Andrew Klavan’s Die, Sports Illustrated, Die! dissects the media’s ideological collapse, from SI’s 2022 fat-model swimsuit cover to its 2023 transgender man feature, framing it as a betrayal of beauty standards. He ties this to legacy outlets’ layoffs—NYT, LA Times—caused by woke policies and open-borders backlash, while praising Trump’s 2024 primary dominance for exposing Democratic lies. Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips’ rally observation reveals voters’ exhaustion with elite narratives, not Trump himself, as Klavan dismisses fascism comparisons and highlights JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon’s pragmatic alignment with Trump’s China/border stance. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Rio Grande fencing clash with the feds underscores federal obstruction, while philosophical debates—Harari’s "fictional rights" vs. Christian morality—frame the cultural shift as a rejection of materialism. The episode ends with a call to action for his New Jerusalem Substack, blending politics, art, and existential reckoning. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, as the passions of election season rise, it's easy to become hateful towards your political opponents and harbor daydreams of, say, picking them up by the heels and slamming their heads repeatedly into the floor, preferably a hard floor, like in a tiled bathroom, so you can then carry them by the heels over to the toilet and dunk their heads in there again and again and finally just stuff them deep into the hole and flush and flush until they swirl down into the sewer like the pieces of crap they are,
and you can just watch their loafers disappear with a glowing inner sense of a patriotic job well done.
But we should always remember that we're Christians and plumbers are expensive.
And if even one of those clowns gets himself stuck in the pipes, the bill is going to be astronomical.
Also, Jesus said, love your enemies.
Sure, I don't know what the hell he was talking about either, but just in case it was something important, I sometimes like to take a step back from the political fray and try to seek common ground between the conservatives trying to preserve American prosperity and liberty and the locusts trying to devour all that in a frantically clamorous black cloud of insectile greed and demonic stupidity.
So, for just a few moments, let's put our animosities aside and try to make a level-headed comparison between conservative philosophy and those noises leftists make that sound like a cross between a tortured seagull and Joy Reed.
Conservatives believe that individuals are created to act freely within the broad confines of human moral understanding, and that that freedom can only be maintained by strictly limiting the power of the powerful.
Leftists believe that whenever someone says that in their vicinity, they should set cars on fire and shout him down by chanting meaningless bumper sticker slogans at the top of their lungs until the spit flies from their mouths and their eyes roll up in their heads and still they go on shrieking and shrieking.
This is what democracy looks like until it's clear to everyone but the news media that leftists think democracy looks like an entire city burning to the ground while mobs of mindless thugs steal every piece of electronic equipment they can lay their hands on when really I think democracy is supposed to look more like voting, but maybe that's just me.
Conservatives believe that normal human life centers on the complementary natures of the two sexes, male and female, which were made to come together and committed love in order to continue God's creation of life in a harmony of spirit and flesh.
Leftists believe that human sexuality is best represented by Richard Levine, who currently sits in a straitjacket in his shadowy cell in the bowels of Arkham Asylum, but dreams of the day when he and the Joker might escape into Gotham City so he can don his woman costume and once again become the supervillain Rachel, with the power to drag children to his moldering hideout in the foggy crags of Mount Perversion, where he can begin the experimental surgeries that will turn boys into girls and vice versa,
until those fools who imprisoned him finally realize he's the normal one, and they're all mad, mad, mad, I tell you.
Conservatives believe that capitalism is a genius economic system because it uses human ingenuity and free choice to create more wealth for every level of society than ever before in human history.
Leftists believe that if they can just steal that wealth at gunpoint, they can use everyone else's money to build a utopia so beautiful it will be worth enslaving and slaughtering the millions who try to get in their way, like they did in the last six utopias.
Conservatives believe that the greatest blessings humans know on earth are their children, and society should be built to support the healthy family life that is their best environment.
Leftists believe babies should be killed in the womb because once they're born, all they ever do is scream gibberish and use up your resources and crap all over everything.
So they're just like leftists.
No one wants more of those.
Laughing at the Fall00:08:17
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
All right, we are back laughing our way through the onrushing fall of the republic.
I've been planning.
I'm not going to continue plugging this forever, but we're having Spencer Clavin, my son, but no relation, on later to talk about our new substack, the New Jerusalem, the newjerusalem.substack.com.
And up till now, I've been promoting it, but there's been nothing on it.
Now we've got a week of worth of content.
So if you go on and check it out, you can find out whether you'd like to get a free subscription so it comes to your mailbox or whether you'd like to get a paid subscription.
So Spencer and I will come to your mailbox and just say thanks.
The newjerusalam.substack.com and Spencer will be on later and we'll talk about it.
Also, please subscribe to the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel, my personal YouTube channel where you will get exclusive content described, you know, surrounded and wrapped up so nobody will know you're getting exclusive content from me.
We'll probably wrap it in, I don't know, racist material or maybe pornography, something that the leftists like.
You get everything there that I do, basically, including my interviews, which you can also get on audio.
But last week's interview was with Robert Spencer on Islam, and this week will be with Andre Archie, who's written a really interesting book called On the Virtue of Color Blindness.
If you leave a comment on YouTube, and we find the comment hateful, despicable, something that we really should censor and just hunt you down and turn you over to the January 6th prosecutors, we'll read it on the air because that's who we are.
Today's comment is from Catherine Ludrick 4821, who says, I'm not sure if you're A, a comedian, B, a political analyst, C, the Philosopher King, D, all of the above, I guess, D.
Well, yes, I mean, obviously, Achilles had a choice in life whether to have a long life but not be famous or have a short life and win glory.
I had a choice whether to be a very popular person or be original.
And so I've obviously chose to be original.
So let's get started with today's episode, Die Sports Illustrated, Die.
All right, we're going to talk about the election and the border, but I really want to focus on the absolute destruction that's been going on with the legacy news media so we can laugh at the suffering of journalists who are losing their jobs and celebrate their pain and mock their tears.
But before we get to the fun part, I want to play two videos that made the rounds this week.
One is an old clip of Yuval Harari giving a TED Talk, which is important because Yuval Harari is kind of the philosophical voice of Davos.
Bill Gates loves him.
All the people who want to run our lives think he's a really terrific philosopher.
I've read a couple of his books.
This is what he said in his TED Talk, Cut One.
Human rights are just like heaven and like God.
It's just a fictional story that we've invented and spread around.
It may be a very nice story.
It may be a very attractive story.
We want to believe it.
But it's just a story.
It's not a reality.
It is not a biological reality.
Just as jellyfish and woodpeckers and ostriches have no rights, Homo sapiens have no rights also.
Take a human, cut him open, look inside, you find their blood and you find the heart and lungs and kidneys, but you don't find their any rights.
The only place you find rights is in the fictional stories that humans have invented.
All right.
I love this guy.
The other video I want to play in contrast is a new one.
It's come just this week.
was from Russell Brand, the comedian, now the thinker and commentator, talking about why he's begun to wear a cross.
And he starts out talking about the trappings of Christianity, how they put them off.
I think they put a lot of people off, but now he's changing.
This is what he says.
I suppose it takes a certain amount of adulthood, and it might be different for all of us.
For me, it seems that it's taken quite a lot to recognize that you need, I need a personal relationship with God.
It occurred to me that if instead of always talking to myself inwardly, I could replace one of those voices with an indwelling God.
He says in Galatians, it is our job to die so that as Christ died on the cross, he might be reborn in us.
This, I think, these two videos actually state the conflict that we're in, the conflict that a lot of the news stories and a lot of the conflicts in the news are about.
Now, I responded to Harai's theory years ago in my article, Can We Believe, which you can still find at the City Journal website, Can We Believe.
And I pointed out that I am a fiction writer.
So when he talks about fiction, he's talking about something I know about and he doesn't understand how fiction works.
Fiction is a language for speaking a certain kind of truth, which is the inner life of human beings.
Art, all art, speaks the inner lives of human beings.
And the problem with Harare and with Bill Gates as well is they're autistic and they don't actually experience the inner lives of other human beings.
And that's convenient for people who are powerful people who want to be able to move us around like chess pieces and don't think it matters whether we have freedom or not or whether we have rights or not, because then we won't complain when they take away our cars and our food and all that stuff because those are just fictions.
But even science is beginning to realize now that reality at its most basic level doesn't even exist as it is until it's perceived, which means there must have been a perceiver before there was a reality.
So this is the argument we're in.
Is the human experience a valid version of an outer reality created by a personal God, a collaboration with God responsible to his creation, which is what Russell Brands is in the process of discovering.
He doesn't want to just be talking to himself.
He wants to be talking to the creating consciousness, the consciousness in whose image he was made.
Or the other side of this, are we just random evolutionary beings, kind of meat sacks, so everything we can believe can be changed.
It's just random.
It can be changed by changing the fictions that we're told, the narratives.
You change the narratives, you change the reality.
This is what the left is thinking.
Sports Illustrated screwed around with this idea of narrativity.
They screwed around, and this week they found out.
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Chapter one.
Sports Writers' Morality Crisis00:10:18
Jordan Peterson was right.
So last Friday, It's a week ago as I'm speaking, the staff of Sports Illustrated got a seven-minute Zoom call with their bosses telling them that they were all going to be laid off.
Now, I don't know if it was all of them, but it was a vast number of people who were going to be laid off while their ownership tried to figure out what to do with the dying Sports Illustrated brand.
And I don't, you know, like to laugh at other people's misfortune, but I just can't help it.
I have to say, I will tell you why.
This is personal.
Sports Illustrated deserves every bad thing that happens to them.
The New York Times ran the big story about it, and it mentioned all the usual excuses why the legacy media is failing so badly.
The internet and mismanagement and all this, but without once mentioning the underlying cause, which is what we call wokeness, this idea that your job is not to report sports, but to school us on your higher morality that no one on earth has ever discovered except yourself, because you're rewriting the old fiction of morality that good is good and bad is bad, and you've got a new fiction, and that's going to change reality.
So a good example, you have probably heard that Jordan Peterson has been ordered by the College of Psychologists of Ontario, Canada to be re-educated for his thought crimes.
And, you know, obviously, Jordan Peterson's problem is he's just not educated enough, right?
He's, you know, he sits around all days playing Super Mario.
You know, it's like, I read a book, Jordan.
Come on, go to the library.
I mean, it's insane.
Personally, I actually like the idea of Canada attacking Jordan Peterson.
It kind of reminds me of that scene in Casablanca where the Nazis are talking to Humphrey Bogart and they're telling them how they're going to conquer America.
Here's a little snippet of that.
Can you imagine us in London?
When you get there, ask me.
Diplomatist, how about New York?
Well, there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to evade.
That's how I feel about Canada attacking Jordan Peterson.
It's kind of not a fair fight for Canada, poor Canada.
One of Jordan Peterson's many thought crimes is that he was looking at a Sports Illustrated 2022 swimsuit cover, which every year they put out the swimsuit where guys like me who like sports got to look at beautiful, beautiful women in very skimpy bathing suits.
So they put on a fat model, Yumi New, just pouring out of bikini in various ways.
And Jordan tweeted, sorry, not beautiful, and no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.
Which is the Harare-Russell brand issue?
Are there human standards and are they based on something beside social invention?
A lot of times we argue back, well, it's evolution.
This is a woman showing us she's healthy, that she's trim, that she, but, you know, I think that's part of it.
I think we want to see a healthy woman to breed on.
But I think the evolutionary sense of beauty and morality is, in fact, linked to something higher.
We evolved an eye because there's something to see that we experience as light.
We evolved a moral sense because there's something that we experience as morality that really is out there.
Beauty in women is the human experience of all kinds of things, but the beauty of femininity.
Yeah, the beauty of fertility and health, but also the indescribable qualities of the feminine that are the things that we are attracted to in women.
That's why women who are not classically beautiful become beautiful when you get to know them, but that's why you don't put them on a cover of Sports Illustrated in a bikini.
So SI didn't listen to Jordan, no Sari.
next year they put a guy on the swimsuit cover, transgender German pop singer named Kim Petrus, and yuck, right?
Jak, because that's not what we're looking for.
I'm not trying to look at a guy.
I'm trying to look at girls because girls are what guys, real guys, like to look at.
But it doesn't start with woke.
Woke is the final stage of this disease, the Yuval-Harari disease.
We'll call it the Eden disease because it's people trying to seize the knowledge of good and evil for themselves instead of allowing God to determine what good and evil is.
So you go back to the George W. Bush administration.
This is one of the big lies, the big lies that the media tells.
Well, it was Donald Trump.
We really, we lost it with Donald Trump.
He was so bad.
We had to start lying about everything and basically editorializing absolute garbage.
They did it with George W. Bush.
They did it with Richard Nixon.
They did it with Ronald Reagan.
They have been dishonest for a long time.
And yes, they've amped it up with Donald Trump because he's made them hysterical, but they were doing it before.
During the George W. Bush administration, I mean, I love sports.
I especially love football, but I love all sports.
And Sports Illustrated was the Bible of sports fans.
You opened it to read about sports.
This athlete I admire, this game I'm interested in, what's going on behind the scenes with the management, all the things that sports fans are interested in.
But suddenly, all I got was this left-wing paliver, which was basically communicating to me that if you wanted to read about sports, you had to agree with us because we know better than you, basically.
I mean, these are sports writers.
They didn't know better than me about anything except sports, which was their job.
Now, at the heart of the matter was God.
And in 2010, Drew Brees was awarded what then was a big honor.
He was the quarterback of the New Orleans Saints, and he was named Sports Illustrated's Athlete of the Year, which was like being the man of the year of time when time mattered.
And the award article opened with a story about Brees giving a speech to elementary school kids where he said that his empowering word was faith.
And here was the response of the writer of the article, Sports Illustrated senior writer Tim Layden.
Quote, faith is a word that in modern times can polarize or politicize an audience, ingratiating some listeners and repelling others.
And then he adds, in parentheses, not this audience, the adult portion of which gasps in approval.
So who is polarized?
Who is politicized?
Who's repelled?
Sports Illustrated senior writer Tim Layden, who then goes on to tell us, well, you know, faith can mean a player's faith in the workday value of practice, a team's faith that its members can do more together.
When anyone who follows Drew Brees knows that when Drew Brees talks about faith, he's talking about our old friend, Uncle Jesus.
That's who he's talking about, faith in Jesus Christ.
He didn't cover the story.
He didn't cover why Drew Brees finds that important.
What does he pray to Jesus about that helps him on the field?
How does his faith help him in playing football?
The story was a great athlete believes in Christ.
The subject of the story was Drew Brees, a reporter, a journalist, reports the subject of the story.
That's his job.
Instead, we get Tim Layden telling us what Tim Layden thinks and what we really had better think as well.
So in 2013, I wrote a blog post on PJ Media, where I was at the time, why I'm canceling my Sports Illustrated subscription, because the magazine, what I said was the magazine has become dishonest, dishonorable, and even occasionally despicable in its conformist lockstep left-wing bias.
And the reason I did this was they hired a left-wing anti-religion writer named Mark Oppenheimer to write about religion and sports.
I think it was a cover article.
I can't quite remember.
It was a sloppy, ill-informed, poorly reasoned article full of nonsense, like saying that athletes pray to win, which is just, athletes pray for excellence.
I pray for excellence.
And as you can see, my prayers are always answered.
But, you know, athletes understand that, you know, you win some and you lose some.
They pray to play at the peak of their abilities and to do the right thing.
They pray for safety and also the safety of the people on the other side.
So I pulled out a few paragraphs of this article at random and fact-checked them, and they just collapsed.
I just pulled them out.
Like I really just cutting them out on my computer.
You know, like it would say things like, well, in the old days, you know, sports wasn't religious.
There was guys like Joe Namath, who was known as Broadway Joe, and he had girls and alcohol.
It wasn't like with Roger Stahlbach, who was religious.
Well, Roger Stahlbach and Joe Namath played at the same time.
So the guy was talking complete nonsense.
He actually had to go on Hugh Hewitt's show and defend himself against my article, which he did just by attacking me and saying how stupid I was.
And I always have been grateful to you, who sort of said in this bewildered tone, I don't know.
Clayman always strikes me as kind of a smart guy.
This is why Sports Illustrated died.
This is dying.
And this is why the Washington Post is dying.
They're having record layoffs.
The LA Times is dying.
There was a wonderful article in the LA Times.
I saw this on Hot Air.
LA Times editor pleads with fleeing Californians to please stop bashing the state on the way out.
And this is what he says.
This is letters editor Paul Thornton.
He writes about the fact that more than 800,000 Californians moved away in 2022 and many thousands more left last year.
And he wonders why they keep running California down after they leave.
They leave, move out of California, which physically is paradise.
Why would anybody leave?
And then they keep telling people that California sucks.
Why are they doing that?
Well, let me tell you, this is what I'm quoting his article now.
Perhaps it's our embrace of LGBTQ plus Californians, or it's our liberal politics with the state Republican Party shrunk to irrelevance after its vicious attempt in 1994 to marginalize immigrants with Proposition 187.
Couldn't be your small-mindedness.
Could it, Paul?
Couldn't be the idea that you have opinions and you think that everybody who doesn't have your opinion is a bigot, which is really what we're dealing with.
That's what woke is.
That's what all the journalists are doing.
They can lie because they're good and you are bad.
By the way, Proposition 187 withheld taxpayer-supported welfare for illegals.
So it was basically saying, you break into my house, I don't have to give you dinner, right?
So it wasn't so vicious.
But oh, you know, it's so vicious.
Mike Miller on Hot Air points out that people are leaving California because these policies don't work.
Out-of-control crime rates, increasing number of illegal aliens and homeless people, runaway inflation, and the damning number of drug-related deaths.
Shoes And Life Outside00:02:09
See, this is the thing.
This is the argument of leftism, and it's really important.
They're good because they have got a different way of pretending about morality than your pretend morality that has to do with, you know, running clean cities.
And when taxpayers pay for a city, they get to have a clean city without homeless people dying, without people taking drugs, without prices going through the roof, without anybody being able to move in illegally when you are obeying the law, right?
They're good because they pretend fat women are pretty.
They pretend trans women are women.
They pretend our country doesn't need a border to survive.
They pretend the freest, most tolerant nation on earth is oppressive and racist.
How good they are to pretend these things because there's no reality.
There's only fiction made up stuff.
So if their fiction replaces your fiction, their fiction becomes reality.
It all makes perfect sense if life takes place inside your head and nowhere else.
But like I said, I've written fiction all my life and I do it because it tells a truth that can be told in no other way.
Your inner life is a collaboration with a life outside you.
And when that life outside you disagrees with what is in your head, you have to change because that life outside you will not do it.
And now Sports Illustrated and the LA Times and the Washington Post and CNN and all these gentlemen and ladies are finding out.
And I'm sorry, but I'm not bleeding for them at all.
They've insulted us for too long.
And my feeling is, bye-bye, learn to code.
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Nikki Haley On Trump00:10:54
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Chapter two, Nikki Haley wins in her imagination.
So speaking of fiction, which we're talking about, I wrote a novel in the 1990s, True Crime.
It was made into a Clint Eastwood picture.
And the thesis of the novel is about a nasty reporter who finds the truth.
And this thesis of the novel is when you tell people that lying is virtuous, which is essentially what the left does, it then requires a non-virtuous person, a bad guy who doesn't care about being virtuous, to speak the truth.
And when Donald Trump was elected, I said, oh, look, there's my thesis.
Come to life.
Trump is just too nasty to care when people tell him he's a bad guy for saying what is right in front of his eyes.
And, you know, that is the reason why he's so entrancing to people.
I mean, it is a big reason he's so entrancing to people, is that he's not being bullied.
You know, his nastiness is part of his strength.
The Mitch McConnell's, see, this is the thing.
He's already won the narrative.
People don't understand this.
He's won the narrative by telling what is a recognizable version of the truth.
He's the future of the Republican Party.
The people who think before they talk, the Ron DeSantises until he learns not to look around before he raises his hand, are the past.
The Mitch McConnells who can't figure out whether or not the border should be closed or not.
They are ultimately the past and Trump is the future.
And that's why I think that Nikki Haley lost.
Trump won in New Hampshire.
He beat Nikki Haley by about 11 points.
This is the New Hampshire primary, obviously, beat her by 11 points, 54 to 43.
And here was Nikki Haley's speech a little bit for.
This race is far from over.
There are dozens of states left to go.
And the next one is my sweet state of South Carolina.
Yeah, the reason she's finished is because she is going to be creamed in her sweet state of South Carolina.
And the reason is, is because she's the old Republican who kowtows to the left and wokeness when she took down the Confederate flag.
Whether you think that's a right or wrong decision, she took it down.
She hugged Jesse Jackson, a race-baiting con man.
You know, she is not the person who is going to do the thing that everybody is looking for, not just on the right.
I think actually throughout the country and throughout a large swath of the left as well, people just looking for someone to tell the truth.
Now, the truth is harsh.
One of the ways that the left get away with the lies that they tell, the lies are nice and the truth is harsh.
And I think one of the things about Trump is that, you know, when you tell the truth, it's harsh, but you don't have to be harsh.
And Trump doesn't know that.
And that can be a problem.
You know, I think that, I mean, Nikki Haley is so fancy.
She told this story about how she was disqualified at a beauty contest because she wasn't white or black.
She was brown.
And I would like the pictures of that, please.
I would like to see the receipts on that one.
She's just, you know, I just think she's done.
A lot of the people who voted for her in these primaries were, in fact, Independents and Democrats who registered to vote in the primary, but in fact will vote for Biden in the general.
But the thing about Trump is that, and again, now, because I think Trump is going to be the nominee, and because I would vote for Trump twice before I voted for a Democrat, I would, you know, as they say, crawl over broken glass to vote for him before I voted for a Democrat.
To me, everything now is strategy.
You know, I have problems with Trump.
I have personal problems with him.
But like I said, I'm going to vote for him because I'll vote for him.
He's going to be the nominee.
And I would vote for him way before I voted for any Democrat.
But things are strategy.
And I think when you tell harsh truth, sometimes it helps to tell it not so harshly.
And he just doesn't understand that.
And Haley is driving him crazy because she's still getting a lot of donors who want to bring him down.
And he just goes after her in this kind of ugly way as part of his speech.
I find in life, you can't let people get away with bullshit.
Okay, you can't.
You just can't do that.
And when I watched her in the fancy dress that probably wasn't so fancy, come up, I said, what's she doing?
We won.
And she did the same thing last week, but he was much more angry about it than I was.
I said, get up there and you let him know.
We are going to win this.
We have no choice.
If we don't win, I think our country is finished.
I do.
I believe our country is finished.
So I actually agree with him in that last part.
I don't think it's finished, but I think it's really, really bad.
And I think that, you know, whenever I hear him say, oh, her dress was not that fancy, you know, I just, I cringe, not because I care whether he insults Nikki Haley's dress.
I think that's bad manners.
But I think the bad manners alienate the 40% of the people, the 40,000 people, I should say, who are going to decide this election.
It's why he lost last time.
They didn't have to cheat.
They didn't have to cheat.
He took the people who would be alienated by him and he alienated them.
This is math and strategy.
That's all I'm talking about right now.
He's even threatening donors.
He put out a tweet saying, or a truth social post, saying if any donor gives Haley money, they're kicked out of the MAGA treehouse, which first of all is baloney.
He's not going to turn away money.
But, you know, the thing about Trump is I really think Joe Biden is the guy who said it best as a cut a.
We'll teach Donald Trump a valuable lesson.
Don't mess with him in an American unless you want to get the benefit.
Wow.
Is he talking about?
He's a complete gibberish, spouter of gibberish.
Here's the thing, though.
Trump has won the narrative.
He has won the narrative because people are seeing through the lies.
You can't just invent a world.
And the anti-Trump narrative is collapsing, and there's nothing the Democrats can do to stop it.
All the media hysteria is just listen to just a small bit of it, cut six.
He can shoot the First Lady.
We're going to see violence, the likes of which we didn't even see on January 6th.
Make it illegal to run against him, to throw his opponents in jail, to shut down the media.
He will make himself into the Fuhrer, and he will make everybody raise their hand and salute him using martial law against the American people.
Terminate the Constitution, rewrite the Constitution, create mass internment camps, throw everyone into gitmo.
You can only listen to this stuff so long.
There was an article in New York Magazine, Jonathan Chade, who was an absolute hysterical left-wing, mindlessly hysterical left-winger.
He writes, despite countless op-eds and campaign ads warning of the threat that a second Trump term poses to the Democratic order, the imperative to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has become tiresome.
The signs of that exhaustion are everywhere in our politics today.
It may be the most dominant attribute of our national mood.
They cannot grip the fact that it's not, we're just not exhausted because we're exhausted.
We're exhausted.
We're tired of being lied to.
We're tired of being lied to.
Biden's one Democrat challenger, Minnesota congressman and businessman Dean Phillips, who did kind of well against Biden.
Biden had a write-in campaign, but he got like 20%.
Dean Phillips got like 20%.
He's just getting started.
Who knows?
But he said this on, well, I said in a lot of places, but he said on CNN here, it's cut seven.
I went to a Donald Trump rally a couple nights ago.
Never been to one.
I had an event across the street.
I saw the line of people waiting in the cold for hours.
And I thought, what the heck?
I'm going to be a leader who actually invites people, doesn't condemn them.
Met probably 50 Trump people waiting in line, every single one of them, thoughtful, hospitable, friendly, all of them so frustrated that they feel nobody's listening to them but Donald Trump.
A diverse crowd, people who had never been to a Trump event before.
My party is completely delusional right now.
When you have Democrats pointing this out, and anybody who has been to a Trump rally will tell you the same thing.
These are nice people.
They're not bigots.
You know, I know that bigots, some of these anti-Semites attach themselves to Trump, but I've never been quite sure why.
I mean, and I don't know why anti-black people would do it either.
He has never demonstrated any kind of racism except what the left calls racism, which is the normal knowledge that other people are other races.
And sometimes those people have a cult of cultural traits that adhere to them, good and bad.
But he's shown that because he's too blunt to hide it.
But I've never seen him be hateful toward an actual group of people except Democrats.
So the thing is, this is happening all over at Davos.
I talked about Jamie Diamond from JPMorgan talking about how Trump was right about a lot of things, but he wasn't the only one.
There are a bunch of people who stood up at Davos where they're making plans to tell us how we should live and say, Trump, these people are not fascists, and Trump's not a fascist.
They just realize that Trump is saying things that are true.
Trump is saying things that are true.
The border is important.
China is bad.
These are things that the Democrats and some of the Republicans didn't say before Trump said them.
Transgenderism is, look, Trump hems and haws about transgenderism, but basically he knows that doing anything like this to children is wrong.
And I don't know why he dithers about that and about abortion, but he does.
It's because he's a New Yorker and he's got that leftist strain in him.
But the thing about it is, is, you know, we all know we're broken and people are so desperate to seem virtuous and to feel virtuous and to appear virtuous to others that the left wing's pretend game, oh, we're virtuous because we say fat people are pretty, you know, all that stuff, it plays for a while, but sooner or later, reality comes back.
Gen 90: Instant Wrinkle Treatment00:02:23
And once the hysteria over Trump's affect is gone, Trump's strength, look, his strength is his belligerence because it means that he will not be shut down by the lies.
His weakness is his belligerence because it alienates votes that he needs.
It's politics.
It's a numbers game.
You got to win those votes.
Like most of us, his strengths and his weaknesses are kind of the same.
This is true of a lot of people.
It's certainly true of me.
But the reason, this is the reason why a lot of people notice that when God needs something, he sometimes chooses broken people.
And it's because in their brokenness and their openness and their nastiness, they are not going to be shut down by the lies.
And that's what we're dealing with right now.
Trump has already won the narrative.
And all things being equal, he's going to be the Republican nominee.
And that's why.
You know, I've been selling Genucell for a while now.
And I finally decided, I really have to try this because they have this, you know, spot remover or something.
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So at my age, you get a lot of, just one big spot, essentially.
So I actually tried it on my nose.
I don't want to lie because I'm wearing makeup and obviously that covers things.
But I swear, it made these things disappear.
Not disappear, but it made it very, very hard to see the spots.
And the best thing was the spots then showed up on my enemies' faces.
No, I made that part up, but it really, really works.
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Battle at the Border00:05:40
Wait, oh, it's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Chapter 3, Borderline Personality.
That was a desperate nation calling out to Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
It was also Luke Costello calling out to Abbott to shut down the borders.
You know, we've been talking, I keep going back to the idea of fiction, this Yuval Harari idea that all of the truths in life are really just fictions.
But if the battle going on in Texas were a novel, the battle over the Texas border were a novel, the symbolism would be this.
If you live totally within yourself and live by your own moral logic, you can convince yourself of anything that makes you feel good about yourself, makes you feel virtuous.
But when things come in from the outside, you suddenly have to confront the fact that your life, your virtue, and your philosophy is a complete fantasy.
And that's what's happening at the border.
You can talk about the fact that you're a mean, rotten bigot if you think our country should have a border like every other country that's ever existed on the face of the earth, right?
You can say we're bigots, but ultimately when these people start flooding cities, when in Boston and Chicago, they're sleeping in airports, when New York is handing over their fancy hotels to migrants, when migrant crime is going up, when people are being raped and when fentanyl is pouring into the country, suddenly your virtue doesn't seem like virtue.
You know, the Democrats used to pretend, they used to pretend that they believed in borders.
Here's Obama in 2005.
We all agree on the need to better secure the border and to punish employers who choose to hire illegal immigrants.
You know, we are a generous and welcoming people here in the United States, but those who enter the country illegally and those who employ them disrespect the rule of law and they are showing disregard for those who are following the law.
We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants in this country.
See, he knew that you had to lie about believing in the truth before you could do what you wanted.
The real problem that they have is the media supports them.
They do not know how much we see.
They think we don't see what they're doing.
But Greg Abbott in Texas, God love him, has absolutely exploded their narrative.
He has this thing called Operation Lone Star, which is to seal up the border.
In keeping with that, about two and a half miles of private property near the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass, got some barbed wire.
The feds came and cut it down.
They appealed to the Supreme Court who said, you know, the feds have the right to do that.
First, there was another court that said, no, Texas can keep the feds out.
Then the Supreme Court overturned that order while this is going through the courts.
They did it without explanation.
A lot of conservatives are picking on the Supreme Court.
They're saying it's John Roberts because John Roberts is afraid of controversy.
But before, when Trump was trying to get stuff done at the border, the right was arguing that he had the sole right to control border law, which of course was ridiculous then, as ridiculous now.
But the thing is, the thing is, Abbott, there's now a showdown, basically, because Abbott continued to say, look, you know, we're being invaded.
The Constitution says you have to protect us from invasion.
You are not doing your job.
You're not upholding the rule of law.
Therefore, we can protect ourselves and started putting barbed wire back.
And now there's a showdown.
Joe Biden said, you better let the feds come and take it down by today.
Nothing has happened yet.
But a lot of governors throughout the country are getting together.
I think it's up to, it's over 20 governors are now saying, all Republicans, of course, are now saying, no, he's right.
He is right.
Now, it's going to be hopefully a non-shooting civil war, but it's a real division.
And, you know, they're saying, well, Biden should, the Democrats are saying, well, Biden should nationalize the National Guard and all this, but it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
He has won the narrative because now all that stuff that the spokeswoman for the White House says, all of that stuff is now exposed as a lie.
All of this stuff, well, it's the Republicans' fault.
The Republicans don't want to do anything, you know, because they have this bill in Congress that's an absolute mess and the Republicans don't want to sign it because it basically makes the border crisis permanent.
So they don't want to sign it.
So it's like, well, we gave them a bill.
Why didn't they do it?
Or give us money.
We need money from more border agents, but the border agents don't do anything.
All of that has disappeared.
Now we see you.
Now we see you do not want to close the border.
When we go and close the border for you, you tear it down.
They have all these excuses, but it's two and a half miles of fencing.
It's not doing anything except protecting this one little space.
So it's all a lie.
And this is how the left wins.
I mean, this is how the right wins, is exposing this lie, because we know a lie when we see it.
We know a lie when we're confronted with the truth.
I don't think you have to do that harshly.
I think sometimes you can do it with a smile on your face.
You can do it gently and say, look, I'm sorry, this is the truth, but this is the truth.
But still, what Greg Abbott is doing is basically staging a novel that shows that all of this is a lie and it's coming to roost.
I think there's a lot of this going around.
Encountering Reality00:14:38
Russell Brand saying that he's wearing the cross of Jesus is the kind of thing I've been talking about for a long time, the coming revival.
And it's what Spencer and I are talking about on our new substack.
And I'm going to talk about him right now in the final chapter, The New Jerusalem.
So the question we've been talking about all through this show is basically whether we are random meat puppets and everything that we experience as moral or true, that it hasn't got physical, material reality, is simply a construct.
something that society has built for its own purposes, maybe the purposes of the powerful over the weak, or whether we're dealing with a perception of a moral order, a perception of something outside of ourselves that is in some ways as conscious as we are.
And this is not just the question as far as I'm concerned of the moment, but this is the moment in which this question means everything because everything depends on it.
And that is why my son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, and I have started this substack called the New Jerusalem.
So we can discuss this as we, in fact, have been discussing it for now, I can't even say how many decades, but it's more than I want to think about.
And so we wanted to bring that discussion.
That discussion has been really helpful to both of us.
We wanted to bring that discussion out into the public and put it on Substack.
You can find it at thenewJerusalem.substack.com, thenewjerusalem.substack.com.
And I wanted to take the time, since this is the show that is about that subject, to take the time to talk to the man himself, the guy who also has the Young Heretics podcast and your own substack, which also exists.
It's called Rejoice Evermore.
Rejoice Evermore.substack.com.
Yes.
So I started the show today playing two clips.
One was an old clip of Yuval Harari saying all these things, human rights are a fiction.
And he believes, oh, God, all these things are just a fiction.
It's something that brings us together.
This is the great power of humankind, he says, to create these fictions.
Now, as a person who has spent my life creating fictions, I do it because I think that fictions communicate a truth.
And the truth that they communicate is that we are a consciousness in the world and what that experience is like.
That's why you make artists, for me to communicate my experience of the world to you, who I assume can receive it because you are also.
I personally can't.
I'm totally mystified, but one in general, yes.
So I followed that with Russell Brand, who is a seeker after things, and now talking about the fact it would be nice if when he talks to himself, he's not just talking to himself, but also is talking to the indwelling God, which is at the center of our religion, the religion that both of us share.
We started this, though, because we feel this moment is crucial.
Well, I want to make people aware that I started against the best advice of my mother.
I almost never ignore my mother's advice, but she repeatedly told me, don't associate with that man.
Get out, stay away.
It hasn't worked well for her.
So you don't need to understand the cost that I've paid.
No, that's absolutely right.
I mean, you mentioned that this subject has been a theme, really, of our many, many conversations going back.
Yes.
Only about one eight hundredth of your life, but most of my life, going back as long as we've been able to have these discussions.
And there's always, to me, one of the things we constantly remark upon is the providence with which conversations kind of lead you to things.
And this is what I think Socrates called his daimon, his little kind of deity.
Or sometimes you just say it was the argument, it's the logos that's leading us this way.
Since we're Christians, we can say, yeah, there actually is a logos that threads through the world and does bring you, if you engage in good faith, with in love, with people that you're close to, brings you to centrally important issues.
And I think that that's what's kind of happened here, because the other part of it is not just about our individual lives, but on a big macro level, this exhaustion of this idea that we're just meat, that we are dust atoms bouncing off each other.
In one way, that's an ancient idea.
It goes back to Democritus and Epicurus, but in its modern form, it's been around for about 500 years.
It was a consequence, a byproduct of the scientific revolution.
And we've been gradually upping the ante, ratcheting that idea up and up and up until it no longer can bear the weight that we're putting on it.
And I think that's what you're seeing with guys like Russell Brand.
It's like we can't live this way.
It's impossible to live as if everything immaterial about us is just a fantasy, just an illusion.
But weirdly, at the same time that that's happening, because you're absolutely right.
You see it, we can see it around.
And I've been predicting it for years that people who think are going to say, wait a minute, this actually doesn't make any sense.
That the things that we see and feel and know about each other aren't simply illusions, because everything we know we know by perception, so it makes no sense that that perception can be completely eradicated.
But at the same time, the idea is falling apart, the technology is coming into place to turn it into some weird matrix-like semblance of reality.
I mean, now we have this AI, which people are saying, oh, you know, if AI thinks as well as we do, then it's sentient.
Yeah, which is not, it doesn't seem to be a problem.
It's a preposterous idea, but it's more than 50 years old.
I mean, Alan Turing, one of the major players in the invention of the computer, puts that argument forward right at the dawn of the computer age.
And everybody's like, yeah, that totally makes sense, you know, because we've been so kind of indoctrinated in this way of looking at the world that that suddenly seems kind of weirdly persuasive.
And even those of us that know it's wrong, we don't even necessarily have argument.
We're not quite sure how to answer that because it feels like all we have are like feelings and subjective.
And what we, I think, both really want to do is instead of waving our hands around and saying, but but my feelings, we want to talk about God as if he is the God of the real world.
Yes, as if it really is.
Yeah, and I think even people that believe sometimes don't talk that way.
I completely agree.
It's kind of weird, right?
Like you hear people make these grand pronunciations about God and then behave as if science or the world can like disprove him or threatens religion and religion needs to be kept decontaminated from all of these outer sources.
And what I think is the world in which God meets us is the world as we live it and experience it because God made that world and he specifically made us to be the capstone of creation, to finalize it, to bring it into being.
I actually think a lot of stuff that's going on right now in physics is kind of screaming this back at us if we're there to hear that our perception has this foundational relationship to matter and existence.
It can't even be what it is without us.
You know, this is funny because I watch the scientists dealing with this.
What we're talking about is this idea that perception in some sense creates reality, which physicists are now saying is in fact the case on the micro level and possibly on the macro level at all.
And you watch the physicists dealing with this, and they're like rats caught in a trap because they keep inventing little ideas like the multiverse.
There must be a multiverse.
Or it's a simulation.
It's all a simulation.
And the thing I love about a simulation is it's exactly the same as there being a God, with one exception.
You don't have to do anything.
What if there's a god-like force that is emanating through the world?
Right.
And there's that dimension where some physicists are kind of trying to just kick up any possible absurdity they can to escape the conclusion.
But then there's, to me, an even maybe more interesting dimension of people that are actually sort of facing up to this, but we've been kind of impoverished of all the resources we would need to talk about it in a spiritual way.
So we get these weird jargony terms.
Like John Wheeler, in I think like 1990 starts talking about getting it from bit, by which he means the source of existence in the world isn't actually objects, it's information.
So he's saying maybe we need to talk less about particles and more about bits, right?
More about these.
And it's like, gee, John, like, where have I heard that before?
And also, how can information exist without a mind to know the information?
So it's like the lights aren't on in that spiritual domain, but all of the raw material is there.
And I think that's one thing we're kind of trying to do.
You do sort of ask yourself if we perceive something and create the reality of it, like the position, didn't something have to perceive the world in order for it to exist in the first place?
But you said this in your first, because now we have actual first week of substacking there.
And you said in your first substack that we don't really care very much about the logic of this.
I mean, we talk about science in a way just to let people know that that original assumption, that original mechanistic assumption when Newton basically came along and said things work like this and everybody thought, oh, we're living in this clockwork world.
That assumption has fallen apart.
And the atheism that sprung out of it, the sort of long withdrawing roar of faith, long withdrawal of faith, is obsolete.
I mean, we're way past that.
Absolutely.
And I think you're totally right.
It's not that we want to get into arguments about the quantum superposition of particles and stuff.
It's just that we want to dispel at the outset, it's a preliminary to dispel this notion that faith is the stupid and superstitious way of engaging with the world.
And the sophisticated people who know things and have information, they're all obviously atheists, which is this very mid-tier online Reddit thing to believe that is nevertheless really convincing to people.
And we want to get that out of the way so that we don't have to spend our time arguing with idiots like Yuval Harari, who is just so philosophically bankrupt.
He's saying things that make no sense.
And people know this, and Peoples knows this, and they really want to just talk.
I think they want to do what we're doing, which is just talk about the God that we encounter in the world in our lives as we actually live.
Exactly.
And you know, I think the thing about Harari, and this is not an insult, I think he's autistic.
And I think Bill Gates, who follows him very closely, is autistic.
And I think the computer age has uplifted autistic people to a position of authority.
And the whole thing about truly autistic people is they don't know that other people exist.
They don't know that the internal world of other people exists.
You know, to me, the most profound scene in all of Western literatures, beyond anything, is Moses confronting the burning bush and the burning bush saying to him, I am, I am that I am.
Tell them I am, sent you.
In other words, that this great cosmos of creation and destruction, the bush showing growth and the fire showing destruction, but it never consumes the bush, is, at least when it meets human consciousness, something like a human being, a check that is written there, but it's cashed with the incarnation of God and Jesus Christ.
And I think that that, you know, I just got off a long interview.
Jordan Peterson had me on his show, and we were discussing things, and he's a Jungian, and one of the things that Jung said is, we cannot know if that experience, that experience of I am, is simply the human experience of totality or is in fact a real encounter.
And I thought, yes, that is why faith is counted to you as righteousness, because when you have faith, you take that I am into yourself and you begin to communicate it like Russell Brand was talking about.
And that, I think that in conversation, the times when I have felt most powerfully the presence of the Holy Spirit has been in conversation about these things, very often with you.
No, amen.
And likewise.
I mean, it's such an important point and really well said that it's another reason not to get tangled up in like ontological arguments about how we can prove absolutely, like I show you on a chart that God exists.
It's like, even if you could do that, I don't think it would really speak to what we're all kind of grappling with, which is much closer to that experience.
I think I talked about it in our first exchange on the substack as an experience of recognition.
Yes.
Because if we are made in the image of God, then the world speaks of God.
Then when we do encounter more than matter in the world, we encounter spirit, we encounter memory, dreams, desire, these things look to us like something we can recognize and have a conversation with, which is probably why conversation is where it really comes out about relationship.
Well, this is, you know, everything is about relationship, I think.
That is the beginning.
And you wrote, you know, very beautifully in your first letter.
What happens in this substack is we have an essay every month that one of us will write, the first one we collaborated on, and then we exchange emails for the rest of the month, kind of keying off that essay.
But you wrote very beautifully about this kind of idea that when you were young, I always tell the story of you as a little boy saying, thank you, sun, for shining on me, that idea that there is something out there that we are grateful for.
And I think gratitude is the first surrender of self.
It's the first thing that you do.
And how do you, that Wordsworthian problem, how do you recapture that and become, as Jesus said, like a child again?
Very difficult.
Absolutely.
Well, I mean, the other flip side, of course, of the great I am is the satanic I am not, which Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Iago, but it goes back to the very roots of Christian theology that because we are free beings with free will, the alternative to acknowledging and confessing this can only really be the denial of existence.
And that takes all these different forms and guises, which is one reason why Satan's always portrayed as a deceiver or wearing costumes and all of that.
But I think that one reason why what we're up against feels so cosmic is because it might be the most direct expression in history ever of the I am not, that there is no I am.
And to deny that is to create what the scriptural tradition calls an idol, which is a mute stone sculpture that looks like a human being but actually isn't.
Hence all the AI stuff, hence all the whatever.
Why We're Up Against It00:03:22
And so yeah, we really are up against it.
Yeah.
So it's thenewjerusalem.substack.com, the newjerusalem.substack.com.
You can subscribe for free or you can support us.
And if you support us, you can also leave comments.
And you get a, on Friday, we're writing each one, we're changing off writing our suggestion of works of art of all kinds that might be essential to understanding the Western tradition and the thoughts of people throughout time.
I just want to end with this, that as we wrote our first essay, we wrote it in collaboration in a cigar bar at the cigar club that Spencer belongs to.
And as we wrote it, outside, this immense flock of birds gathered peering in.
It was like the positive version of Hitchcock.
Instead of being threatening, they were very beautiful.
They covered, just absolutely covered the wires outside our window looking in.
So you know that we have the blessing of the Holy Spirit.
So you want to be there because otherwise, you know, you're in trouble.
This is the issue of the time.
This is the issue we're talking about.
This is the thing that we're all arguing about underneath the politics of the day.
Come to thenewjerusalem.substack.com and subscribe.
We hope you will join the conversation.
As I talked about during the show, America is currently experiencing an unprecedented invasion with millions of illegal immigrants flooding over our border under the Biden administration's watch.
As Texas shoulders the fight against the surge, Arizona's governor remains eerily silent as Biden pursues his perverse agenda.
Ben Shapiro traveled to America's southern border to uncover the shocking truth and the real depths of this crisis.
What he discovered is absolutely shocking and criminal.
And it's our duty at the Daily Wire to share the truth that others are unwilling to reveal.
Take a look at invasion on the southern border.
America is currently experiencing an invasion.
A lot of people coming in from Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria.
Is there a fair bit of gang affiliation amongst the people?
These people are just crossing the border illegally, waving their hands in the air at our cameras saying, hey, here I am, come get me.
We're no longer the border patrol, we're the welcome patrol, the number one site in America for fentanyl trafficking across the border.
And if Joe Biden remains in office, it's only going to get worse.
I'm Ben Shapiro, and this is the Divided States of Biden, invasion on the southern border.
Watch now on Daily Wire Plus.
The southern border is wide open.
The blame rests squarely on Joe Biden.
Join Ben Shapiro on the ground as he brings you the real world consequences of one of the most destructive presidencies in American history.
Watch Invasion on the Southern Border, streaming now on Daily Wire Plus.
Clavin Clapbacks.
Don't mess with the men in America unless you want to get the benefits.
That's right.
All right.
It's kind of like a guy you're meeting in a bar really late at night.
Clavin clapbacks.
If you want to submit a Clavin clapback, agree, disagree, anything, comment, questions, we will take them all.
Clavin clapbacks, both spelled with a K, Clavin and clapback, spelled with a K, at dailywire.com from Lance.
I got a lot of reactions to a question that I was asked about the terminal list where I recommended it and somebody said the Holy Spirit had made him feel very convicted for watching it because it was so violent.
And I responded that I thought the Holy Spirit tells you what you need, not what everybody needs.
Clavin On Game Of Thrones00:04:21
And so I was recommending what I like.
So here is a letter from Lance.
He says, Andrew, you're the best.
I listen to many voices and yours is always like a cold drink on a hot summer day.
The terminal list, the main character, is demonic, sick, bastard.
I simply cannot root for evil to win, to top it off.
Our hero kills his only friend.
I usually find people that are entertained by human suffering to be quite simple-minded.
I never would have lumped you in with them.
Well, that, to me, is a misunderstanding of what's happening.
Art, a work of art, whether it's an entertainment like this or more, you know, another kind, a deeper sort of work of art, is about the audience.
It's not about the people in the work of art because there are no people in the work of art.
All the people in the work of art are figments of the writer's imagination.
So there's nobody there.
There's, you know, nobody, no human suffering is actually going on.
What you are doing is you are having an experience going along with the hero.
Remember, the hero in this story has had his wife and child murdered.
And so when he commits these heinous acts, he's committing it in that context.
And so you get to experience that without having gone through it.
And it tells you something about yourself.
Now, if you feel that that's damaging to you, you shouldn't watch it.
But I don't.
I felt that it was both entertaining and interesting.
I'm not sure.
Actually, I think I might do something very similar if I were a Navy SEAL and somebody killed my wife and child.
That would be an actual natural reaction.
Now, I got another one from Jason about the same subject.
The reason to not watch Game of Thrones, which I said I did watch and enjoyed, is not because it might make you view pornography, but because it is pornography.
Some of the actresses describe the degradation they experienced and felt pressured into doing.
It's not the same as when you write violence or sex into a book.
That is actually not real, but the exploitation of actresses on Game of Thrones was indeed very real.
Now, that's a much more, to me, serious objection, and it sounds righteous, but I'm just simply not that righteous.
Because when you start to think like that, you actually can't do anything because sin adheres to everything.
You can't own an iPhone because of the people who have to, the enslaved people who dig up the materials needed.
You know, you're living on land taken from the Indians, so you have to get up and pretend to apologize to make yourself feel good before you can do anything.
In fact, when I don't judge other people, when I don't judge other people's sins, because I believe Jesus said judge not, I don't think he was talking about something complex.
I thought he meant don't pass judgment on the sins of other people.
You can pass judgment on the crimes because you have to, but you don't have to pass judgment on the sins.
When I don't judge other people, I also don't accept their sins as mine.
So if the Game of Thrones was filmed with enslaved actresses being forced to take their clothes off, I would say, no, that's a crime, and I cannot participate in that crime.
But in fact, because I'm watching women whose ambition trumped their modesty, which is essentially right, they can talk about, listen, you know, they can talk about being exploited, but this is, and it was exploitative.
I'm not denying that.
No, I don't feel that that is a sin that adheres to me.
I feel that that's something that I can watch.
Now, whether or not I did not find the nudity and sex edifying in Game of Thrones, I almost had to get, you know, I used to laugh when I was watching it and say, put your shirt on, sister.
I can't hear the dialogue because it was distracting.
But still, still, I do not believe that that level of righteousness, at least for me, it's just not something that I do because you couldn't move at all.
You literally, I could make that argument about almost everything on earth, that it is touched with sin for the simple reason that everything on earth is touched with sin.
I don't believe very, very, very few nude scenes.
I've seen maybe four or five in my life are necessary.
And I believe women, these actresses are exploited, but maybe they should make a stand against that.
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