Ep. 1164 mocks Iowa’s 2024 caucus chaos—Trump’s absurd "victory," Nikki Haley’s North Korea blunder, and MSNBC’s self-promotion—while framing it as a symptom of collapsing institutions. The episode pivots to The Terminal List, defending action films against moral puritanism, then skewers the WEF’s $2,500 hookers and John Kerry’s climate failures, contrasting their decadence with Trump’s populist "guillotine." A listener’s question on evil sparks a Dostoevsky-infused defense of faith over atheistic despair, ending with a Ladyballers rant as proof of leftist absurdity. The core message: decaying elites and cultural chaos demand either redemption through faith or reckoning through populism. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, the primary season has begun, so we can finally forget all those useless and ignorant speculations about what will happen next and report the actual results of the Iowa caucuses, followed by useless and ignorant speculations about what will happen next.
Donald Trump managed to eke out a victory in the Iowa contest by winning over several key voting blocs, including Iowans, other Iowans, and the rest of the Iowans.
With Trump winning 98 of Iowa's 99 counties and with the 99th county being populated only by a guy named Homer who thought the caucuses were on Thursday instead of Tuesday because both days begin with the T and it's easy to get them confused, Trump's opponents were left splitting the rest of the state, which consists of a little town named Dune, whose votes are suspect because they spell Dune, D-O-O-N.
So they obviously have no idea what they're doing.
In the wake of Trump's triumph, Vivek Ramaswamy dropped out of the race.
Ron DeSantis said he would stay in the race but would change his name to Vivek Ramaswamy, so it seemed like he was outperforming expectations.
And Nikki Haley declared victory and ordered the invasion of North Korea.
The news media and other Democrats reacted to Trump's victory with anger, saying they were appalled that mere members of the public had voted for Trump after the news media had specifically instructed them not to.
Because if you can't trust the news media, who can you trust besides literally anyone else?
On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow refused to show Trump's victory speech and began babbling wildly that she would not expose her audience to misinformation before she came to her senses and remembered she was on MSNBC.
On CNN, Jake Tapper also cut away from Trump's speech and instead played a highlight reel of his favorite moments from his own newscasts, like when he told Americans it was okay to let COVID dominate their lives because it had dominated their lives.
Tapper hopes to spin the comment off into a new series called Jake Tapper Through the Ages, in which he tells Americans it's okay to let Britain dominate their colonies because they have dominated their colonies.
And it's okay to let the Nazis dominate Europe because they have dominated Europe.
Fortunately for Tapper, he made these absurd remarks where no one would hear him, namely on CNN.
At the New York Times, a former newspaper, editorial board member vastly sententious, wrote, quote, Republican voters support the racism of Donald Trump because they're white people whose whiteness causes them to act in a racist white manner due to their white Caucasian whiteness.
These are the sort of bigots who want to ban homosexual pornography from kindergarten libraries simply because putting homosexual pornography in kindergarten libraries is the sickest thing anyone's ever heard of.
They want Trump to close the border to keep out illegal Mexican farm workers so there'll be no one to pick our lettuce and we'll be forced to eat things that have flavor even when you don't smother them in creamy blue cheese dressing.
In short, without Democrats in office to imprison political opponents, censor speech on social media, raid the homes of anti-abortion protesters, investigate parents as terrorists when they try to protect their children from teacher union pedophiles, and spy on Catholics who attend the Latin Mass, Donald Trump is sure to transform this nation into a police state, unquote.
Ria Joseph, an obscure political columnist on a small-town newspaper, pointed out that the Iowa results may not be that important because A, there are only 17 people in Iowa, B, only eight of them showed up to caucus because the temperature was 104 below zero, and C, most Republican candidates who have won Iowa in the last 45 years have not gone on to be the party's nominee.
Ms. Joseph was immediately surrounded by other commentators and beaten into unconsciousness so they could return to their hysterically overblown reactions without being interrupted.
President and venal houseplant Joe Biden also reacted to Trump's victory saying, quote, it's time for Americans to look in the mirror and ask themselves, who am I?
And then let me know because I'll be damned if I can remember.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
All right, we are back, laughing our way toward the last American election.
I just want to remind you that my son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, and I are starting a new substack called The New Jerusalem, in which we'll be discussing faith.
Some of the things I'm going to be talking about at the end of the show today, we'll be probably talking about there.
So if you're interested in this, you'll be interested in that.
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He says, how dare you say the January 6th protesters only stole podiums?
They also took selfies.
That's pretty offensive.
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We like it.
You might want to deliver that to people personally so they're really upset.
All right, let's get to today's episode, Chris Pratt in hell.
I'm going to talk, get back to the Iowa results and the election and the morons and Davos, but I really want to talk more about something that's been kind of a theme of the show, which is this transitional moment we're in, where basically so much of what we've lived with for the last 50, 60 years is passing away and new things are coming.
I'm going to talk about it in a way you've never heard before.
Terminal Culture War00:17:19
And I know you've never heard it before because I've never heard it before.
And at this point, I've heard everything.
So let's get started with chapter one, How Terminal is the Terminal List.
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That's policygenius.com slash Clavin.
You must know how to spell Clavin to get that.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Now, I've been talking for a long time about the fact that this is a huge transitional moment.
A lot of things are ending.
That's the first thing.
And when there are these moments, it can either become a violent transition because it means that certain people are going to lose power and other people are going to come to power, or it can be a smooth transition.
Winston Churchill said after World War I that he was in a room with the most powerful people in Europe before World War I and with the most powerful people in Europe after World War I and they were totally different people.
And that's the kind of moment I think we're in.
The baby boomers generation is ending.
Those are those baby boomers who are mortal, not me, of course, but the baby boomers generation is ending.
The post-World War II world order is collapsing.
The post-Soviet world order, where we were the only game in town, the only superpower game in town, that's coming to an end.
And at the same time, we've got, we're in the midst of a generally, genuinely human life-changing event, which is the internet.
And I know it's invisible because it's everywhere and you don't see it anymore, but it's only the Zoomers, remember, who first, who were born into a world with iPhones.
And the iPhone was a tremendous change and basically put the internet in your pocket.
It became part of your life, part of your mind.
AI is now added to that.
This has changed everything.
And all the talk we have about information and misinformation, disinformation is because this threatens people's power, just like the printing press did in the Middle Ages when it was invented and the church said, uh-oh, we don't want this to happen because we want to be in control of what people read.
And the Protestant Reformation came hot on the heels of that and spread through the printing press.
That's what we're facing now.
And the people who have the power don't want to lose the power.
They want to censor the voices of those who disagree.
And I personally believe that both Trump and Biden are the end of something.
Now, if I had to pick one of them, I'd pick Trump every single time.
And he's right about a lot of things.
And I've said that repeatedly.
And he did something urgently important, which has opened the way to the future.
But these are older men, and they're not going to bring the future in.
This is going to be something that comes, you know, in time as we think about it.
And our politics is backward-looking.
That's why we have these, you know, 80-year-old men running for office, basically.
And our culture, our creative culture is at a virtual standstill.
I've never seen anything like it.
I've never seen anything where we're not producing anything that grabs the attention and really, you really think, wow, I've never seen that before.
That's cool.
That's a new thing.
It's coming.
It will come.
Culture never dies as long as human beings don't die.
Culture doesn't die.
But still, at this moment, this is a moment when there is almost nothing good besides my books coming out.
So before we can understand what government or culture should look like, I've said this before, we have to ask ourselves what a human being is.
Because for those of us who believe in God and the image of God and every person and the things that derive from those facts, God and the image of God and every person, like the sacredness of human life and the sacredness of human liberty, it's no good making gigantic plans from on high about what the world should look like if you don't know who the world should serve.
And this is my problem, obviously, with the socialists for reasons I'll talk about in a minute, but also with the dissident right who believe that democracy is over, whatever you want to call it, the Democratic Republic is over, now we need to bring back monarchy.
All that may happen, but I would like to say that before you make those big plans of what you should do, you should really think about what a human being is.
So I want to start with culture and the arts because that's the place I believe that new ideas are generated.
That's where James Joyce said you forge the uncreated conscience of your race.
And if we can think of America as a race for a moment, the race of Americans, you know, that is where the new ideas are going to come from.
So I noticed, you've probably never heard of the show Schmigadoon.
I think it's on Apple TV, but it was a takeoff on an old beautiful musical that I love named Brigadoon.
And Brigadoon is about a guy in New York who's engaged to a woman who he really doesn't love, and he wanders into a town that only arrives in Scotland that only arises every hundred years.
And he finds there a way of life that he's forgotten and a beautiful girl who's so much more appealing and lovable than the girl boss that he's engaged to.
And he winds up entering Brigadoon forever and just disappearing from the modern world.
Schmigadoon, which had that Keegan Michael Keene, who I like a lot, Key, Michael Key, from Key and Peel, they go in to Schmigadoon, and it's the same thing.
It's the past.
And they go in and they teach them to be more tolerant toward gay people.
It's the arrogance of now.
It's this arrogance that we know.
We bring this into the past.
And that is a big change.
I mean, we've seen that in a lot of movies where they go back into the past and they explain what they got wrong instead of learning the things that they got right.
And so that's being canceled now.
It should have been canceled after one 10 minutes episode, but it was canceled after two years.
And I know it didn't make a big splash, but my point is that stuff is not going to play, and a lot of stuff is not really playing.
But here's the other side.
I got a clapback last week that I didn't respond to because I wanted to think it over.
And I know that's against the rules of commentary.
You're supposed to just have an opinion on everything, but I'm a radical contrarian, and I like to think things over before I talk about them.
I could get fired for this, but I thought I would try it.
It's a very long letter, and I can't answer and regard the whole thing, but I just want to read a little bit of it.
It's from a fellow named David.
He says, a while back, you recommended the Terminal List, starring Chris Pratt.
It's on Amazon Prime.
And I believe you interviewed the author.
I did, Jack Carr, great guy, really good writer, I think.
Given your praise for this series, says David, I looked it up and watched some episodes.
The last one I watched had the hero butchering a man hanging from chains.
The man had murdered his wife.
I remember there was an upsetting scene.
He says, I went to bed that night, distraught.
Two points.
The movie was gratuitously violent and had as its main objective the seeking of personal vengeance under the cover of justice.
And two, I was convicted by what I believe to be the Holy Spirit that this was not entertainment that I should be viewing.
That's Christianes, convicted.
It means you felt guilty about it or the Holy Spirit told you that you had convicted you of doing the wrong thing.
He says, there is the interesting question as to why I would be so convicted as to feel the need to repent in prayer over watching two or three episodes and your willingness to promote the series.
And the letter goes on for a long time, basically pitching his charismatic Christianity to me, which is absolutely fine, but it's not what I'm interested in talking about today.
Now, I want to respond to this.
I love action movies.
I love the Terminal List.
I thought it was really, I liked the book.
I liked Jack Carr.
I liked the show.
I liked the whole thing.
And I really was into it.
And right now I'm watching Reacher, which is on Amazon Prime.
That's based on the Lee Child, hugely best-selling books.
And it's not as good as the Terminal List.
It's a little bit dopey, but it's good fun if you like action scenes and also very violent with lots of brutal killing for personal revenge.
And the best thing about it is this guy, Alan Ritson, who plays Reacher's big, big muscle man.
But you might think he's a lunkhead by looking at him, but no, he turns in a very witty, very subtle, tough guy performance.
And he is obviously getting a lot of the same complaints as I got from David about Terminal List that it's wicked for him to be in this show.
Now, it turns out that despite the fact that he is this big Muscleman, he's also a Christian and an intelligent, articulate guy.
And he responded, and here's part of what he said.
This is cut one.
It's funny to me how a lot of people criticize me.
Supposed Christians especially criticize me for playing Reacher, as if the only TV that should exist is seeing people silently folding their hands in the pew of a church.
I mean, what kind of stories are we supposed to tell?
If you look at scripture, what do you find?
You see a thousand years of an infinitely holy God holding tension with human beings as he tells the story of who he is, reveals who he is through an imperfect people.
So we get stories, we get stories of paganism and war and bloodshed and ghost stories, mysticism.
We see miracles and magic and we see life and resurrection and death.
And we see this incredible canvas where God is completely unafraid to tell the story of who he is through less than morally ambiguous characters, through pure evil sometimes.
He shouldn't have said supposed Christians because people can be faithful Christians and disagree.
And I'm sure actually if you confronted him with that, he would probably take that back and just slipped out.
We're not going to get stuck on that or hold that against him.
The rest of his point is entirely valid.
God is God of this world.
He's not God of Candyland.
He's God of this world.
And I get complaints all the time from people who say to me, your stories are violent and they have sex in them and they have cursing in them.
I'm just going to read the Bible.
And I think, whoa, have you read the Bible?
Because in the Bible, you know, Lot gets drunk and sleeps with his daughters, right?
After the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, they think it's the end of the world and they think, well, how will mankind go on?
So they get their father drunk and they sleep with him.
There's a hilarious, I believe it's a true story, out of Hollywood when they made Noah with Russell Crowe, which is this complete desecration of scripture because God, instead of destroying the world through a flood because of sin, destroys it because they're not green enough.
It's like the God, you know, the God of climate change and not being green enough, so he destroys the world.
But that's not what the evangelicals complained about.
According to a producer I talked to, the evangelicals complained because it showed Noah getting drunk.
That's in the scripture.
So some Christians are so pious, even the Bible isn't clean enough.
So Richard is completely right about this.
But I don't want to be hard on Christians because we pick on Christians sometimes about the movies they make.
But in fact, Christians are the only people anywhere near the right who have cracked the Hollywood storytelling code.
They made movies like God's Not Dead, The War Room Fireproof.
These movies are not the Godfather, but they gave Christian audiences what they want, which is where you got to start in movie making because it's expensive.
And they brought genuine acting talent to the fore and they made money and they opened the way for more interesting films like Sound of Freedom and The Chosen.
And we shouldn't forget, by the way, to mention Mel Gibson because of the passion of the Christ, because he was almost literally crucified for it.
They said they were crucifying him and canceling him because of something he said when he was drunk, some anti-Semitic remarks he made when he was drunk, but that's not why.
He could have gotten away with that, but he could not get away with making a beautiful, really excellent movie about Jesus Christ.
That's why he was thrown out of Hollywood and that's why his career was staggered.
So here's my serious answer to David's letter.
I believe in the Holy Spirit.
I believe what Aquinas said, that when you have faith, God gives you as a gift, the Holy Spirit, and that makes it easier to discern God's will because God is talking to the image of himself in you.
He's talking to a part of himself that has now entered you.
I don't fall down and tremble and drool when I receive word of the Holy Spirit, but I feel my discernment gets better over time.
And I do believe that is what we call the Holy Spirit.
I've also encountered works of art that I felt I shouldn't watch.
I read a ghost story once that I was really, I love, as you know, I love ghost stories and I was reading along and then suddenly it took a very dark turn where I felt the author was enjoying tormenting a child and I not only threw the book away in my trash can, I actually got up out of bed and took it out of the trash can, carried it outside and put it in the outdoor trash.
I didn't want it anywhere near me.
I turned off Midnight Mass on Netflix, not because I thought it was a bad show and not because I didn't think anyone else should watch it.
I turned it off because I personally was at a moment when communion was becoming a very, very urgent, important part of my life.
I didn't want those images, those demonic images in my head about communion.
I don't think the show is demonic.
I don't even know whether it is or not because I didn't see it.
But I didn't want those images in my brain at that sensitive transitional moment.
I know a guy who couldn't watch Game of Thrones because of the exploit of sex scenes.
They were totally unnecessary, all the nudity and all that.
And I said to him, kind of, you know, it doesn't bother me.
I'm not going to cheat on my wife and I'm not going to, you know, watch them over and over again, but I'm really wrapped up in the story.
I love the story.
And HBO can be exploitive with sex.
And that's, you know, just part of the price of admission to this great show.
And he said, I can't watch it because I'm addicted to porn.
And I said, do not watch it if you're addicted to porn.
He was absolutely right.
One more personal story before I make my point.
When I was an atheist, I was usually an agnostic.
I was not sure about anything, but I was a functioning atheist.
But for a while, I embraced atheism philosophically.
And I read atheist philosophy.
And one of the most important atheist philosophers is the Marquis de Saad, from whom we get the name sadism.
And his philosophy is spelled out in sadistic porn.
Scenes of women being raped, killed, tortured.
And that's how he expresses his philosophy.
And then people philosophize while these horrible things are going on.
And the man himself was a truly evil psychopath.
When I read that, I thought this is the only atheist I've ever read who makes perfect sense.
This is what the world is like without God.
I reject it.
I turned away.
I'm not sure.
Jordan Peterson asked me the other day, what made you turn away?
And I'm not sure what did, but I did turn away.
And that began my path back from atheism to God.
And so this work of evil, and it is an evil work written by an evil person with the intention of stimulating you and arousing you with scenes of cruelty, that turned me back toward God.
All right.
My point is this.
Christianity is not a rulebook.
There are obvious rules.
Don't commit murder.
Don't commit adultery.
Don't lie about people.
Honor your father and mother.
But Christianity is not a rulebook.
It's a personal relationship between individuals, Jesus on the one side, and you.
And God knows you and he knows your name.
He knows who he's dealing with.
And so each person is going to walk that path individually.
There is such a thing as temptation and there's such a thing as self-deceit where you think, oh yeah, I can handle watching Game of Thrones and you end up degrading yourself in some way.
And you should be aware of those in you.
But God doesn't need you to judge other people and what they should watch.
If you feel yourself drifting because something is bad on TV, there's a little knob on there, you know, a little thing on your remote control called the off button.
Turn it off like I did with Midnight Mass.
I love the Terminal List.
I thought it was great and I watch Reacher and I enjoy the hell out of it.
I love the fighting scenes.
I like the kind of rough justice.
I like watching the guy deliver justice to the bad guys.
And basically, it just makes me want to work out more watching that guy, Alan Richen.
I just think I got to work out more.
If I have a heart attack in the gym, it's his fault.
Then you can blame him for playing Reacher.
But until then, each person has to decide for himself what it is he can see because you never know.
You never know where this salvific insight is going to come from.
God makes us one by one.
This is an important point because this is what I'm trying to get to.
I'm trying to get to what is a human being?
How can we start to build government and culture for human beings as we want them to be?
God makes us one by one.
Our individual selves are the path we walk to get to God.
They are the clues we have on how to get to God.
Your personal personality is a path to God.
And that tells us a lot right there about the world we want to build.
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I don't understand our copywriters.
They tell you how to spell BEAM.
Anyone can spell BEAM is B-A-M.
How?
Oh, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A.
V-A-N.
No Ease in Clavin.
I just make it look this easy.
This is why Davos Man, the World Economic Forum, is so despised because of what I said before, that the individual is a path to God.
And only in freedom can he walk that path.
And this is why I reject a lot of the things that come from the right about, you know, you're free only to do what's right.
You're free only to do what's good.
Basically saying that the church insights should guide your insights.
You should be guided by the wisdom of those who come before.
You should be guided by orthodoxies that are in place for a reason.
But obviously, there are times you have to rebel against wisdom and rebel against orthodoxies.
And those two are part of the world.
The thing is, ultimately, you have to be as free as possible to do those things.
And this is why, you know, two things, two quotes.
C.S. Lewis said, no one has told any story but his own.
One of my favorite of C.S. Lewis quotes, we only really know our own stories.
And Thomas Sowell talks all the time about how nothing is about right and wrong.
It's about who decides what is right and wrong.
And because we're individuals, the World Economic Forum in Davos looks like a gathering of bond villains.
I mean, I was going to come in and joke that they look like the League of Ancients, the enemies of the Justice League, but just before I came in, I saw the Babylon B and compared them to Hydra, which is basically the Marvel version of that.
And I thought, well, all right, they beat me to the punch on that one.
Now, the thing is, they are threatening because they have a lot of power and they plant people in power segments throughout the world, in power sections throughout the world.
But they're also a joke now because these are the people who broke the world because of the flu, because of the wu flu.
They broke our economy.
They locked us in our homes.
They closed our churches.
They lied about the vaccine.
They lied about the source of COVID.
And they didn't save a single life.
They are morons.
And you can tell that they're in trouble because in 2021, their theme was the great reset.
Remember the great reset?
Oh, they're going to, oh, this is it.
This is our moment.
We're going to change everything.
It's going to solve climate change.
We're going to make everybody, you know, own, no one will own anything and you'll be happy because we'll own everything and we'll make all the decisions.
You know what the theme is this year?
Rebuilding trust, which translates into, please don't hate us because we're morons who ruin everything.
They just look like a bunch of clowns, but only because, to be fair, they're a bunch of clowns.
So they want to blame this fact, of course, on information, the internet, right?
It's the fact that we can see them and talk about them and disagree with them and then find out that we were right to disagree with them.
That's the problem.
Here, just as an example, is the European Commission president and the European Commission is Davos, essentially, translated into political power.
Here's the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen.
For the global business community, the top concern for the next two years is not conflict or climate.
It is disinformation and misinformation.
Followed closely by polarization within our societies.
These risks are serious because they limit our ability to tackle the big global challenges we are facing.
Changes in our climate and our geopolitical climate.
You just finished tackling the big problems and you screwed it all up.
You don't know what you're doing.
They never think, maybe it's us.
Maybe we're tyrants.
Maybe we're fools.
Maybe we don't really have any expertise to deal with.
Maybe we have all these prejudices that serve the elites, but they don't serve the people.
And maybe human beings are individuals who don't want a bunch of decadent billionaires deciding what they can eat and where they can fly and how much gas they can put in their Volkswagens while you're flying around the world in a jet.
Here's a New York Post description of what happens at Davos.
Caviar, magic mushrooms, gold leaf desserts, A-list selfies, $2,500 a night hookers and secret dinners are likely to be on the menu as scores of private jets touched down in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum 2024.
Why do we hate them?
First of all, a $2,500 hooker a night, you have to have extra body parts that most people, you have to have pleasure centers that most of us don't have.
I mean, she's got to be like, you know, let me stroke your normal Aba-Duba-Dabbin D because the normal body parts, you can get about $500 worth of pleasure out of a hooker with your normal body parts.
You've got to add some body parts to be, these people are idiots.
They're idiots.
So they're going to save us from the climate, right?
This is unbelievable, this thing with the climate.
You know, there's talk now that John Kerry, who's our climate czar, because we need a czar to deal with the climate, he's going to leave the czardom.
He's going to leave the Winter Palace and join Joe Biden's campaign.
And if he does, Joe Biden is finished because he's been a complete failure as a czar.
You know, last year of the world, first of all, last year of the world used more fossil fuels than it ever has.
Kerry's big thing has been trying to convince China to cut out carbon.
China's CO2 emissions have soared.
This is from the Wall Street Journal as demand for electricity surged.
In 2022, China accounted for 53% of the world's coal generation.
The Ember think tank says, and now new permits for coal power plants in 2022 reached the highest level since 2015.
The thing is, he's done.
He hasn't done a single thing.
Green energy stocks have tanked as the rest of the stock market was skyrocketing.
And by the way, in the cold in Chicago, people are coming out of their offices and finding that their Tesla batteries have gone dead.
So they have to wait online in the freezing cold and they have no heat because the battery has gone dead to charge up their car before they can get home.
Here he is, climate czar Thurston Howell III getting asked a question by a reporter, cut to.
What's the carbon footprint of these events every single year that you come here?
You think it's worth it?
Peasants pay for your crimes?
That's a stupid question.
Nobody ever suggested that.
Don't make up stupid questions.
A little annoyed, just a little annoyed.
They're annoyed when the voices of the people start to leak to them.
But that's what's happening because people are sick of the whole idea.
The whole idea is so decadent.
I sometimes think that these guys have never read any history.
They've never read what happens to people like themselves when they separate themselves from the people.
But suddenly now, the voices of the people, the voices of populists, are starting to reach them.
The new president of Argentina, Javier Mele, went there and he just laid into them.
This is him talking through a translator, Cup 3.
Today, I'm here to tell you that the Western world is in danger.
And it is endangered because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.
Unfortunately, in recent decades, motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others and others motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism.
We're here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world.
Rather, they are the root cause.
Do believe me, no one better placed than us, Argentines, to testify to these two points.
So Guy goes, and they compare him to Trump, but really he's very different than Trump because he actually has a much more formed philosophy, a much fuller philosophy.
But he goes to Davos and he says to them, yes, the world is in trouble and the trouble is you.
It's like Pogo, we've met the enemy and he is us.
And this is happening again and again.
Kevin Roberts, who is the president of Heritage Foundation, excellent think tank for conservatives.
He's in a debate and they're always going after Donald Trump, of course, the terrible tyrant Donald Trump.
And in the politest possible way, but absolutely on target.
I'm just going to play a snippet of this because I can't.
In order for him to work out his thought, he speaks for too long for me to play, but you can find it online.
Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation.
This is how he responds to all the Trump hatred that these people feel.
President Trump, if he's the next president, for that matter, I think whoever the next conservative president is going to take on the power of the elites, which I mentioned earlier.
But the thing that I want to drive home here, the very reason that I'm here at Davos, is to explain to many people in this room and who are watching, with all due respect, nothing personal, but that's your part of the problem.
Political elites tell the average people on three or four or five issues that the reality is X, when in fact reality is Y.
So he goes on to detail what he's talking about, immigration.
The elites say, oh, it's great.
It's great.
It's, you know, you're just a bigot if you don't believe in this.
You're just a horrible person.
It's not great.
And obviously all these sanctuary cities, when it finally occurred to the folks, the governors down south to send some of these people up to the sanctuary cities, suddenly those no people or illegal signs started.
You have to paint them over.
You know, love is love, and no, you know, I'm getting rid of the sign.
You know, this is a problem.
They're living in a world protected by their money.
He goes on, he talks about China.
China was supposed to be great, not so great.
It's a threat to the free world.
China is a threat to the free world.
The climate change alarmism is one of the biggest things.
I mean, this is just, it is just amazing.
Atlantic hurricanes, they're not becoming more frequent.
The frequency of hurricanes making landfall in the continental United States has declined slightly since 1900.
This is Bjorn-Lomborg.
Although the data for the rest of the world is less extensive, we see the same picture.
The best reconstruction from 1950 to 2020 shows no significant increase for all or major hurricane frequency, even though they keep reporting this dishonesty.
And obviously the things they do, their solutions, which mean you can't drive your car, you can't get nuclear energy, which is the cleanest form of energy there is, you're not supposed to frack, all this stuff, are worse unless you happen to be a Davos man.
And then you're never going to give up any of your money.
This is the problem, by the way, with socialism, is that it always ends up as just being the rule by the elite.
Jamie Dimon, same thing.
He was an old, you know, head of J.P. Morgan, old pal of Obama, suddenly saying people aren't voting for Donald Trump because they're racist, because they're bigots, because they're hateful.
They're voting for him because he was right about certain things.
And the thing is, Rasmussen did a poll.
Kim Strossel writes about this today in the Wall Street Journal, where they polled people with postgraduate degrees who make over $150,000 a year and live in cities.
They believe everything that the left and the media and Davos is telling you.
Among the elite, 74% say their finances are getting better compared with 20% of the rest of the voters.
The elite give President Biden an 84% approval rating compared with 40% and lower now from non-elites.
And their complete faith in fellow elites extends beyond Mr. Biden.
Large majorities of these people have a favorable view of university professors, journalists, lawyers, and union leaders, all the people that the people dislike.
This is a genuine break in two ways.
It's the end of the left.
The left, remember, was supposed to be for the poor.
It was supposed to be now they're forcing gender ideas, this crazy transgenderism stuff.
They're forcing that on Africans who last people will want it.
They're forcing abortion on them.
They don't want that either.
But they're forcing it, literally forcing it on them, saying aid is connected to it, Bill Gates.
These people who are so out of touch with everything, but they have the answer because they have that idea we talked about in the beginning.
We talked about in regards to the arts of the individual, the sacred individual on his own path.
They're not thinking about that at all.
They are not thinking about that at all.
They're thinking about the big picture.
Oh, the big picture.
But the big picture is not a big picture.
This is a Pointaless world.
It's a world where every little point forms the big picture and you cannot change the big picture without crushing, destroying all those little points.
You know, what Donald Trump is, is he is, last week I said he was Godzilla, but he's also, he's a metaphorical guillotine.
That's what happens to people like this eventually.
Eventually, if you don't wake up, if you don't look out the window, if you don't listen to the voices of the people, right, the guillotine shows up.
Donald Trump is a metaphorical guillotine.
And as I have said before, it is a tribute to the patience and restraint of the American people that they said, metaphorical one.
Because God forbid, you know, political violence, I've said this before, our republic will not survive real political violence.
It will not survive.
Another revolution is not going to usher in a world, take us back to 1776.
That's not what's going to happen.
That's not what I want to see.
I do not want to see political violence.
God forbid, they should get to a point where they say, you know what?
A metaphorical guillotine isn't waking these people up, right?
That's what happens with this kind of dissociation from the people you're trying to serve.
If you forget, if you forget the sacredness of the individual, as they have obviously, with their abortion policies, forgotten the sacredness of human life, if you forget the sacredness, if you forget even the fact that creation, there's something good about creation.
God finished creation and saw that it was good.
It may be fallen.
It may be broken, but there's something good about it.
So you don't butcher your body to make believe you're the opposite sex.
It's an insane thing to do.
When they have forgotten all these things that the ordinary man knows in his heart, the ordinary man and woman knows this stuff in their heart.
And conservatives are always talking about IQ.
I'm not a big IQ guy, not just personally, obviously, but I'm not a big believer in IQ because people know things in their heart that some of these hyper-smart people totally forget.
I've met a lot of high IQ idiots, right?
And I think that the thing is, all of this elitism, whether it's IQ elitism or money elitism or power elitism, all of it is forgetting what people are, the sacred individuality of what people are.
Are you a few years or like me, a few centuries out of school and wondering what the heck did I even learn and what was the point?
You might even be thinking, I don't have the time to learn anything new.
If that's you, you're not alone.
It's not too late.
Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses.
I love these guys.
I taught at Hillsdale for a couple of weeks.
I got a fellowship there.
Wonderful place.
Wonderful students and great, great intelligent professors.
Learn about the works of C.S. Lewis, the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, or the history of the ancient Christian church with Hillsdale College's online courses.
If you're not sure where to start, check out American Citizenship and Its Decline with the mighty Victor Davis Hansen.
In this eight-lecture course, Victor explores the history of citizenship in the West and the threats it faces today.
Threats like the erosion of the middle class, the disappearance of our borders, the growth of an unaccountable deep state, and the rise of globalist organizations.
Why Elites Fail00:14:57
The course is self-paced so that you can start whenever and wherever you want.
Start your free course on American citizenship and its decline with Victor Davis Hansen today.
Go to hillsdale.edu slash clavin to enroll.
There's no cost and it's easy to get started.
That's hillsdale.edu slash clavin to enroll.
Hillsdale.edu slash clavin.
You might want to start with the class on how you spell clavin.
It's KLA as I hint.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Chapter 3, Iowa Way with a Hiaway.
So I want to do a quick analysis of the Iowa caucus' results.
Here's some photos from some video from the actual caucuses, cut four.
Oh, I know all I owe, I owe IOA.
I owe Iowa all I owe and I know why.
All right, that had nothing to do with anything.
It was state fair.
I just wanted to play that.
It really is true that very few people are in the state.
That's the 1% of the country is Iowa.
And it's also true that it was snowing and it was like 24 below with the windshield factor.
And a lot of people didn't show up.
Only one in six registered Republicans came to caucus, which was about 110,000 people, which is less than almost every year besides.
But you got this reaction, oh, it's over.
You know, Trump is now president, or Trump is now the nominee.
And a lot of Republicans certainly took it very seriously.
Ted Cruz, who has good reason to hate Donald Trump, nonetheless endorsed him.
People make fun of him for doing that, but I think he's actually putting country first before his own feeling.
He knows that Trump is not going to have any loyalty to him.
Marco Rubio has already endorsed him.
Ramaswamy, Vivek Ramaswamy, dropped out of the race and endorsed him.
And the reason is this, I think, is that DeSantis, who was really the only conservative alternative to Trump, busted his chops in Iowa.
According to Karl Rove, his super PAC knocked on 947,000 Iowa doors.
He must have been knocking on barns.
I don't even know if there are that many people in Iowa.
They had 1,700 caucus captains, identified 40,000 supporters, made 268,000 volunteer calls, and he just barely came in second.
So this was actually a good showing for Nikki Haley because she was a very close third.
And, you know, they always use these words.
Well, he was second, third, but there was like two percentage points separating them.
And in Iowa, that's four people, right?
And she's running much, much closer to Trump in New Hampshire.
And DeSantis isn't even in the polls.
He's like 5%, 6% in the polls, where she is somewhere between 30 and 40% and somewhere between 5 and 15 points behind Trump, depending on which polls you're talking about.
And that's why Trump is attacking her.
And also, I'm going to play a clip from NBC of Trump attacking Nikki Haley.
And you will see why people love Trump instead of what they're saying.
Just play this clip from NBC Cut 5.
Tonight, former President Trump returning to a familiar campaign refrain, weaponizing race, gender, and xenophobia against his political opponents.
Nikki Haley is a disaster.
Trump posting on Truth Social attacking Nikki Haley, who is the daughter of Indian immigrants.
Writing, anyone listening to Nikki Nimurata Haley's whacked out speech last night would think that she won the Iowa primary, misspelling Haley's birth name, Nimerada.
Trump also posting this picture, mixing Haley's photo with Hillary Clinton.
Nikki Haley, in particular, is counting on the Democrats and liberals to infiltrate your Republican primary.
Trump has often resorted to race and gender-based attacks on Haley.
Is that amazing or not?
They call him a racist.
They say he's a sexist.
What he was making fun and xenophobia.
What he was making fun of clearly, obviously, to anybody with a brain was the fact that she had changed her name.
So she wasn't being sincere.
She wasn't being authentic, as he is obviously authentic.
That's the one thing about Trump that you can't deny.
He's an authentic guy because he doesn't think before he speaks.
So you're getting unfiltered Trump.
Putting her, blending her picture with Hillary Clinton, there's nothing sexist about that.
He's saying she's a liberal.
She is a person of the left, and she's got the same policies as Hillary Clinton.
There is nothing sexist about that, nothing xenophobic.
And they couldn't even find a clip that made him sound xenophobic.
I mean, it was just amazing.
So they lie and lie and lie.
And they think nobody sees them.
They think that, oh, everybody takes us seriously.
And that's why, what, 11% of people trust the press?
They just help Trump.
But the point is this.
Haley may do well in New Hampshire, but she's in trouble because she's going into South Carolina, where she used to be governor.
And they keep saying, oh, the popular governor of South Carolina.
And wasn't popular with the people who are going to be voting in the primaries.
Remember, she promised never to take down the Confederate flag.
And then there was a shooting.
And she not only took it down, which is one thing.
She might have said, oh, I changed my mind, but she wound up hugging Jesse Jackson, who the guy is a, you know, I mean, I'm sorry, the guy's a racebaiter.
And I think that that's very offensive to the people who are going to be turning out en masse to vote for Donald Trump because they love him.
So they're all hanging in because they think Super Tuesday, which I guess is March 5th, maybe, they think that's going to turn things around.
But I don't think it is going to turn things around.
And I think that it really does look like Trump versus whoever Biden, whoever replaces Biden, rerun, which does show you, though, that our politics is not looking forward.
We haven't found the new leader, the guy who speaks.
I mean, Vivek Ramaswamy was trying to do that, but he was kind of, you know, he kind of hadn't fleshed out what he was talking about.
And he was so busy trying to become Trump's vice president pick that I think he didn't really state, make a full case for himself.
And certainly the people don't seem to have felt he had.
And he doesn't seem to have felt he had because he's walked away.
So Trump is a populist.
I think that's fair.
He's speaking with the voice of the populace.
What the populist likes is that he takes down Davos man.
He goes after these people.
He is the metaphorical guillotine for these people who deserve it.
They deserve, you know, like I said, I don't want to see a real guillotine, but they deserve.
What I've said repeatedly is these guys, I don't want anybody to be killed, but they deserve a good swift kick in the backside in public.
They should basically put them on a stage, make them bend over and kick them and say, and go and stay out and keep out.
They should be humiliated because they're humiliating.
They're decadent, they're incompetent, they're foolish, and they do not care or know who the people are or what they want.
So here's the thing.
I am not a populist.
And I'm going to explain why in the final part.
People know when they're being screwed.
Individuals know the truth in their hearts.
They have a moral guide in their hearts.
They're born with a moral guide.
Most of them are.
I hope so.
But you do need thinkers to point the way.
Donald Trump is an elite.
Kevin Roberts from Heritage, he's an elite.
He's a thinking man.
You know, he's an educated man.
I'm an elite.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Madison, they were all elites.
What you want, as I've said from the minute I started doing this show, is you want elites who aren't elitists.
It has never occurred to me, ever.
You know, I went to a good school.
I had an elite upbringing.
I'm an highly educated person.
I'm obviously in the media, which gives you a power that people who aren't in the media don't have.
It never occurred to me that I was better than the people I was talking to.
It always thought I was actually here to serve them.
I thought, you know, as a novelist, I was here to entertain them.
I wasn't here to tell them what they should be entertained by.
You've never heard me say, you didn't buy my book because you're a sexist.
I don't even say to leftists.
I don't think leftists have to buy my book if it offends them.
I am here to serve the people who read me if I can.
With whatever gifts I have, I'm supposed to give those to you.
You listen to people, you listen to the people, and you serve them.
That is what elites are supposed to do.
You have to fight to make the individual free so he can find his way through himself to God.
That is what we're doing here.
And this is why I reject, this is why I reject both socialism and this new, what do they call it, the DRs, the dissident right, and their ideas that we now need to go back to monarchy, they have a new idea of monarchy.
This is why I reject both of those sides, because I think that what we are fighting for is a construct in which the individual can be free.
And obviously, our original construct has collapsed.
It's collapsed by people telling, like Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama and all these people telling us, oh, the world is now too complicated for that.
Barack Obama said, I wish I could just lock myself in with some experts and come back and tell everybody what to do.
But now we saw that.
That was what COVID was about.
That's what the pandemic was about.
It was about the experts telling us what to do and us finding out, oh, not only do they not know what to do, they lie.
And they also take care of their own interests as opposed to ours.
So what we're looking for is people who will start to think about what people are and this moment, this special moment, which is what I'm going to talk about next and why I also reject Ayn Rand.
that's why the final chapter is called Atlas Sucks.
So let's just recap this.
The sovereign individuality of a human being tells us why Davos stinks.
That's why, because they're making big plans without consulting that idea.
And it tells us why we love Trump, I think, because he fights back against them.
But it doesn't tell us the bigger picture.
How do individuals work together?
Because you do need a framework.
We're not individuals.
We're not just individuals.
We're also part of a family.
We're part of a town.
We're part of a state.
We're part of a country.
We're part of the world.
All of that stuff is true.
And these people can get it in their head that that means more than it does, but it can't be avoided either.
We're all a part of everyone we meet and everything we're involved in.
The problem with Davos and DC is they think down to us, whereas the founders actually thought up from us to them.
That was a big difference.
That's the difference between being elite and being elitist.
They thought, this is what a person is.
How can we support his happiness?
That's all they wrote about is how can we form a government that supports the happiness of the people?
And they understood something else, which we have totally forgotten, which is the sinfulness of man, the brokenness of man.
They worked not just from below, which is what these elite clowns think, but they also worked in both directions.
In both directions, there's sinfulness and brokenness, right?
This is what the founders understood.
You know, when the populace gets enraged, they forget too that they can be wrong, that they're broken, sinful people, just like the people in Davos.
This is why this famous quote that I always love, James Madison, Federalist 51, if men were angels, no government would be necessary.
If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
This is what the people of Davos forget, and sometimes what the people forget, that men are not angels.
We do need a government.
We do need to have people in control.
And those people are going to ultimately be the elites no matter where they started.
And what the people in government have to remember is they need to be controlled, and they've forgotten that completely.
When does Davos ever think that they need controls on themselves?
When do you ever hear of someone in Davos say, we can't do that because people are free?
We can't tell them how much gas to put in their car because people are free.
We can't tell them what to eat or what to own because people are free.
I'm not a populist because I know the same is true of everyone else, including me, that we are all guided by unsavory, selfish motives sometimes.
So it's an old problem.
But here's why the problem is new.
And this is what I started out saying you haven't heard before the way I'm about to lay this out.
Because of technology, because of medicine, because of science, we now have choices we didn't have.
You can have sex without getting pregnant.
This was one of the main differences between men and women throughout history is that women got pregnant when they had sex.
That is no longer true because now they take a pill and they become sterile.
They become an android, basically.
A woman can fight in a battle now by using advanced weaponry.
That wasn't true.
When I say that a woman can't win a medieval sword fight, that is the literal truth.
She cannot win.
She would be swept away like a feather by the force of men charging down on her, great big men charging down on her, carrying away.
But now that's not true.
A woman can fight because of technology.
A man can become an imitation woman through surgery or hormones.
The consequences of bad actions have been reduced.
But that doesn't mean that the actions don't remain bad, right?
They don't become right.
You may be damaging your soul.
You have to know this.
But now you have a choice.
In the new world, you have to make arguments that go beyond consequentialism.
You can't just say, oh, if you do this, you'll have syphilis because you can get penicillin and your syphilis goes away.
You have to make much more sophisticated arguments.
That's one problem.
Here's another.
The people of the Enlightenment, up to and including the founders, shaped new systems that solved some of the unjust systems of the past.
Republican democracy was built to regulate the will to power at the top by playing power centers off each other and by making the people the ultimate sovereigns, right?
And that meant that when someone was elected, he wasn't in charge because of his bloodline.
It wasn't accidental.
He didn't just inherit rule.
It wasn't like Shakespeare's Henry V, who says, oh, there's no difference between me and anybody else, except for ceremony.
Now, power is legitimized by elections and by the different branches of government fighting off each other.
Capitalism is the same.
In the past, wealth could be a zero-sum game.
If you had it, someone else didn't.
Capitalism is amazing because now your getting rich can also mean jobs for others and it can mean more wealth.
It virtually eliminates poverty.
It's a wonderful economic system.
So where before a rich man might suddenly wake up, this happened to Tolstoy.
He woke up one day and he thought, oh my God, I'm a parasite.
I'm living off the serfs.
Now a businessman, a Jeff Bezos, can say, no, I have $7 billion or however many billions he has, but I'm a benefactor.
If it weren't so, I wouldn't be so rich.
If people didn't want what I was selling, I wouldn't have it.
It's a fair game.
This is the argument the conservatives are always making.
And that's where you get Ayn Rand saying, oh, the rich man is the hero.
He's the creator.
He's the maker.
Everyone else is the taker.
Ladyballers: Soul Desiccated By Greed00:04:35
And this is why I reject her.
You know, they say they're making Atlas shrugged here at Daily Wire.
And every time I talk to the movie guys, and when I walk out, I always say, bye, don't make Atlas shrugged.
Who knows if I'll get through to them.
The reason is this.
Here's the reason.
The solution to the problem is also a problem.
The love of money is the root of all evil.
It still is.
That hasn't changed even a little bit.
And power still corrupts, and absolute power still corrupts absolutely.
Hasn't changed even an iota, not a little bit.
The human heart is exactly the same as it was before.
So whereas before, if you were promiscuous, you got syphilis or you got a girl pregnant, that's not a problem anymore.
You got immediately punished for doing the wrong thing.
Now birth control and medicine protect you, but you've still degraded yourself because you're still a human being.
Whereas before, a rich man like Tolstoy might awaken to himself as a parasite.
Now you're a benefactor.
You can feel justified.
But the love of money is still the root of all evil.
So now you're justified in screwing your workers and ignoring the poor and bringing, forcing abortion on the people of Africa and forcing gender confusion on third world countries because your soul is still destroyed and still desiccated by the love of money like Bill Gates's.
Before King Henry V might have woken up and had taught himself humility, Elizabeth I said, oh, I only rule through the love of the people.
But now Obama's power is legitimate.
So when he wants to light up the White House, the people's house, with rainbow colors that offended half of the people, he says, well, I was elected.
Elections have consequences.
We won.
That's what he said.
Those were his words.
Because his power is legitimate, but it still corrupts.
This is the world we're facing.
The sacred individuality of people remains in place, but so does their brokenness, and not just their brokenness, but yours and mine too.
And to put it in religious terms, we have eliminated many of the mortal consequences of sin without eliminating the reality of sin.
So whereas the founders could solve the problems with only a passing reference to God and the rights he granted us, because God was assumed by the vast majority of people, today we have to go back to the beginning.
This is the situation we're in.
We're in the situation where everything that good rests upon, which is the source of all good, the creator of all good, everything, has been forgotten and obscured by our brilliant solutions to the problems of the consequences of sin.
The sin remains, and so does the image of God remain in man.
And we're going to have to convince people of that from the ground up.
And if we don't do that, if we don't do that, we're going to lose everything because the rules of the game have not changed even a little bit.
The human soul is still in place, still broken, still sinful.
Sin will still destroy you, even if it doesn't make you ill, even if it doesn't give you all the problems it used to give you in the past.
That's where we begin.
We have to begin at the beginning because man needs the image of God in order to find his way to himself.
More to come as we go on.
Ladyballers, you've heard of it.
It's the hilarious story of how a group of male losers who can't win against other men decide to identify as women and join a women's basketball league.
It's absurd.
It's ridiculous.
It's laughable.
It's also happening right now in the world.
Here's a quick look at what is being called the most triggering movie of the decade.
Leftists are losing over Ladyballers.
Nothing's changed.
This movie is a straight-up and intentional transphobic hate crime.
What?
I see.
The Ladyballers movie needs to be banned.
I'll cancel you.
Come on, get the blinds, please.
Code 11.
The most toxic BS you've ever seen.
You're a monster.
Yeah.
Next level hate speech propaganda.
That's it.
That's the pitch.
Watch the most triggering comedy of the decade.
Ladyballers, streaming exclusively on Daily Wire Plus.
Don't wait.
Watch Ladyballers, the movie that Hollywood didn't make.
So we did exclusively on Daily Wire Plus now.
It's time for Klavan Klopbacks.
That's the witch.
They brought in this crazy witch at Davos.
I was hoping when she went, they just all disappear, but no such luck.
All right, first question.
Clapback is from Justin.
The Worst Suffering00:04:20
He says, greetings, Lord Clavin.
I was raised Baptist by a physically and emotionally abusive father.
As you can imagine, that put a bad taste in my mouth as it relates to Christianity.
I'm now 40 years old and still without faith.
I wanted to tell you that your faith is an inspiration to me.
Every time I listen to you, you exude love and humility and wisdom in a way that most Christians do not.
It's nice.
Thank you for that.
My interactions with Christians are usually uncomfortable because I find Christians to be overflowing with arrogance and judgment.
I don't see that in you.
There's just one major hang-up that I can't get past.
How do you deal with the problem of evil?
If God is omnipotent and omniscient, and I will add all-loving, how can evil exist?
This question haunts me and the answers I get are always weak.
This is called theodicy.
It's obviously a big issue.
There are many people who say it can't be solved.
In a way, that's true.
It can't be solved.
But there is a response.
The best expression of theodicy I've ever read of this issue is in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
And that's the Ivan, the brother who rejects God.
He says this, I believe in God.
It's obvious that there's a God, but human suffering is so terrible.
And he then gives terrible examples of things that you went through, of children being abused.
And he says, what in eternity could ever erase the tears of a child who has been brutally abused?
He said, so it's not like I don't believe in God, but I reject God because he cannot do anything to redeem that child's suffering.
So my reaction to Ivan is this.
I too, because I've seen horrible suffering and you have experienced it, I too cannot imagine what could happen in eternity that redeems the suffering of a child.
But I can imagine that something in eternity redeems the suffering of a child because I understand that my mind is not, is limited.
My mind is a mortal mind and cannot even begin to picture what eternity means.
that there is a pattern to life that will, as C.S. Lewis said, work back into the past and make even the suffering somehow beautiful.
I can imagine that.
And the reason I can imagine that is because of art.
I've talked about the Pietà, Michelangelo's beautiful sculpture of Mary holding the dead body of Jesus Christ.
And I've said this before, but I'll repeat it.
I look at that and I've seen it maybe three or four times and it never fails to move me to my soul because it's so beautiful.
It's got to be the most beautiful piece of sculpture ever made.
And yet, it's a picture of the worst thing that can happen to a person.
Better to die than have your child die.
It's a terrible, terrible thing for a mother to lose her child.
And the worst thing, the worst thing.
And so it's a picture of terrible grief, terrible atrocity, terrible injustice.
And because Mary's child happens to be the son of God, it's bad for everybody.
It's the worst thing that can happen to everyone, not just the worst thing that can happen to anyone.
It's the worst thing that can happen to everyone.
Yet, and yet, this statue is shockingly beautiful.
It is shockingly beautiful.
If a man, Michelangelo, can somehow take that terrible grief, that terrible tragedy, that terrible injustice, and make a thing of beauty out of it, then how much more can God, working with all eternity as his canvas, make the suffering that we experience, the evil that we experience, beautiful?
The pattern that we can't see, the pattern of eternity, is so much bigger than we can imagine that you do have to live in trust.
There are many reasons to trust in God, many reasons.
For instance, the long-term joy of doing the right thing, which doesn't even make any sense because doing the right thing always deprives you of something.
And yet the long-term joy of it is proof that there is something even longer.
If the long-term is eternity, then that is going to be incredibly redemptive.
So I agree with you.
It requires faith to understand theodicy.
But with faith, you do start to understand that eternity is so big, it can probably make beauty out of anything.
All right, we're going into the member block.
If you are not a member, become one this moment.
Eternal Redemption00:00:30
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If you do not do this right, I don't mean to threaten you.
I don't want to threaten you.
If you don't do it, clavenlessness is upon you and you'll be destroyed.
So not a threat.
I'm just explaining the way this is just the way things work.
Like you don't go to the gym, you get flabby, you act immorally, you go to hell.
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