Andrew Klavan argues Hollywood’s writers strike masks a woke takeover, mocking Disney’s reparations-themed reboots and J.K. Rowling’s defiance as proof of cultural capitulation, framing it as a "cold civil war" between "Americanists" and institutionalized wokeness. Data shows English majors plummeted 42–50% at top universities (Ohio State, Tufts) as CRT and queer theory replace literary study, while Claremont McKenna thrives by teaching "truth and beauty." He warns this erasure of objective art—from Shakespeare to The Scarlet Letter—threatens universal truths, comparing woke academia’s fear-based narratives to Hollywood’s moral decay. The solution? Hillsdale’s free courses and PragerU’s counter-programming. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm on vacation, so I have no clue what is going on, and I plan to keep it that way for as long as I possibly can.
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As you know, we Hollywood writers are on strike right now.
And you may be saying to yourself, oh no, who will take our favorite childhood cartoon characters and transform them into sexually deviant groomers so that the minds and lives of our own children can be destroyed by the very franchises we had come to love and trust?
And yes, that is a problem.
But the fact is the corrupt, greedy industry moguls who've been pumping toxic and immoral sludge into our culture for the last 60 years aren't paying us enough to write the scripts.
Now, if the strike continues too long, screen content may start to dry up, and some of you may be forced to seek your entertainment elsewhere, like in great novels or conversation with your friends or classic old films on TCM, or even just quietly reading the Bible to yourself until you never want to watch another morally repugnant modern movie ever again, and may even be inspired to hunt down every Hollywood content creator of any kind whatsoever and tie his shoelaces together while he's napping so that when he wakes up and gets to his feet,
he falls over and cracks his head open and gets to feel what it's like for the rest of us to watch a modern American movie.
In order to prevent that from happening, I personally would like to ban the Bible before you find out what's in it.
But there's just too many damn copies out there, so instead, I'll try to divert your attention by giving you a rundown of the great, great content we're just waiting to write for you as soon as we can get the miserable capitalist pigs who are destroying our culture to pay us fairly for helping them.
One upcoming movie we have in the pipeline is the latest entry in the most popular DC franchise, Superman.
In this sequel, the man of steel rushes to Metropolis to destroy a swarm of murderous invaders and is then charged with first-degree manslaughter by Metropolis District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
We're also planning a modern take on the 1970s Watergate blockbuster All the President's Men, in which once again, a sleazy and untrustworthy presidential candidate is exposed, dragging our government agencies into a series of despicable, dirty campaign tricks until the intrepid reporters of the Washington Post cover the story up.
Then, we're rebooting the Great Lord of the Rings trilogy.
In film one, Frodo fights through orcs to reach Mount Doom until he's charged with first-degree manslaughter by Mordor District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
In the sequel, George Soros mysteriously becomes invisible, then later turns up as a corrupt, twisted, deformed blue creature of darkness who contributes to Bragg's reelection campaign.
The final film details the war between Soros and an army of conservatives who want to destroy the corrupt, twisted, deformed creature of darkness because they just don't like bluish people.
In the Houdana genre, we'll be rolling out Moonlight 2, in which a homosexual black detective tries to solve the mystery of how a film can win an Oscar when literally no one has ever seen it.
Unfortunately, Anthony Hopkins has grown too old to play Hannibal Lecter, but we have attached Denzel Washington to star as the cannibal serial killer who cooks and eats a census taker's liver with fava beans and a fine Chianti and is then charged by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg with cooking over an open flame without a permit.
It's a complicated joke, I'll give you a minute.
The Marvel universe will continue to expand with Native American Panther.
In this brilliant epic of virtue signaling and racial pandering, history is rewritten when Native Americans develop the world's greatest culture after a space rock falls on them and magically turns them into Europeans.
Superhero Native American Panther then sets out to spread the gift to the world until he realizes that Native Americans never invented the wheel, so he can't go anywhere.
And finally, in a real life sequel to 2011's pandemic thriller, Contagion, a fast-spreading flu virus threatens to kill 80-year-olds until heroic government doctor Anthony Fauci destroys the economy, strips Americans of their civil rights, ruins the lives of children, and then sets out to try to solve the mystery of why the disease caused so much damage to society.
So there are great films coming your way as soon as we can get back to work in the movie industry.
Meanwhile, stop reading the Bible or there won't be a movie industry.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
All right, we're back laughing our way through the fall of the republic.
And I just want to add to that opening, I do actually support the writers in their strike.
It's hard to describe how greedy and nasty and dishonest the people who make movies are.
And the writers are really at the bottom of the totem pole, and they really do get crushed.
Wake Up Call00:14:50
So I'm teasing them about their content, but they really do deserve to get better pay for their work.
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He said, somebody did something to me sometime in the 90s.
It must have been Trump.
Thanks, Steve.
Your $5 million check is in the mail.
So we're always hearing this country as an idea, and that is right.
And the idea centers on one thing, which is liberty, individual liberty, the liberty, the freedom to do, say, think, worship how you please, okay?
When the founders said all men are created equal, they meant equal in their right to liberty.
They obviously didn't mean that I'm as good of a basketball player as LeBron James.
They obviously didn't mean that, you know, a smart guy is not smarter than a dumb guy.
They didn't mean we were equal.
They meant that we were equal in the fact that we all had the right to liberty.
And they said that.
We have unalienable rights.
Life was first because obviously that's the basis of everything else.
But then comes liberty.
When they said that governments are formed among men to ensure those rights, they were talking mostly about liberty.
Again, the opposite of liberty is woke.
The opposite of liberty is wokeness.
It takes away your individuality, replaces equality of the right to freedom with equity of results.
It utterly, obviously, destroys your free speech.
I will talk about that more as we go on.
So fighting wokeness is the most important is the country.
The country is on the line.
There was a congressman from Indiana, Jim Banks.
He has recently announced the formation of an anti-woke caucus.
Every Republican should be in that caucus.
Every human being who calls himself an American should be in that caucus.
And in the American Mind this Week, two scholars, John Fonte of the Hudson Institute, he's a guy I know, he's an absolutely brilliant guy, and Thomas Klingenstein of Claremont, who may be the only conservative in America I haven't met, I don't think.
They wrote a manifesto for this anti-woke caucus.
It's in the American minds called woke revolutionaries versus Americanists, because obviously woke and America are the opposite.
And this is what they say.
They say national socialism, Nazism, and communism were the challenges for prior generations of Americans.
Wokeism is the challenge of our generation.
America is in the middle of a cold civil war between woke revolutionaries who believe America is and has always been systemically racist, evil, so that it must be deconstructed, delegitimized, i.e. destroyed, and those who believe that America is good and that its principles are the greatest antidote to racism ever created, and that preserving America and its principles is the highest and most urgent political calling.
Now, they are absolutely right about this, and they give the caucus some very good advice, but they're wrong about one thing.
They are wrong about one thing.
The woke people are not the revolutionaries.
We are.
They already own the culture.
They own every part of the culture.
They own the businesses.
They own the movies.
They own the academies.
They own showbiz.
They own just about everything.
They are just solidifying their victory.
Now that they've won the victory, they're now bringing in the big guns, the real things.
And like the Nazis take over France and then they start rounding up the Jews.
They're rounding up the Jews, basically.
And the Jews are you and me.
Anybody who disagrees with them, they're big business.
They're the government.
They're academy.
We are the revolutionaries, and we have to learn to fight like revolutionaries fight.
And that's what I'm going to talk about.
Disney, I mean, just an example.
Disney, once the fullest expression of American values and innovation, it is now a body-snatched zombie of wokeness.
They have taken it over.
They reissued their old proud family show, I think, from the 90s.
Here's a snippet of what was in it, Cut 3.
This country was built on slavery, which means slaves built this country.
Till this land from sea to sea to sea.
First there was rice, tobacco, sugarcane.
Then Whitney did his thing and captain became can.
And we were its soldiers, four millions strong, fighting for America's freedoms, even though we remained America's slaves.
Built this country.
The descendants of slaves continue to build this country.
Slaves built this country.
And we, the descendants of slaves in America, have earned reparations for their stuff and continue to earn reparations every moment we spend submerged in the systemic prejudice, racism, and white supremacy.
Now, it's an incredible, everything in that is a lie.
I mean, you know, slaves worked in this country.
They worked in a lot of countries, but they didn't build this country.
This country was built in very different ways.
But still, it's hateful.
It's a hate, anti-American hate being fed to your children by a corporation that was made in America, by America, for America, by a deeply American guy, Walt Disney.
So they have won.
They have already won.
And, you know, Disney, the Disney CEO, Bob Iger, just announced that he's cutting 7,000 jobs and $5.5 billion in cost.
They had a bad 22.
But if you think that, you know, go woke, go broke is going to save you, if you think capitalism is going to save you and the market will stop these guys, you're wrong.
You are wrong.
First of all, their quarterly earnings and their streamer losses were not as bad as they thought they were going to be.
And you're still going to watch Star Wars.
You're still going to watch stuff that they, even though Luke Skywalker is going to be retconda's gay, you're still going to, you know, go back and watch those films because you love them.
You'll be sending them their money to give that crap to your children because money, and they don't care because money is secondary.
This ideology is a virus and the people who have it have so much cultural power that people are simply falling over to support them and back them up.
This is what happened in the Soviet Union, what happened in China.
People will follow the crowd around them.
They will follow the crowd around them, even if they don't want to.
They find themselves saying things.
Things come out.
I mean, you ever tell somebody you liked a movie because they liked it, but you didn't really like it, but you don't want to say it.
That's the way this works.
This is a glitch in the human system.
Now, at the same time, there's a full court press going on to stop or damage the release of the new Harry Potter video game because J.K. Rowley won't bend the knee and she won't say that men can be women.
She's not anti-trans.
She's not transphobic, a state of mind that does not exist, a word that has no relation to anything in the truth.
She just says the truth, that men can't become women.
We don't have the technology.
It can't be done.
It's like saying, you know, if you're a man saying you're a woman, it's like saying you're standing on Pluto.
We can't get you there.
Too bad.
That's it.
That's the reality.
And people are saying, oh, they can't stop Rowling because she's a billionaire and they say her books make too much money and all this stuff.
Doesn't matter because the next person, the person just starting, the new author of a new Harry Potter, can't get going.
Even I've taken flack for this, by the way.
I won't bend the knee either.
But again, if I were just starting out, would I?
Probably not because I'm me, but somebody else will.
You know, remember Chick-fil-A?
The president of Chick-fil-A said he opposed gay marriage and gave money to Christian charities and everybody.
And then when they attacked him, he stood up to them and Chick-fil-A became the most popular fast food restaurant in the country because people were supporting him.
Doesn't matter.
Chick-fil-A has stopped funding those charities and announced that they stopped funding those charities because every time they went to open a restaurant, the activists were there shutting them down.
What do you think they're thinking in Colorado when they go after this baker every time when they destroy his life?
He's a strong Christian man.
He's standing up to them in faith.
But what do you think about the next baker who just thinks, I just want to sell my cakes.
If somebody wants a gay wedding cake, so it's against my principles.
I don't care.
Capitalism will not protect you.
The Constitution will not protect you if the culture loses the values that make them work.
You know, they're just papers.
Money is just paper.
Everything is just paper except those values in your heart.
That's what matters.
If God's values aren't written on your heart, they ain't in operation.
So they are the government.
They are this power.
We are the revolutionaries.
And they have a strategy for making it seem like they aren't.
That's how they fool you.
They make it seem that they're the revolutionaries.
They're the upstarts.
They're the ones.
You know, there was a House oversight committee about how Twitter at the instigation of the FBI blocked the Hunter Biden laptop to help Biden win the election over Trump.
I've told you that this Twitter story is the biggest story of the decade.
It is one of the biggest stories of the decade.
It's so important because it is about big government and big industry colluding to strip you of your right to free speech and to rig an election.
That's what the story is.
That's what's happening.
So AOC just hates that she's there and she's in this thing.
And she's got woke warrior Yoel Roth, who used to be on Twitter, used to be their head of censorship before Musk came in.
And she's talking about Libs of TikTok.
Now remember, Libs of TikTok, who we love on the show, we play her stuff all the time.
All she does is show the left talking.
She doesn't have any content except their content.
She shows you what they are saying.
And she keeps getting, she kept getting kicked off Twitter for that.
Now she's not.
So here is AOC talking to Yoel Roth about what she saw on Libs of TikTok.
Are you aware that from August 11th to August 16th, that account posted false information about Boston Children's Hospital, claiming that they were providing hysterectomies to children?
Yes, I am aware of that and other claims from the account.
And are you aware that this lie was then circulated by other prominent far-right influencers?
Yes.
And are you aware that all these claims, which I have reiterated were false, culminated in a real-life harassment and ultimately a bomb threat to the Boston Children's Hospital?
Yes, I am aware.
And this account is still on that platform today, isn't it?
Regrettably, yes, it is.
Now remember, Libs of TikTok doesn't put out content.
It only puts out content that the left is there.
So I went on the Boston Children's Hospital website.
Here is what they say.
As the first pediatric center in the country dedicated to the surgical care of transgender patients, we take an interdisciplinary approach.
Our skilled team includes specialists in plastic surgery, urology, endocrinology, nursing, gender management, and social work who collaborate to provide a full suite of surgical options for transgender teens and young adults.
That's what it says on their website, AOC.
Now, maybe they don't do hysterectomy specifically.
I don't know.
It didn't say, but it's a lie.
And this is the thing.
I'm talking about the strategy. that the woke people have for convincing us that they're the revolutionaries instead of us.
They're the power.
They're the power.
Twitter is a powerful place.
The FBI is a powerful stuff.
They colluded to Barry Hunter Biden's laptop so that it would help Biden win the election.
AOC is telling us this lie, and they all do it, right?
This is what they do.
They lie and they lie.
They're not teaching CRT, but it's good that they are.
They're not sexually grooming our children, but it's good that they are.
Do you remember the movie, The Usual Suspects, where Kaiser Sozi, they're talking about Kaiser Soze, the master villain, and nobody knows who he is.
And the guy says, channeling Baudelaire, the poet Baudelaire.
This is what he says, cut five.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.
Right.
That's the greatest trick the devil ever pulled.
And it is the same trick that the woke people are pulling.
It's not happening.
It is not happening.
And if you say it's happening, you're a bigot because it's happening and it's good.
That is what they keep doing.
They don't exist.
It is exactly what the devil does.
And that is no coincidence.
You know, a lot of people on the right got upset about the Grammys and this song by Sam Smith and Tim Petrus, a gay guy and a make-believe girl guy.
And they did the song called Unholy, which is a celebration of adultery.
Here's a quick video.
The guy is dressed as the devil, and there are scantily clad girls with whips dancing around him and bowing down to him.
Here it is.
So they get a standing evasion sponsored by Pfizer.
You know, it may be many things, but I'm not shocked by this.
Remember, in the 1980s, Iron Maiden did this stuff.
They had the number of the beast and all those metal bands had it.
But then it was transgressive.
Then they were the revolutionaries.
Then they were shocking people and people were shocked.
Not now.
Jill Biden gave a speech at the Grammys.
The people cheered.
They said, they sent out a tweet.
We're all worshiping now.
They are not the counterculture.
We are.
They are the culture.
Satanism is the culture.
Worshiping Satan is not shocking to anybody.
If it were, Jill Biden would not have been at that show.
The point about this, this is important.
It's important to the mentality of how you fight back.
This is not a siege where we are protecting the glory of America.
This is a conquest.
We have to take it back.
We have to go in and take it back.
They've got the citadel, not us.
We can't huddle and play defense and complain.
We have to attack and replace.
Let's talk about this music for a minute.
Let's talk about how we got here with this music.
Satanism was inherent in rock from the very beginning, from the Beatles singing yeah yeah.
I'm not saying they were Satanists.
I'm not saying they were bad people or anything like that.
It's interesting.
When you go back to the beginning of rock and roll, it was shocking to everybody because the music was so different, but it was really inherently decent.
It was love stories.
It was nice.
Even if you take the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger, Sympathy for the Devil, right?
Sympathy for the Devil was based on a Christian novel written by a Soviet dissident called The Master in Margarita.
And he says in the song, he says, he talks about how he was there.
The devil was there when Jesus Christ died.
And he says, I stuck around St. Petersburg when I saw it was time for a change.
I killed the Tsar and his ministers, and Astasia screamed in vain.
So he was the Soviets.
And then he goes on to say he was the Nazis as well.
And he says, I hope you guess my name, but what's puzzling you is the nature of my game, right?
And that's the thing.
So the old rock had a certain decency, a certain actual Christian foundation.
It was just a different kind of music.
Roll over Beethoven.
You know, it was a different kind of music.
But in that music, inherently, it was going in this direction.
I'll tell you why, all right?
Art Reflects Culture's Dark Side00:02:25
There was a book written, a famous book written in 1987 by a guy named Alan Bloom called The Closing of the American Mind, about the left's takeover of the universities.
And in it was an attack on rock music to this very day is ridiculed by the right.
The left just dismisses it, but it's ridiculed by the right as ruining the whole argument because it made conservatives look like old grumpy grandpas who didn't like rock and roll.
There's kids today are listening to the wrong music.
Here's what Alan Bloom said.
Young people know that rock has the beat of sexual intercourse in alliance with some real art and a lot of pseudo-art.
So he's saying it is art and some of it's not, but it's because an enormous industry cultivates the taste for the orgiastic state of feeling connected with sex, providing a constant flood of fresh material for voracious appetites.
Never was there an art form directed so exclusively to children.
So he was absolutely right about this.
Why did it make him sound like an old grump to say it?
And I will tell you why, because art always reflects pop art, popular art always reflects something that has already happened or is happening in the heart of the people.
I think that modern abstract art is trash.
I think Jackson Pollock is absolute garbage, but it is an absolute expression of what reality looks like when there's no God.
You lose the sense of that things have shape, that things matter, that things have meaning.
It just becomes splat on a page.
So it is art.
It's just bad art because the culture is bad.
So when you say that something that is truly art, and rock and roll is truly art, and rap truly art, when you say that something is art is bad, you are saying that the culture is bad and nobody wants to hear it.
Nobody wants to hear that their cultural moment is low and degraded and it sucks because they're part of it and they like that music.
So that's how you get to be called, what did Vanity Fair call me, an old crank?
That's how you get to be an actual old crank because art is prophecy.
The counterculture becomes the culture.
And if it represents the tenor of the times, and that has real life consequences, but people like it, even as it's cutting out the ground from underneath them.
Are you a few years or maybe decades out of school and wondering what the heck did I even learn and what was the point?
You might think to yourself that you don't have time to learn something new.
A Personal Reminiscence00:06:06
If that's you, know this, you're not alone, and it's not too late.
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Learn when and where you want.
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All right, so we're talking about the fact that everything the left touches goes bad.
Everything they touch goes bad, and then they can't figure out why.
And there was such a beautiful example of this in the New Yorker magazine, and it's one that's very dear to my heart, a subject that's very dear to my heart.
A lot of talk about this.
This is a massively long article, and I read every word of this piece.
I don't know if you guys have ever seen The New Yorker, but the stories in it just go on forever.
They're like book-length stories.
It's called The End of the English Major.
Enrollment in the Humanities is in Free Fall at Colleges Around the Country.
What happened?
What happened?
So I read every word of this.
It took me, I think, about seven and a half weeks.
I could have told them at the beginning, the left took over the humanities.
The humanities turned to crap.
But there is like, what happened?
What happened?
Before we get to the article, I want to start with a personal reminiscence.
And this is part of, this was in my memoir, The Great Good Thing.
I was a lousy student, and I didn't pay attention.
I was a renegade.
I was a rebel.
I didn't want to have anything to do with it.
I got my education after I got out of college when I read all the books that I had bought in college.
It took me 10, 15 years, really, to get an education that way, which I should have been able to get in college, but I didn't, and it was my fault.
I'm not blaming anybody about it.
But while I was there, the left was starting its takeover of the institutions.
This is the 1970s, so they're really just beginning to come in.
And you would kind of hear them.
It was kind of like that scene at the end of the movie Cabaret, where you look around and there's just a few more Nazis in the audience than there used to be.
That's what it was like at university.
They started with the moral relativism, the racism stuff.
All of this stuff was just coming in.
Now, I took a course in Victorian poetry, I believe it was in.
And the lady who taught this course is now a very big deal.
I'm not going to tell her name because it's not really her fault, but it was indicative of something that was happening.
At the time, she was just an English teacher.
She was teaching poetry.
And she was teaching one of my favorite poems, a poem I already knew because in those days everybody knew it, The Charge of the Light Brigade.
Now, this is by Alfred Lord Tennyson, one of the greatest top-tier poets.
The top tier is what happens right after Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is above it, and then comes the top-tier poets.
And Tennyson is out of favor because he represents the Victorian Imperial Britain, but he was one of the greatest poets who ever lived.
And this is one of his greatest poems, The Charge of the Light Brigade, which is about a charge in 1854 in the Crimean War.
The Light Brigade, because some orders got screwed up, was sent to charge full frontal into a line of guns, of cannons, right?
And they were just blown away, and people watching them from above saw they were so disciplined that as each one of them was blown away, they would just close ranks and keep going.
And they actually charged through the guns.
It was one of the great tragedies, one of the great screw-ups in military history, but it was also one of the great acts of nobility.
And in this brilliant, brilliant poem, Tennyson manages to capture both the glory of it and the stupidity of it.
You know, just the kind of, you know, there's a line in it, someone had blundered.
But at the same time, you understand the incredible courage of these men, but you understand also that they are being sent to their deaths for no reason.
And so we're reading this brilliant, brilliant poem, and this girl stands up in the class, a student stands up and says to this lady, who would later become a very, very big deal in the English game, says, why are we learning this poem?
It's pro-war.
Why are we talking?
Why do we like this poem?
It's pro-war.
It glorifies war.
And she couldn't, the teacher could not answer the question.
She shrugged.
She literally just, I don't know.
I don't know.
And she didn't know.
She didn't know why we were learning it.
She was an English teacher and as I said, became one of the leading lights in this field and could not answer why we were reading Charge of the Light Brigade, one of the greatest poems in the English language.
She couldn't answer it.
She didn't know.
So I was so upset that I leapt to my feet and I couldn't talk.
I was completely inarticulate.
I just babbled for a few minutes and I kept saying, you know, the poem goes half a league, half a league, half a league onward, all in the valley of death rode the 600.
You've maybe heard the famous line, there's not to reason why, there's but to do and die, do or die.
And so it's like this beautiful poem.
And I was saying half a league, half a league, half a league onward.
So you can hear the horse's hooves.
I was trying to explain, and I couldn't.
I finally just flopped back into my chair, completely inarticulate, made a complete fool of myself.
Because if you couldn't hear why that the poem was great, then you shouldn't be learning about poetry in the first place because you're an idiot.
And the thing is, this was an ignorant child because all children are ignorant.
That's what being a child is about.
You come to college to be taught.
She wanted to hear her own ideas talked back to her because she was a child, because that's what children want.
Why Study Literature?00:03:17
They want to be reassured that everything they think is true and you have to break it to them as a college professor.
Yes, but this is a brilliant poem bringing an amazing moment to life with incredible talent.
And it doesn't matter what you think about war.
This is an experience in itself.
You can still hate war.
You can still think that war can be, you can think any stupid thing you want, but at least have this experience with another mind speaking to you out of the past.
It's like a time machine.
This is why, I mean, these guys are editing Roald Dahl.
This is why they're editing James Bond.
And eventually they'll edit Shakespeare too.
They're just starting with these guys because they can say, oh, it's not important.
It's just Roald Dahl.
It's just James Bond.
But they'll get to Shakespeare.
Believe me, they want to silence the voice of the writer so their voice is the only voice around.
Don't give us objectivity.
Just give us reality.
And we know what reality is.
It's the same thing, right?
So the question then becomes, why study literature if it's just going to tell us the same things we already know?
Because if it doesn't tell us the same things we already know, we're going to silence it and re-edit it, right?
So they can't figure out why nobody's taking English classes anymore because you don't get anything from English classes.
You just get the left telling you what you already know because you read it, because you were taught it in high school.
So the article begins in the New Yorker.
This is the article in the New Yorker about why the, where went the, whither went the English, you know, why did the English department turn to crap?
Can't imagine, cannot figure it out.
The crisis when it came arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first.
They're always surprised.
Everything they touch turns to crap and they're always surprised when it happens.
From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from 953 to 578.
According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Humanities Indicators Project, which collects data uniformly, but not always identically, to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020, the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State's main campus fell by 46%.
Tufts lost nearly 50% of its humanities majors.
Boston University, 42%.
Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with.
SUNY, just on and on.
People are abandoning these things, right?
Now, the thing is, some of the people, they go around asking people, why is this happening?
Why is this happening?
Nobody says because the left got hold of it and everything the left touches turned scrap.
Nobody said that, strangely enough.
Well, I'll get back to one person who said one interesting thing, but nobody really came up with the big answer.
But somebody said, well, you know, it's impractical.
Somebody always wants you to do STEM.
But being an English major was always impractical.
When I was an English major, we called it pre-short order chef.
That's what we called it because we thought, you know, like you're pre-med or you're pre-law or something like that.
were pre-short order chef because there was no reason to take it.
But even as a bad student, I learned stuff.
Stuff filtered into my mind.
I was at UC Berkeley, had the second best English department in the country.
There was Yale and UCB.
So I was getting great professors.
And even though I was a dope and even though I didn't show up for things and even though I was drinking and chasing girls, doing all the stuff that you'd think I was doing, I was.
You know, I got something.
I learned, for instance, that the Greeks came before the Romans and the Romans came before the Europeans and the Europeans came before us.
Great Minds See the Past00:15:10
That's an important thing.
You start to see, oh, there is an idea working itself out over thousands of years in great literature.
I realized that the West is unique in its ability to self-reflect, that only the West's artists can win, say, the Trojan War, and they can defeat the Trojans.
The Greeks can defeat the Trojans.
And then the Greeks write plays about how badly the Trojans were treated.
I mean, that's only in the West.
You know, you think about the Middle Ages and you think, oh, back then, everybody was pious and holy and the church was in charge.
And then you read Chaucer and it's filled with sex.
People are constantly writing to me, why is there so much sex in your books?
It's not like the good old days.
They should read some Chaucer.
You know, if you can get a translation and get it in modern English, instead of Middle English, it says girls sticking their butts out the window because guy wants a kiss and it's too dark for him to know, and then like farting in his face.
I mean, it's like amazing stuff that is going on in the depths of the Middle Ages in the 13th century.
And then, of course, there's Shakespeare, who in some way invented who we are.
That is, he put on paper what it means to be a man and a woman in a Christian world.
People say he's a secular artist.
That's not true.
It's just that his Christianity is so deep, it just permeates the world, and people don't have to talk about it all the time because it's just the way the world works.
So you can break the moral web, you can bend the moral web, but the moral web snaps back in Shakespeare all the time.
If you kill your way to the top of the throne, the ghosts of the people you kill are going to come back and haunt your conscience, and your life is going to become meaningless.
It's a realistic portrayal of life.
Now, you don't have to agree with Shakespeare.
You can think, no, I don't want to live that way.
You can think, no, there's a better way to live.
You don't have to agree with any of these guys, but visionaries are speaking to you from the past.
It is as if, it's as if people had come to you in a time machine and said, this is what it's like.
And they're genius people.
They're not your professors who are second-rate people.
They are genius people with vision and talent that comes from God.
They're being spoken to by the Muses from God.
This is what Shakespeare is doing.
He's channeling stuff.
He's not just thinking it up by himself.
You know, the Folger Shakespeare Library, one of the greatest Shakespeare libraries in the world, what are they teaching over there?
Go look at their website.
Exploring race and whiteness in Shakespeare.
Now, the funny thing about that, the funny thing about that, Shakespeare says a lot of things about race.
He has a lot to say about race.
If you want to read a great article about it, go to City Journal and look up A Nation of the Iagos.
Absolutely brilliant article by one of our great, that's by me.
I'm joking, but it is still a good article about what Shakespeare has to say about race, a nation of the Iagos.
But he's not talking with CRT.
If you're talking CRT, critical race theory, you're not talking Shakespeare, you're talking you.
He said it had a lot to say about gender, but if you're talking feminist theory or queer theory or critical race theory, you're obscuring the voice of the author.
And so when a kid says to you, why should I learn this when I'm just learning you?
I'm not learning genius.
I'm not getting a visit from the past.
This article goes on forever.
Let me read some of the reasons people give the writer about why this is happening.
Technology, it's technology.
It's changed me.
I probably read five novels a month until the 2000s.
If I read one a month now, it's a lot.
Over the New York Times, Ross Dothat said the same thing.
He no longer reads great books.
I read great books all the time.
I use technology, but I read great old books all the time.
Another one says, young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction.
You think that just popped into their heads?
This is what they say.
She says, several teachers described young people as having an orientation toward the present to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past.
The last time I taught, says one teacher, the last time I taught the Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences, like having trouble identifying the subject and the verb.
Their capacities are different, and the 19th century is a long time ago.
It's not the 19th century being a long time ago.
It's you!
Who the hell taught them in high school?
You did, just the high school version of you.
It's leftists who've taken over our education department, so these kids are ignorant.
That's the problem.
The problem is not they're oriented toward the present.
It's that nobody's taught them about the past.
It's your fault.
That's why this is happening.
One teacher said, there's a real misunderstanding that you can come in and say, I want to read post-colonial texts.
That's the thing I want to study.
And his answer is that all the big writers you want to study, the black writers and the Indian writers and the writers from other cultures, they all read Dickens.
And she says, one of the tragedies of the British Empire is that all those writers read all the British books.
Terrible tragedy.
Guess what?
The British wrote better than anyone.
They were better at writing.
Their books are better.
Their language is better.
Their insights are better.
I've read all the Europeans.
I've read a lot of people from other places.
The British and the period in the 18th and 19th century wrote better than anyone had ever written before.
Oh, I'm a racist.
But I'm not British.
I'm not British.
My race is Ashkenazi Jew.
The British were mean to Ashkenazi Jews for 2,000 years, but boy, oh boy, they sure wrote well.
Buried in this article, one paragraph, buried in this article.
In my department, the author is very much alive, says Robert Fagan, a Robert Foss scholar and a longtime literature professor at Claremont McKenna, which is a more conservative college.
And he said, we are very concerned with the beauty of things, with aesthetics, and ultimately with judgment about the value of works of art.
I think there is a hunger among students for the thrill that comes from truth and beauty.
And of course, their enrollment is up.
Their enrollment is doing just fine.
When I went to Hillsdale, one of the students told me there that when the teacher, it was actually Larry Arne, I believe, the president of Hillsdale, made a speech about truth and beauty, about bringing living with truth and beauty.
And she started to cry because she had never heard that concept before.
When you say these kids are oriented to the present, it's you.
They did this to these kids.
The kids don't just grow up like that.
Kids don't want to hear about the past until you teach them, until you make it interesting and exciting and tell them that they're getting something.
You know, Maya Angelou, terrible poet, but one of the poets who's always overpraised because she's black, right?
And she said, she had this wonderful line where she said, Shakespeare must be a black girl.
She read Shakespeare and she said, Shakespeare must be a black girl.
Why did she say that?
Because Shakespeare spoke to her.
She said, the poetry you read has been written for you.
Black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight, it has been written for you.
And that is the whole point.
Literature, art, is like salvation.
It doesn't come to the world.
It comes to you.
It is about you.
The present knows nothing about itself.
We know nothing about ourselves in the present, but the past knows a lot because it's already gone.
And when learning how great minds, great talents saw the past, you learn about other people.
You get other people inside you.
You know, I talk a lot on the show about what I call the great speculation, which is the basis of the golden rule.
The golden rule is do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
But that is based on the speculation, unprovable, the speculation that your inner life is as important to you as my inner life is to me, and both are equally important before God.
That is the great speculation.
It's a two-part speculation.
It can't be proved, but there it is.
You learn this by loving.
You learn it in marriage.
You learn it by having children and you learn it through art because art is communing with another soul.
And if you can't hear the artist because some idiot theorist is telling you about feminism and queers and race and gender in a way that the artist wasn't talking about it, if you don't let the artist speak, you aren't going to hear anything.
If you don't think this is true, look at the arts now.
Look at TV now.
Look at the movies now.
Nobody goes.
Nobody cares.
Nobody wants to see it.
Why?
Because the left is in control of the culture and the culture has turned to crap.
And the left can't figure it out what went wrong.
Where are all the English majors?
How could this have happened?
It's the same thing over and over and over again.
It is them.
When will they wake up?
Never.
We have to wake up for them.
we have to do it ourselves.
I was thinking about why in general Christian movies don't move me all that much.
And I was thinking it's because they do not show reality.
They don't show the way people really are.
They'll show people who have a flaw or some or do a bad thing, but they don't show how inherently flawed we are.
I was comparing them in my mind to romantic comedies.
Romantic comedies are not the most realistic stories in the world.
They're kind of happily ever after stories.
But at the same time, if you look at the great romantic comedies, look at Philadelphia's story, Harry Met Sally, the first few seasons of Cheers, one of the really great romantic narratives with Sam and Diane.
You know, if you look at those, the people in them are not just flawed.
They're us.
They're small.
They're stupid.
They're governed by sex and greed and personal ambition and neurosis.
They have their neurotics.
And yet, love flourishes in the midst of those things.
And when I was talking about King Lear and the Tempest, I was showing how Shakespeare pours Christian truths into tragedies, into things with terrible appeal.
The guy's eyes are being put out, and you think, well, where's the Christian?
Hey, where's the happy Christian talk here?
Nowhere.
There's nowhere.
And yet Christ is there.
So I wanted to take a look at some movies that weren't religious movies and yet were filled with Jesus.
They were movies about Jesus and yet movies about Jesus that include all the flaws and even evil of human beings and aren't squeaky clean and aren't G-rated or anything like that.
So the first one I thought of is a movie that many people don't know about, which I just think is absolutely wonderful.
It's a small movie, but it's a wonderful film.
If you've never seen it, 1961 is called Whistle Down the Wind.
I think at one point Andrew Lloyd Weber made a musical out of it, but I don't know if I don't think it ever went anywhere.
But it is a wonderful little film.
It's based on a novel by a lady named Mary Haley Bell.
And Mary Haley Bell was married for like 60 years, one of the great showbiz marriages to an excellent British actor named John Mills, a very famous British actor in his day.
And Mary Haley Bell and John Mills had two daughters.
One was an actress named Juliet Mills, who was in a TV show for a while here called Nanny and the Professor.
But the other was Haley Mills, right?
Putting the two names together, Haley Mills, and she was a big Disney child star.
She was in a film called Pollyanna, which is still a good film.
If you haven't seen it, your kids would love that film if they're younger.
And Haley Mills, a very beautiful young girl, and she plays a little girl in this film, Whistle Down the Wind.
That also has Alan Bates, a great, great actor in his first starring role.
And it's about a bunch of local school children in the Lancaster villages around a farm.
And one day, there's a fugitive hiding in the barn of one of these kids.
It's Alan Bates.
And he's wounded.
He's got a knock on his head.
And one day, Haley Mills walks into the barn and she hears somebody in the barn.
She's scared, right?
And she says, Who is it?
And just as she says, Who is it?
The fugitive passes out.
And as he passes out, he says, Jesus Christ, and he collapses.
And Haley Mills, being a little child, she thinks Jesus Christ is hiding in the barn.
And that's the story.
The story is this fugitive is hiding in the barn, and the word spreads throughout all the little children of the neighborhood that Jesus Christ is hiding in the barn.
And the conflict is between the realism, but also the cynicism of the adults, and the falsehood, but also the faith of the children.
And you can see the children's kind of rudimentary faith in this sign here, in this scene here, it's cut eight.
Who's got to look after them then?
Jesus.
Don't talk wet.
Yes, he will then, because that woman told me.
What woman?
The woman in the Sally Harvey.
That woman.
I asked her to look after it, and she said Jizza would look after it for me.
But what's she know about it?
She does because she lives in his house.
How can she when he's dead?
Oh, I Kathy.
Well, what's up?
He is, isn't he?
Well, fancy saying he'll have something terrible happening now.
Yes, you just wait till Jesus comes and gets you.
I'm not bothered.
It's only talk.
Jean Gas is worried.
Look up at the sky when Jesus is going to come and get her.
And the thing is, obviously their faith is, as I say, simple and misguided, but still their faith finds a truth that is higher than the truth of the world that they're living in.
The world is still the world, but there is a truth higher than that, and the children see it when the adults can't.
It's a beautiful movie, Whistledown the Wind.
Another one is one of a personal favorite movie of mine, Kool Hand Luke.
If you've never seen this picture, especially if you're a guy, it's a great guy's movie, 1967, starring the terrific Paul Newman, one of the great stars of that era.
Kool Hand Luke is just a terrific, terrific picture.
And it's got beautiful, beautiful music.
And Whistledown the Wind has a beautiful theme in it too.
The music in Cool Hand Luke is by Laylo Schifrin, who you know from Mission Impossible.
He was a very prolific, terrific writer.
And the theme is Down Here on the Ground.
If you can find a good version of it, the jazz in that time was too overdone.
But if you can find a good simple version of someone singing Down Here on the Ground is a very, very lovely song.
And it had a famous line in it.
Struther Martin plays the leader, the head of a chain gang.
And he beats up the prisoners savagely and says, What we have here is a failure to communicate.
And that became a very famous line.
So Kool Hand Luke is about a guy who commits a minor crime.
He's drunk and he starts wrenching the tops, the heads off parking meters.
He gets arrested and he's sentenced to two years on a chain gang in a prison camp run by this sadist.
And the guy just decides to break this guy.
And Kool Hand Luke is just a guy.
He's just trying to get through his thing.
But he just starts to beat him up no matter what he says.
If he's a smart aleck, he beats him up.
He puts him in a hole, in a box, this horrible punishment.
And Luke has nothing to fight back with.
He has no power.
And yet, he will not be broken.
Or at least he stands up to this guy.
And it starts out with this guy, Dragline, who is the guy who won a George Kennedy won an Oscar for that.
Dragline is the tough guy.
He's the bull goose loony, they call it, you know, he's the bull of the alpha male of the yard.
And he beats the living hell out of Luke, too.
But Luke will not surrender.
He just never surrenders.
That's the only thing about him.
And so they're playing cards one day, and Luke bluffs.
And this is how he gets his nickname.
Here's that clip.
The man's got kings, get your tail out.
Yeah.
Cool Hand Luke00:08:15
You want to see them?
Yeah.
Right there.
One, two, three, four, five.
Yeah.
Hand it on.
He beats you in none.
Good luck today when he kept coming back at me with nothing.
Yeah, well.
Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand.
I'm going to sit in here next to my boy.
Cool hand Luke.
Cool hand Luke.
But cool hand means he's got nothing, but he's going to play nothing.
And it's a beautiful film, very moving.
And the idea that this alpha male understands that this guy is unbeatable.
He's undefeatable.
And that inspires the other people.
He's still just a drunk and a petty criminal, but he has freedom.
He's free because he's willing to take the pain.
And this is the thing.
This is what freedom is, right?
Freedom is not being afraid.
If you're not afraid, then you're free.
The deaths of saints tell us why saints are free.
This is as opposed to what was sold to us by the news media during COVID, right?
When Donald Trump, remember Donald Trump came out and said, don't be afraid of COVID.
Don't let it dominate your life.
And this was the reaction of the press.
Don't tell your supporters, don't be afraid of COVID.
Everyone should be afraid of COVID.
It's okay to be afraid of COVID.
And it's okay that it's dominating your life because it has dominated your life.
So if you want, you know, they say that men can't become women, but Jake Tapper did a good job there.
You should be afraid.
Well, why do they want you to be afraid?
Because then you have to tune in next week.
Then you're a slave.
If you're afraid, you're a slave.
If you're afraid, you're angry.
If you're angry, you're a slave.
Only when you're fearless.
Only courage, only courage makes you free.
Because life is hard and there's a lot of pain in it.
And sometimes to be free, you've got to take the punch.
You got to stand up to people.
And that is the thing that Jesus gives people because he says to you, as I said before, that death is less than death and life is more than life.
And so you don't have to be afraid.
Be not afraid.
Jesus says this all the time.
Be not afraid.
And that's where freedom comes from.
Because you know what?
There's always going to be somebody who wants to take your freedom.
And the bigger they are, the more they want it.
The more power they have, the more they want to keep that power in play.
And the more they know that your individuality and your freedom threatens their power.
The only way to be free is to be free.
The only way to be free is not to be afraid.
And that is the thing that Christ gives you when you suddenly realize, oh yeah, they crucified this guy, yet there he is, right?
That is where that courage comes from.
And it is beautifully, beautifully shown in Cool Hand Luke.
Terrific movie, terrific movie.
The other is an Oscar winner.
Maybe you've seen this one.
This is probably the most famous of them.
This one flew over the cuckoo's nest, 1975.
It won the Oscar, I believe.
And obviously Jack Nicholson won as Randall Patrick McMurphy.
I've sometimes compared Donald Trump to Randall Patrick McMurphy.
I like the book better by Ken Kesey.
The novel is absolutely wonderful.
And I like it because it uses this kind of trick, literary trick, where the whole thing is told from the position of a crazy person as he slowly becomes sane because of Randall Patrick McMurphy.
And the thing is, McMurphy is a petty criminal, gambler, a brawler who is sentenced to prison.
And to get out of prison, he pretends to be insane.
So he's sent to an insane asylum.
Ken Kesey worked in an insane asylum.
This is based on this.
And it reflects, the film reflects this kind of growing idea in philosophy.
Foucault, Michelle Foucault, was saying this at the same time.
He was saying, people aren't crazy.
It's just a definition of society.
It's a power.
You know, Foucault thought everything was a power structure and the power structure defined where madness is.
Now, that's false.
That's foolishness.
Some people are mentally ill.
But what Kesey is saying here is that it can be done that way.
Some things that are considered crazy are just normal.
At one point, Randall Patrick and McMurphy says to these guys, you're no crazier than everybody else.
And that, I think, is the point.
This also is about manhood.
The place is dominated by Nurse Ratchet.
She hates their manhood.
She uses every trick she can psychologically to confuse them out of their manhood, out of their convictions, out of their anger.
There's a wonderful scene where they have a group therapy thing where everything devolves into babbling and craziness and screaming.
And through it all, Randall, Patrick, and McMurphy just stands up to her.
And the great scene, the best scene I think, where he stands up to her is when he wants to see the World Series.
She manipulates the people so that they won't vote to have the World Series and she won't let them watch it.
So McMurphy sits down in front of a blank screen and starts to dictate, you know, announce the World Series as if it's there until all the crazy people gather around them and they can see it too.
And here's that clip.
All right, here we come for the next pitch.
Press swings.
It's a lot of go- I gotta go.
Oh my God, we're in here.
All right.
Pick up the pitch.
Metal swings!
Hit the f*** up!
That's great.
Louise Fletcher.
As Nurse Ratchet, she also won an Oscar for this.
And why is she so angry?
She's angry because they're free.
Why are they free?
They're free because their minds are free.
They're in asylum.
They can't get out.
They're locked up.
They can't break out.
But they're free because their minds are free.
And their minds are free because Murphy is unafraid.
And McMurphy is unafraid.
And he teaches them to be unafraid as well.
Each one of these stories, I say these are Christian stories because each one of them follows the pattern of a Christian story.
Only the first one, Whistle Down the Wind, involves Jesus directly in the sense that this guy, they think this guy is Jesus, but all of them follow the pattern of the passion story and the resurrection story.
And you'll see when you watch them that that story is embedded in these stories.
And the reason I love to see it is Christian truth embedded in evil, selfish, unrighteous reality is because Christian truth is embedded in evil, selfish, unrighteous reality.
It does not transform the world into a happy place.
It does not transform you into a righteous person.
You will still be the person that you are, but you will grow into something new with Christ.
You really will.
I've never experienced anything like the personal growth that I have simply in having a relationship with the living God.
It's just an amazing thing.
But it takes place in reality.
It doesn't stop me from having an ego.
It doesn't stop me from being annoyed.
It doesn't stop me from sometimes being afraid and angry.
All of those things.
But it's a light.
You know, it's like the difference between being lost in a storm and being lost in a storm and being able to see the North Star so you know what direction you're traveling in.
When you leave the truth of reality behind, when you leave the truth of reality behind, you leave the Christian truth behind because that's where the Christian truth lives.
It's not a fantasy.
It's not a fantasy.
It is the hidden truth of life.
It is the uber truth of life, the life, the truth of life that is above life.
And these films, Whistle Down the Wind, Kool Hand Luke, and whatchamacallit, the Kenkeesi novel of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Great examples of how to tell stories about Jesus without getting involved with religion.
Whether it's changing the definition of words or trying to convince you that two plus two actually equals five, it sometimes feels like the current culture is doing its best to make you stupid.
It is.
When wokeness is permeating every aspect of your life, it's hard to know where to turn for guidance.
I will give you the answer.
Turn to our good friend Dennis Prager. is back with additional episodes of PragerU Masters Program.
We released the first five episodes earlier this year.
Inspiration Through Stories00:04:30
Audience loved it.
It sparked a ton of conversation online.
Dennis offers useful advice on marriage, happiness, how to be a good person, plus so much more.
He even dares to explain the differences between men and women.
What?
In a world that wants to make you woke, Dennis Prager's on a mission to make you wise.
Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe to become a member and watch PragerU Masters program along with so much more content.
That's dailywire.com slash subscribe today.
All right, we've changed a lot about the show.
We like change.
We like new things.
And I think the, I have to say, the team did a great job with those graphics.
If you're not watching, they're terrific.
I think the music is terrific.
Really good job in redoing it.
But certain things remain the same.
One of them is that you will now, in a few moments, be plunged into the Clavenless Week.
Now, the Clavenless Week will only be half a week because on Wednesday we will release an interview.
So we will kind of, you know, we'll mitigate.
Mitigate's a good word.
We'll mitigate the hellish destruction and darkness of the Clavenless Week.
And we want to remind you to please send in your comments on the show or questions to clavinclapbacks at dailywire.com.
That's K-L-A-V-A-N, as some of you may know.
It's K-L-A-P-B-A-C-K-S at dailywire.com.
That's an email address.
So please send in your comments on the show there.
But the one other thing that hasn't changed is what is going to happen when I say now Clavin Clapbacks.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is ticky.
There it is.
I missed it.
Oh, I'm so happy.
From Jack, I have a question which would be most suited to you because it concerns video games and you seem to take video games more seriously than everyone else.
My question is, do you think that an addiction to reading could be as bad as an addiction to video games?
I have classmates who spend all their spare time reading and they seem to get a more positive response from teachers, parents, et cetera, than me, and my friends who will spend most of our free time playing games instead.
I realize that reading is more classical than gaming and that it is easier to learn from reading than from games.
And my father has told me that there is no replacement for reading, even if it is just for pleasure.
What is your opinion?
Thanks.
Your father is right.
You can get addicted to anything, and you should get outside and you should live and play and interchange with people.
And if you're reading all the time, that may not be a good thing.
And certainly if you're reading trash all the time, I'm not sure I see much of a difference between reading utter trash like romance novels and playing video games.
But no, if you looked at the most beautiful pictures in the world, went to a museum and just stood there and looked at the most beautiful paintings, if you went and listened to the most beautiful music in the world, it would be uplifting and it would be soul stirring, but you'd still have to read.
So you can get rid of all those things.
You shouldn't, but you could, but you can't get rid of reading.
Reading is how we get information.
It's how information is stored.
It is how we learn.
There is absolutely nothing that replaces it.
It is just everything.
If you spend your life playing video games, first you'll be a moron.
And second of all, you will not get the experience of connecting to another mind in thought that you get from reading.
So yeah, there's trash reading.
I understand that.
I understand what you're saying there.
But most people who read a lot, even if as a kid they read trash, they come to read better things over time.
Reading is the cornerstone of everything.
And I would go further than that and say reading books is the cornerstone of everything.
I don't think reading the internet is the same as reading books.
People who read books think better.
They have longer attention spans.
And they have information coming in that you're just not getting from video games or any kind of visual art or even oral art.
I love music, love painting, I love video games, but they're not the same thing as reading.
Your father's right on this one.
Sorry.
From Sandy.
Hello, Drew.
I heard you last week talk about Shakespeare channeling his work from God.
I would like to hear more of what you think about people who claim to channel.
I am a Christian Protestant.
When I ask ministers this question, I usually get a negative response as well as a look of unbelief that I needed to ask.
Artists get what they get from without, not from within.
I mean, it is experienced through, it comes through them, so it has their mark on it, but you receive inspiration.
That's why it's called inspiration.
That means breathed into.
Inspiration From Without00:01:29
You are breathed into by what used to be the muses.
I don't know how that works exactly, but it definitely is inspiration.
I've had experiences.
Every good writer certainly has had experiences.
I remember writing one of my first crime novels where I had to have a body buried in cement, and I thought, I really don't know how you would do that.
What would that mean to have a body buried in cement?
Would it rot and then the cement would fall in and all this?
I was at a party and a guy sat down next to me and he said he was in the construction business and I laughingly said, how would you bury a body in cement?
And he actually was a mobster and knew exactly how to do it and explained it to me and I used it in my novel.
That sort of thing happens because you are getting, you are receiving material.
And that, to me, is why the sensitivity writers who say they are fixing your material so you're not insulting anybody, my Muse has a response to that.
My Muse says, bugger off and die.
Now, I would never say, I'm a lovely person.
I would never say anything, but my Muse is a wild thing.
And she basically says, you can go kiss her gazoo because that's not the way this works.
Yeah, so definitely channeling and definitely from a godly source if you're doing it right.
And, you know, I don't think it's, it's not like you definitely are, what you say comes directly from God.
It goes through you and so it can get messed up.
That's what people are like.
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