Ep. 1142 – Never Say Never Trump dissects Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump as politically timed, contrasting it with Hunter Biden’s buried plea deal and ties to Ukrainian oligarch Vadim Pozarsky. Leaked Facebook files reveal Biden’s White House pressuring Meta to censor dissent, while the WEF and corporations like Bud Light collude in "brand safety" blacklists targeting conservative media. The episode frames this as a clash between elite censorship and populist resistance, linking it to COVID-era church lockdowns—where pastors like John MacArthur defied state overreach—and argues conservatives must reclaim faith as their foundation, not secular ideology. Trump’s legal battles become a proxy war for moral and informational control. [Automatically generated summary]
In the wake of damning testimony linking President and venal house plant Joe Biden to a multi-million dollar influence peddling scheme, the Justice Department has indicted Donald Trump again.
The day after Devin Archer told Congress that Joe Biden personally helped his son Hunter bilk millions of dollars from businesses in hostile foreign nations, federal prosecutor Jack Smith charged Trump with three counts of saying stuff.
The DOJ's rapid-fire response to Archer's testimony implicating the president in his son's sleazy pay-to-play schemes confirmed Jack Smith's commitment to seeking justice against Trump without delay.
For instance, on June 8th, the day after Congress released evidence that Joe Biden had taken bribes from a Ukrainian oligarch, Smith immediately indicted Trump for keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
On July 27th, the day after Hunter Biden's crooked sweetheart deal fell apart in open court, Smith piled some more charges onto the indictment.
Smith swears that he will continue to act swiftly to bring Trump to justice whenever the Bidens are exposed doing anything illegal.
The new indictments center around Prosecutor Smith's complex legal theory that he ain't got no badges, but he don't need no badges because he don't got to show you no stinking badges.
Speaking to a reporter from NBC News while the reporter lay on his back and Smith scratched his tummy, Smith explained he'd indicted Trump because Trump claimed he had, quote, actually won the 2020 election and that, quote, these claims were false.
Thus, according to this complex legal theory, a statement made by a politician that Jack Smith believes is false is not covered by the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.
To give you an example, if a politician were to say, Jack Smith is a corrupt dirtbag who's willing to tear up the Constitution to get at his political enemies, that politician could be indicted because Jack Smith is a corrupt dirtbag who's willing to tear up the Constitution to get at his political enemies.
So, okay, maybe that's not such a good example.
But you get the idea.
I think at this point, we all get the idea.
News outlets across the media political spectrum from the left all the way to the far left reacted to the news of Joe Biden's widespread corruption by breaking off their coverage of women's soccer to announce the Trump's indictment.
On Knucklehead Row, the op-ed page of the New York Times, a former newspaper, editor-in-chief Blithering Prevarication III wrote, quote, the prosecution of Donald Trump for saying things may sound unconstitutional, but I don't care because Trump is a doo-doo head and I hate, hate, hate him so, so much and he has cooties and smells like poo, unquote.
On ABC News, anchorman David Muir was in the midst of explaining that Devin Archer's damning testimony about Joe Biden's corruption was nothing serious at all when news of the Trump indictment broke, causing Muir to breathe a sigh of relief and say, quote, thank heavens I can change the subject because for a minute there, I was beginning to sound like a lying sack of crap, unquote.
More Trump indictments could be on the way after Project Veritas verified Ashley Biden's diary in which the president's daughter expressed her fear of taking showers in her youth because her father liked to join her, behavior so disgusting that Trump could be charged with pedophilia.
In fact, Republican voters are now beginning to worry that Joe Biden is such a walking cesspit of moral depravity, Trump will have to spend most of his campaign funds on legal fees.
On the other side of the aisle, Democrats continue to claim that Republican investigations into Joe Biden's lifelong history of rank corruption are nothing more than a witch hunt.
If by a witch, you mean Joe Biden's lifelong history of rank corruption.
New York Congressman Daniel Goldman, a man so dishonest we can't be totally sure he's really from New York or a congressman or named Daniel Goldman, said, quote, Republicans investigating the Biden family's influence peddling are merely attempting to distract the public from, oh, look, there's a Trump indictment and also a squirrel, unquote.
Fact checkers later found the alleged congressman, allegedly named Daniel Goldman, lied about the Republicans and Biden's corruption, and there was no squirrel.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
All right, we are back laughing our way through the bowels of hell.
I want to take a moment here to please ask you, I'm going to be doing this more and more now as the publication date comes up, to pre-order The House of Love and Death.
This is really important to me, and I think you will love the book.
I wouldn't be selling it to you if I didn't think so.
It's the third book in the Cameron Winter mystery series.
The first book was When Christmas Comes.
Second was Strange Habit of Mind.
You guys put When Christmas Comes at the bottom of the USA Today's list, even though we screwed up and didn't print enough copies and got messed up because of the pandemic and because we couldn't get supplies fast enough, but you still managed to put it at the bottom of the USA Today list.
Strange Habit of Mind, you put much, much higher on the USA Today list, which is great because USA Today is the only list that actually just counts the books directly, although they compare you to other things like Goodnight Moon.
So it's hard to get really high up on it.
But still, that shows the book is really selling and I really appreciate it.
I would love, it would make such a big difference to me if we can put this book, The House of Love and Death, on the New York Times list.
I know they won't like it, but I think we can do it if we sell enough copies.
So please pre-order the book.
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Today's comment is by Absolute Truthers.
He says, I went and saw the Barbie movie, and because I hadn't yet listened to your monologue, I had no idea I had the option of sticking a screwdriver into my ear.
Instead, lesson learned, always listen to the latest Clavin before going to the movies.
I am here for you for exactly that reason, and you're absolutely right.
You should never go to the movies without first sticking a screwdriver in your ear.
So today we're going to talk about all the stuff, Biden's corruption and Trump's indictment and censorship.
And I'm going to describe, which I don't think anyone else has, why I think that we're watching something much bigger than a political conflict here, much bigger than the next election.
We're watching two visions clashing, and one is represented by the Biden administration, and one is represented by Donald Trump, which is why I call today's episode, Never Say Never Trump.
If there's one thing you can say about Barack Obama, it's that he's a smart politician.
And according to the Washington Post, he met with Joe Biden this summer and, quote, voiced concern about Donald Trump's political strengths, including an intensely loyal following, a Trump-friendly, conservative media ecosystem, and a polarized country, underlining his worry that Trump could be more formidable as a candidate than many Democrats realize.
Never Say Never Trump00:15:41
Well, that's true.
And one thing that Obama left out of his assessment was the fact that the arrogance and blatancy of the corruption riddling Joe Biden's administration and the DOJ, led by the hack Merrick Garland, and bolstered by an unbelievably dishonest news media, make Trump look fantastically great in comparison.
After this new indictment, Trump posted on Truth Social, I need one more indictment to ensure my election.
He very well may be right.
So let's get to chapter one, no stinking badges.
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There are no E's in Clavin.
Just make it look this easy.
So I've been a crime novelist all my life, all my career.
And as a crime novelist, one of the things you have to do is you have to invent villains and criminal schemes.
And so I've been very interested in corruption and how it affects the human spirit and how it affects human systems.
And there comes a time in a system when the system becomes so corrupt that the people in the system become very arrogant and overconfident and begin advertising their corruption because they feel that the corruption itself is an instrument of power.
In other words, this is a point where they become these swaggering criminals who are basically saying they're justified in their own mind.
And so they're basically starting to send the message to you or whoever they're dealing with that they will mess with you not because they should, but because they can.
And that's their corruption.
If that's corruption, too bad, because here it comes.
This week, Hunter Biden's business partner, Devin Archer, testified before Congress that then Vice President Joe Biden not only made speaker phone calls to business meetings to help Hunter sell what he called the brand of the Biden family name, but he actually had Joe Biden sit down to dinner with foreign slime balls seeking political influence, including this guy, Vadim Pozarsky, an executive of the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma, who sent an email to Hunter afterwards thanking him for FaceTime with the vice president.
This was while Hunter was taking in 83 grand a month from Burisma.
And Archer told Congress from the transcript, there are particular objectives that Burisma was trying to accomplish, and a lot of it's about opening doors globally in D.C.
And then obviously having those doors opened, you know, sent the right signals, you know, for Burisma to carry on its business and be successful.
My only thought is that I think Burisma would have gone out of business if it didn't have the brand attached to it.
And Joe Biden was also on a guest list for a dinner that included the corrupt mayor of Moscow, who then wired $3.5 million to one of Hunter's company.
Here's more from the transcript.
The counsel asks Archer, you keep saying the brand, but by brand, you mean the Biden family.
And Archer says, correct.
And Congressman Andy Biggs says, when you say Biden family, you aren't talking about Dr. Jill or anybody else.
You're talking about Joe Biden.
Is that fair to say?
And Archer says, yeah, that's fair to say.
Obviously, that brought the most value to the brand.
Archer gave an exclusive interview to Tucker Carlson on Twitter and said this was, you know, influence peddling is essentially typical Washington practice, but it was an abuse of soft power.
And he said their real problem was once they got to the vice president, they had really gotten gone too far.
This Cut 3.
There are people that maybe were, you know, sons or relatives or brother-in-laws of other high-ranking officials, but I think what we ran into with what Hunter ran to was like almost like an Icarus issue.
So he got a little, it was too close to the sun.
It was too good to be true.
And the connections were too close and the scrutiny too much.
Yes.
And it ended up destroying, you know, it left the wake of a lot of destruction in business over a number of years.
So this is absolutely damning testimony.
And this is how my new favorite politician, the hilariously dishonest Congressman Daniel Goldman, this is how he tried to sell it to the press before the transcript came out, cut four.
Doesn't it contradict the president's statement saying that he never talked to any of Hunter Biden's business associates?
Clearly he talked whether about the weather or whatever, but he said specifically that he's never talked to them.
Does this contradict them?
I don't know what his comment is.
And if we're going to, well, I don't think that's what he said.
He never said that he has never spoken to anyone.
He said that he had nothing to do with Hunter Biden's business dealings.
If he says hello to someone that he sees his son with, is he supposed to say, hi, son?
Oh, no, I'm not going to say hello to the other people at the table or the other people on the phone.
It's kind of a preposterous premise to think that a father should not say hello to people that the son are at dinner with, the son is at dinner with.
And that is literally all the evidence is.
Of course, the regime's news organ, Pravda, I mean, the New York Times, a former newspaper, ran with these lines, a story headline, Biden spoke with sons associates, but not about business, former partner says, which included the wonderful, wonderful sentence, it has long been known that the elder Mr. Biden at times interacted with his son's business partner.
It's been known by everyone who didn't believe a word coming out of Joe Biden's mouth.
Here's cut two.
Mr. Vice President, how many times have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?
I've never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.
I have never discussed with my son or my brother or anyone else anything having to do with their businesses, period.
And what I will do is the same thing we did in our administration.
There will be an absolute wall between personal and private and the government.
Do you stand by your statement that you did not discuss any of your son's overseas business deals?
I did not know he was on the board of that company.
I've never discussed my business or their business, my sons or daughters.
I never discussed a single thing with my son about anything having to do with Ukraine.
It has long been known, says the New York Times, that the elder Mr. Biden at times interacted with his son's business partner.
Now, as I said last week, we now know for a fact that DOJ is corrupt because of the way Hunter Biden's sweetheart deal fell apart.
Remember, the DOJ buried an offer of immunity in the deal in a place where they may have hoped the judge wouldn't see it, but certainly a place where once the deal was in place, the judge couldn't touch it.
It was in something the judge had no jurisdiction over it.
And when she asked about it, the prosecutor, the federal prosecutor, lied and said, oh, no, there's no immunity in the deal.
And that came as a surprise to Hunter's attorney because they had fashioned the deal together, as you do with a plea bargain.
So he thought, yes, there is immunity in there.
And that's why the thing they were told to take 30 days to make the deal better.
So we already know the DOJ is not dealing fairly with Donald Trump and not in comparison to the way they are dealing with Hunter Biden.
They let Hunter Biden's cases outrun the statute of limitation and they indict Trump at times that are convenient for them.
In fact, as I said in my opening, I was joking about it, but it's absolutely true.
The way the indictments come out are designed to distract people from Hunter Biden and Joe Biden's corruption.
Here is Donald Trump's hot lawyer, Alina Haba.
Of course he would have the smoking hot lawyer.
This is before the arraignment yesterday at which Trump pleaded not guilty to the new charges that he said stuff that inspired the January 6th revolution, Cut 18.
On March 17th, Hunter accidentally admits that it was his laptop from hell.
The next day, DA Alvin Bragg indicts President Trump.
June 8th, an FBI document is released showing that the Ukrainians paid the Biden crime family millions and millions of dollars.
The next day, the Mar-a-Lago raid and the Mar-a-Lago indictment.
Last week, Hunter Biden's sweetheart plea deal fell through when the judge realized it had blanket immunity.
The following day, a superseding indictment against Donald Trump.
July 31st, Devin Archer goes to testify in front of the House.
That was only after they failed to put him in jail prior to the fact.
What happens the next day?
The January 6th indictment that we're here for today.
This is not a coincidence.
It's not a coincidence, and it's not disguised.
It is this aggressive, blatant corruption that essentially is slapping you in the face and saying, we have the power.
It doesn't matter about the Constitution.
It doesn't matter that you can see us.
In fact, we want you to see us because that's how powerful we are.
Jack Smith's, the prosecutor's announcement of the indictment, was insane demagoguery.
Listen to what he says, cut one.
The attack on our nation's capital on January 6th, 2021 was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy.
As described in the indictment, it was fueled by lies.
Lies by the defendant, targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government, the nation's process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.
The men and women of law enforcement who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6th are heroes.
They are patriots and they are the very best of us.
They did not just defend a building or the people sheltering in it.
They put their lives in the line to defend who we are as a country and as a people.
I'm all choked up, but even if any of that nonsense were overblown, you know, that overblown nonsense were actually true of the description of a bunch of idiots foolishly going into the Capitol, maybe with federal instigation, maybe not.
It doesn't matter because it's still a stupid thing to do.
But just because that was an overblown, stupid description.
My question is, so what?
That's not what Trump is charged with.
What Trump is charged with is saying stuff that some people might have told him was untrue in order to get what he wanted, which was a recount, which was a delay in certifying the votes so he could have a recount.
Every politician says untrue stuff to get what he wants.
Barack Obama, you know, Clinton, all of them do that stuff.
And sometimes the stuff they want to do is illegal and the Supreme Court has to say, no, you can't do it.
But are we going to start to arrest each and every one of them?
Apparently we are.
So how is this?
Part of this, of course, is this cocoon that these corrupt clowns are in because of the corrupt clowns who are in the press.
And I just want to give one example because it made me laugh out loud.
This is Nora O'Donnell at CBS, who so beclowns herself she may have won a role as pennywise in the next it sequel, Cut 7.
This is her describing the prosecutor that Trump was going to go up against.
I want to spend a moment on Jack Smith because he is essentially who Donald Trump is up against in multiple of these indictments.
The two, of course, the classified documents and the January 6th one.
And they are sitting across from each other inside this courtroom.
Jack Smith is someone who has run over and competed in over 100 triathlons.
He was reportedly at one point hit when he was on his bike by a truck.
And 10 weeks later, he ran another triathlon.
This is a man of a lot of grit and a lot of determination.
And even what we have seen in these indictments is just a sliver of what they know and his prosecutorial team knows, right?
Get a room, get a room.
The press is essential to this kind of corruption because it paralyzes decent, honest people because they can't believe they're being lied to at this level.
And it's difficult.
It means the rest of us have to be careful how we communicate because if the only people who are saying that the DOJ is this corrupt are people who are also saying that Obama drowned his chef, then ordinary, decent people are going, oh, it's that guy who thinks Obama drowned his chef.
I have this objection.
I really like and admire Tucker Carlson.
I think he's doing great work.
But when he says, oh, now we know that there are aliens in town, then that lessens his power and his reliability when he says something like the DOJ is acting completely corruptly, which it is, but this is important.
So that's one side, this absolutely belligerent corruption in the face, obviously used to skew the election, to manipulate the election, to manipulate the minds of people.
And on the other hand, you've got Trump who goes in and he pleads not guilty.
And then he goes to a wedding and dances around.
And Trump is the kind of guy who says stuff like this.
And I'm just playing it because it is typical of what I and everybody else really likes about Donald Trump's Cut Five.
Will there ever be a time when Joe Biden says, this thing with Hunter just isn't working out well?
I'm starting to get a little angry at Hunter.
Or when Hunter comes to him and says, Dad, Dad, we have a problem.
What?
What is it, son?
Another one.
Oh, son, you're a disaster, son.
Son, you're a disaster.
Dad, we have a problem.
I left my laptop at the repair shop.
And Joe looks at him and says, what's on it, son?
What's on it?
And Hunter looks back and he says, every single crime that you've ever committed, Dad.
Who would you rather have as your president, this lineup of criminals in the DOJ and this absolute decadent, desiccated houseplant of a corrupt old man who has been corrupt ever since he was a young senator?
Who would you rather have as president?
If that's your choice, if that's your choice.
And I think when you look at this, you know, when people are that corrupt, when people, when the powers that be are that corrupt, when they leave you no way to express your political choice, the thing that this country is supposed to be about, because they are actually in your face saying, we can do anything we want.
The only thing you can do is vote the bums out.
And that's why I'm saying never say, never say never Trump, because they may put this guy back into power.
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All right, chapter two, A Break in the Cloud of Lies.
Are we the baddies?
You know, I always say if you want to know what the left is thinking, you turn to the New York Times, a former newspaper.
And this is important because the other thing about corruption is not everybody on the left is corrupt.
Of course not.
That would be ridiculous.
That's not the way human beings are.
And so when this corruption becomes this blatant, this arrogant, this out in the open, people even on your side are going to see that you're corrupt.
And so that's why I like to turn to see what the left is happening on the left.
I like to turn to the op-eds page of the New York Times, which I call Knucklehead Row.
Oh, hey, ho.
Let's go to Knucklehead Row.
So just an amazing op-ed by David Brooks in the New York Times.
David Brooks used to be the House conservative, but he kind of drank the Kool-Aid and he fell in love with Barack Obama.
And basically, his conservatism really consisted as a mode of dress and speech and not an actual conservative philosophy.
And now he's just another kind of liberal voice.
But he wrote a column called What If We Are the Bad Guys Here?
And I wish I could read the whole thing, but I'll just read as much of it as I can.
Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis, yet he's utterly dominated his Republican rivals in the poll, and he's tied with Joe Biden in the general election surveys.
What's going on here?
Why is this guy still politically viable after all he's done?
We anti-Trumpers often tell a story to explain that.
In this story, we anti-Trumpers are the good guys.
The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians.
I partly agree with this story, but let me try another story on you.
Let me try a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys.
In fact, we're the bad guys.
The story begins in the 1960s when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam.
But the children of the educated class got college deferments.
It continues in the 1970s when the authorities imposed busing on working class areas in Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley, where they themselves lived.
The ideal that we're all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there.
Over the last decades, we've taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out.
When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old, crusty working-class guys around the newsroom.
Now we're not only a college-dominated profession, we're an elite college-dominated profession.
How much of what I'm reading to you now have you heard on this show?
Almost all of it.
He's almost saying the stuff that I say.
Members of our class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas.
Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural, and political power, we support policies that help ourselves.
Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China.
Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less educated immigrants aren't likely to put downward pressure on our wages.
Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others.
Words like problematic, cisgender, latinx, and intersectional.
Meanwhile, members of the less educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we've changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.
People reading the New York Times who think the New York Times and the news are now listening to the Andrew Clavin show without knowing it.
You have heard me say all of these things.
He says we also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves.
There used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance.
After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened.
Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and had children within wedlock.
People without our resources were less able to do that, which matters because the rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.
If you've listened to the show routinely, you are thinking, oh yeah, I know that because you've told me that a million times, but the people in the New York Times have never heard it before.
Now he goes on, he says, does this mean I think people in my class are vicious and evil?
No, most of us are earnest, kind, and public spirited, but we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive.
It's easy to understand why people in less educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural, and moral assault and why they've rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class.
Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch?
Of course not, as a card-carrying member of my class.
So what he says now is just self-interested.
He says, I still basically trust the legal system.
Trump is a monster and the way we've all, as we've been saying for years, and he deserves to go to prison.
But there's a larger context here.
As the sociologist E. Digby Balzell wrote decades ago, history, listen to this quote, history is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.
And Brooks goes on to say, that is the destiny our class is now flirting with.
We can condemn the Trumpian populace until the cows come home, but the real question is, when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?
This is a column by a man who finally looks through the clouds of his own corrupt system.
I'm not saying he's corrupt.
You know, I don't know him.
It has nothing to do with that.
But you're in a system where just being part of the system makes you corrupt.
And he doesn't see, and a lot of people don't see, that in the end, this argument between Trump and the Biden administration, this fight between Trump and the establishment, the clericy, as Coleridge called it, the people who set mores and set opinions and set language, each side represents an idea of what human beings are.
Trump is a deeply flawed man, and Biden is a thoroughly corrupt dirtbag, but they're a language that we've been given because we only have these choices.
They're the language we've been given to argue out our theories of who we are, not just as working class and elite people, but as human beings.
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K-L-A-V-A-N.
All right, chapter three, we own the science.
You can't handle the truth.
Nowhere are these two theories of what a human being is more urgently on display than in the issue of free speech.
We want it.
They don't want us to have it.
There are new Facebook files released this week that show the incredible pressure Biden's White House brought to bear on all the social media, but this is just specifically about Facebook, to suppress opinions during the pandemic, to get people kicked off the site, and even to introduce algorithms that would cause the Daily Wire and the New York Post to appear less often and the regime organ, the New York Times, to appear more often.
So they were trying to introduce an algorithm that would get us pushed off Facebook, which we depend on quite a lot.
The White House asked Facebook if they could provide government agencies with special access to tools to target users.
So if you said, oh, this vaccine gave me a nosebleed, they could come on immediately and say, doctors say it doesn't give it a nosebleed.
Even Facebook was saying, you know, that's kind of creepy.
It makes people feel that Big Brother is watching them, only because Big Brother would be watching them.
My favorite part of this, by the way, and indicative of who these people are, was when Biden's head of strategic communications and public engagement for the nation's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, that was her title, Courtney Rowe, appeared to mock Middle America's ability to determine what is true and what isn't.
She said, if someone in rural Arkansas sees something on Facebook, it's the truth.
What we need is help pushing back on the myth.
See, you guys in Arkansas, you believe anything you read.
So they have to make sure that you are only reading what the regime wants you to read.
And look, this is not just the White House.
This is not just Facebook.
This is a global effort.
Here is, we all know what's going on in Davos with the World Economic Forum.
Here's a representative of the UN at Davos talking about how they deal with spreading information about climate change, CUT 10.
We partnered with Google, for example.
If you Google climate change, you will, at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources.
We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled climate change, we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top.
So we're becoming much more proactive.
You know, we own the science and we think that the world, you know, should know it.
And the platforms themselves also do.
Remember that phrase, we own the science.
It really means we own the truth.
I mean, that is what they think, that we own the science.
We own the truth.
So what's wrong?
You know, they're justified in their own mind.
What's wrong with partnering with Google to make sure the algorithms bring up what they want us to hear about climate change, which, by the way, I'll be talking about this in the member block later, is very, very far away from the actual truth.
Ben Shapiro, whom some of you may have heard of, wrote an excellent piece on the globalists who are choking businesses at the advertising spot and controlling what people can say.
And I'll just read a little bit of it.
You can find it.
I'm sure you can find it on our site, right?
You have the World Economic Forum, he says, the WEF, and their platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment, and culture.
You have the World Federation of Advertisers, the WFA, who represent mega corporations that control 90% of global advertising dollars.
WFA members are a who's who of global business and include some of our recent woke-fied favorites like Bud Light's parent company, AB and Bev, Hershey, Procter ⁇ Gamble, Lego, and, you guessed it, Disney.
In 2019, the WFA established the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, GARM.
Within months, the WAF adopted GARM as part of its platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment, and culture.
GARM is a cross-industry alliance that brings these mega corporations, the advertisers, together with big tech companies like Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram, Google-owned YouTube, the CCP's TikTok, and even Snapchat.
chat and Pinterest.
This unholy alliance created something they call the brand safety floor and suitability framework.
Think of brand safety as a dog whistle for censorship.
They say it themselves.
The brand safety floor means content not appropriate for any advertising support.
In other words, if you publish content that violates these guidelines, you will be blacklisted from 90% of the advertising revenue in the marketplace, making it hard, for instance, for the Daily Wire to get sponsors, which is why your memberships are so important.
And meaning that when we boycott Bud Light and they take a huge hit, which they have, it's a great and effective boycott.
And all the conservatives who are saying, no, maybe we shouldn't do this.
Maybe we should stop it.
No, absolutely not.
Drive them into the ground.
But remember, you are not just fighting a can of beer with Dylan Mulvaney on it.
You are fighting this massive global conspiracy to control speech because they own the truth.
So let's take all this together.
The arrogance of the corruption, the censorship, David Brooks' sense that we're up here and everyone is down there, and his dawning awareness, I hope, that maybe that's not such a good thing.
This is about two competing theories of being a human being.
People are going to talk about the elites and the working class, but I am an elite.
You know, I mean, I've lived an elite life.
There's just no getting around that.
I'm not an elitist, but I am certainly in the elite.
And I see it, and I'm opposed to it.
This is about two different ways of looking at the world.
There was a speech given to First Things, which is a wonderful magazine of kind of a religious take on life, but at a very high intellectual level.
Matthew Crawford gave the speech.
He's a research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies and Culture at the University of Virginia.
And he wrote, in the decades after World War II, the rational actor model of human behavior was the foundation of economic thinking.
So basically, you did what was right for you, and that lifted all ships.
You know, I tried to make a profit.
You tried to raise your family.
You tried to support your family.
We all made a profit.
And freedom, which left us alone to follow our rational goals, lifted everybody up, right?
Because I made an iPhone and you wanted the iPhone and you paid me for the iPhone and now I had money and you had an iPhone and that was great.
And we kept lifting each other up and creating wealth.
Crawford goes on.
He says, in the 1990s, this intellectual edifice was deposed by the more psychologically informed school of behavioral economics, which teaches that our actions are largely guided by pre-reflective cognitive biases.
Rider And Elephant Dynamics00:02:07
This is Jonathan Haight's Elephant and the Rider.
Maybe you've heard of this if you've read any of his work.
The elephant is basically emotion.
The rider is reason.
You think the rider is guiding the elephant, but that is an illusion.
In fact, the elephant turns in an emotional way, and then the rider makes up reasons why the elephant turns.
Our reason is acting behind our emotional responses.
And there may be some physical truth to this, but that still doesn't change the theory.
So in other words, what they are saying is this elephant, this elephant was created by random evolution.
This is the important part.
It's random.
It is not necessarily operating on a reasoned moral scale.
So because it's random, you can't trust it.
You may think it's immoral to butcher a child and castrate a child to turn him into a little girl, but that's just because you evolved to think that.
So is it really, what's really immoral about it?
And sometimes we can't explain.
We just know it's bad.
I mean, it should be obvious to everyone.
That's just the elephant.
That's just the elephant.
We have a different theory.
We have a different theory.
I have a different theory.
Let me just say that.
I believe we are created.
We are a whole people.
And everything that we see together is how we make judgments.
Our reason, yes.
Our emotions, yes.
So what they're saying is all we have to do is nudge that elephant in the right direction by making sure when they go on Google, they only get the information we want.
And what I'm saying is, no, you have to convince me.
And you have to convince me not just against my reason, but against my deeply held understanding of the world that we are living in.
I am not AI.
I am actually a real human being made by a God who made me in his image.
So I know when something deeply disgusts me, when something deeply repels me, when something gets my moral hackles up, I should be listening to that and not talked out of it by you just because you have some big credentials, some supposed expertise or some kind of degree.
Government Reveals Its Hand00:08:27
So this brings me to my final chapter, Our Last Defense.
All right, final chapter, Our Last Defense.
We did a backstage this week, and Ben told me something that I did not know that I found kind of shocking was that talking about COVID and the lockdowns and Fauci is an audience killer.
People don't want to hear about it anymore.
They want to get past it and they don't want to think about it.
And I think that that is a serious problem because in that moment, the government really revealed to us who it was and how it wants to run things.
And central to that effort was the attempt to shut down churches and even more importantly, the weasel willingness of churches to let themselves be closed down.
And even as an atheist, when I was an atheist, I believed, for reasons I'll expand upon later, I believe that we had to support churches and their freedom as the institution that was best able to defend our natural conscience because you cannot defend yourself against the government, simply too powerful to take it on alone.
And that's why I was so admiring of John MacArthur, who was the pastor of Grace Baptist in LA.
I, who was at that time, had been told by my doctor that I was at great risk from COVID.
I went to his church just to support it, didn't wear a mask and just blended in with everybody.
And at that time, everybody was telling you to be terrified.
And I was a little nervous, I'll confess, but I just wanted to support him.
He went to bat and he went to battle, along with some other pastors, against the city of Los Angeles, led by my friend Jenna Ellis on the legal team.
He is one of the central subjects, John MacArthur is one of the central subjects of a new documentary called The Essential Church.
Now, I watched this documentary, I believe it's in theaters now.
The Essential Church, I watched this documentary because Jenna asked me to, and I told her, I'll watch it, but I'm not going to plug it and I'm not going to talk about it unless it's really good.
It is really, really good.
Jenna knows that I wouldn't do that.
And I watched the entire thing.
It's moving.
It's inspiring.
It's very powerful.
And it's important because it shows us what the government, how the government behaves toward religion, not just now, but always, especially the Christian religion.
I wanted to talk to its writer and director, Shannon Halliday.
Shannon, thank you so much for coming on and congratulations.
You did a terrific job.
Oh, thanks so much.
It's a pleasure to be on.
I love your show.
So can you tell the audience a little bit about the story that you were telling and why you decided?
You tell it in a very, very straightforward narrative way and why you decided to tell it that way.
Yeah, one thing is I wanted it to be about the church.
And so I focused on church history, the local church, Grace Community Church, and then our Canadian brothers and sisters, which represents the global church.
It's not really about John MacArthur at Grace Community Church, though we do tell our story, but we tell it through that lens of the church and involving church history because I believe there are things here that need to transcend COVID and lockdown.
And I agree with Ben actually that we do have COVID fatigue.
And I would say this film's not really about COVID.
And I would hope that 20 years from now, the theological themes and what happened through the story showing that would transcend 20, 30 years from now.
You know, one of the things I just loved about the movie, first of all, place it in a historical context so we can see that shutting down churches is not a new thing.
You know, stopping Christians is something that's been going on since there were Christians.
But it also shows something else, which I just found enormously touching.
Pastors are frequently not he-men.
They're usually kind of nerdy guys, intellectual guys.
And what you saw was that these guys in conference with Jesus Christ became heroes.
I mean, some of them went to prison.
I was wondering what it was like.
Had you been talking to these Canadian guys all along, or did you only learn about them while making the film?
No, I knew about them before.
Tim Stevens was kind of new to me.
We knew of James because he actually went to seminary at Master Seminary a while back.
So we had a connection there.
So when he was imprisoned, we were sending him letters.
We were sending him messages.
John MacArthur was talking about him.
But yeah, what happened to him was super eye-opening and to Tim Stevens because really when they were arrested, you know, they weren't put in jail.
They were put in maximum security prison.
And at that time, they didn't know when they were going to get out.
It could be two years.
It could be five years.
They didn't know what was going to happen.
And they had to say goodbye to their families and go to a maximum security prison because they weren't willing to compromise their conviction.
And they would say it's not about their courage.
They would say it's about conviction.
And we would say that too, that what we did during the lockdowns really wasn't about us conjuring up courageousness.
It was about being convicted based on what the Bible says about the truth, that Christ is the head of the church.
And we don't dole that out to the government for anything, even a temporary edict.
I have to say, watching the scene of that guy being taken away to prison, that pastor being taken away to prison while his family wept, you know, if you don't want to call it courage, okay, but it's something awfully close.
And I know it had to do with the spirit and his belief.
And it was just a beautiful, beautiful thing.
And your point in the film is kind of that martyrdom, and this is martyrdom, there's no question about it.
Martyrdom is typical of the history of Christianity.
Yeah, that's right.
And we wouldn't compare ourselves to the same kind of sacrifice that the Covenanters made, which is in the film.
They lost their lives over this argument, many of them.
They took the stand on this conviction of, I am not going to compromise the headship of Christ in the church.
The king, the state, can be a member, but they can't run the church.
The king can be a member, but he can't be the head of the church.
So that is a constant conflict throughout history.
I mean, I'll never look at Exodus the same in the Bible.
After COVID, I see Exodus in a new light.
And it really was the Pharaoh, the state, saying, you need to worship this way.
He wanted to regulate their worship.
And the Lord says, you're not going to do that with my people.
They answered to me and not you.
And I'm going to make an example of you.
And we see that throughout the scriptures.
We see that in Daniel when a temporary edict was put on Daniel.
He says, I'm not only going to pray, I'm going to open my doors and the whole city is going to see me pray.
You're not going to stop me from doing this.
And those are our examples.
And then we see that throughout church history.
And Satan always makes a play for the headship of the church.
He wants to control the church.
He wants to shut down the church.
He wants to manipulate the church.
And I think Christians hopefully walk away from this film saying, I'm more aware of that.
And I don't see the government as a neutral party anymore.
I understand that spiritual warfare is in every sphere that I walk into.
And as a Christian, I need to bring my Christian world view with me so that I can discern what's actually happening.
It's really interesting.
I told Jenna that I laughed out loud when I saw her.
She was so eager to get the government on the stand and the government knew it and they headed for the hills.
Where can people see the Essential Church?
Yeah, the best way to learn about it is go to essentialchurchmovie.com, essentialchurchmovie.com.
And on the homepage, you can click on a button for tickets if it's still in the theaters when you hear this.
And it'll take you to a page with a list of theaters.
You can put your zip code in and you can see if there's a theater near you.
But we're also pre-ordering Blu-rays and DVDs.
So if you want it in Blu-ray, which I suggest because it's shot in 4K, it's beautiful.
We went to Scotland and shot a lot of this.
It's really nice.
So I'm going to have a 4K version, but you'll have that.
You can pre-order that.
And I think we're going to have those towards the end of August.
But go to essentialchurchmovie.com.
And if you scroll down to the bottom of the homepage, there's actually a place you can put in your email and you can subscribe and then you'll be updated on all the developments concerning this film and any future projects we may do.
Shannon Halliday, thanks for coming on and congratulations.
You did a great job.
You really did.
Thanks so much.
I appreciate it.
I'll talk to you again.
Thanks.
So I want to show you just a very brief clip from this film because at the end, there is this, I found hilarious because of its triumphant tone, where Jenna and the other lawyers, she had a big law firm with her.
She wasn't obviously the only lawyer.
They maneuvered the government into a place where they could get them on the stand and start to ask them questions under oath.
Acting As If God Were Real00:13:29
And the government just said, shut down their whole effort to stop John MacArthur and his church.
And MacArthur's on there saying the kinds of questions he wanted to ask.
So take a listen.
What is the statistical figure that gives us the death rate of COVID?
Not dying with COVID, dying from COVID.
What is the age group that is most susceptible?
What comorbidities contribute to death?
Show me the efficacy of masks.
Show me the efficacy of lockdowns so that you could actually say it's so important to have a lockdown that we can destroy an entire economy.
We can destroy an education system.
We can destroy families.
We can destroy people's lives.
And if you are willing to do that based on those statistics, what in the world is motivating you?
Why are you doing this?
That to me is the big question.
Why are they doing this?
Why do you think?
Why do you think the state always, always, always martyrs the church?
You know, a lot of times conservatives talk about the practical value of religion.
It's been true for centuries.
I mean, George Washington said, let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.
Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.
So in other words, the religion is there to inculcate the morality, which it does do that, yes, but the religion basically gives the morality sense.
It gives it logic.
It gives it a reason for being there.
Without it, as I keep telling you, not only will you not have morality, you'll have the exact opposite of morality.
So religion is useful in preserving public morality.
It makes you happier.
It holds families together.
It makes you feel more fulfilled.
But the problem with all of this is that no man of conscience can profess to believe in a thing unless he thinks it's true.
I'm not a Christian because it's good for me.
I'm not a Christian because it makes morality logic.
I'm a Christian because I came to believe in the unique witnessed miracle of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And I believe in it because, well, because there were thousands of witnesses, I mean, that's one reason, but because it perfectly explains to me what I see in the world, which is not a bunch of experts who know how to run things, which is the person next to me who is a creature of God.
When God took on human flesh, he was saying to us, you can live into the image of God.
You can live into my image, into the image of justice, into the image of truth.
You can become the language of created humanity.
Created humanity is a language for speaking about spiritual things.
We don't know what we know by pure reason.
We don't know what we know by force.
We don't know what we know by education or learning.
I mean, all of those things are tools.
They're right.
They're truly tools.
But the created tools God gave you, your mind and your body and your gender and your feelings and your reason, your human spirit, which is a wholeness that comes out of your body and out of your history and your life and is not, it is not a random thing.
I've said this before, but people who say that evolution is random are not speaking logically because if there is a system, the order of that system, the reason for that system exists outside the system.
So you can see hints of it in the system, but you cannot see the entire thing because it's outside the system and you're inside the system.
So you can't tell if it's random.
You don't know if it's random, but there are signs that it's not.
So I have long been opposed to the idea of Christian atheism.
And if you want to read me about this, there's an article called Can We Believe in City Journal.
You can just Google Can We Believe Clavin and it comes up.
And I stand by every word of that article, even though I wrote it a few years ago.
And I've long been opposed to the idea of Christian atheism.
This is an idea put forward by the philosopher Marcello Perra and Douglas Murray.
I think Jordan Peterson used to say it, but I think he's kind of moved away from it, which is that we should act as if God were real, but we don't have to believe that God is real.
And I just don't see how you do that.
Ultimately, it seems to me that that is wanting to get to the end of an equation without believing in the equation itself.
But there is one way in which I might concede the point.
Those of you who listen to the show carefully and are not swept away by emotion know that I have no personal animus against Donald Trump.
I decided I was going to vote for him.
I was talking to Knowles last night.
We were talking about the fact that there was a turning point in this organization when I came in and said, I am going to vote for Donald Trump.
And I did it before anybody else.
And I voted for him again.
And if I have to, I'll vote for him again.
I judge him like I judge everybody else by his behavior.
I don't judge his spirit.
That's not for me to do.
That's for God to do.
I just judge his behavior.
And when I think it's wrong, I say it's wrong.
When I think it's right, I say it's right.
He's a deeply flawed man.
We're all deeply flawed.
But he's a big guy.
He's a big, expansive character.
So his flaws are also big.
But we look at him, I think all of us look at him.
And I don't accept myself at all on this.
In our hearts, he represents something better than he is.
He's like, like all of us are a language for something.
And he expresses a humanity that in all its flaws has a sort of effervescence and an energy and an honesty and a willingness to dance and joke around and scream against the power even when the power is as it is now, tormenting him unfairly.
And when we vote for him, even those of us who have real problems with him, and I do, when we vote for him, we're voting for that.
Now, in the end, and in the long term, and I don't know if this is true of the 2024 election, because I don't know what's going to happen in the future, but in the long term, I think that there is a better representative of the things we want to say about humanity than Donald Trump.
And I think that that representative is you and me.
And I don't think we represent it alone.
I think we can only represent it gathered together in the name of God, what we Christians call in a church.
And I think when people ask me what's the first thing conservatives should do to win back the country, my answer has become we should gather together in the name of God.
David Mamet, in a wonderful movie called The Verdict, I don't know if you've seen it, he gives the lead character a speech where he says, act as if you had faith.
and faith will be given to you.
And I don't want you to believe what you don't believe.
I truly don't.
But I think we've reached a point where even if we don't believe, we can at least gather together with one another in God's name.
We can at least gather together and talk about God as we haven't talked about him, as we haven't been allowed to talk about him, as we've been told not to talk about him.
We can test whether, if we gather in God's name, because God said, if you gather together in my name, I will be with you.
We can see if we gather together, he will appear among us, which he has done in ages past.
And that's the only solution I can see to the problem that we're in now, that if we gather together in God's name, he will appear to us as he has in ages past.
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All right, it's time for Clavin Clapbacks.
I don't have to show you any stinking boxes.
A little message from your Department of Justice, ClavinClapbacks at dailywire.com.
Clapbacks is spelled with a K, as is Clavin.
Please send in your comments on the show.
We'd love to hear from you, and I like to respond.
But I also like to know what you're thinking about the show, what I say, where you disagree with me, of course, foolishly, or wisely agree with me.
Either way, just let me know, and I will try and read it on the air.
First letter is from Sally.
I believe this is in reference to my interview, my midweek interview with Knowles and Spencer Clavin, my son, no relation.
She says, this was great, but I'm not enjoying the new format.
This particular episode, especially, was so abruptly stopped.
30 minutes are up, done by.
I like Andrew Clavin's views a lot more of Clavin.
I had to catch a plane.
That's really why it was abruptly ended.
I had to catch a plane, and they've been messing with the plane schedule.
So sometimes I have to leave really quickly, and sometimes I have more time, and I can spread it out.
I would have spread it out, but I had to catch a plane.
That's why it really is not.
We're not limited in the time we take.
We're somewhat limited.
We don't want to go on forever.
And I like to keep things tight.
But in that case, I wanted to continue that conversation too, and we will.
I'll have them back.
Maybe not Knowles.
Yeah, I'll bring him back.
Somebody's got to empty the ash race.
All right, from Paul.
Beloved brother Andrew, countless hours I have listened to you and to Jordan Peterson and the words are like water for a thirsty soul.
I think you have made more progress than your fellow commentators on how to defend our beliefs and institutions against the predations of the post-Marxist radical progressives.
I sense something lacking in the conservatives' defense of our causes, which is a core object or ideal.
I believe I see a lot of reacting, a lot of this is how we're going to defeat them this time, but I don't hear a simple common thread at the center of our beliefs and actions.
You are quite right, you don't.
And the reason you don't is because we're not going to win without God.
And I'm sorry.
This is not a question of it's nice to believe or you go to heaven if you believe.
It's the point is that our philosophy makes no sense without God.
Without God, you can become a libertarian and ultimately a libertine, but you cannot be a free man because the ultimate freedom.
Somebody once said the ultimate freedom is in the stars where they have to obey the law of God.
And that is, it's just, you know, I've tried to, I can't explain it right now, but I've explained it over and over again why you cannot get to the place you want to go without faith, without faith.
And it's not enough to pretend you believe or to act as if you believe.
You have to learn to believe.
And one of the ways to learn to believe is to talk to God, but people don't want to say it.
It has become outre.
And we were taught that it was not the thing to do, that you're not now saying anything rational.
People say that's so irrational, it's like a religion.
There is nothing irrational about my religion, not one thing, except that I do believe that it is better to give a beggar bread than to torture a child to death.
That's the only thing I can't prove for sure, but I take that axiom as my starting point, and everything else I say is perfectly rational.
We have been taught that this is not quite the thing.
We don't talk about religion.
We just don't do it.
But that's not right.
We have to talk about religion, even if we talk about it in new ways.
We have to talk about it if we want to remain free.
From Stephen, dear Clavin, please give us hope, or if not hope, then a quick and painless death.
Call me.
I'll take care of it.
Shortly after Trump was first elected, I remember you pointing to the situations being similar to the election of Nixon as opposed to the election of Reagan.
You said it may happen that the Democrats take over again and enact such disastrous leftist policies that America would be right to swing back to conservatism and that such a swing may be brought about by Trump and may be brought about by a different candidate.
As far as I can tell, you've been completely correct in this prediction.
Yes, I have.
So how do you think things are going at the moment for that outcome?
is there still a chance that Trump might be our new Reagan?
No, I don't think Trump can be.
I shouldn't say that.
I don't know.
The way Trump looks to me, just judging him by his behavior, it looks like he opened up the path to the future.
He did a wonderful, god-sent, brilliant thing.
But I'm not sure he's the guy who can get us past that.
Reagan was a great communicator.
He was a great dealer of people.
He could wrangle the cats in Congress and get them to pass what he needed passed.
He was kind.
He was witty.
He was graceful, but he took the left apart.
And Trump does not have that grace or politeness that Reagan has.
And I'm not sure he can do what we need him to do.
So I feel he's standing in the way.
But I hope I'm wrong because he looks like right now, he looks like he's leading.
Gene says, I have been binge listening to your podcast since having the good fortune of finding them.
Their thoughtfulness, intelligence, and humor offer much relief and hope for what currently masquerades as journalism.
I really enjoy the truth and beauty, and I'm now starting the great good thing.
You are truly a gifted writer, and I'm hooked.
I don't generally read suspense crime thrillers, but would be interested in reading one or more, Where's a Good Place to Start, start with When Christmas Comes, A Strange Habit of Mine, and most importantly, The House of Love and Death.