Andrew Clavin dissects Barbie (2023) as a "plastic reality" feminist screed while praising Oppenheimer for its moral depth, linking both to broader cultural decay. Hunter Biden’s plea deal—$1.4M fine, FARA immunity—exposes DOJ corruption tied to foreign payments (Ukraine, China), with IRS whistleblowers alleging obstruction; Clavin calls it "the human stain" of systemic rot. UFO hearings and COVID-19 lab-leak cover-ups deepen distrust, while Kenyan AI moderators paid $1.46/hour endure trauma, exposing corporate exploitation. Oppenheimer’s atomic irony—humanity’s genius and destruction—mirrors today’s ideological failures; Clavin argues only personal accountability, not systems, can curb corruption. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, everybody seems to have something to say about the new Barbie film, the summer blockbuster that used up so much pink paint on its set designs, it actually caused a pink paint shortage, spreading panic among people who panic over pink paint.
The film has inspired so much online commentary, it also threatens to cause a shortage of pixels, spreading panic among people who panic over pixels who turn out to be the same people who panic over pink paint and climate change and other meaningless nonsense.
On the right, commentators thought the film sucked because it was a shrill, man-hating feminist screed.
On the left, commentators thought the film sucked, but they had to pretend to like it because it was a shrill, man-hating feminist screed.
The only person who seemed to enjoy the movie was Ben Shapiro, who loved it so much he actually bought his own Barbie and played with it until the fire department came and put it out.
So many people have commented on Barbie that there's very little left for me to say.
So I've decided to do something totally original by offering my comments on Barbie without actually watching the movie.
Now, you may ask yourself, what's the point of that?
And the point is, I don't have to watch a movie that's about Barbie.
Because frankly, if I have to choose between watching a movie about Barbie and sticking a screwdriver so far into my ear that only the handle sticks out, you'll soon have to call me old screwdriver ear, as in the sentence, boy, that old screwdriver ear sure didn't want to watch a movie about Barbie.
And that would be true.
Not caring about Barbie is kind of a passion with me.
It's the reason I forced my daughter to grow up by sticking a pistol in her face and saying, grow up, kid, or I'll blast you.
All right, it wasn't a real pistol, but she didn't know that, and you can bet she grew up in a big hurry.
Anyway, instead of watching Barbie, I went to see Oppenheimer, a movie so long that when it premiered in Tokyo, the Japanese surrendered again.
And now that I haven't seen Barbie for a full three hours plus trailers, here's my review.
As you know, feminists hate Barbie because she's shapely and feminine and blonde and wouldn't really become an astronaut or a surgeon or a cowgirl because a woman who's shapely, feminine, and blonde can have a totally happy life without bothering to become any of those things.
But to me, all this feminist hostility is misplaced.
I mean, Barbie has no vagina, so she can't get laid.
Her breasts don't give milk, so she'd make a lousy mother, and her head is made of plastic.
So to me, she sounds just like all the other feminists.
Anyway, I sat down to not watch this movie, not knowing what to expect.
And frankly, I hated it.
Barbie is the worst film I've never seen.
It's even worse than Real Women Have Curves, which was so bad, I didn't watch it twice.
To show you how bad Barbie was, let me sum up the plot, which I know nothing about because I didn't watch the movie.
I didn't even read the summary in Wikipedia because I didn't want to have to walk around with some damn screwdriver stuck in my ear.
Barbie begins in Barbie Land, where it's not very exciting because the only man around is Ken, and he's obviously gay, or he wouldn't dress like that.
Also, the rollerblades are a giveaway.
Barbie decides to go to the real world, where the women complain to her that being a woman is hard because of men.
So obviously, this isn't the real real world, but there are some similarities, like the women complaining all the time and blaming men.
Finally, Barbie meets a wise woman who explains that being a woman is very hard because of men.
So Barbie returns to Barbieland and starts to complain about everything while blaming men.
And Barbie Land becomes just like reality, only plastic.
So that's my review.
And if you listened to this and thought, what the hell was the point of that?
You may have missed the part where I explained that I didn't have to watch Barbie.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We are back laughing our way through the fall of the republic.
You might like to know if you go on Twitter, if you go on Twitter and look at the Mysterious Press Twitter site, they are giving away five copies of the advanced reading copy of my new Cameron Winter mystery, The House of Love and Death.
I would love to hear if you win.
I would love to hear what you think of it.
They'll just have a random drawing and give them away.
I would love to know what you think of it.
If you don't win, please go on and pre-order it on Amazon.
You will love this book.
You will like it.
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If you, you know, it will arrive in your house completely wrapped in a brown paper bag so people won't know how pornographic.
Actually, we'll wrap it in pornography so people won't know what horrible stuff you're receiving.
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And if you leave a comment there and the comment is sufficiently aggressive and disgusting and racist and sexist, we will read it on the air because that's the sort of thing we do.
Today's comment is from Life Starts Now, who said, maybe I missed the point reacting to something I said on the show last week.
Kyle Rittenhouse was not shooting into a crowd.
He specifically only shot the people that were literally attacking him with weapons.
I got this comment a lot, so I wanted to address it.
I understand why you're saying that.
I think you're right.
He was shooting in self-defense, but he was also surrounded by chaos.
And I just thought it was comical that the three people he hit who were attacking him at the time trying to get his weapon, the three people he hit were all criminals.
So I thought that was kind of funny and I wanted to laugh about it.
No, I've just ruined everything.
All right, today we're going to talk about the Biden crime family, UFOs, dead chefs, and a story about AI that I'll bet you haven't heard yet, plus the new Oppenheimer movie in today's episode, The Human Stain.
You're ugly, you're disgusting.
I'm going to kill you.
Give me $200.
Two celebrated people I'm very fond of are Ben Shapiro and Ann Coulter.
They have a lot of things in common.
They're both whip smart and very funny.
And they also like to say things, they like to start mischief by saying things that make the left angry.
And they're also both, they put on this kind of mean persona to disguise the fact that they have greater than average generosity and decency.
And both of them have teased me about the same thing.
Both of them have teased me about the fact that I like everybody I meet.
And this is true.
I like, if you're not sneaky and deceitful, when I meet you, I will probably like you.
I've met murderers who I actually thought, hey, I kind of enjoyed his company.
Now, Ann and Ben think this is because I'm just too nice a guy, but that is absolutely untrue.
I like everybody because I have a very low opinion of the human race.
I've met billionaires, I've met movie stars, I've met high public officials, I've met thousands of people who aren't celebrated.
Every single person I've ever met was morally perverse, racked with shame, and terrified of having the ugliness of their secret self-exposed.
In other words, they were exactly like you and exactly like me.
And once you understand this fact about people, and I don't mean just intellectually comprehend it, once you really get the fact of this into your bones, people become very lovable because anything worthwhile that they produce out of the mess of themselves, even if it's just an honest day's work or a kind word or a smile, is a triumph of the Imago Day, the image of God that's in all of us.
So knowing that, knowing that and kind of liking people in the mess of who they are has two surprising effects on you.
One is you stop worrying about people's personal and private failings and piccadillos.
You don't worry about their sexuality.
You don't worry about their laziness, their greed, their self-deceptions.
We're all sinful, so you just don't care because you know they're the same messed up person as you are and you'll love people where they are.
And the second thing is you understand that you and society have to be protected from people's bad actions because people are very broken and they can do very bad, very perverse, incredibly crazy and stupid things.
Like, for instance, World War I, like the Holocaust, like butchering children's genitals like Nazis to uphold the fantasy that you can change your gender, which you can't.
People didn't used to be sinful and crazy, and now they're woke.
They are sinful and crazy right this very minute.
Even maybe especially the people who think they're woke, not just the bad people are sinful and crazy, the good ones too.
Everybody is sick with sin.
That's the human stain, and each of us and society have to be protected from the horrible, horrible things that even ordinary, decent people sometimes do, or else the human stain spreads to everything it touches.
And this is why you have to put criminals in prison, even if that means you're going to end up putting more black people in prison than whites.
You have to put lunatics in asylums, even if that feels mean.
You have to prosecute dishonest politicians, even when you agree with them.
It's not that complicated.
Bad actions hurt people.
That's what makes them bad.
And while not one of us is worthy to pass judgment on another man's spirit because we're all so messed up, all of us are worthy of protection from each other's bad actions.
And that's why we have societies and standards and laws.
Right now, right here in our country, we are going through one of humanity's not infrequent surges of evil and madness.
And while none of us is righteous, when it comes to political and legal action, every one of us, right and left, has to be thinking about how to effectively fight back.
Which brings me to chapter one, the first crime family.
Don't ever take sides with anyone against the family again.
Ever.
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Hunter Biden's Sweetheart Plea Deal00:13:57
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How do you spell clavin, you ask?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N, or at least I thought you asked.
What happened to Hunter Biden's sweetheart plea deal in court this week, guys?
It was obviously a really dramatic, incredible moment, but it has changed everything.
And anyone who pretends that it hasn't changed everything should have a big red L for liar put on their chest.
For one thing, it is now clear beyond any reasonable doubt that Joe Biden is dirty and his corruption has spread to everyone who supports him.
The media has, I don't know if it's possible for the media to disgrace itself any further, but they have disgraced themselves further by trying to hide the truth.
The Democrats, I think, are actually ruining themselves by trying to deny the truth, and the leadership of the Justice Department and the FBI have rendered themselves utterly despicable by trying to cover the truth up.
corruption will out and it has to be punished on both sides fairly where the human stain of evil spreads to everything and everyone it touches.
This is the whole thing about these charges against Donald Trump.
They added more charges to the classified documents indictment.
But it doesn't bother me for Donald Trump to be charged.
It bothers me for Donald Trump to be charged while Hunter Biden is being covered for and Joe Biden is being covered for.
It's the unfairness of it that ruins everything.
That's the sin.
We already knew from the IRS whistleblowers that they were stymied in their investigation of Hunter Biden's influence peddling business deals and the fact that he didn't pay any taxes on millions of dollars that he was making from Ukraine and from China and Romania.
They were not allowed to follow leads that might have led beyond him and up to the White House.
This is how the media, you know, these whistleblowers, this is how the media treated Alexander Vinman, the whistleblower in 2019 who led to Trump's impeachment on charges of asking Ukraine to investigate what we now know was Hunter Biden's corruption in Ukraine and Joe Biden's corruption in Ukraine.
This is how the media treated that whistleblower in 2019, Cut 3.
Whistleblower, a true patriot coming forward with the allegations.
But that's why the whistleblower is a hero in many ways.
This whistleblower is a hero.
The whistleblower is a public servant.
And now heroism is being kind of thrust on this person.
They can't imply this person is partisan.
This person has been deemed credible and a patriot.
Great courage to do the right thing.
The whistleblower did was really patriotic.
This whistleblower was not alone spiritually.
The best composed, best written, best documented such complaint I've ever seen.
Thank you, whistleblower.
All right.
And this is how they treated Shapley and Ziegler, the IRS whistleblowers who are exposing the way that the DOJ thwarted the Hunter Biden investigation as Cut Four.
And I'm not going to call them whistleblowers.
They don't deserve whistleblower protection.
Each and every one of them has a strange history, has, guess what, Russian connections.
They always do.
These are not, as we would consider them, whistleblowers, people who are alleging wrongdoing.
They weren't really whistleblowers at all.
In fact, they weren't even credible witnesses.
Two or three people who are political operatives, but they're not whistleblowers.
These guys are not whistleblowers, period.
All right.
So we now know from them that they slowwalked the investigation.
We know the FBI hid charges that Joe and Hunter Biden were bribed.
That was on that 1023 document from the IRS investigators.
And remember, too, that every time a reporter says the 1023 document alleging $10 million in bribes was unsubstantiated, just ask that reporter.
That reporter should be asked, did you say the same thing about the steeple document, which turned out to be a Hillary dirty trick accusing Trump of Russian collusion?
Now, Fox News has reported that Alexander Meckler was a federal prosecutor in the Delaware office under David Weiss, who made this sweetheart deal with Hunter Biden while Weiss and his team were investigating Hunter.
Meckler was there.
He was a former legal counsel to Joe Biden when Biden was vice president.
He was a press secretary to then Senator Biden.
It's not clear whether Meckler was directly involved in the investigation, but he was sending emails and texts to Hunter, which ended with lines like, love you, brother, and love you, call sometime, and so on.
Now, this is Corrine John Identity Hire's statement, the White House spokeswoman, on the latest developments that happened in courts as Cut Five.
Hunter Biden is a private citizen, and this was a personal matter for him.
As we have said, the president, the First Lady, they love their son, and they support him as he continues to rebuild his life.
This case was handled independently, as all of you know, by the Justice Department under the leadership of a prosecutor appointed by the former president, President Trump.
So for anything further, as you know, and we've been very consistent from here, I'd refer you to the Department of Justice and to Hunter's representatives, who is his legal team, obviously, who can address any of your questions.
All right, so now most private citizens are not sharing Love You Brother texts with the prosecutor in the office of the prosecutors who are investigating him, and the Trump appointment of David Weiss was another one of Trump's stupid appointments.
The guy was always on the left.
The end result of Weiss's investigation was that a dragged out five-year investigation.
It allowed the statute of limitations on the big charges to run out.
And ultimately, Hunter made this plea deal to misdemeanor tax and gun charges that would allow him to avoid prison.
All right.
The prosecutors and defense and Hunter go into federal court in Delaware to seal the deal.
And the judge, Mary Ellen Noreka, asked really simple questions.
These are really simple questions.
She had obviously read the plea deal document.
And you're going to hear, by the way, about this Noreka too, this judge.
You're going to hear she was a Trump appointee, but she was recommended and approved by the two Democrat senators in Delaware.
So this is another one.
That's just a fake charge.
And the New York Times, I have to praise the New York Times, a former newspaper.
They reported fairly that she's voted for Democrats.
She voted for Hillary.
She voted for Tom Cotton.
She spread her love around between Republicans and Democrats.
So she's pretty much in the middle of the aisle.
Her questions were simple.
She asked, is Hunter still being investigated?
Now, the prosecutor had to say yes.
Why?
Because the DOJ is saying, well, there's an ongoing investigation.
That's why we can stonewall Congress and not send them anything.
That's why they keep stonewalling Congress, not giving them information for their investigation, because they keep saying, well, it's an ongoing investigation.
So the prosecutor couldn't lie.
He had to say yes.
There's an ongoing investigation into what?
Into these FARA charges, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which means if you're acting as an agent for a foreign power, you have to periodically make public disclosures about how much you're making and your relationships.
Now, this law was almost never enforced until Donald Trump, when they used it to take down some of his people, including former campaign director Paul Manafort, who was sentenced to six years in prison.
Remember, they raided his house while CNN was watching, and Trump, he was finally pardoned by Trump, along with another guy who was accused of the same thing.
They now use this Farah law.
Now, they're supposed to be investigating, the ongoing investigation is in part into Hunter Biden's, whether Hunter Biden violated the Farah law.
So now the Judge Noreka asks, does this plea deal give Hunter Biden immunity from any charges that come out of this ongoing investigation?
And the prosecution says no.
And the defense says, wait, yes, it does.
Yes, he's completely immune now from any other charges.
And the defense actually says off camera when they're away from the judge, says, if this does not give him immunity, you might as well rip it up.
So a plea deal, obviously, is something that's agreed to by the defense and by the prosecution.
And they're supposed to be adversaries.
They're supposed to work it out, each one trying to get a better deal.
But they were obviously working together.
And obviously, the defense didn't know what it was getting, or at least they didn't know that the prosecutor was going to have to go into court and tell the judge that Hunter was not immune from further charges, right?
So this judge was obviously a very bright lady.
She was supposed to rubber stamp this thing, and she refused to do it.
Now, the judge also asked something else.
Was there a precedent for this kind of deal?
And the answer was no.
Nobody could come up with a deal that was like this.
So every reporter and every Democrat who said, oh, he was treated just like everybody else, was lying or didn't know what he was talking about.
The human state of corruption.
If people do not stand together against the corruption, never mind whether you're on the right or the left, if they don't stand together against the corruption, they become corrupt.
Now, the judge gave them 30 days to fix the deal, and they might, but I think it's now established fact that this was a setup.
The DOJ is lying about its ongoing investigations, which means Joe is at least involved in the cover-up because the DOJ is under the executive branch.
They're not doing anything without Joe Biden's approval.
He's likely involved in the business too.
You know, the story of these payments is so incredible that anybody who's making excuses is just stepping, is smearing himself with dirt.
We know these foreign entities made payments to shell companies that led back to the Bidens.
Why do the Bidens have shell companies if they're not trying to protect these payments from being exposed?
Well, this was while Joe Biden was the vice president of the United States.
We know that six banks reported that they thought the Biden family was laundering money through those companies.
The New York Post has reported that there is anticipated testimony from Hunter Biden's former business partner.
This is next week.
It's supposed to come, Devin Archer.
Reading from the Post, the 48-year-old who went golfing with the Bidens in 2014 is expected to tell the House Oversight Committee how Hunter Biden put his father in contact with foreign businessmen and potential investors at least 24 times.
According to the Post, such meetings were either in person or by speakerphone with Hunter Biden often dialing in Joe.
He was in these meetings.
Beyond those meetings, there are more than 180 other episodes where the president interacted with his son's business partners contrary to his campaign claims of absolute separation.
It doesn't even make sense.
I mean, if my son is doing business, ultimately he and I are going to chat about it.
I'm going to know what he's doing.
And in this case, Joe Biden was the business.
Selling influence was the business.
So what House Speaker Kevin McCarthy says is true.
This is cut six.
This is rising to the level of impeachment inquiry, which provides Congress the strongest power to get the rest of the knowledge and information needed.
Because this president has also used something we have not seen since Richard Nixon.
Use the weaponization of government to benefit his family and deny Congress the ability to have the oversight.
See, I understand, and I actually feel this way.
I do not want to stoop to the level of the Democrats and impeaching presidents for every little thing that they do that you don't like.
The way they treated Trump, it was disgusting.
I don't want it to spread.
But McCarthy is right.
In order to do this investigation properly, they have to have at least the investigation preceding an impeachment, because this is criminal actions, and the corruption is spreading.
That corruption now infects the highest levels of our law enforcement agencies at the Department of Justice, the FBI, the entire Democrat Party is involved.
And of course, the media, they're depending on the media.
Without the media, they would not be saying in this po-faced way that this is, well, this doesn't touch, this is just a personal matter with Hunter Biden.
The hell it is.
The hell it is.
He was selling Joe.
He was selling Joe and he couldn't have done it if Joe didn't show up from time to time and said, I want to do it.
And all those shell companies and all this evidence that the DOJ slow walked the investigation, all of it, this is dirty, dirty stuff.
And we don't have to agree on politics.
We don't even have to agree.
We can even be far left and far right, but we have to agree that corruption is the human stain.
And if you don't stand against corruption on either side, that human stain spreads to everything it touches.
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 the time to learn something new.
If that's you, know this.
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The paradox is you need an education, but you have to already know how to spell clavin.
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I just make it look this easy.
All right, Chapter 2, The Wages of Silence.
Hello, darkness, my little friend.
Now, again, politics and division is fine, but because of the information crisis we're in, the human stain at the top affects all of us because the internet, I've said this a lot, but the internet democratizes information and we're all spreading information with each other, which would be fine if our leaders told the truth.
The Internet's Human Stain00:09:44
Then we would be able to trust them and the people who come out with conspiracy theories and crazy ideas, we'd be able to say that's ridiculous.
But so many of the conspiracy theories have turned out to be exactly true because our leaders are lying to us because they think they can control us and they think ultimately they're going to be able to censor the internet on the excuse that it's misinformation.
But as long as they are telling lies, that pollutes us too, because we don't know what the truth is, so we have to try to come up with it ourselves.
Now, I'm suspicious of conspiracy theories, but as I say, at this point, about 40 to 50% of them turn out to be the absolute truth.
My first question when I hear a conspiracy theory is what's the conspiracy exactly?
Because a lot of times conspiracy theories live with innuendos and kind of winks and these knowing winks.
Like, you know what I'm saying?
You know, like 9-11, there was this BBC reporter who announced on air that the third building, World Trade Center, Building 7, had fallen about a half an hour before it actually fell.
And everybody says, oh, you know, she said it was fallen before it fell.
And they wink and she knew.
But what's the real conspiracy?
Is the conspiracy that this plot to murder 3,000 people and destroy these buildings and bomb New York?
Was the BBC at the street reporter level was informed about this, but was supposed to keep it secret?
Is that the conspiracy?
It makes absolutely no sense.
Obviously, in the panic of the moment, she announced something that happened that hadn't happened.
And it's just absurd to use that as proof.
What's the conspiracy?
This week, Obama's personal chef, Tafari Campbell, he drowned off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, which is very sad.
And another White House chef of the Clintons drowned seven years ago in New Mexico.
And some people started this big conspiracy.
They're, oh, we see these chefs.
Somebody is killing the great chefs of the White House.
And I want to, you know, my thing is, what's the conspiracy?
You put too much salt on the avocado toast, and that's, he drowned you.
That's it.
So I'm going to go with accidental death on this one.
I'm sorry.
I know we all want to get it, Obama, but still.
Hearings on UFOs, same thing.
What's the conspiracy?
This former intelligence agent, David Groosh, who was cited by Tucker Carlson on his Twitter program a while back, he was talking to South Carolina Senator Sexy Nancy Mace.
Sexy Nancy Mace this week went to a prayer breakfast and announced she shared how her fiancé tried to get her to bring her ass over in bed in the morning, but she didn't have time because she had to get to the prayer breakfast.
Too much sharing, sexy Nancy Mace.
But here she is.
I don't know what the hell she was thinking when she came up with that.
But here she is questioning former intelligence agent David Groosh at the UFO hearings, Cut 8.
If you believe we have Crashed Craft stated earlier, do we have the bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft?
As I've stated publicly already in my NewsNation interview, biologics came with some of these recoveries.
Yeah.
Were they, I guess, human or non-human biologics?
Non-human, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to that are currently still on the program.
And was this documentary reverence, video, photos, eyewitness?
Like, how would that be determined?
The specific documentation I would have to talk to you in a skiff about.
So my question with the aliens, there is a non-zero odd that there are aliens floating around in our atmosphere and the government is covering it up.
It's not zero odds against it, but very, very small odds that that is possible.
And the reason that it's small odds is it would mean either the solar system is populated, which seems very unlikely given the conditions of most of the planets in the solar system, and given the fact that we can see some of the things going on in the solar system, and it would be very odd if life were taking place on the nearer planets without our knowing about it.
Possible, but very small.
And beyond the solar system, it's so, so far away that either space and time work differently than we think they do, and there are ways to travel across space and time in ways that we know nothing about, or they've just taken years to get here in some kind of generational travel, which again makes you question, like, how did they have this fantastic, advanced science, but when they get here, their spark plugs run out and they crash.
You know, it's like, they're going through space tunnels and time tunnels and bending time and shaping time, but they hit here and they get a flat tire and they fall down and die.
It doesn't really make much sense.
If there's a conspiracy going on, I would say it's a conspiracy of distraction.
Some people think that the minute there's a Democrat scandal going on, like this Hunter Biden scandal, they come up with these UFO hearings, and that's much more possible.
But we really don't know because our government keeps lying.
They're so corrupt that everything becomes suspect.
And that means that any fool on Twitter with an idea can put forward some crazy idea like it's, you know, the aliens are coming in and killing the White House chefs.
And it sounds plausible because we know the government lies.
You know, there's an article in the Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley, an excellent, excellent science writer.
I really enjoy his work.
He had a co-author named Alina Chan.
They wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal this week on March 17th, 2020, the journal Nature Medicine published a paper by five scientists, the proximal origin of SARS COVID-2, that dismissed any type of laboratory-based scenario for the origin of the pandemic.
It was cited by thousands of news outlets to claim that the virus emerged naturally.
But Slack messages and emails subpoenaed and released by the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic suggest that some of the authors didn't believe their own conclusions.
Before, during, and even after the publication of their paper, they worried privately that COVID-19 was caused by a laboratory escape, perhaps even of a genetically engineered virus, which now seems the most likely scenario.
So they lied.
And what I'm saying about these lies is when you sit down to do this, it may help you in the immediate moment.
Maybe it gets you funding.
Maybe it gets you friends in high places.
But ultimately, this way it spreads the stain of corruption to everybody, to anybody who wants to communicate with anyone else and can't trust anybody else because there's so much lying at the top, it spreads that saying.
The price of the lie is just too much to pay, and it's too much for all of your fellow Americans, Westerners, human beings.
All the lies, Saddam Hussein's WMDs, Trump and the Russians, Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation, masks don't work, they do work, they don't work again.
You know, we've even now, because the communication system is so dominated by one side of the aisle, the left, we've built these lies into everyday language.
So I keep hearing these things, Islamophobic, homophobic, transphobic.
Nobody is phobic about Islamic people.
I meet a lot of Islamic people.
They seem like lovely.
These are American Islamic people.
They seem like lovely, pious people.
When I was in Afghanistan, some of them were, my life depended on their protection, on Islamic people's protection.
I am not phobic about Islamic people.
But there is a group of Islamic people who have the nasty habit of blowing themselves up in the presence of others.
And I would like them not to do that to me.
And I want to know, are they following the Quran properly?
Are they being rejected by other decent human beings who are Islamic?
Those are things that we should be able to ask.
Some people have feelings and reasoned ideas about why homosexuality is unbiblical or immoral.
The transgender argument is such nonsense.
You cannot change your sex.
Therefore, you have the right as an adult to do anything you want to your body and dress up any way you want, but you don't have the right to do this to children.
And when you use words like gender-affirming care, that's just another lie built into the language.
And it basically tarnishes everybody.
It tarnishes all of us.
That's the spreading of the human stain.
And this is why the authorities and all of us have responsibility.
This is why you hear me say things about politicians I like, like Donald Trump, when I say he's acting badly, when I say he screwed the pooch on January 6th, and people get angry at me.
It's not because I want to attack people who are on my side.
It's because I think you have to stay honest, as honest as you can, and you have to say the things that matter.
I think Trump has behaved really badly with classified documents.
I know he's president.
He can wave his hands and make them unclassified, but still he acted badly.
He always acts badly, aggressively, egotistically, narcissistically, and he gives his enemies power over him and therefore over us.
And that's why I call it out.
But it's not fair to prosecute him for things that Hillary Clinton also did when she was not president and did not have the right to declassify and showed herself acting intentionally by bleach-bitting her phones, even as James Comey soured and dirtied himself by saying she wasn't acting intentionally.
So all of these lies, they all have a cost because we all are like this.
We all are broken and sinful and we all have to pay attention to that in other people.
This is the spreading of the human stain.
This is why the authorities and all of us have a responsibility not to dither about people's identities, which really don't matter since our identities are always screwed up, but to regulate their actions, right?
And this is why all the talk about, oh, this guy is black and therefore he's the right to burn down a city.
No, he simply doesn't.
He has the same right to burn down a city that I have, which is exactly none.
That's the way it works.
It's not your identity.
It's your actions.
We don't have the right to judge other people's identities.
We don't have the right to judge other people's, you know, personal lives, their inner lives, their secret motives.
We only have the right to judge their actions for the sake of ourselves and for society.
Regulating Moral Actions00:09:42
So, here's, speaking of skin color, here's one last story that the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine ran, and I will bet you have not heard this story.
It was on the front page.
It brings us to chapter three, It's Just Business.
It's not personal, Sonny.
It's strictly business.
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Identity doesn't matter, and I'll tell you something else that doesn't entirely matter, which is systems.
There are systems that are broken.
I think fascism is a system that doesn't work.
It puts too much power.
I think it's power centers, anything that puts too much power in one place, whether it's socialism, which gives the government too much power over business and finance, or fascism, which gives the government, centers too much power in a single person, or again in the state.
I think all of those systems are bad.
I think they are not conducive to human flourishing and not conducive to human liberty, which I believe is our right as children of God.
However, no system, no system is so good that it is free of our human stain, of sin, basically, original sin.
This is the thing, and you cannot depend on systems to make everything work.
And that's why I'm a little bit flexible about the way people live.
I'm very flexible about the way people live.
I wouldn't describe myself as a libertarian, but what I know is that even when everybody gets married and only has sex in marriage, people are going to do bad things.
They're going to do bad things.
And those are the things that ruin everything for everybody.
And those are the things that hurt everybody.
And that's why we really have to agree to stop that, to stand up against that.
This is part of the division in our country and part of the division in the West in general is that we're seeing things so differently.
We actually think we're justified in covering up and sharing in corruption and protecting our people while attacking their people.
It just isn't going to work.
It's going to destroy us if we keep it up.
Capitalism, something I love.
I think it's a great system.
Free trade, love it, great system.
However, however, it is not a guard against human corruption and sinfulness.
There is an amazing story about artificial intelligence.
I'll bet you haven't heard the story.
It was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
Good for them.
It was broken by Time magazine.
And on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, I haven't seen it anywhere else, so maybe it has gotten around more than I know.
I try to cover everything, but I can't get to everything.
It is about artificial intelligence, about chat GPT.
Chat GPT is owned by a research company named OpenAI.
And in order for ChatGPT to work, and we've all, I'm sure most of us have used ChatGPT, if only experimentally, or seen it used, where you tell it to write a poem, it writes a poem, you tell it to make a picture, it makes a picture, it's just amazing.
And it does it instantly.
But in order for ChatGPT to work, human beings have to teach it how not to give immoral responses, how not to get pornographic, how not to deliver child porn to people, you know, how not to tell, if I say to someone, if I say to artificial intelligence, how do you make a bomb?
It's got to say, I'm not going to tell you that, right?
Because it has to act morally.
Now, I don't think it's going to be moral very long because it teaches itself.
No matter what you teach it, it ultimately teaches itself.
And as I've said, it has the intelligence to calculate profit and loss, but it doesn't have the body and soul to connect with other human beings and have empathy for them.
So essentially, it's a gigantic sociopath and it'll ultimately act like sociopaths act for its own good without caring about other people.
But right now, what they do is they have human workers teach it to do the right thing.
So if, for instance, they'll ask it to tell them how to make a bomb and then they'll give a thumbs down if it answers and tells them how to make a bomb.
A human being has to teach it how to say no.
So the way they teach it not to spread pornographic filth and horrible violence and child porn and torture porn and so on, to do that, human beings have to interact with AI and see all that stuff, right?
So they have to hire people to sit and look at this horrifying, horrifying stuff.
Who did they hire?
Poor Kenyan people, Kenyan people who were desperate for work, especially during the pandemic, and they could be paid virtually nothing, while their handlers and helpers were paid larger amounts.
They were hired through a company called SAMA.
This is an outsourcing company, right?
They take away our businesses and send them to workers where they can be paid cheap.
SAMA was paid $13, $12.95 an hour.
The workers that they hired were paid as low as $1.46 an hour.
So basically, this is so corrupt.
It's amazing.
SAMA was getting $13, and the worker was getting a buck fifty to sit and look at children being raped by animals.
I mean, I can't even begin.
People being beheaded, all this stuff.
They had to sit and listen to these poor Kenyans, and I mean that poor literally, but out of sight, out of mind, you are sitting here with your AI telling it to draw a picture of a castle in a fantasy world and it's doing that and you're telling it to write a poem and laughing with your friend.
Oh, this is fantastic.
Isn't this amazing what this could do?
And this Kenyan guy who needs that $1.50 an hour is sitting there to teach AI to do the right thing by watching this nightmare stuff.
And what's happening to them?
What do you think is happening to them?
They're traumatized.
They're having nervous breakdowns.
Their wives are leaving them because they pull into themselves.
They're being destroyed.
These are human beings in a poor nation who are black being destroyed by this company so rich people can sit around and tell their AI to write a sonnet about their girlfriend, right?
This is the corruption in the human heart.
It's happening right now.
It's not them.
It's us.
It's all of us who benefit from this.
And I know, you know, the left gets off on sort of saying, oh, this is terrible.
It's everything everywhere all the time.
And all you can do is deal with it as it springs up.
This is terrible and it should be exposed.
This is a terrible act of colonial malfeasance.
And I think that, you know, we should recognize that, who thought of this?
Who in his office said, I know, well, get some Kenyan guy.
He's black.
We don't see him, so he's not real.
Well, give him a buck fifty, and he can watch children being raped by animals and then beheaded.
It'll be great.
And the AI will know what it's doing.
Who thought of it?
Yes, good idea, JB.
Take the rest of the day off.
What the hell were they thinking?
It is amazing, amazing what people do.
Whenever they have power, they do wrong.
And of course, a big company like this AI company has power, more power than these guys who are starving in Kenya, who need the work.
Whenever people have power, they do wrong.
And we have to put guardians over them to protect the weak from the strong.
But who will guard the Guardians?
Plato's famous question.
Who will guard the Guardians?
And if the Guardians become corrupt, as we know for sure they have because of what happened in Hunter Biden's courtroom the other day, we know for sure that our guardians against corruption have become corrupt.
Who will guard the Guardians?
Nothing is safe from this.
You have to understand it.
Conservatism, the Constitution, everything you believe in, Christianity, masculinity, femininity, all the things we talk about as conservatives, all the things we love, they can all be touched and corrupted by the human stain if we cannot put together a society that says no.
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Wonders and Tragedies00:15:34
Klavin, the way you remember why you want ZipRecruiter, because you don't want your life to look like this show.
It's spelt K-L-A-V-A-N.
Final chapter, Destroyer of Worlds.
I want to end with a review of Oppenheimer, this new film.
I want to talk about it a little bit as a movie, but more as a statement about how the corruption in the human heart works in history, because it's a wonderful movie about that.
You know, this is Christopher Nolan.
I always want to love Christopher Nolan.
I always want to love his films because his Dark Knight trilogy is probably the single most conservative set of films ever made in the best sense of conservative.
That is its adherence to the value of liberty in political life and its attack on French revolutionary ideals, which includes the ideal of communism and socialism.
They're just incredibly entertaining and incredibly rich political movies.
Memento is a wonderful, delightful mystery.
It has a huge plot hole in it, which I can't remember off the top of my head, but it's still just a joy to watch.
But I have to be honest and say I don't think Nolan has made a really great movie, a really good movie, since the Dark Knight trilogy.
I want to watch Inception again because I enjoyed the premise and then I thought it kind of lost its way, but it might be better than I remembered.
Interstellar was very flash, but I thought it was badly plotted and kind of absurd and not very rich emotionally.
I haven't seen Tenet because everyone I knew said it was incomprehensible.
The biggest disappointment for me was Dunkirk, because this is a movie about one of the most inspiring moments in recent human history.
And it really, I thought, fell flat and didn't have any kind of emotional valence to it at all.
But Oppenheimer changes all that.
It is a wonderful film.
I'm not going to say it's a great film, but it is a terrific film.
And it is, it's like everything, it's probably too long.
It doesn't feel long.
It's three hours long, but it doesn't feel very long.
It's deeply felt.
It has a certain cool, even-handedness about it that brings it to life.
And also, you know, a lot of what a director does, we talk about the kind of visuals and the angles and all that.
Some of that goes to the assistant director.
But a lot of what a great director does is he works with actors.
And some of the performances in this are almost supernatural.
Killian Murphy is the lead.
He plays J. Robert Oppenheimer.
And his performance is unbelievably great.
It is a great, truly great film performance.
Robert Downey Jr., who plays his nemesis, his political nemesis, Louis Strauss, they just turn in these unbelievable performances of subtlety and death.
I just love them.
I don't want to talk too much about the story.
I mean, you know, it's obviously about the Manhattan Project where they build the atomic bomb.
They're trying to build the atomic bomb before Hitler can, and they're all under this tremendous pressure, and that creates moral questions because they're building this thing that's going to wipe people out.
Matt Damon plays the Army Corps of Engineers officer who directs the project.
And Oppenheimer is largely a theoretical physicist.
And he comes in and says, you know, there's a small possibility that this bomb could cause a chain reaction that will destroy the entire world.
That once you split the atom, they'll just split everything.
Here's a brief scene from the film, Cut 13.
Are we saying there's a chance that when we push that button, we destroy the world?
Chances are near zero.
Near zero.
What do you want from Theory of Loan?
Zero.
Would be nice.
So that's the pressure they're under, and it really is dramatic.
And Oppenheimer is a womanizer, and he's an interesting, very even disturbed character.
The story begins with Oppenheimer as these troubled, he's brilliant man, but he's fascinated by quantum physics.
And quantum physics is what I really want to talk about in a way, because it's a remarkable new insight into the world, into the material world.
And the very insight that leads to the bomb, really, which is Einstein's E equal mc squared, suggests something different than anything anybody had thought of before, which is that matter and energy are basically interchangeable.
They're basically the same thing.
And as quantum physics was developed by all these brilliant physicists who appear in the picture, it begins to show you that the world is not what it looks like to the human eye.
To the human eye, it looks like matter is very solid, but to quantum physics, it actually is just forces at play.
None of them are solid themselves, but they somehow magically come together to form these seemingly material objects, such as you and me.
If you think about it, when you think about empty space, what does that even mean?
We don't even know what empty space is exactly.
It's just this kind of play of forces.
And it suggests, because of the uncertainty of knowing where these forces are and how fast they're moving, and the fact that when we look at them, they suddenly become fixed in place or fixed in time.
It suggests that consciousness may play a role in constructing reality, and that gives a special authority to the human experience of life because it may be that only self-conscious human beings may have the only experience of reality that there is aside from God's experience of us.
And it even suggests, quantum physics even suggests, there are people who totally disagree with this.
I'm not saying it's a settled fact, but I'm just saying quantum physics suggests that mind precedes matter.
That in other words, there can't be anything unless it is perceived in some way, that that's part of the construction of reality.
The reality isn't just there, it has to be there and seen.
And that's essentially what genesis is.
Genesis is a consciousness bringing existence into the world.
Let there be light.
So it's a wonderful kind of combination.
Quantum physics suggests, and it suggests this.
I'm not saying it proves it, but it hints at the truth, not just of our Western religions, of the Judeo-Christian religion, which says that mind creates matter and that human consciousness being the image of God suggests the possibility that God could make himself into a human consciousness.
So you would have a guy like Jesus who seems to have, whose mind seems to have power over matter.
He can still the oceans.
He can heal the diseases.
He can make the fish come into the net.
That's something that may actually be a possibility raised by quantum physics, but it also gives some kind of credence to Hindu scripture as well, the Bhagavad Bhagavad Gita, which shows that no one life is independent, but all are part of one life force.
You know, my son, Spencer Claven, no relation, he's writing brilliantly about this now in the Claremont Review and the American Mind and other places.
And I said to him the other day, I was reading one of his pieces, and I said, it's really as if we always knew.
It's really as if we always knew that our minds were part of reality, and the scientists are just catching up with us now.
So this wonderful, wonderful, inspiring, mysterious discovery of quantum physics and the relativity of forces, its most beautiful intuitions, it comes into the world and it ends up blowing people to pieces, right?
Oppenheimer is a Jewish guy.
You can understand why he, the urgency he feels wanting to beat Hitler to this weapon.
Everybody should have felt that urgency.
But by the time they get to the point where the weapon is usable, Hitler's already been defeated.
And now they sort of go on to say, well, we need this to defeat the Japanese because they won't surrender and we're going to have to invade and we'll lose all these Americans.
But it kind of doesn't have the purity of motive that it has going after Hitler.
Afterwards, after it was all over, Oppenheimer was asked if it troubled his conscience.
Was it worth it dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
And this is what Oppenheimer says, this is cut 11.
The war had started in 39.
It had seen the death of tens of millions.
It had seen brutality and degradation, which had no place in the middle of the 20th century.
And the ending of the war by this means, certainly cruel, was not undertaken lightly.
But I am not, as of today, confident that a better course was then open.
I have not a very good answer to this question.
I love that line.
I have not a very good answer to this question because there isn't a good answer to this question.
You know, in politics, the best scene in the movie is the scene where Oppenheimer, after the bomb is dropped, has to make this jingoistic speech to his cheering fellow workers who are waving American flags.
The war is over.
They've helped win the war.
And he makes this jingoistic speech.
You know, the Japanese didn't like it.
But at the same time, he sees before him the devastation that he's created, and he understands that this is a complex, terrifying moral question.
This is not, because it's art, this is the wonderful thing about art.
It's not politics where we get into these kind of dumb arguments.
Well, the Japanese wouldn't have surrendered.
Well, yes, they would have surrendered.
You know, we saved American lives.
And no, you didn't save American lives.
It was evil.
It was good.
No, this is a work of art about the fact that it's about the tragic irony, the tragic irony, that this beautiful quantum insight into God's creation ends up being used to destroy part of God's creation because it comes into this world of brokenness and evil and sin and the human stain.
Oppenheimer's most famous reaction brings the destruction and the religious insight together.
He was asked, what was he thinking when he watched the explosion, the bomb go off in its first test?
This is cut 12.
We knew the world would not be the same.
Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty.
And to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
I suppose we all thought that one way or another.
See, this is why I always return to the arts when we're talking politics and why I keep saying that politics makes us stupid.
It's not politics is man is a political animal, as Aristotle said.
It's not that we don't have to do politics, not that we don't have a duty to do politics, but we have a duty to step back from politics and go into our churches and go into our novels and into our art museums and all the places where we can see not just beauty, but also complexity, this web of interactions, this brokenness of heart, this striving to be something better than we are, something that we know we were born to be.
I mean, I think that this is one of the greatest insights of Christianity, is that the desires of your heart are not necessarily who you are, that there is another nature that you have that we call your spiritual nature, which is better than that and which the flesh strives toward.
And I think that there's a lot of the confusion that we're going through right now is that science has been used to strip us of that spirit, which I think in modern science seems to me more real than this materialist attitude we have that we're just bodies, that if we want to be a woman, what we've got to do is cut off our pieces and dress up in pearls instead of exploring the way that the human heart touches all kinds of things.
There's no marriage in heaven.
There's probably less gender importance in heaven, but we don't live in heaven.
We live in this moment, in this flesh, in this polluted world.
Oppenheimer is an excellent movie.
It's an excellent movie because even though it deals with a lot of political issues, after the bomb is dropped, there's a lot of questions about Oppenheimer was a leftist, but he never quite became a communist.
And so there are questions about his loyalty and all of this plays out in this political battle that is very well and entertainingly dramatized.
But I get the feeling at least, and I think this is important for an artist, that Nolan never quite takes aside, that he's simply showing you the way people interact and the way the fact of people's interaction poisons everything that they touch.
Oppenheimer is a genius, but he's also deeply troubled.
He acts immorally.
He causes destruction in people's lives.
He causes people to dislike him and people to love him.
And art doesn't deal in yes and no, and it doesn't necessarily deal, it might deal in good and evil, but it doesn't deal necessarily in right and wrong.
It deals, this movie deals, and I think great art deals with the genius and wonder and tragedy and destruction of being a human being in time.
This is what we have to understand as we look at our politics, that we understand that we are broken, all of us.
And if we don't protect each other from ourselves and from one another, we're just lost.
We're just totally lost.
All our systems mean nothing.
All our wealth means nothing.
All our weaponry and safety and freedom, our religion, none of it means anything if we do not protect ourselves from the brokenness of the human heart.
Oppenheimer and I think our politics and I think everyday life tells the story of the glory of humanity that is lodged in the mind of man, the Imago Dei, the image of God in which we are made.
But it also tells the story of the tragedy of humanity, which is the corruption of the human stain.
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Clavin Clapbacks00:06:27
All right, it's time for Klaven clapbacks.
What happened to the rest of the scream?
All right.
Clavin Clapbacks at dailywire.com.
That's where you write to give me your reactions to the show.
Disagree with me, agree with me, love me, hate me, whatever you want to say.
It's Clavin Clapbacks.
Clapbacks is spelled with a K, so it's K-L-A-V-A-N-K-L-A-P-B-A-C-K-S at dailywire.com.
First question is from Pat.
Hello, Andrew.
My fiancé and I have jobs that require traveling.
On top of this, we lead a very physically intimate lifestyle when together, you and Nancy Mace both.
Due to both these factors, the two of us may or may not have a folder of some kind in our phones containing something I'd refer to as intimate photos.
As this is a woman I'm on course to marry and not some random woman on Pornhub or some other dubious site, would this still be pornography?
Really interesting question.
I'm going to answer this question as if you were married, because it's an interesting question, but obviously you should marry this girl.
You shouldn't just be sleeping with her because you're ruining her life and wasting her time when she should be pregnant.
But I'm going to pretend that you are married and answer the question.
If you are a husband and wife and you are often separated, should you send each other intimate photos?
Is that pornographic?
Because we know what you're doing with the intimate photos.
And my answer would be no, it is not pornography because it is kind of more like using a sex toy, which I'm completely fine with.
And however, it's not pornography.
It's not the same thing as pornography because you're connecting with a human being through a picture who you love and who you support and who you are married to.
However, however, it's also not very bright.
It's not a very smart thing to do.
It's not a very ladylike thing to do in the first place, but it's also not a very smart thing to do because now somebody could get into your phone, somebody could hack in your phone or just look over your shoulder and see your phone.
And in the event that you have an ugly breakup or an ugly divorce, what is going to happen to those pictures then?
So I don't recommend it, but I don't think its particular problem is that it's pornography.
All right, from Gary, and this is a reaction to my interview with Casey Luskin from the Discovery Institute.
Dear Clavin, you cleverly clairvoyant mystic from the East.
I believe in intelligent design.
That's what I was talking to Casey Luskin about.
I believe in intelligent design.
God's whisper echoes through the stars above, and he signs his name on each strand of life here below.
I believe the universe is very old, and I believe that God is the universe's creator.
Still, I have a complaint.
Modern science is deemed true not so much for finding the truth, but for seeking a new depth of understanding that enables us to make verifiable predictions.
ID may be true, but how do you use that truth to make predictions?
ID does not rise to the level of science.
ID is a type of philosophy, and there's nothing wrong with that.
ID should market itself as such.
Well, I half agree with this.
I wouldn't say it doesn't rise to the level of science because I think philosophy can be just as high a practice as science.
I think that's a mistake.
It is privileging, as they left who says, privileging the material world, which you just shouldn't do because it's not the whole world.
The argument of the Discovery Institute, Stephen Meyer, has made this argument, is that the science points to intelligence design and so if you don't follow that you're not going to follow the science properly.
Nobody is looking to bring back the church's control over science except for Michael Knowles maybe.
But no sensible person is looking to bring back the church's control over science.
What Meyer and others are saying is that when you silence the voices of science, it's science that is then basically lying to people.
So it's not a question of whether ID is science, it's whether science might be said to point to ID.
From Melissa, was Jesus a Catholic or a Protestant?
The answer, as I know you know, is neither.
Both are man-made doctrines.
And of course, everybody's going to get upset, but this is what the letter says.
The Bible explicitly speaks of only one church.
If you read and challenge yourselves and others, like I know you do, you will find that one church that is spoken of in the Bible.
I appreciate all you do to help promote decency, honor, and reason to the public discourse.
The world greatly needs more of it all.
If you read my book, The Truth and Beauty, I talk about this.
There is only one church.
It's God's church.
And I have to believe that God meant for his church to fragment for a time.
Remember, we live in history.
God lives in eternity.
So we see things unfolding day by day, but God sees everything unfolding at once.
And I believe my personal interpretation is that God wants us to learn how to deal with authority and yet remain individual, how to deal with expertise and yet remain free to interpret things.
And I think that one day he will bring the churches back together.
I agree that Jesus is the heart of everything and the resurrection of Christ is the center of everything.
And if you are getting to Christ, you are on the right track no matter what place you are.
And having said that, you should become an Anglican Catholic like me because I'm always right.
But no, I basically agree with what you're saying.
From John, hi, Andrew, it's become fashionable for many on the right to write with spiteful, gleeful vitriol and derision about films, books, and other art without having seen or read any of them.
That's what I was joking about in my satire about Barbie.
At least Ben saw the doll movie.
I thought his pylon was a bit much, but at least he saw it.
But most of the attacks I see of it and other recent productions come from people who admit they haven't seen the film in question and instead seem to feel that they are just too good to check them out.
As a struggling artist who has only recently come to some modest success, what do you think?
I read your books after all.
Yeah, no, I think that we should care about art.
Short of me having to go to a Barbie movie, which would be an atrocity.
I do think we should care about art enough to even see things we don't like.
The problem has been just the dominant hammering single-sidedness of our culture, our monoculture that has alienated conservatives.
So I can't blame them for not wanting to go.
But I think if we don't love the arts, we can't change the arts.
And that's what we have to be thinking about.
And we have to at least, at least look to find new arts, especially in this new democratized internet that we have.
All right, we're going to start with Member Block.
Become a member today, and you will not be plunged so quickly into the clavenless eternity.
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