, you caused a lot of trouble this morning.
Might have got somebody killed.
And somebody ought to belt you in the mouth.
But I won't.
I won't.
The hell I won't.
The hell I won't.
In other words, he doesn't want to lose his temper.
He's not supposed to lose his temper.
He hasn't lost his temper in 40 years.
But when the time comes, he is ready for action.
Now, then came the revolutionary 1970s, and the image of a man became kind of intellectual and ethnic and kind of inward and offbeat.
Actors like Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro.
They were troubled men trying to find a code in a kind of corrupt, lost world.
It was really in the 1980s when things changed, and that's what this book is about.
Suddenly, there were all these really, really muscle-bound stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, to a lesser extent, Bruce Willis.
They were almost cyborgs.
They were defined by violence in action.
That's all they did in the movies.
Here's a scene from The Terminator where Arnold Schwarzenegger is playing a literal cyborg, but it shows you kind of what I mean.
Cut 11.
I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle.
You forgot to say please.
So he's not even a man at all, really.
You can't hurt him.
He doesn't experience what Daniel Penny experienced.
He doesn't experience fear.
He just is so huge, so indestructible that he does what he has to do.
It's kind of this weird, blown-up, puffed-up idea of what manhood is.
And now, I noticed this, as I said at the time.
I thought, when did men become that?
When did that become the image of a man?
And of course, you can only guess at the reasons.
You're only imposing your guesses.
But I thought then, and I still think now, that this coincided with the first real rise of angry leftist feminism.
So this cyberg maleness, which would ultimately morph into today's superheroes, these guys who are also indestructible, it may have been like a comforting assertion of male fantasy power at a time when men felt they were losing their power to these loud, angry, nasty feminists.
Or it also may have been a reaction to the idea that men and women were antagonists.
See, this was the part of feminism that was leftist, that men and women were antagonists rather than lovers and friends, so that they had to heavily define themselves as utterly male and utterly female.
Movies for women in that time were unwatchable by a man.
The old soap operas, which were called women's pictures, a man could watch.
They were entertaining.
They were interesting.
They had men in them.
They had relationships in them.
But modern romantic comedies and romances, you can't look at at all if you're a man.
It's like having a screwdriver dug into your head.
So instead of being human beings who are different genders, feminism defined us as antagonists with utterly different personalities, which is just not true.
This is the idea of context, which is very important to manhood.
How a man expresses himself, how he expresses his manhood, is going to depend on what situation he is, what historical situation he is.
If Genghis Khan is the most natural man, then warfare and conquest express something very basic about men, which I think they do.
That's why Andrew Tate resonates.
There is something natural in man that wants to conquer, that wants to seduce, that wants to be the top dog.
Every civilization, I think, has a place, a golden age that it looks back to when men could be that thing, but be it morally.
So the British have the knights in shining armor.
You can be a tough guy, you can be a wanderer, you can be a fighter, but you are the exemplar of morality.
Same thing is true in the Western.
The Japanese had the samurai, the French had the musketeers, the Trojan warriors are like that.
If you look at the Knights in Armor and the Westerns, there's always a sense there that golden age is passing.
If you look at the Arthurian myths, there's a sense that this is a doomed way of life.
And if you look at Westerns, there is always this idea that as the tough guys, the real man, the basic man, settles the West, a new man is required who is something new and something less than this.
The best version of this is in the novel and movie Shane.
If you've ever read the novel Shane, you should read it.
It's just an absolutely terrific Western.
This is about a wandering gunman who comes to a farming community that is being bullied by the ranchers who don't want the farmers to move in.
And the family takes this gunman in, and the little boy and his mother have to choose between two versions of manhood.
One is the wandering gunman who's the tough guy, and that's Shane.
And the other is Joe Start, who's the farmer, the husband, the father, the provider, the guy who can till the land, farm the land, and build a civilization.
Alan Ladd, a terrific tough guy actor, he plays Shane, and there's one scene where he's teaching the little boy how to shoot a gun, but the mother, Mrs. Start, she doesn't want to see her boy using a gun and she comes out and scolds him.
You ought to see Shane shoot, man.
I did, Joey.
He's teaching me to shoot.
Yes, I know, dear.
Now you run along, get ready for the party.
Oh, mom.
How aren't, Joey?
Guns aren't going to be my boy's life.
Why do you always have to spoil everything?
Gun!
Bang!
A gun is a tool, Miriam.
No better, no worse than any other tool.
An axe, a shovel, or anything.
A gun is as good or as bad as the man using it.
So there he is, schooling the lady on what it takes to settle a community.
The man can't always be a farmer, can't always be the husband, can't always be the provider.
Sometimes he has to fight it out.
And she has to choose between this romantic stranger and the man who has taken care of her and she's married and she loves them both.
And so does the child.
The child has to decide what he's going to be like.
Another great version of the story of the two men, the two different kinds of men that it requires to build a civilization, the man who shot Liberty Valence.
Here the two men are Jimmy Stewart.
He plays Rance Stoddard, who is a physically weak but intellectual lawyer who comes out to the West to establish a law practice.
And John Wayne plays the tough guy frontiersman, Tom Donovan, who, and the woman who's caught between them is named Hallie Erickson.
She's played by Vera Miles.
The villain who terrorizes the town is the great Lee Marvin playing Liberty Valence.
Here's a scene where Stoddard, the lawyer, he has to get a job waiting tables because he has to support himself.
And Liberty Valence bullies him and trips him up as he's trying to carry a tray until Donovan John Wayne steps in.
This is Cup 13.
Looking at the new waitress.
That's my mistake, Balance.
You heard him, dude.
Pick it up.
Pilgrim, hold it.
I said you, Valance.
You pick it up.
Great movie, great scene.
Jimmy Stewart has courage.
He's going to go after him, but he's going to get killed if he does because he's not John Wayne.
And in the end, spoiler alert, in the end, the lawyer, Jimmy Stewart, has to face off in a duel with Liberty Valence and shoots Liberty Valence dead.
And on the glory that accrues to him from that duel, he becomes a senator, rises, becomes an ambassador to England, and is now on the verge, if he wants to, to becoming the vice president of the United States.
He comes back when Tom Donovan dies as an old man and he tells his story to the reporters, and the reporter tears the story up.
Famous line from this movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Cut 14.
Well, you're not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?
No, sir.
This is the West, Sue.
When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
It's a hugely important line, not just a great line, but it's also a hugely important line because what it means is this.
After men like John Wayne, after tough guys settle the world so the women and children are safe, they want to forget it.
They want to forget what it took.
And this is why you get these people apologizing for taking the land from the Indians.
Oh, we're here in college, but we're so sorry that we took the land away from the Indians, who, of course, were taking the land from the last Indians who were on it before them, who took it away from the guys before that.
They're not leaving the land.
They're not stopping going to college.
They're not living in teepees.
They're living the life that was given to them by tough guys who fought with the Indians in order to settle the West.
And so we live in lies, right?
We live in lies.
And what people like me try to do is live in the truth.
I love to read books.
I love arts.
I know.
I understand that I'm able to do that.
I'm able to live the life that I live because men are standing on walls defending me, risking their lives to defend me.
And I never forget that.
And I never diss them because of who they are.
Sometimes people say to you, oh, you can't be for war.
You can't decide on whether we should go to war because you were never a soldier.
And I say, no, no, no, no.
Because I was never a soldier, I have that much more respect for the people who make the world safe.
So all of the things that make civilization worth having can be done.
So now as the country becomes urbanized, the opportunities for that kind of natural male aggression disappear, right?
The violent man becomes an outlaw.
This is why gangster movies start to become popular and why we saw So many TV shows in the 2000s like The Sopranos and The Shield and Breaking Bad, where a man becomes a man by being an outlaw.
Context matters.
That's why what the show, the book, and the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is about.
This guy comes in who is a bad guy, Randall Patrick McMurphy.
He's not a guy that you like.
He's not a civilized person.
He's an anti-social character.
But when you put him in this place where men are essentially being castrated and are being told that they're crazy for being who they are, he becomes a man.
I think this is a lot of Donald Trump's appeal.
It comes from context.
Our freedom is threatened by corrupt politicians.
So Donald Trump's loud mouthery sounds like manhood as long as he is fighting for our freedom.
When he's just fighting for his own ego, not so much.
The guy who has dealt best, I think, with the question of manhood and the two kinds of manhood and the dilemmas of manhood is David Mammet.
He's written a lot of good things, but the two great things that he wrote are Glen Garry, Glenn Ross, and The Untouchables.
Glenn Garry Glenn Ross takes up the idea as a play.
It started as a play and then was made into a terrific movie, 1992, a fantastic cast, if you haven't seen it.
Al Pacino, Jack Lemon, Alec Baldwin, Alan Ark and Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey, Jonathan Price, one great actor after another, turning in one great performance after another.
And it is about this unsatisfying idea that the adventures of the West, the adventures of violence, have been taken over by trade.
To be macho is to be a salesman.
The guy who makes the most money is the guy who is the most manly.
And here's Alec Baldman driving that home to his sales staff, Cut 15.
You can't play in the man's game.
You can't close them.
The Romance of Eternity00:08:45
Then go home and tell your wife your troubles.
Because only one thing counts in this life.
Get them to sign on the line which is dotted.
You hear me, you f**king...
A, B, C.
A, always, B, B, C. Closing.
Always be closing.
Always be closing.
If money becomes the measure of manhood, the price is your moral soul.
Here's a scene where Al Pacino is the top salesman, makes a sale.
This is what he says, Cut 16.
When you die, you're going to regret the things you don't do.
You think you're queer?
I'm going to tell you something.
We're all queer.
You think you're a thief?
So what?
You get befuddled by a middle-class morality.
Get shut of it.
Shut it out.
You cheat on your wife?
You did it.
Live with it.
Little girls, so be it.
Is an absolute morality?
Maybe.
And then what?
If you think there is, go ahead, be that thing.
Bad people go to hell.
I don't think so.
You think that?
Act that way.
That's a great, great, great speech.
And it just shows that he's lost the core of himself.
He's acting out the rituals of manhood, but he is no longer an actual person and therefore no longer a man.
At the same time, I think he wrote, I think Mammet wrote the script for The Untouchables around the same time he wrote Dungary Glenn Ross.
And there he deals with this.
He turns the gangster movie on its head by making the hero, the goody two-shoe lawman, played by Kevin Costner, Elliot Ness, who comes in to take Al Capone out in Chicago.
But before he can do the telos of his job, which is getting Capone, he has to learn the lesson from the old guy from the old West, the old lawman, Sean Connery.
This is that great scene, Cut 17.
You said you wanted to know how to get Capone.
Do you really want to get him?
You see what I'm saying?
What are you prepared to do?
Everything within the law.
And then what are you prepared to do?
If you open the ball on these people, Mr. Mesh, you must be prepared to go all the way because they won't give up the fight until one of you is dead.
I want to get Capone.
I don't know how to get him.
Want to get Capone?
Here's how you get him.
He pulls a knife.
You pull a gun.
He sends one of yours to the hospital.
You send him one of his to the morgue.
Batch, they should back away.
The man who does his job according to its telos and who lives in the truth even when it costs him is going to face the challenges that require all the finest qualities of manhood.
A woman can do that, but women can't.
Just look at the occupations that have been taken over by women and you will see the truth.
Without men, civilizations aren't built.
Without men, civilizations crumble.
What men are, the future will be.
And you may say, well, I want to be a man like that, but I can't afford it, or I'm afraid of losing my Twitter account, or my wife doesn't respect me enough, or society isn't fair to me.
My response to that, to all of that, is that's all true.
Now, be a man.
As you may know, we've been in an ongoing battle with some of the biggest social media platforms out there.
Last month, Matt Walsh was demonetized on YouTube, and Candace Owens and Michael Knowles were both suspended for seven days.
Even Dr. Jordan B. Peterson was given a channel warning.
Most of these so-called violations stemmed from our coverage of the transgender debate.
It's also telling the truth.
That's what really gets you in trouble.
Being expected to adhere to vague, arbitrary, and constantly changing rules has become increasingly frustrated.
These rules, also called lies, contradict everything we stand for.
However, we will not stop speaking the truth.
We will not allow the left to restrict us from reaching the audiences that need to hear this debate the most.
As our CEO and God King Jeremy Boring recently tweeted, if platforms like YouTube believe in free speech, then they must change these vague and capricious policies and their arbitrary enforcement.
In the meantime, we'll keep fighting and speaking the truth wherever we can, unquote.
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And now, Clavin clapbacks.
You can act like a man!
What's about with you?
Lincoln.
Last week you answered an email question asking if romance novels are wrong or sinful as they are porn for women, literally not just in jest.
You responded saying romance novels are not in fact wrong and not actually porn.
But just as pornography is a fantasy for men's desires of a woman, romance novels are a fantasy of a woman's desire for man.
If porn is in large part wrong because of how it makes a wife feel inadequate, could the converse not be true?
Could a woman indulging in romance novels, imagining the fantastical ideal of hundreds of different men who are what she desires, not make her husband feel inadequate?
That's not the thing that's so wrong about porn.
The thing that's wrong about porn is that it takes the function of love and creation and turns it into a drug.
When you're looking at shapes that excite you but don't actually aren't actually there and you aren't having any relationship with them, a drug is being put into your head that makes you feel good.
That's all that's happening.
You might as well, it's like saying you're a farmer because you saw a picture of wheat growing.
You're not actually doing that thing.
It's degrading to you.
It is taking away the purpose, the telos, of making love to your wife.
That's the problem with it.
It also makes your wife feel inadequate.
But if you feel inadequate because you are not handsome enough or good enough or strong enough or as powerful as the guy in a romance novel, become better.
That's a different, a very, very different thing.
Diane, about your biblical distinction between being inspired by God and written by men.
I said the Bible was inspired by God, but it's written by men.
She says, It was taught to me that the meaning of inspiration in regard to the word of God was as a beam of pure white light.
In writing God's word, man's sinfulness and state of separation was like a piece of red cellophane.
The inspired word of God means that the white light shone through the red cellophane does not produce a reddish or pink outcome, but instead ensures the light remains pure and unchanged by man.
That's not what inspiration means, though.
Inspiration means breathed into, into.
That's why it's sometimes translated as God breathed.
It is breathed into you, and then you bring it out.
And I do not believe that men ever do anything purely and ever do anything godly.
I think that they do the best they can.
This is not, somebody accused me of cherry-picking quotes from the Bible, but that's not true.
I think everybody cherry-picks quotes from the Bible.
I simply recognize that the Bible are stories in context, people living in context, and I don't think it's wrong to read it that way.
From Anonymous, hey, Mr. Claven, could you please explain your view and understanding of predestination?
I've been looking into it and can't bring myself to accept the idea.
I think it doesn't actually make sense to me because God is living in eternity, which is not a long time.
It's all time.
He's living all time at once.
We have no idea what that looks like.
We can't imagine it.
We can't think about it.
Our minds can't encompass it.
But there is no pre or post in eternity because all things are happening at the same time.
So it may feel like predestination to us, but it's not to God.
From Steve, I really liked your shows.
My wife, who is a Daily Wire member, and I look forward to the shows.
We love your sense of humor.
I've recently read True Crime, Empire of Lies, and The Last Thing I Remember, and I'm starting The Scarred Man, all recorded for the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped.
I was read for that.
Well, I like the book generally.
I hated the way The Last Thing I Remember ended since there was no resolution.
That's because it's the first book in a tetralogy.
There are three more books that each one tells a part of the story.
All of them tell the story together.
It's called the Homelander series, and you can get it online.
All right, I got to stop there.
If you want to be in Clavin Clapbacks next week, it's Clavin Clapbacks, K-L-A-P-B-A-C-K-S at dailywire.com.
Clavinclapbacks at dailywire.com.
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