Andrew Klavan critiques media bias, citing a fictional WHC policy mocking legacy journalists while praising the New York Times and Washington Post’s Pulitzer-winning "honesty," then contrasts it with perceived double standards—like selective scrutiny of Trump’s tariffs (10% on imports) versus Biden’s border policies. He accuses Judge Jamie Raskin of judicial overreach, comparing cases like Kilmer Garcia’s deportation to MS-13 to leftist legal tactics against Netanyahu and Le Pen, while dismissing conservative outrage over Adolescence’s portrayal of male violence as misguided. Klavan ties cultural narratives—Disney’s Snow White, Gen Z’s dating trends—to declining birth rates, framing leftist movements as "inherently violent" due to ideological lies, and urges resistance against media manipulation while promoting Tax Network USA (1-800-958-1000) and The Daily Wire’s investigative role. Tolstoy’s Alyosha the Pot serves as a counterpoint, illustrating how art exposes emotional truths beyond simplistic morality. [Automatically generated summary]
Trust in the news media has dropped so far that after people watch Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation, they check their wrist to make sure she hasn't stolen their watch.
A new Gallup poll shows that 53% of Americans believe journalists are two-faced, lying dirtbags who have sunk so low they could walk under a snake's belly with a top hat on.
36% say they couldn't do it with a top hat, but probably could with a derby or maybe a fedora.
The remaining 11% say they watched the news just last night and think journalists are great.
Or maybe that was Matlock and they mean lawyers.
The White House Correspondents Association, or White House Correspondents Ass for short, became concerned over the media's failing popularity after White House smoke show Carolyn Levitt announced that from now on, new media reporters would get front-row seats at press briefings while legacy reporters would be required to stand in the corner and repeat, I will not lie about the president 400 times before they can ask a question.
And even then, they can only ask it silently in their minds.
The president of the White House Correspondents Ass, Mr. Schmuckface McLowlife, protested Ms. Levitt's decision and said he would do anything to be allowed to sit close to her again or just to have a garment that still smelled of her perfume.
Ms. Levitt responded, get the hell away from me, you creep, which Mr. McLowlife took as a good sign since at least she acknowledged his existence.
In an attempt to win back the goodwill of the public, journalists have hired a new spokesman, the accomplished hypnotist Swami Origami Umami, who is so excited to make the journalist's case that he's taken a pay cut from his former job of running the three-card Monty game off the top of a cardboard box outside the Port Authority bus terminal in Manhattan.
The Daily Wire interviewed Swami Umami, and we're pleased to publish the transcript of that Q ⁇ A. Q. Swami Umami, after the news media actively covered up Joe Biden's dementia, why should anyone trust them ever again?
A. Concentrate on the tip of my finger.
Listen to the sound of my voice.
Sleep now.
And when I snap my finger, you will awake knowing that the news media was dogged in bringing the truth to the American public.
Here's a new book by Jake Tapper that explains how he and other intrepid journalists uncovered Biden's dementia.
Would Jake Tapper write such a book if it weren't true?
Of course not.
Q.
Yes, I guess Jake really did try to find out.
No, wait, wait, that's ridiculous.
He lied like a dog.
So did the rest of the press corps.
And what about the Russian collusion hoax?
The news media held up the country for two years with that garbage, even though they knew it was a psyop by the Clinton campaign in league with the corrupt FBI and CIA.
A. Think of a rippling lagoon beneath a gently whispering waterfall.
Imagine the steady plashing of the water as you drift into a peaceful trance.
Now look, the New York Times and the Washington Post won Pulitzer Prizes for their work on Russian collusion.
Repeat after me.
The Pulitzer Prize is very prestigious.
They wouldn't give it to newspapers who were perpetrating a hoax out of political malice.
Q.
Yes, of course.
They don't just give Pulitzer Prizes for...
No, no, no, no.
This is nonsense.
The Pulitzer is just as corrupt as the Times and the Post.
And what about how the media covered COVID?
They made a hero out of Anthony Fauci while he was covering up his own role in the deaths of millions, then demonized far better doctors who were trying to get out the truth.
A. Look at my watch, swinging back and forth on its chain.
The media battled right-wing misinformation to bring Americans the truth about COVID.
Q.
Yes, yes, I see now.
Our news media is totally honest and has been doing a great job.
Thank you, Swami Umami.
A. You're welcome.
Now just relax.
Let go of all your freedoms and quack like a duck.
Q. Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
All right, we are laughing our way through the dismantling of the deep state.
I want you all to pause just a moment and ask yourself one important question.
Why have you not yet ordered pre-ordered Kingdom of Cain, Finding God in the Literature of Darkness?
It is really good.
And many of you may notice that Christian art today stinks.
Have you noticed this?
The Christian movies are all slap happy and everything is good and everybody prays, gets what he prays for.
And it's like, this is a book about evil from a Christian point of view and how evil works in the arts and appears in the arts and actually reveals many things through the arts that lead us back to faith.
So it's called The Kingdom of Cain, Finding God in the Literature of Darkness is about real murders that appear in movies and books and in philosophy and how those things reveal what evil is and how to stand up against it and live with joy in an evil world.
Go out and pre-order it because I need you to do that and you will love the book.
I promise you'll love the book.
Also, you should also, after you've done that, I'll pause.
I'll wait here for 10 minutes to let you order the book.
Actually, you have to pause and do that.
But leave a comment wherever you get the show.
If you get it on Daily Wire Plus, like you should, or you're low, you know, kind of slumming and go over to YouTube.
Leave a comment.
And if your comment is the kind of thing that disgusts ordinary people, kind of thing that makes women turn away from you, turn their back on you and just pretend you're not there, we will read it on the air because we are already not here.
Today's comment comes from Time K Pearsall, I think, 524.
He says, honestly, it's a good thing you retired the Trump happiness montage.
It was getting a bit old.
I agree.
And it's completely gone.
You will not see it again.
In fact, we will just skip right to today's episode.
Imagine an honest media.
In the past, most people enjoyed genuine privacy.
What changed?
The internet.
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Chapter one, imagine honest news.
It's easy if you try.
You know, the reason I want to do this for a minute is because I feel that there are some chinks in the armor of the president and of this administration.
I'm not saying that because they lost the court race in Wisconsin.
I think it's ridiculous to be judging the administration's popularity on things that happened like three months after they took office.
That's just silly.
That's bad news reporting.
But I do want to remind you that the news affects all of us, including those of us who know it's untrue.
It sends out an atmosphere, and we breathe that atmosphere of misinformation and lies and bias and corruption, even if we don't want to.
You can't help but breathe the atmosphere.
And so I'd like to talk about how that affects us because it can affect you even if you react to it, even if you say, oh, I hate these people and everything they say is untrue.
And then you start to believe in the opposite, which is also oftentimes untrue, or you start to believe sources who hate the news media like you do, but are not, or just as equally unreliable as the mainstream news media.
Markets Nervous About Globalization00:10:42
So I think it's really important to talk about the way the news media works and what we want it to be, you know, because I don't want to have a conservative news media.
I want to have a fair news media.
I don't want to have conservative entertainment media.
I want an entertainment media that has everybody involved in it because I think that that is the best way to get creativity out of entertainment.
So when I say imagine honest news, I'm not saying imagine conservative news.
I'm saying imagine honest news.
So yesterday, just to give you an example of what I'm talking about, the president announced his big tariff push, and he's been talking about this for a long time.
He's labeled it Independence Day.
It's supposed to, it's 10% tariffs on all imports, I think, with adjustments up and down for the tariffs other countries put on us and the other shenanigans they pull, like they subsidize their markets and while penalizing ours, they rejigger their money and the value of their money.
So we get burned when we sell them stuff and all this stuff.
And obviously, this is a big deal.
You know, I know Trump's a showman, and I know he is a deal maker, so we never know quite what he's planning or when he's bluffing or what he's thinking.
And I know he uses hyperbole a lot, but you could tell by the way he rolled this out that he's essentially staking his presidency on this.
This he thinks is going to fix something.
And he's been talking about it his whole life, by the way.
He didn't just come up with it yesterday.
This is something that he feels is a problem, that we're getting basically screwed by the rest of the world because we're the big guy, you know, and he's trying to end globalization.
He's trying to end this idea.
You know, I don't think that's fair.
People keep saying he's trying to end globalization.
That's not quite right.
I think he's trying to make globalization what it really is, which is not one big happy family that's one market just trading with each other fairly and all this.
It's a competition between nation states.
See, this is it.
The left likes globalization because they think the nation state is supposed to disappear and we're all just supposed to be governed by the United Nations where they will gather and tell us what to do or by Davos or something like this.
And we think, no, you know, the nation state is still important because our idea of how people should live is different than Saudi Arabia's idea of how people should live.
And so what Trump is trying to do is he's trying to reconstruct globalization into a competition between nation states because he thinks that's what it already is and we might as well just be honest about it.
And instead, he feels we're getting picked on because we're the big guy.
Here is Trump, a part of Trump making that announcement as cut eight.
But it's not too late any longer and we're going to start being smart and we're going to start being very wealthy again.
We're going to be wealthy as a country because they've taken so much of our wealth away from us.
We're not going to let that happen.
We truly can be very wealthy.
We can be so much wealthier than any country.
It's not even believable, but we're getting smart.
Nearly a century later, in the face of unrelenting economic warfare, the United States can no longer continue with a policy of unilateral economic surrender.
We cannot pay the deficits of Canada, Mexico, and so many other countries.
We used to do it.
We can't do it anymore.
We take care of countries all over the world.
We pay for their military.
We pay for everything they have to pay.
And then when you want to cut back a little bit, they get upset that you're not taking care of them any longer.
But we have to take care of our people and we're going to take care of our people first.
And I'm sorry to say that.
You know what he's saying?
It's like Shaquille O'Neal.
I don't know if you ever watched basketball, but Shaquille O'Neal was on the Lakers years back.
And he was just a fantastic player, but he was also a giant.
I saw him in person once.
He was enormous.
And he was not just tall and thin like a lot of basketball players.
He was just huge in every way.
And whenever they would slow down the footage of Shaquille O'Neal taking a shot, you would see that the other players were just pounding the living crap out of him.
They were punching him.
They were knocking at the body.
You couldn't see it in normal speed.
But when they slowed it down, you could just see it.
And the refs never called it.
Why?
Because he was so big and so great that they wouldn't have been able to stop him if they hadn't fouled him.
So they let him foul him.
And that's the way people feel about us.
So let me give you a, this is John Fort from CNBC.
I think, you know, I put it on just because it's a fair reaction, a fair sample of the reaction from economic reporters on both sides.
Here's John Fort Cut 11.
And the market reaction after hours, I've never seen anything like it.
This, I think fair to say, is worse than the worst case scenario of the tariffs that many in the market expected the president to impose.
You laid out a number of the percentages there.
And there's some question of how the administration calculated the percentages that they're responding to in each of these cases.
Are they adding in value, added taxes?
He talked about non-tariff barriers as well.
So I think while many were hoping that this would eliminate uncertainty, there's going to be more uncertainty in the market and from those watching policy tomorrow on, well, if countries push back on how these non-tariff barriers were calculated, will there be wiggle room here?
So this is coming from both the left and the right, because the right wants free trade no matter what the results are, because that's where all the money is.
The Wall Street Journal type right, they want free trade completely and globalization has been very good for them, very good for the rich.
And the left, because they will throw any pie at Trump they can, anything they have.
So if it's an argument from the right, they don't care.
As long as it just makes Trump look bad, they will do it.
So I want to be honest with you, as I always am.
I have no idea whether this is going to work or not.
And it may be a disaster.
It may be great.
But I will tell you this.
I'm pretty sure that no one else has any idea how it's going to work also because we just never quite can tell with Trump.
This is his superpower that we never know when he's negotiating, when he's bluffing, when he's coming.
So we just don't know how far he's going to take it.
But the one thing I will say is the arguments that are being put forward are bogus.
I think a lot of the arguments are bogus.
One argument, the markets are nervous.
The markets plummeted after he made this announcement.
And, you know, that's always unnerving, I think, especially unnerving for people who are retiring and have retirement accounts.
But look, Joe Biden stole your grandchildren's money by printing money we didn't have and gave it in graft to his friends in the so-called green energy business.
So they're already con men and now they're taking graft from Joe Biden.
And instead of using the energy that's already God-given in the ground, which is our fossil fuel and nuclear energy, which is perfectly clean and natural gas and all these perfectly clean things, instead of doing all that, he was giving it to guys who made those little whirligigs they show at fairs and say, oh, look, I can power a bunny, an electronic bunny with this thing.
It was completely ridiculous.
It was total graft for people to vote for him.
But the markets don't care because all they do then is they move their money to the places where the government is sending your tax dollars.
And they say, oh, good, you're sending your tax dollars there.
That company is going to thrive for a while until we find out they can't actually produce enough energy for us to live on.
So it's going to be great.
We're going to make a fortune off your money, right?
Instead, you know, I never know why the government should be investing in anything.
We should be investing.
We should be deciding these things.
So it's graph and the government doesn't care.
And it's not going to do anything, of course, for the environment because it's China that's doing most of the polluting at this point.
So the markets don't care.
So the markets are nervous.
And Trump is trying to change the economy to a private economy instead of just the government hiring people, which is what happened before when they kept telling you, oh, the unemployment rate is low.
It's the government was doing all the hiring.
He wants people to manufacture stuff and hire people because they're doing business, right?
And so when they tell you that the market is turmoil, it's news.
I'm not saying it's not news.
But when they panic over it, and especially when they use retirement funds as an example, but they say, oh, you know, your 401k is in trouble.
They're doing that because if you're going to retire, you know, you're toward the end of your life and you don't have a lot of time to wait for the markets to come back.
Even when the markets crashed in 2008, they came roaring back eventually.
But if you only have a couple of years of retirement before you pass along, then you don't want to waste any of that time.
But think about the logic to that, right?
This is what I call teardrop news.
Anytime a politician does something that the elites don't like, they find someone who feels bad and they take a picture of the teardrop running down his face and say, oh, look, in this case, it's retirees.
But what does that mean?
That the president can't do anything without roiling the markets.
I mean, if he roils the markets, he has to pull back, even if he has a vision for what he thinks will transform the country.
I mean, this is what Trump is talking about.
He's talking about his vision.
And I say we elected him.
Let him play out his vision.
It may be a disaster.
If it is, we're going to vote him out.
We're going to vote his party out and they'll come back and trans our kids again and have DEI.
But still, you know, that's not a reason to stop doing what you're doing.
The other argument that I think is absolutely ridiculous is globalization is great.
This is a conservative argument that the leftist media rolls out just to hit at Trump.
Globalization has its benefits.
You get cheaper goods from overseas because we're hiring slaves to build our iPhones so they cost less.
But here's what it hasn't done, right?
It hasn't made China into a good actor.
That was the idea.
We were going to include them in the trading groups and then they were suddenly going to become good citizens.
They're not good citizens.
They're oppressive, genocidal slavers, and they want to destroy us.
And now they're in charge of all the things we need, the medical supplies, the military supplies, the materiel we would need to fight who?
To fight the Chinese when they go into Taiwan.
So in other words, they could cripple us because of globalization, because they skew the markets.
They subsidize their businesses.
They cheat us.
They steal our intellectual property.
So yes, Trump is right.
Trump should say, you know, we want to bring the factories back because even if they're going to be automated, a country is not doing anything.
If it's not producing anything, ultimately, you just become a slave to the people who do.
And if it's the small poor countries that do the production, because that's where they have the slave labor that makes your iPhone cheap, if it's the small, the Chinese can go into those countries and bribe the people there and take those countries over, essentially, take over the government faster than we can go in and convince them that gay pride and abortion is great.
You know, that's harder for us to do than the way they just go in there and they bribe.
We'll build your casino.
You can take all the profits and we run the country.
That's what they do.
And third, protectionism is bad.
This is another one of these right-wing arguments that the left appropriates.
Well, yes, protectionism is bad, but is it protectionism if it's reciprocal?
If what he's saying is they are putting tariffs on us, we can put tariffs on them.
So this panic that they are trying to induce, I think it affects us all.
Jeffrey Goldberg's Campaign Revelations00:15:38
And I'm not going to sit here and tell you, oh, this is a great thing.
Thomas Sowell says if it lasts too long, it won't be a great thing.
And Thomas Sowell is right about everything and knows everything.
So, you know, I want to be careful, but I don't know how long it's going to last because I don't know what Trump is thinking.
But a fair media would give it a chance.
He was elected.
This was part of his campaign.
He talked about it all the time.
He clearly has a vision.
We clearly haven't got the full vision because he's playing his cards close to his vest as always.
But he's taken the chance on his administration.
Let's see how it plays out.
Let's remain calm.
That's what an honest press would basically allow us to do.
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Chapter 2, Imagine Honest Quartz.
Now, the other thing that would happen if we had a fair news media is we would hear a lot more about the things that are working and a lot more about the context of the things that Trump is doing.
You know, context with the news media is really important because I wasn't just joking.
I thought that opening was absolutely hilarious, but I wasn't just joking around about it.
They are basically trying to bury the lies they told.
And I just want to go back and revisit this.
Remember all the reporting about how Joe Biden was fine.
He had dementia.
I want to show you something.
You know, we just had that thing with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic where he listened in on the phone call and it was a blunder.
They shouldn't have invited him in.
He came on and said, well, I had to do the honest thing.
Let me show you exactly how honest Jeffrey Goldberg is.
And I already said that the Trump administration shouldn't have attacked him because he didn't do anything wrong in that particular case.
But he is not an honest journalist and he's not an honest actor in this thing.
Here's just a clip.
And I got this from Newsbusters, one of my favorite sites, the MRC site.
Here he is on a PBS panel.
It's the Washington Week panel with The Atlantic.
It's The Atlantic is this panel.
And remember, we just heard from testimony that PBS, there's no bias there.
There's no bias on PBS.
What are we talking about?
So he's talking to, among other people, Mark Liebowitz from The Atlantic.
And it starts with Politico's Kyle Cheney.
And then it goes over to Goldberg and Liebovich.
And this is them covering up for Biden after Biden flubbed the press conference.
And this was when Robert Hur, the U.S. attorney, released his report saying Biden couldn't be prosecuted for stealing classified material.
Trump could be prosecuted, but Biden couldn't be because he was just an old man with a bad memory.
And the press went insane.
What do you mean?
He's an old man with a bad memory.
Here is what they were talking about from the Atlantic magazine on PBS with starring at the very end our friend Jeffrey Goldberg.
This is CUP 13.
Donald Trump, they're running ads showing Biden tripping every five seconds.
And I think that that creates sort of an aura that sticks, that is sort of stuck with Joe Biden.
John Trump has always been very good at branding his opponents in ways that they can't shake.
And this seems to be one of those examples is to talk about Biden's age and his health.
And every time he coughs, we're going to put that in an ad.
And they don't do that.
There's no counterpart to that aimed at Donald Trump, who is, you know, has a different demeanor than Biden, but certainly has things you could point out about his own age.
Can I just actually just point out, though, that I mean, it's not just making an issue of Biden's age.
It's lying.
It's saying he's senile, saying he's demented, saying he's out of it.
I mean, I think it's important to sort of state for a fact that a lot of these are just mentally, he's quite acute.
So that's Mark Liebovich saying that Trump is lying about Biden's dementia and Jeffrey Goldberg, our old pal from the Atlantic, saying mentally Biden is quite acute.
Mentally, Biden is quite acute.
All right.
Now the election comes over.
It's obviously clear that Biden hasn't even got a clue where he is.
And that costs the election, the Democrats the election.
They come back and this is the same show, Washington Week with The Atlantic on PBS, same show, Jeffrey Goldberg talking to Mark Liepowitz, and suddenly they knew this all along.
It was obvious.
Everybody knew it was Cut 14.
Mark, I want to ask you about Joe Biden.
Remember Joe Biden, president of the United States for another few weeks.
A lot of coverage in the last week or two about, including the Wall Street Journal, his limitations that were showing themselves, his intellectual limitations or cognitive limitations, the age issues, coming out long before this past summer or the debate on June 27th.
You were warning early about Biden's age.
Is there anything surprising coming out to you now, or is this kind of a story about a group of people around Joe Biden covering up for him?
I mean, I'm not really surprised.
I mean, I'm surprised to the degree to which he has completely disappeared.
You were on the story early, Mark, calling Trump a liar when he talked about it.
They were saying he's quite mentally acute.
I mean, you know, they have that meme on social media.
We do not hate the media enough.
I do.
I think I can say I fairly hate them enough.
They are lying scum.
And I think when I called their representative scum, what I call him schmuck face Mick Lille, I thought, is that over the top?
No, I think that's probably being kind.
Now there's this new book, Fight Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, which is disclosing how the president's handlers used fluorescent tape for him to walk on and how they protected him from the press and all that.
But the press knew.
I was making jokes about this for four years.
I was making jokes about his dementia.
Everybody knew except the Atlantic and all of its ilk.
So I put that out there because we can never forget Trump is Donald Trump is the most powerful person on earth politically.
He should be questioned.
He should be, his motives should be examined.
His policy should be examined.
He should be held to account for any mistakes he made.
That's the way.
But you can't do it if you're going to tell us how acute Joe Biden's mentality is because we're not going to believe you anymore.
We need a press.
We need an actual honest press that speaks truth to power.
This is a press that speaks truth, sort of, to Republicans and no truth whatsoever to Democrats.
We do not distrust them enough.
They are really trash.
They are absolute trash.
And it's not just that either.
The FBI knew Hunter Biden's laptop was real when they covered that up and forced the New York Post, who broke the story off Twitter.
The DOJ stopped the IRS from following the money trail to Joe Biden, one of the most corrupt politicians in American history.
The Wuhan leak was obviously covered up in Fauci's role in the research that was done.
All of this stuff was aided and abetted by the media who demonized anyone, conservatives mostly, who called them out on the lie.
I mean, it's always the same thing, the one thing you cannot say on TV, conservatives are right.
They just don't do it.
So that puts into perspective the fact that they are now not reporting on how the border was closed in about 10 minutes.
Trump closed that sucker up.
It took seriously.
I mean, I must have like blinked and the border was shut.
This absolute invasion of people coming over the border, suddenly nothing.
I think it's last month, March, I believe, there were fewer illegals coming in March, around 7,000 than there were in a single day, some single days during the Biden administration.
There were well, well over 100,000, close to 200,000 coming in some months.
Shouldn't a big ongoing investigative story be, why did they do that?
Why did they open the borders?
If it was that, remember Biden saying, I can't, I don't have the power to close it.
What happened?
You know what?
Did Trump take some kind of eat spinach or something and that gave him the power to do it?
Why?
Isn't that a big, big story?
Because the Democrats are going to be running again in four years.
They're going to be running again in the midterms.
Shouldn't we know why they lied to us?
Shouldn't we know why Mayorka's the head of Homeland Security sat in front of Congress and said the border is secure?
That Joe Biden said the border is secure.
Shouldn't we know about that?
Shouldn't that be in the news every day?
Isn't that more important than Trump saying, oh, I'm going to run for a third term?
And we know he's just doing it to tweak the press.
You know, I think this is a big ongoing story.
These judges who are getting in the way of the Trump administration by issuing universal injunctions stopping Trump from what he's doing when what you're supposed to do is somebody comes before you, you can have an injunction against them, but not against an entire program.
These guys like Jeb Boesberg, a D.C. district judge, is trying to shut down the president's agenda altogether.
And Jamie Raskin says, this is the way it works, right?
I mean, he is an activist judge, not an activist judge.
I won't say what he is for the sake of the ladies and for my own dignity, I won't say what I think he is.
But obviously, he's a bad guy.
You know, he's obviously trying to seize the power of the presidency and the executive branch for the judicial branch.
And Jamie Raskin says he's right to shut down.
They're trying to deport these evildoers who were let into the country.
And Jamie Raskin says, no, no, bring the evildoers back.
This is totally unfair because they sent a bad guy, a good guy over when they deported all of the gangsters and sent them to El Salvador prison.
Here's Jamie Raskin defending gangsters and killers and rapists because one guy, they say, was sent over.
Here he is, cut 12.
They say those planes were filled with terrorists.
I think my good friend from Texas said, well, here's one person of many who wasn't a terrorist on that flight or a gangbanger.
His name's Kilmer Garcia.
He's a Marylander married to a U.S. citizen who has a five-year-old son with autism.
And he went to pick up his son, but he was picked up first by ICE.
And then he was shackled and put on that airplane and shipped off to the torturers of El Salvador.
Uh-oh, where did he get that story?
It's not from reading the Atlantic.
Yes, it is.
It's from reading Jeffrey Kohlberg's Atlantic.
An administrative error sends a Maryland father to a Salvadoran prison.
The Trump administration says that it mistakenly deported an immigrant with protected status, but that courts are powerless to order his return.
Now, this is true as far as it goes.
The Trump administration did make an administrative error and put this guy in there.
But why was he teardrop journalism again?
They're going to look at the tear running down this guy's face.
Now, listen, if he were innocent, it would be a serious problem and the president would have to answer for it.
Again, I'm not asking for conservative media.
I'm asking for honest media, but honest media in the context of the way they covered Joe Biden.
You notice that no one has asked Donald Trump what kind of ice cream he likes, that no one has asked the way the New York Times asked Obama, what enchants you about being president?
What enchants you about being president?
That was the New York Times tough coverage of Barack Obama.
The reason this guy got caught up in this is because he was in custody because he was a verified member of MS-13 and a flight risk.
So in other words, he wasn't a member of the Venezuelan gang.
He was a member of a different murderous bunch of gang members, right?
So that's why he got caught up in it.
And it leaves out the question of why can a D.C. district court judge issue an injunction that shuts down a program, a policy that affects the entire country.
The great senator, one of my favorite senators, John Kennedy, who's just hilarious.
I wish I'd like to know who his writers are because I'm afraid it might be him and he doesn't need writers, which would just make me feel bad.
He was questioning Brett, I believe his last name is Shoemate, who is Trump's pick for assistant attorney general at the DOJ.
And here is Kennedy questioning him to a point about these judges and the way D.C. district judges issue universal injunctions stopping to try and stop Trump's policies.
Got five.
What's the statutory basis for a federal judge issuing an order that affects people other than the parties before the court?
I'm not aware of a statutory basis, Senator.
There is no statutory basis, is there?
No, Senator.
What's the United States Supreme Court opinion which interprets the Constitution in a way that allows a federal district court judge to do this?
Can you name me that case?
I'm not aware of one, Senator.
There isn't one, is there?
I'm not aware of one, Senator.
Explain to me how this works.
You have a plaintiff and you have a defendant, and the plaintiff files a lawsuit and goes in front of a federal judge.
Federal judge has certain jurisdiction and persona and subject matter over the parties, the people, the plaintiff and the defendant.
They're the only two people in court.
How can a judge, a federal judge, issue an order that affects everybody else other than those in front of him or her?
How is that possible?
It shouldn't be possible, Senator, but district courts do it all the time.
They do do it all the time, and it should be put to an end.
I hope it goes before the Supreme Court.
And the Supreme Court says it should be put to an end because they're not just doing it in this gang deportations where I believe that people should have due process if they deserve due process, but it's also happening when Trump tries to fire someone in the executive branch.
So in other words, Congress is inventing executive agencies that the executive has no power over.
That's an evasion.
That is a corruption of the separation of powers.
I don't understand why that should be allowed at all.
And so far, the court cases say it can be allowed in very, very small ways.
So this is not just happening here.
I mean, do you remember in Israel?
Everybody's forgotten this.
In Israel, before the murderers of Hamas invaded and raped and killed and started this war that they're now whining about, before that happened, the big controversy was that Netanyahu was trying to reform the courts.
And remember, there were protests and Netanyahu's career was over and it was all going to be terrible.
Well, all he was trying to do, and there, the courts have seized for themselves the right to throw any law out they want just because they don't like it.
And they also have the right to appoint their successors.
So the left is in there in perpetuity.
Netanyahu may have gone too far because he was trying to bargain his way to a proper place, but he was still trying to reform a court system that was trying to overturn democracy.
FBI Calls It House Stealing00:03:19
Then we have, of course, in France, Marine Le Pen, the conservative candidate, who they're all trying to stop, and they've been trying to stop her every way they can because she's anti-immigration, basically.
She's anti-the country being taken over, as Britain has now been.
You know, they claim she embezzled funds, which she didn't.
Her defense was really a good defense.
Basically, they gave her 4.4 million euros, which is about 5 million bucks.
And it was earmarked for assistance helping lawmakers in the European Parliament with their work.
But they also had other work they did for her because the European Parliament hadn't hired her, hired them.
So they said, oh, well, that's, you know, that's embezzlement because the money is fungible.
It was really ridiculous.
And then they said, oh, and now you're guilty and you may have to go to prison, but you cannot run for re-election for five years.
So they basically took her out.
She's the lead candidate.
She would probably win in the next election, but now she's not supposed to unless she can win an appeal very, very quickly because the elections are coming up.
So this is a scam that the left is running across the West in their attempt to take over the West for socialism and for authoritarianism.
It's happening in Spain.
There was the right-wing spokesman for the Vox party there was arrested for hate speech because he read off the names of the people who had committed crimes, the first 50 people who had been arrested on Saturday night in Barcelona.
This is a couple of years ago he did it, but I think they just now arrested him for hate speech and went with their names.
Their names were all Sabar, Omar, Omar, Nassim, Abdel, Kaider, you know, Salas.
You know what I'm saying?
So they arrested him for hate speech in Romania.
A candidate won the election and the judiciary decided the election was rigged by the Russians.
Poor Russians, you know, I think the Russians are bad guys, but I'm beginning to feel sorry for them.
This stuff should be huge.
This should be a huge story.
It's dangerous because ultimately when somebody stands up to the courts, it's going to damage the rule of law.
If Trump says, I'm not obeying this injunction, everybody says, oh, my God, Trump is ruining the rule of law.
But no, these corrupt judges are doing it and they're doing it all across the West for the reason that they're trying to stop nationalism, populism, the right, essentially, from rising.
And I think what we need is an honest media that covers this with the care and with the insight that they cover the color of Donald Trump's tie.
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Why Artists Turn to Crime00:10:28
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Chapter 3, Imagine Honest Art.
Now, as you know, I think the arts are every bit as important as the news and politics and the courts.
I think the arts, people do not realize how much, you know, the poet Percy Shelley said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, meaning that it's stories that fill us with our ideas, with our viewpoint of life.
And if those stories are dishonest, then we get filled with dishonest viewpoints of life.
And for those of you who don't remember or weren't here last week, to show you how much I care about the arts, I'm opening our member block to everybody.
And I asked everybody to read the Tolstoy story, Alyosha the Pot.
And I'll be talking about that and why I think it's a good lesson for conservatives about the arts because I don't think we handle this very well.
There is a show on Netflix called Adolescence.
And it is a huge hit.
I mean, it cracked the all-time list in three weeks, the all-time Netflix popularity in three weeks.
So it's huge.
And it's a British crime drama mini-series created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, directed by Philip Barrentini.
And it's about a 13-year-old schoolboy named Jamie Miller, who is played by Owen Cooper, who's arrested for the murder of a girl in his school.
And each of its four episodes is shot in one continuous take.
And it is incredibly grim, but incredibly powerful.
And the acting in it is unbelievable.
Stephen Graham plays the boy's father.
And it's a stupendous performance.
And a lady I'd never heard of named Aaron Dougherty plays a child psychologist.
Funny, when I looked these people up, because I'd seen Graham before, but I'd never seen Aaron Dougherty.
So I was looking them up.
And it turns out like he's an ex-alcoholic who wants tried to hang himself and she's a lesbian.
And people wonder why I'm so tolerant of eccentrics and crazy people and gay people, because I live in the arts.
And I know that a lot of these people are creative.
A lot of times people who are outsiders, who are damaged in some way, become answer that with their creativity and spurs their creativity.
People like me who are just perfect just have perfect creativity.
But here's the point.
Here's the point about this.
Conservatives looked at this and they thought it's not fair because the boy is white.
And it basically says men are angrier than women and men are more prone to violence than women.
Now, the second part of that is just plain true.
Murder is a male sport.
Men commit murder.
I think they commit something like 95% of murders.
Not only that, but they're the victims of murder.
I know we all like a story of a girl being chased around the room by a guy with a butcher knife, you know, the Jack the Ripper thing.
That's very rare.
Most murder victims are men.
Mostly it is men killing men.
And so conservatives were angry because they mentioned Andrew Tate, who shouldn't be loved by conservatives, but there you go.
And because the guy is white, when most of the knife crime, this is a knife murder that he's accused of, most of the knife murders in England are committed by black people.
And so they're saying this is not fair.
They're trans, they're what?
Race switching.
And they're blaming white males for something that is really only true or mostly true of black males.
Now, first of all, the show itself is not actually about that.
I have to say, I want to be fair.
I think it's a really good show, a really good story.
And it is not about race.
It is about violence.
Men are mostly prone to violence.
Men are more prone to anger.
We're more aggressive than women are.
It's just the facts.
That's just the truth.
And it's about how adults have lost control of the young and this poison is coming in through the internet.
And one of the episodes takes place in a school.
And people who go to these schools, this is a kind of lower middle class school.
People who go to these schools say this is a very accurate depiction of people just completely carried away, you know, out of control.
The children are just completely out of control and the internet has more control over them than their teachers and their parents.
Now, But the thing is, because the story is made by people who are not conservative, they view things through that racial lens.
They're not making, that's not the point of the show, but the only good father in it is a black guy and a cop, and the only person you can really fully think is a good father.
But you do feel a lot, a lot of sympathy for the family of this kid who was arrested.
You feel a lot of sympathy for them.
And I don't think that they were trying to be anti-white or anti-male.
I think they were trying to tell a story, but they're telling it from their point of view.
Why?
Because we, conservatives, are not making stories.
Our billionaires are not contributing to stories.
Our billionaires are not giving money to people.
Our thinkers are not giving awards to artists.
Our think tanks don't deal with the arts except as an ancillary consideration.
We're not doing it.
So they're doing it.
So boo-hoo.
You know, that's too bad because this is a really good show.
But here's the thing I want to show you.
This is the thing that it made my throat close.
All right.
Because this thing is done in one shot, each show is just one long shot.
I don't know if they cut it.
They probably did, but still, it's all like very contained.
It's all an unbroken flow of action.
There are scenes in it that are just a stationary camera on an actor.
And there was one scene in it that made my head explode because I wanted to shake every aspiring artist on the right and just take their heads and force it into the television and say, look at this.
Here's what it is.
The father who loves his son.
His son is a little sensitive.
He's not, you know, doesn't fit in with the rest of the working class kids, you know, and but the father loves and wants to protect his son.
And he is there when they arrest him and he's trying to be protective of him.
And the police say we have to strip search your 13 year old son.
And the father just tries everything he can to stop them.
He begs them, please, you know, this is a 13-year-old boy.
How would you feel if we and they won't do it?
His lawyer, the lawyer defending the boy, says we can't stop them.
They have the right to do this.
And they take one shot and the scene must go on for five, six minutes.
It's all the father's face, and you just hear the kid being strip searched off stage.
So it's just a camera on a man's face.
I'll show you a little bit of it.
And if you're listening, you can hear the dialogue that he is hearing, but you can't watch his incredible performance on his face.
Cut seven.
So, Jama, it's just okay to pop your clothes off, Farmer.
So I need to observe, and then PC Grogan's just going to observe me.
All right.
Just want to pop your clothes on the side there, yeah.
If you want to turn to face me, just lift your arms up for me.
There we are.
So this scene goes on and on, and it's excruciating.
And this guy's, it's just his face, and he's not an emotive guy.
He's not hamming it up, but you are in hell with him.
And I looked at this and I thought, who on the right, besides me, would do a scene with one camera and one face.
It costs nothing.
I mean, you got to pay for the actor because he's a great actor and there's no mate.
You can't make great actors and you can't do it.
Just because you think you're an actor does not make you a guy like that.
That's a trained, terrific British actor doing what he does.
You can't replace that with some guy who walks in and you think, well, we'll put him in it because he's my pal.
You cannot do that.
But it doesn't have to cost anything.
And if we could let go of our childish superheroes, Star Wars, all these franchises that have reduced adult males to 25-year-olds or frozen them.
I shouldn't say that.
It's reduced them to 15-year-olds.
If you are an adult male arguing about Spider-Man or having a in-depth conversation about Hans Solo, you have been infantilized by a media that wants you infantilized because that's how they can control you.
This is adult entertainment made.
And I don't know what this costs because I don't know what the costs of the actors are, but it doesn't cost much to train.
You could do that with a Radio Shack camera and a great actor.
I mean, the guy's a great actor.
We need the arts, just like we need good reporters who question Donald Trump the same as they question Joe Biden, but they have to question both at the time, not lie about it later.
Just like we, I want there to be left-wing artists.
I want to see what their vision is, and I want to see right-wing artists.
And I want to see people who don't have any politics.
I want everybody to be included instead of blacklisted.
Blacklisting, the arts matter.
We want everybody involved.
I want all the visions that can be in the arts involved.
But you can't do it if you don't create something new.
If you're just constantly trying like Christian Rock to try and do what the left has done, which in a lot of cases is infantile, you're not going to get anywhere.
And if you complain every time a Christian or a conservative includes sex, includes cursing, includes the things that life is made of, you will get what you deserve, which is Pablo and crap.
And so we are all, we're the audience.
The Arts Unite Us00:02:08
You know, it's not just for makers.
We're the audience.
These guys have to please us to make the money they did.
This show was one of the most popular shows on Netflix ever.
So they did please the audience.
But you got to be creative and you got to get real artists doing real art at low prices.
You don't have to pay a lot of money and do it creatively.
And then, then you'll start to have a voice in the culture, whether they try to stop you or not.
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Final chapter, Imagine True Love.
Violent Movement Conflicts00:08:39
Bill Burr used to be one of my favorite comedians.
He did this anger control, you know, loss of control with anger comedy.
And he used to kill me.
But he has married a left-winger.
I think she's a black woman, but more importantly, she's a left-winger.
And a lot of people will tell you that guys who marry left-wingers ultimately become left-wingers.
And he has now become a walking, talking bore.
He is just a boring, woke guy whose anger is just anger.
And, you know, I think, you know, you have to learn.
Listen, I love my wife, but you have to learn when not to listen to your wife.
So he says in this cut, he's talking about the movie Snow White.
He keeps calling it Cinderella, but he just said this.
He obviously means Snow White.
So replace Cinderella with Snow White.
Here's Bill Burr talking about the recent live action Snow White Cut 10.
My people, Whitey, we're all upset.
There's enough of us to get it going trending anyway.
We're upset about the new Cinderella movie.
The actress playing Cinderella is in white.
So he goes on and on with this, you know, making fun of white people, as he says, for complaining about this.
So the idea here is that the left, and that's who Disney is, they are the social left, can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to push leftist propaganda on the U.S.
But if we say, no, we don't like that, we're the ones who are obsessed with this.
We're the ones who are obsessed.
I didn't spend any money on it.
I didn't even spend the money to go see it.
So like, who's the fool?
It's not me.
It's not the people complaining about this.
It is them.
And it has an effect.
This idea that Disney princess does not need a prince, that love is not important.
They said this, love is not important.
It's power that is important is having and has had an effect on two generations of women.
This is why I'm fighting so hard for Gen Z to wake up to this stuff, because Gen Z has a chance to change it.
So many people, remember I was saying that when the left does these things, it affects you, even if you know it's wrong.
And the thing that we have on the right is we have these people who are so angry about feminism that they've turned to guys like Andrew Tate who treat women like garbage instead of saying, no, we want to honor women for their femininity, and we want women to be feminine and fulfill the role of femininity, which is, I'm sorry, it's having babies and bringing them and nurturing them and bringing them to life.
I understand that, listen, I want people to be free.
I want people to choose these things.
That's why I think it should be done through the culture.
We should sell these things through the culture so people at least have a chance to make a real choice instead of just feeling that they're nothing if they actually make a home for people and nurture children and bring a new generation into the world.
But it has an effect.
You know, there's an article in the Wall Street Journal, I think it was Thursday, fed up with situationships.
That's another one of these internet phrases.
Gen Z is ready to commit.
So he says the vague relationships that rule the dating scene are hard to navigate, even well after they end, and Zoomers have had enough.
And so I have Rachel Green, a 24-year-old, says, I've just come out of a six-month situationship, which is basically this guy is, she's having a relationship with this guy.
She's having an affair with this guy.
And then whenever he wants to walk away, he does.
And she says there's a feeling of constant rejection throughout the situationship because one person does not want to fully commit.
Otherwise, it would become a relationship, she says.
But the adrenaline and sense of reward when it's going well can be addictive.
In other words, men can play off women's desire to be loved and protected and then dump them because they're not married and they're not having children.
How could anyone have ever known?
Well, guess what?
We knew this for thousands and thousands of years of human development.
We understood that women were vulnerable.
I've said this before and the left came after me for it.
That's that for the ex-site Media Matters.
I don't even know if it still exists, but they were attacking me for this.
I said, societies are largely organizations that control the distribution of women.
If you're a free society, it's one woman to one guy, right?
If you're not a free society, then a guy can have as many women as he wants because the women are going to be treated like garbage.
That's true.
Marriage is the first and foremost structure of every society.
That is why every myth starts with an Adam and an Eve, and they come together to become one flesh.
That is why every mythology begins with the male in the sky and the woman in the earth.
I mean, this is just part of the human construct is what are we going to do about the relationships between women that create life.
So these movies, this culture that they've created is a culture of lies, and it is continued throughout.
Everything that has to do with sex has become a lie.
The police report on the Nashville Covenant school shooting, remember that transgender person who went in and killed all these people because she was a she, I think, who wanted to be a male, who didn't like the Christian teaching.
She had attended the school and didn't like the Christian teaching.
So the police finally, finally released this that they've had forever.
Steve Crowder, to his credit, got a scoop on this and got notes out of her manifesto.
But now they're saying, yeah, she didn't have a manifesto and they play it all down.
They say regarding why she selected the covenant, many have speculated the shooter selected this location for racial, religious, or economic motives.
It is certainly true.
She raged over these topics at times in her writings, but none of those motives impacted her decision to attack the covenant.
BS.
Yes, they did.
You know, this is a violent.
Transgenderism is a violent movement.
Matt Walsh was in California testifying about a proposed law to ban men from women's sports.
And it always shocks me when Matt Walsh says something that has incredible moral clarity because, I mean, look at the guy.
I mean, who would believe it, right?
But he got this just right.
He said something.
I really appreciated what he was saying.
And I've said before, I think Walsh does God's work.
And who knows why God picks the people he does?
It's just amazing.
But here he is testifying on this law, Cut 15.
Today, I'm not going to talk about fairness, although it's certainly true that allowing men to compete in women's sports is deeply unfair.
And I'm not going to talk about safety, although it's certainly true that allowing men into female sports teams and into their bathrooms is incredibly unsafe.
I'll let others highlight those important points.
I want to talk about something even more important and even more basic.
It's the most basic thing of all.
It's truth.
You must keep men out of women's sports and out of their facilities for the simple reason that they are men.
Men are not women.
A man who claims he is a woman is still not a woman.
So why shouldn't men play in women's sports?
Because they aren't women.
It isn't true.
We should not allow men into women's sports for the same reason we shouldn't go around claiming that two plus two equals seven.
It's just not true.
It is a lie.
Now, the trans movement is an inherently violent movement.
If you don't think so, ask Matt why he has 24-7 security.
Leftism is an inherently violent movement.
If you don't think so, ask people who own Teslas.
And the reason, and feminism is an inherently violent movement, just ask anybody who stands up against it.
Why?
Because it's lies.
It is lies.
It is based on lies.
What Walsh is saying is exactly right.
It's exactly the reason we reject it.
It's not because I want any control over how people live their lives.
I just don't want people to ruin their lives.
And I don't want anybody to tell me what I'm seeing when I look at reality.
Women's bodies make it wise for them to arrange their lives differently for men.
You know, I was just talking to a very, very bright woman who I like extremely.
I won't name her because she didn't say, I didn't ask her, but she, in her spare time, she's a matchmaker.
And she said, the problem is, is that men are taught, women are taught to take care of their careers.
Then they age out of the dating pool.
And the men who are ready to get married at, say, 30, are marrying younger women who are ready to have kids and who don't care about their careers.
Women are made to have children first and later.
And while they're raising children, as the children can be let free, you know, they have careers, they build careers, they have another life.
They've been lied to.
And I've been saying this again and again.
biggest story that nobody is covering is that we're dying.
People are dying.
We are not replacing ourselves.
And when this happens, it is a disaster.
You know, there's no such thing as, well, there's no such thing as transgenderism.
There's no such thing also as overpopulation.
You can't be overpopulated.
We need these people.
And we need women and men to return to marriage and to making babies because the future is going to belong to the people who do that.
And we want the future to look like the best of us.
So we should return to those things.
Winning with Heart and Faith00:15:10
And if we do return to them, then, then we will truly be able to say.
We're going to win so much.
We're going to win at every level.
We're going to win economically.
We're going to win with the economy.
We're going to win with military.
We're going to win with health care and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
We're going to win so much.
You may even get tired of winning.
Yay!
You'll say, please, please, it's too much winning.
We can't take it anymore.
I feel pretty.
Oh, so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and gay.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
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The media wants you to believe the Trump administration is faltering, Elon Musk is a crook, and the world is spiraling into chaos.
But here's the truth: we're winning.
The left's lies are unraveling.
Their narrative is crumbling.
And that's why the Daily Wire is here to cut through the noise and bring you the facts others won't.
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The Daily Wire is where the real story lives.
So go to dailywire.com/slash subscribe and join the fight.
All right, Clavin, clapbacks.
Then one true one will follow you forever.
No idea.
Clavinclapbacks at dailywire.com.
Clavin with a K, clapbacks with a K. Ask us anything you want.
We will do our best to answer you.
And let me remind you again that the member block today is going to be open to all.
And we're going to be discussing this short story, Alyosha the Pot.
Adam Wolf, I'm not sure you can play the Trump happiness montage anymore.
It feels like the sugar high of executive orders in the first few weeks of the administration has worn off and been replaced by the grinding gears of the bureaucracy.
Are we actually winning, or are we just seeing that after having knocked over the first wall that was the rigged media, we are faced with a taller wall that is the rigged judicial system?
That is true conservative giving up.
Conservatives love to give up.
It can't be done.
It's done.
We're finished.
I'm done.
America is done.
We're finished.
Did you expect it not to be a fight?
Do you expect it ever to not be a fight?
It's always a fight.
Freedom is always one generation away from being extinguished.
We always have to fight.
They were not going to give up.
I didn't think they were going to give up, and we could lose.
But I'll tell you something: you can lose a fight, but you can't win a surrender.
So this is the next phase of the fight.
You're absolutely right.
And, you know, it's worrying and it's scary.
And don't be afraid.
From Nathan, Dear Andrew, you have long been my favorite member, favorite member of the Daily Wire family.
Obviously, I miss your daily doses of Claven, but I'm thankful for the creative work that the change allowed you to produce.
As a longtime viewer, I wonder if your thinking on sex scenes and movies has shifted over the years.
In the early days of the Daily Wire, you drew distinctions between gratuitous and purpose of nudity in films.
Are such scenes ever truly needed?
Thanks, Nathan.
As I've said repeatedly, even back then, I think that almost all nude scenes are exploitative.
There's a perfectly valid question of whether a nude scene in a movie is less valid than painting a nude because an actress actually has to take off her clothes.
And I think that that is, I've never, you know, I actually have to be honest, I know this sounds, makes me sound incredibly old, but I've never understood why an actress has to be able to take off her shirt to be an actress.
I mean, as Liv Ullman, the great Swedish actress, once said, my breasts aren't actors.
And I think that, you know, I don't see why that should be true.
I have seen nude scenes that I would have put in a movie.
That's all I can say to you.
I think that they were never exploitative.
They were never sex scenes.
They were just a moment that told us something about the human body that I thought was important in that work.
But it wouldn't bother me.
I mean, look, for years, they made films where nobody took off anything and they were great and they were sexy.
And I talked about that show Disclaimer that was on, where two people sat fully dressed at a table and they had this fantastically sexy conversation.
And then they went and had this pornographic sex scene.
And the conversation was better, more exciting, and more interesting and more human than the sex scene.
The thing about sex scenes that is a problem is that's not what sex is like.
Sex is an internal experience.
Obviously, it's an external experience, but when you're just looking at it, all you can think about is the nudity and the pornographic thrill of it.
And you don't really get at the experience of what it is like to make love to somebody.
And that's why Hitchcock said he didn't like them and he didn't like to show people praying either, although he did both eventually.
But he didn't like to show people praying either because that too is an internal experience and showing a guy kneeling with his hands doesn't really show you anything.
All right.
We are going to go to member block promo and allow everybody in to talk about this Tolstoy story.
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All right.
So I asked you to read Alyosha the Pot.
Now, what I say here will work even if you didn't read it, although I think it'll obviously be a deeper, richer experience if you did read it.
I will be describing the plot of the story, so there will be spoilers, but it's a three-page story.
And in fact, I asked, I picked this story for three reasons, three specific reasons.
But one of the reasons was it was so short.
Instead of doing these things that we do too much of, where somebody comes on and talks about David Copperfield, but you've never read David Copperfield and you're never going to read David Copperfield because it's 800 pages and you're not the kind of person who reads 800-page books.
I think this is something short that at least introduces you to some of the reasons why art is so important and some of the reasons, the ways that you can judge good art from bad art and what it's supposed to do.
Because the important thing about art, I will say up front, is that it is not a one-way street.
It is not the artist telling you something.
It is you engaging emotionally with what the artist is doing.
And there are reasons to do that and reasons not to do it.
So Alyosha the Pot is about a child who lives in a village in Russia, obviously.
It's a late story by Tolstoy, one of the greatest writers who ever lived, just a fantastically great writer.
And his late stories are a little different than his early stories.
He had a conversion experience, became a kind of weird, radical Christian.
And I don't think this was published until after his death.
But anyway, it's a story about this boy.
And he becomes a teenager.
He's a merchant's son.
And he's the kind of boy who does everything he's asked to do.
His father tells him what to do.
He does it.
He never complains.
He always seems happy.
He basically, the merchant then takes the boy and basically rents him out to another family.
I'm sorry, the father sends him to a merchant's family, sends him to a merchant's family, and then he just works for these people and they can sell him to do anything they want and he will do it.
And occasionally he gets some money and he'll go out and buy a uniform and that makes him happy and he's always happy.
But most of his money goes to his father.
So his father wants him to keep working.
And the boy doesn't speak.
He's kind of a simpleton.
He prays with his hands, Tolstoy says.
He crosses himself.
And after a while, he begins to discover that there is a relationship other than the relationship of people telling him what to do and him doing it, which is that somebody falls in love with him.
The cook, Ustinia, I think her name is, falls in love with her and he falls in love with her.
And he eventually asks her to marry him.
But the merchant doesn't want to lose this hard worker.
And so he gets the father to come and tell him, No, you are forbidden to marry this girl.
And because he is a boy who always does what he's told, he doesn't marry the girl.
And so at one point he says, well, I couldn't do it because I had to do what my father told me.
And then he bursts into tears.
So it's clear that he is very, very hurt by this, but he fully believes that he's just supposed to do whatever his father tells him.
Later during Lent, Alyosha is clearing snow from a roof and he falls off and he gets a fatal injury.
And in a few days, he dies, but he dies very calmly.
Then he says, Well, it really worked out well for me to obey whatever my father, whatever he told me to do.
So maybe when I get to heaven, that it'll just continue to work out well for me.
And then there's a line that is variously translated in different ways.
But it says he lay in wonderment, then stretched himself and died, but he has a reaction of surprise and then he dies.
It is a spectacularly great story.
And like I said, it's three pages long.
But it's a very complex story because what it is is watching this boy get abused, watching him be stripped of the chance at love.
And he's just a sweetheart.
He just does anything he's told and he's a simpleton.
And it never occurs to him that he should rebel.
Not once does it occur to him that he should rebel.
So I picked it for three reasons.
One is because it's only three pages long and I thought maybe you would read it before I was talking about it, which would be helpful.
And the other is it's by Tolstoy, one of the truly greatest writers who ever lived on earth, ever walked the planet.
And three is because it is featured in a book by a living writer who's quite good named George Sanders.
He wrote a book called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which is he's been, it's his lessons.
He's been teaching Russian literature for 20 years at Syracuse University.
And this is his book about Olyosha, about various Russian stories.
He prints the story and then he talks about it and he talks about Alyosha the Pot.
And I thought he was entirely wrong about the story.
So I thought that was interesting because he's a smart man.
He obviously knows Russian literature.
And I just think he got it wrong.
And he says this, I'm just reading from this book.
He says, for many years, I taught the story this way.
What surprises Ilyosha in his last moment is the sudden realization that he has lived too submissively.
He should have stood up for himself and for Eustinia.
Tolstoy doesn't say this exactly, but the story is a masterpiece of understatement.
But then he says, these days I'm not so sure.
It's possible, a student says to him, it's possible that Tolstoy intended us to read the story as simple praise of Olyosha, who even in the face of death and over the course of his whole life enacted radical Christian humility.
A sad story on the human level, but ultimately a story of the triumph of obedience and faith.
Now, I would like to say that I have had a different reading of it because I approach work differently.
And the way I approach art is very much like the way Tolstoy says we should approach art.
He wrote a book called What is Art?
It was a very small book, but a very brilliant, insightful book, where he says the purpose of art is the transmission of emotion from the artist to the receiver, right?
He has a vision, he has an emotion, and he transmits it to another person.
He says, art begins when a man, with the purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.
And he goes on to say that Christian feelings, because he was a devout Christian, are infinitely new and varied, only not in the sense some people imagine.
Not that they can be evoked by the depiction of Christ in the gospel episodes or by repeating in new forms the Christian truths of unity, brotherhood, equality, and love, but in that all the oldest, commonest, most hackneyed phenomena of life evoke the newest, most unexpected, and touching emotions as soon as a man regards them from the Christian point of view.
In other words, Christianity transforms our life into something other than it would be.
That's his, in what is art?
That's what he says.
Now, I would go a bit further in what I think art is.
I think art is the transmission of a vision emotionally from one person to another.
I live life.
I walk down the street.
I have an inner experience of walking down the street.
It is my inner experience, but because we're all human beings, I believe that I can transfer that experience to you and you will see that experience, but from a slightly different point of view, because it'll be my point of view instead of yours.
So it's an experience that you're having.
When you go to a movie, when you read a novel, when somebody tells you a story when you listen to music, you are having an experience that broadens your mind.
It allows me into your heart.
It allows Tolstoy into your heart.
It allows Shakespeare into your heart.
And that makes your heart bigger and includes a bigger, more complex view of life so that when you have other experiences, they are informed by that experience.
And you may remember in Lord of the Rings when Sam Gamgee, is that his name?
Surrendering to a Higher Power00:04:19
They were at the moment of despair.
He says, oh, this is what the great stories are about, or about how to deal with these moments of despair.
So when you read Eliosha the Pot, it's not about good or bad.
about what you're feeling.
And I think everybody feels that this kid is being abused.
Everybody wishes he would stand up.
When the father comes and says you can't get married, everybody wishes Elyosha the Pot would say, you know, I'm going to marry this girl.
I defy you.
I'm tired of being pushed around.
But he doesn't.
And when he doesn't, we have a bad feeling about that.
But at the same time, we have that feeling, we understand that this is a Christian.
This is what.
How a Christian is supposed to surrender himself to God.
And when God tells you to do something, like, for instance, take up a cross or die as a saint, you are supposed to surrender and do it.
When God tells you not to let money get in the way of telling the truth, you are going to suffer for that.
When people say to me, oh, you know, you got only seven likes on that because I told the truth and people didn't like it.
You only got seven likes on that thing.
I understand.
I get it.
I get it.
I'm operating on another level, hopefully, and surrendering to something higher than how I know many people don't believe there is anything higher than how many likes you get on social media, but I'm surrendering to something higher.
So what happens is, in the story, is that Elyosha brings that heavenly submission to his father, his father, who is supposed to represent God on earth, but he doesn't because this is earth and his father is corrupt.
This is the story that you are experiencing.
And you are experiencing the frustration of surrendering to authorities and to your father and to people who are telling you what to do who are not worthy of that surrender that belongs only to God.
Is Elyosha making a mistake?
No, I don't think he is.
I think his father is making a mistake.
I think his father is corrupt.
I think the people who crucify Christ are corrupt and yet he surrenders to them, even though he has the power to shout them down.
Tolstoy is telling you something about Christianity.
He's telling you it will not do the things that you naturally want in life.
It won't make you rich.
It won't make you popular.
It won't make you famous.
And yet, and yet, when you prepare your soul and it goes to the eternal world, it will be the right thing to do.
So you are preparing your soul for a life other than this one.
Now, the question is, how do you react to that?
What do you make of it?
What are you going to choose to do?
Not just in theory, but all the time.
How are you going to live your life the next time you have to choose between the big payoff and the fact that if you do the right thing, people are going to excoriate you.
They're going to hate you.
They're not going to give you the money that you want.
You're not going to get the popularity, the likes that you want.
You're not going to get the girl you want.
What are you going to do?
I don't have an answer.
Only you have that answer.
But now you've been through that experience before and you bring the wisdom of this piece to that experience.
And this is why, this is why I don't like Christian art because Christians always win in Christian art, modern Christian art.
In old Christian art, they get burned alive and skinned alive and killed.
So it's very, very different.
And they're telling you something much more serious, something that I think Tolstoy is telling you in Elyosha the Pot.
It is not there for you to approve of or disapprove of.
It is for them, you to receive the feelings that he's transmitting to you and have that now experience in your soul when you make your next decision.
And I think that that is what conservatives get wrong about art.
They want it to tell them conservative lessons.
They want them to tell them little bromides that they can bring to their friends and tell them what the truth of the world is.
They don't want to hear anything leftist, even though leftists have an experience of life too that should be experienced.
And so that is, I think, the way we should deal with art and the way the story teaches us to deal with art.
And it's very, very hard to do.
I got to stop there, which means you will now be plunged.
Talk about sacrifice and sainthood and martyrdom.
You will now be plunged into the clavenless week.
The pictures of saints being skinned alive doesn't even compare to what you're going to go through.
You probably won't make it through.
But if you do, I'll be back next Friday with the Andrew Clavin Show.