Ep. 1227 - Democrats for National Suicide critiques America’s cultural and religious decline, from Pope Francis’s perceived failures (94% Muslim "limousine driver" satire aside) to his weak stance on China’s Christian oppression and migration policies. It ties falling birth rates—3.6M in 2024, fertility at 1.63—to leftist feminism undermining motherhood while ignoring parental rights, like Maryland County’s LGBTQ book mandates. Trump’s deportation efforts contrast with Democratic priorities, such as Kilmar Obrego Garcia’s MS-13 crimes, and radical judges blocking them. The episode urges men to reclaim moral leadership amid societal "self-destruction," previewing Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind next—where beauty reveals deeper truths. [Automatically generated summary]
I believe that America's core ideals are very much linked to its Christian faith.
So, since it's Easter season, I thought this would be a good time to take a closer look at the state of our national religious life and then weep quietly and say it was a great country while it lasted.
According to a Pew poll, 62% of Americans identify as Christian.
This is a slight drop from the 1697 poll, which showed 99.9% of Americans were Christian, with one heretic hiding in the woods, hoping some guy with a buckle on his hat wouldn't blow his head off with a blunderbuss.
But today's religious landscape looks different depending on political affiliation.
On the political left, 43% of those who identify as progressives say they have abandoned Christianity and become Episcopalians.
14% of progressives say they have renounced the corrupt beliefs of colonizing white men, have returned to the innocent and beautiful natural religion of indigenous peoples, and were preparing to sacrifice a virgin to the volcano god until they realized that by the time they were sure she was a virgin, she wasn't a virgin anymore, and if they threw her into a volcano, there'd be no one left who knew how to make breakfast.
Other progressives say they are sick of the sort of restrictive religions that ruined the 1950s by making everything so great.
Instead, they have turned to more modern faiths with practices that reflect the moral progress of mankind.
These practices include yogic meditation, ritual mindfulness, and tantric sex, followed by butchering any unborn babies conceived during tantric sex, then celebrating the mass slaughter by dancing around a pole in a wild, blood-drenched frenzy,
getting a full body tattoo, featuring goat-headed demigods with flaming eyes, then running naked through a forest while grunting inarticulately and listening to music that's mostly composed of drum beats and shrieking because classic rock is just the best.
Among Christians on the extreme right, 17% say they believe in Christ so hard they'll kill anyone who disagrees with them.
14% say their faith is so strong they might even be willing to go to church as long as porn is provided, and 8% say their worship mostly involves posting unspeakably cruel remarks on social media to people who aren't as Christly as they are.
Among more traditional conservatives, 4% of Christians say they have abandoned their own egos for Christ's sake and have thus elevated their souls into a state of suffering yet serene agape love and are now hiding in the woods hoping some guy with a buckle on his hat won't blow their heads off with a blunderbuss.
The remaining 57% of right-wing Christians spend most of their time quietly murmuring, oh God, I'm a miserable sinner.
Please have mercy on me and don't send me to hell or California.
As far as other American religions go, 94% of Muslims identify as limousine drivers, 16% of Christian women pretend they're Buddhists, and 82% of Jews control 90% of everything except which parts of Ivy League campuses they're allowed to walk on without some professor pointing at them and making that horrible insect noise like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Approximately 29% of Americans have no religion whatsoever, and they say that makes life much easier because they're able to rotate their heads 360 degrees and spider walk across the ceiling, which comes in very handy when they're trying to escape from the exorcist.
Around the world, the religious landscape is much more varied.
For instance, in Great Britain, while 47% of the people identify as Christian, 70% of them say that Islam is also absolutely great.
Totally fine, really wonderful, and not a problem at all.
No, really, it's fantastic.
They're not just saying that because they'd be arrested for telling the truth.
In France, 49% of the population used to be excited by religion because they thought they belonged to a dark, obscure mystery cult with elaborate secret rituals until they found out they were actually just Catholics.
And in China, 23% of high-ranking communists identify their kidneys as Uyghur.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
All right, the vast right-wing conspiracy known as Klavanon continues.
If you have not yet pre-ordered The Kingdom of Cain, Finding God in the Literature of Darkness, please go on and pre-order it now.
It really helps.
The publishers love to see those pre-orders come in.
Roman Catholic Reflections00:15:17
It helps us.
Maybe we can push this onto a bestseller list, which would, I think, make the heavens open.
It would be a wonderful, wonderful thing.
I was on with Glenn Beck yesterday and talking to him about the book.
I'm really fond of Glenn, and you always get a beck bump.
And it really did send the book up on the Amazon list.
And you can do that too if you'll go on and pre-order your copy today.
At the end of the show, around the Clavin clapback period, I'll be announcing a new short work.
We're going to do this again like we did with the Tolstoy story.
And I'll tell you about a short work that you can read if you'd like to be prepared for talking about this.
This is going to be in the member block, and I got to restrict it to members because this is, I'm talking on Daily Wire's air, and I can't sell their air for them.
They have to do it themselves, and that's the member block for members.
So please become a member.
That would be a great thing to do.
Also, leave a comment.
If you can come up with a comment that just degrades us all and actually makes us look like that terrible, hateful, snarling people the left think we are, please send it in because that's who we are here.
Today's comment is from Great White Cat.
It says, I wish you would still play that Trump-winning montage.
I kind of miss it since you started refusing to play it.
I understand.
You know, nobody likes change, but when a joke is played out, I mean, I just want to keep the show fresh.
And when a joke is played out, we just let it go.
It is time to let it go.
All right, let's get to today's episode, which is Democrats for National Suicide.
I want to start the show by reading you a brief passage from Thomas Jefferson.
Some of you may remember him.
He founded your country or helped found your country.
When he was president in 1803, his ambassadors arranged the famous Louisiana Purchase, which is a huge piece of land right in the center of the continent, very important to our taking over the continent, to our unifying the continent as the United States of America.
But the Constitution didn't give the federal government the power to acquire foreign territory.
This is back in the days when we still had what were called enumerated powers.
The Constitution granted certain powers to the federal government.
And if they weren't granted in the Constitution, the federal government did not have that power, right?
That's why Madison at first didn't want a First Amendment because he said they don't have the, we didn't give them the power to control speech, so they don't have that power.
And everyone was like, Jimmy, Jimmy, take my word for it.
They're going to seize the power if we don't stop them.
And those people were right.
So the idea was the Constitution only gave the government the power that was specifically stated in the Constitution and no other.
But Jefferson overcame his doubts and he accepted the foreign, he said that the government didn't have the power to take foreign land, but he overrode those doubts.
And this is what he said.
He said, a strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest.
The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation.
To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law would be to lose the law itself with life, liberty, property, and all those who are enjoying them with us, thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means, right?
Got to obey the law, but sometimes you've got to obey the higher law of self-preservation.
This is why the Roman Republic fell in a lot of ways because people were more free under Augustus, as Romans.
They were more free under Augustus than they had been under the late stage republic, which had basically shut down.
But it also tells us something else.
Christianity does not scale.
There's a reason that Jesus said, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar and unto God the things that are God's, because he was here to save you.
He was not here to change the world.
He never said the world was going to get any better.
Although I think if more people allowed him to save them, the world would get better.
But he didn't say that.
He said, the world will be the world.
In the world, you're going to have trouble.
The poor will be always with you.
He was trying to save you.
So you have the right and maybe even the responsibility sometimes to sacrifice yourself to speak the truth, to do what's right.
But you don't have the right to sacrifice somebody else to do what's right.
You have an obligation to give charity to the poor, mostly to teach yourself to let go of the things of this world, but you don't have the right to take somebody else's money and give it to the poor.
That's called stealing, right?
That's something the Ten Commandments say you shouldn't do.
So today I want to take a look at a lot of ways leftism, whose purpose is the destruction of Western freedom in the name of utopian government from on high.
That's the idea.
They take over.
None of that voting stuff because they will take over and do it for you.
They have overturned this simple piece of wisdom and pointed this country and many other institutions toward death.
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Chapter one, the Pope is dead.
Obviously, Pope Francis passed away.
And I want to say up front that I don't think non-Roman Catholics have a right to pass judgment on the Pope as a Roman Catholic.
I mean, how do I know whether he was good for Roman Catholicism or not?
I have no way of judging what it means.
You know, when they started to downplay and then get rid of the Latin Mass, I didn't like it.
I think the Latin Mass is beautiful.
But Roman Catholicism is not a movie for me to review.
It's a system.
The church is supposed to be a vehicle for passing on Christian wisdom and faith.
And since I choose to find that vehicle in Anglican Catholicism, I can't say whether the Roman Catholic Church is better or worse without the Latin Mass.
I have my opinions, but my opinions don't count.
But, but, so I say that, I just want to make it clear that I'm not criticizing or appraising the Pope for what he was as the Pope, because that's not my business, really.
But he's also a major public figure with power, and I want to talk about him that way and how I saw him from a point of view as a person and an American and a believing Christian and an Anglican Catholic who deeply respects Roman Catholic theology and shares most of it, but is not a member of his church.
So from my non-Roman Catholic position, I have to tell you, I lived through two of the greatest popes of all time, St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
These were incredible giants.
The fact that they were even in the Vatican at the same moment is like the fact that Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin were in the same room and George Washington were in the same room during the founding.
Just clearly an act of God.
John Paul II, I can remember in 1979, June of 1979, he was the first Polish pope.
He made a trip to Warsaw and Poland.
The Soviets who were then at the communists had a lockdown of power over the Poles and they didn't want this guy to show up and they tried to play it down and they were giving classes in school about how he was Catholicism was the enemy, God was the enemy.
They upped security to try and keep the crowd small.
Nothing worked.
Over a million people showed up in the streets chanting.
And if you can see this on YouTube, it'll break your heart.
It just is so touching.
They're chanting, we want God.
There they are under Soviet slavery, under atheist slavery.
They're chanting, we want God.
And you can watch the faces of the security guards thinking, uh-uh, I think we're in trouble.
So he was just a massive, massive hero of his time.
Pope Benedict XVI, great genius.
I've read many, many of his books.
He's deepened my understanding of my faith and of theology.
His resignation was shocking.
It made me wonder just how corrupt the church bureaucracy might be that he had to step down.
I don't really know the full answer of that.
But the experience of these two popes shaped my sense of what a pope should be as a non-Roman Catholic.
And to me, you know, Pope Francis seemed to be lacking in some of those abilities.
The New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan is one of, I think it's 10 American cardinals who participate in the conclave, which, as you know from Hollywood, Hollywood teaches us, that's where cardinals get together to select a pope who has both kinds of genitals.
I saw that in the movie, so I assume that must be true.
No, seriously, they vote, they get together, they vote on a pope, and if the vote doesn't bring a new pope, they send up black smoke, I think, through the chimney.
And then if they do select a pope, they send up this.
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.
Zip-ba-do-do-do-da, zip-ba-dee-yay, my, oh, my, what a wonderful day.
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.
We're gonna wait more.
All right, that's just a little Catholic lore for those of them people who aren't familiar with church customs.
But here's, let's go back to Cardinal Dolan.
Here's what he said he's looking for in a new pope, Cut Four.
When you get to be 75 like I am, you kind of got in your memory bank past popes, and you kind of are always dreaming of a blend of them.
I'd love to see somebody with the vigor and the conviction and the fortitude of John Paul.
I'd love to see somebody with the intellectual wattage of a Pope Benedict.
I'd love to see somebody with the heart of a Pope Francis.
How we can blend them all.
We're not in some laboratory doing genetic mutations here.
But that's probably what we would look for.
Somebody with the same style of Francis, that warmth, that heart, that smile, that goodness, that embrace.
And maybe within a little bit of a blend with John Paul and Benedict, when it would come to more, what would I say, more clarity in teaching, more refinement of the church's tradition, more digging in the treasures of the past to remind us of what Jesus expects of us now.
Probably a blend of the great popes that we've recently had.
That's what we'd be looking for.
So, I don't know.
To me, if you read between the lines, he seems to be saying, you know, Pope Francis, lovely guy, people loved him.
Too bad he wasn't a Catholic.
He just seemed to be saying, it's a little short on the actual Catholicism.
So again, from my outsider perspective, I thought Pope Francis did not do the kinds of things that John Paul II did.
He didn't stand up to the Chinese, for instance.
The Chinese were picking their own bishops, I believe.
And he said, well, we'll collaborate with you on the bishops, which may have been a compromise in one sense, but the Chinese are oppressive to Christians.
They oppress Christians and Catholics.
And I don't understand why you should recognize their government's ability to appoint anybody.
And he should have called them out, I think.
And I don't think, you know, he doesn't seem to have cleaned up the church corruption.
Maybe that's impossible.
The Pope seems to me in a very similar position to Donald Trump, is that he's like this one guy, as honest as he may be.
There's this incredible bureaucracy, you know, trying to stop him.
I remember this one point where he brought in an Australian cardinal named George Pell to reform the finances, which were apparently scandalous, scandalously corrupt.
And Pell was accused of this incredible series of sexual things.
He would have had to have been a devil from hell to have committed the sexual things.
They put him in solitary confinement, and then the high court overturned the conviction.
And Pell said that he thought his enemies in the Vatican bureaucracy had come after him.
And we didn't hear too much about that.
He just kind of disappeared.
Maybe there were some things that maybe he had done that were wrong.
We've all done wrong things, but it sounded like a hijab to me.
And the media loved him, right?
Because he was definitely more liberal than Benedict when it came to doctrine.
And people would say, he had this famous remark about gay priests.
He said, if someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge?
And I can sort of see that point of view that we're not here to judge one another, but still, and everybody sort of said he hasn't changed Catholic teaching, that he still was saying that homosexuality was inherently disordered.
That's what the Catholic Church says.
But it did change the tone because Pope Benedict had said that if your homosexuality is deeply rooted, you probably shouldn't be a priest.
So that does seem like a kind of change.
But the big one for me was migration.
This is the one the press loved.
They love this illegal immigration and this mass migration.
And here is ABC reporting on Pope Francis and who he was, this kind of lovely, and of course making it an attack on Donald Trump, Cut 16.
Always touching base, essentially, Diane, to issues that are happening right here right now.
It's easy to say that maybe some people don't have any direct relation to any of these problems that are going on, but the migrations, the refugees that we've been seeing just across the world and so many of these things that he's been leaning into, Pope Francis has been vocal, speaking out against ways that the Trump administration has handled migrant issues to also issues across Europe when we've seen other instances with migrants seeking refuge across European and African countries.
So, you know, there were renegade priests.
There still are renegade priests who really got, you know, shut down by Francis, who also shut down people who wanted to call out China.
Here's a guy with a different take on migration in Europe.
His name is Bishop Anastasius Schneider.
And here he's saying something.
He's a very controversial guy.
And here he said something very blunt, cut 17.
This is very serious.
Now we're witnessing an invasion.
They are not refugees.
No, this is an invasion of mass Islamization of Europe, which already went on for at minimum 50, 60 years.
Bishop Schneider's Controversial View00:04:04
I think the Islamic faith, speaking bluntly, is in some ways more alive than Christianity has been for a while.
I think Muslims understand that a country rests on faith.
A culture rests on your founding cult.
You know, all of your traditions come out of the religions that shaped your minds over centuries.
Those don't go away because one or two guys don't believe in things.
Those have shaped the way we look at things.
And ours is a Christian faith.
And that's worked great for many people because Christianity is supposed to be a tolerant, accepting religion that loves strangers.
It's worked really well for Jewish people because Jesus was a Jew.
You know, I know they always say, well, Judeo-Christian doesn't make any sense because there's all these big differences, very, very big differences between Judaism and Christianity.
But Judeo-Christian does work as a sort of technical, you know, kind of shortcut way of saying that a lot of the ethical teachings of Jesus, maybe not the spiritual ones, but the ethical teachings of Jesus, are Jewish teachings.
You know, be good to the poor, love justice, and all this stuff.
And the centrality of love.
And so I'm not trying to put out a hit on the many lovely Muslim people that there are and that I meet all the time, but a living faith by nature wants to be evangelical because you feel that you have the truth.
And it also wants to override false faiths.
Now, you don't have to do that with cruelty.
You don't have to do it with violence.
And that's the Islamist way, and that's wrong.
But just as a friendly outsider, I think you need a pope who sticks to the teachings of the church very aggressively and very openly and without fear of the current fads and also says, you know, yes, this is the true faith.
I mean, Pope Benedict had to apologize when he basically quoted an old story about how Islam had spread through violence, whereas Christianity had spread through conviction, which is true, right?
I mean, not that there's no violence in the Christian world at all.
I'm not saying that at all.
But in terms of the way that Christianity spread, it spread through martyrdom, not through violence and power.
But, you know, you want a pope who sticks to the great commission to make believers of all the nations.
And that quote I read you by Thomas Jefferson is sometimes shortened to the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
Well, neither are the Gospels.
The Gospels are not a suicide pact.
Sometimes you have to go and give yourself over to death, as Christ did, to do the right thing, as the martyrs did, to do the right thing, as soldiers and police officers sometimes do, as Christian men or people based in Christianity to do the right thing.
But you can't call on the society to die so that you can say that you are a Christian.
And you can't say that Christianity should die in order to be Christian.
That doesn't make any sense.
The Gospels are not a suicide pact.
And I hope as they pick a new pope, and may Pope Francis rest in peace and may he see the face of God, but I hope when they pick a new pope, it is somebody who will stand up for this, which is, I still believe, the most powerful and important sector of Christianity.
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Chapter 2, Humanity is Dying.
So this is from the Wall Street Journal.
Births in America.
This week, births in America hovered near record low rates last year.
More than 3.16, sorry, more than 3.6 million babies were born in the U.S. in 2024, a less than 1% advance from the year prior, according to federal data released Wednesday.
The total fertility rate was around 1.63 births per woman in 2024, slightly higher than a record low rate recorded in 2023, but far below the rate needed for a generation to replace itself.
And by the way, when a generation is not replacing itself, the falloff is very, very quick.
It actually kind of compounds like interest.
We can disappear in a real big hurry.
The latest snapshot of U.S. births and fertility rates reflect a continuing trend as Americans contend with a confluence of economic and social challenges, pushing some women and families to forgo or delay having children.
I don't agree with that assessment.
I don't think that's the problem, but that's what the Wall Street Journal says.
The long-term declines in American birth rates have become a focus of the Trump administration.
President Trump on Tuesday expressed openness to giving baby bonuses to those who have children.
This was a little exchange with a reporter.
Here it is, cut nine.
There are reports that you're considering doing something for moms across the country.
Hearing that as a cut bonus sort of house.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
So, you know, that's basically where we're at with that.
And a lot of fuss was made about it.
The left is saying, oh, no, you're going to give, you know, $5,000.
What good is $5,000?
Woofy Goldberg was going on.
What good is $5,000 when the cost of child rearing is so great and all this?
And what we need, she says, are childcare and we need maternity leave and all that.
But they have that in other countries.
And in the other countries, birth rates are falling off as well.
Moms in the West are quitting motherhood.
Women in the West are quitting motherhood.
Elon Musk has been talking about this for a while, which is probably what's brought it to Trump's attention.
And what he says is a lot darker than that.
It's cut eight.
The birth rate is very low in almost every country.
And unless that changes, civilization will disappear.
America had the lowest birth rate, I believe, ever.
That was last year.
Places like Korea, the birth rate is one-third replacement rate.
So that means in three generations, Korea will be 3% or 4% of its current size.
And nothing seems to be turning that around.
Humanity is dying.
And people, it's just not something we evolved to react to.
And I worry generally about the strength of America.
You know, America is the central column that holds up all of Western civilization.
So I feel like if we've got the temple of Western civilization, America is the central column.
If that column fails, it's all over.
All of that is quite true.
Well, not all of it is true.
I'll go back to that in a minute.
Musk, of course, has his solution, which is that every woman should have his baby.
That's his idea.
I think he has 14 that we know about.
So his idea is that we need more of his genetic makeup, which, by the way, I completely disagree with.
Nature and nature's God give us the occasional Elon Musk, and I think that is quite enough.
That's all we actually need.
We do not need everybody to be Elon Musk.
That would be a disaster.
The guy is brilliant and does wonderful, wonderful things, but he is not, he's not a full person.
He's autistic a little bit.
And I think, look, God bless him.
I'm glad he's here and he's done wonderful, wonderful things.
But we don't need the rank and file of humanity to be Elon Musk.
That's actually a mistake.
And the other thing he says that I don't agree with is that we haven't evolved to deal with the fact that humanity is dying.
In fact, I think that racism, for instance, tribalism, let's say, isn't one of the ways that we have evolved to deal with threats to ourselves, to our people, and to the culture that we're in.
I think that the modern world, even if you look at World War II, after all that death, people came home and had babies.
That's where the baby boom comes from.
But I think that the problem is the modern world has detached us from necessity.
And so our evolutionary systems for self-preservation don't always go off.
And sometimes we have to warn people that this stuff is happening.
But next to finagling us, this is the reason I see, and this is where I disagree with the Wall Street Journal on the causes of the baby dearth, is that to my mind, next to finagling us out of our founding religion, the greatest triumph of the left, the anti-West, anti-freedom left, is that by commandeering the reasonable complaints of feminism for their own purposes, as I've said, feminism is now just leftism in a skirt.
Everything, you know, all the attempts, you know, civil rights are just leftism and blackface.
That's all it is.
You know, every single movement in America that ceases to, that attempts to deal with the problem is immediately taken over by the left and put to the service of bigger government.
That doesn't mean that the problem doesn't exist.
It means we're using the wrong solution and they're not really solving the problem.
I don't think that they have done anything.
I don't think the left has done anything for black people, literally nothing for black people.
They've made their life worse.
I think the Democrat Party is a cancer on the lives of black people.
And I think that they take over civil rights to install.
Again, the idea is to get their brilliant, elite, utopian ideas in power and make sure that nobody else has anything to say.
But the incredible triumph of the left, almost unbelievable, is that they have managed to make the central joy of earthly life, which is the love of a man for a maid and her love for him, problematic.
I mean, there are always problems between men and women, but they have made it like it's not, those problems are not supposed to be overcome.
Like the problems outweigh the joys.
You know, we have lost two generations of love to feminism, either on the right where men, on the left, I mean, where men have ceased to uplift and cherish their manhood, or on the right, where they're so angry at women, they think a man's power lies in the ability to dominate and abuse them, which is going to get you into a really bad situation, too.
I mean, I see this in young right-wingers of the last two generations that they are angry.
This is the first thing I noticed when I came to work at the Daily Wire when everybody was 20 years younger than me, that they were angry at women in a way that I had not seen in my generation.
We all, you know, men and women roll their eyes and make fun of one another because of our differences.
That's great.
But usually we do it with great affection and love.
And some of that has disappeared.
And now you've got these Groypers and others on the extreme right who will say, if you're a loving husband, you're a simp.
And listen, I am the picture next to simp in the dictionary.
And if you look up the word simp, my picture is there.
I am my wife's love slave.
I mean, I adore her.
And yeah, she treats me like a king, but that's just her clever way of making a slave out of me.
Because look, look, the fact is, and this is what Andrew Tate and others who talk about enslaving and dominating women, this is what they're getting at.
A good woman will do anything for a good man who loves her.
And a good man will do anything for the love of a good woman.
Some of these Groypers ought to try that out for a change instead of what they're doing now.
The system actually works out really well if there is love involved.
Turning like angry incel porn-loving right-wingers, turning angry incel, turning right-wing men into angry, incel, porn-loving people is something the left works at very hard.
It's intentional.
I don't know if you're following this case in the Supreme Court.
Maryland County was forcing children in pre-kindergarten.
These are little people, you know, like toddlers, tiny tots.
They're forcing them to listen to LGBTQ propaganda books, books like Born Ready, The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope.
So this is like this girl named Penelope thinks she's a boy and her mother says, it's what's on the inside that matters most.
Untrue.
If you feel like a boy, that's fine.
And Penelope says, I don't feel like a boy.
I am a boy.
It was also not true.
And other books, Love Violet, about two little girls who fall in love and all this stuff.
So this case has brought together in this county Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
They were allowed to opt out and say they hold their kids home.
But when they all did it, all these kids stayed home from school.
They said, no more opting out.
Forget that.
So Brett Kavanaugh is questioning the school district's lawyer.
This is Alan Schoenfeld, and saying, well, you know, every other county in America, every other school district in America has opt-outs.
What's the problem here?
There's got seven.
I guess I'm just not understanding.
The whole goal, I think, of some of our religion precedents is to look for the win-win, to look for the situation where you can respect the religious beliefs and accommodate the religious beliefs while the state or city or whatever it may be can pursue its goals.
And here, they're not asking you to change what's taught in the classroom.
They're not asking you to change that at all.
A lot of the rhetoric suggests that they might have, that they were trying to do that, but that's not what they're trying to do.
They're only seeking to be able to walk out so that they don't have to, the parents don't have their children exposed to these things that are contrary to their own beliefs.
So, right, you know, exactly.
Gay rights started out as leave us alone to live our lives, which of course I think as Americans, we can leave people alone to live their lives.
But then it was like, bake me a cake or I'll destroy your business.
And now it's your kids belong to me, right?
What pains me about this, what pains me listening to some of the testimony in this case, was that not one justice got down to the underlying facts.
And I think obviously they're supposed to talk about the law, but I think the underlying facts do affect the law.
The great Thomas Sowell, his name be praised, talked about the start of public school sex education.
Listen carefully to this.
This is one of his books, and I love his books.
He says, the decision as to when and how parents want their children to be informed and advised about sex was simply preempted by surrogates who introduced sex education into the public schools in the 1960s.
Like so many other social crusades by intellectual elites, the sex education agenda was presented politically as an urgent response to an existing quote-unquote crisis.
In this case, the problems to be solved were said to include unwanted pregnancies among teenage girls and venereal diseases among both sexes.
What were the actual facts as of the time of this crisis?
Supposedly in urgent need of a solution by preempting the role of parents.
Venereal diseases had been declining for years.
The rate of infection for gonorrhea declined every year from 1950 through 1958, and the rate of syphilis infection was by 1960 less than half of what it had been in 1950.
The pregnancy rate among teenage females had declined for more than a decade.
As for the facts about what happened after sex education was widely introduced into public schools, the rate of teenage gonorrhea tripled between 1956 and 1975.
The rate of infection for syphilis continued to decline, but its rate of decline from 1961 on was nowhere near as steep as its short rate of decline in earlier years.
And of course, pregnancy, you know, unwed pregnancy just skyrocketed.
So if the justices had done their homework, they might have asked the following question.
On what evidence of your expertise are you basing your right to teach children about sex at all?
Our children can't read.
They can't do math.
They're being passed from one class to another, from one grade to another, without the ability to read.
These people are claiming that they have an absolute right to take your child and educate him about sex.
Where and what is that right based, right?
Because the death of motherhood is not a casualty of leftist feminism.
It's the purpose of leftist feminism.
I have said this a hundred times.
Motherhood is not a power center.
That is the complaint of leftist feminism, is that mothers don't have power.
Right.
Motherhood is not a power center.
It is a love center which all power ought to serve.
You want to talk about Christianity in practice?
That is Christianity in practice.
A woman sacrifices a lot when she stays home to take care of her baby.
She sacrifices money.
She sacrifices power.
She sacrifices an early career and a bigger life in the world.
And as a representative of Mother Mary on earth, she is proclaiming with her very being that money, power, career, and the world are at her service, not she at theirs.
You know, we don't need $5,000 to have babies.
We don't need maternity leave or anything else.
We need to remember that the two great commandments aren't about passing judgment on anyone.
They are about putting love at the center of life.
Because if you don't, guess what?
Life dies out.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact.
Neither are the gospels.
Neither is feminism.
If you want to see Christianity in action, look at at-home mothers.
That is what we are here to preserve, and the entire society should be organized around that preservation.
During this holy season, I'd like us to take a moment to think about something amazing, namely you.
Psalms tells us that God carefully knit you together in your mother's womb.
He saw who you were meant to be before you even existed.
At pre-born ministries, they believe each person is made in God's image and that all life is sacred and eternal.
Maybe not all pregnancies are planned, but that's okay.
Whether planned or not, all life has incredible value and God has a purpose for everyone each day they're here.
Today, I invite you to thank God for the gift of life and to remember the babies still in their mother's wombs.
Their lives matter too.
Last year alone, Preborn's network of clinics helped save over 67,000 babies from abortion.
Your tax-deductible donation of $28 sponsors one ultrasound, which doubles a baby's chance at life.
How many lives can you help save today to donate?
Just dial pound 250 and save baby or visit preborn.com slash Clavin.
Again, to make a donation and sponsor one ultrasound, visit preborn.com slash K-L-A-V-A-N.
Thank you for supporting this life-saving work.
Leftist Judges and Due Process00:08:12
Chapter 3, Give Us Back Our Gangsters, if ever.
If ever this idea of the Constitution as a suicide pact is being acted out in front of us, it is the way that leftist judges and leftist Democrats are moving everywhere to stop Trump from deporting people who poured into this country under Joe Biden while Joe Biden lied to us and his head of Homeland Security, Mayorkas, lied to us, said the border was secure.
Joe Biden said, oh, there's nothing I can do.
I can't do a thing.
I'm sorry, I can't do a thing.
To stop this influx of this invasion of migrants, Trump did it.
I mean, it must have taken Trump like half a day to shut down the border.
And so everything that Biden, and nobody, nobody has reported the fact that Biden was just lying about this continually.
So all we're hearing is that give us back our gangsters.
You're stealing our gangsters.
You are taking our gangsters off the streets and sending them to foreign countries and putting them in prison.
And it's just not right.
Due process, due process, due process.
Which, by the way, a lot of these guys are getting the due process they are supposed to get, but it all has centered around Kilmar Obrego Garcia, the Maryland man, as they keep this, this illegal immigrant.
So already he's illegal from El Salvador, has been sent back to El Salvador.
And here's AOC, who's obviously running for president.
I've told you, she's the most dangerous politician in the country, and she is the most dangerous politician in the country, and also a dope.
And here she is at one of her many rallies talking about this Cut 18.
And we also demand the return of Kilmar Obrego Garcia, who's in El Salvador.
This is America.
We demand our rights.
We demand our freedoms, our due process, and we don't just point a finger and lock someone up without their day in court.
Never.
So by the way, she's good.
You know, she's a very scary person.
It turns out, not only have several judges said this guy was a member of MS-13, one of the worst gangs in the world, and not only was he here illegally and ready to be deported, it turns out, this is from Fox News Digital.
It turns out he was previously pulled over by a highway patrol officer while driving a car belonging to a confessed human smuggler.
Multiple sources in DHS confirmed Abrego Garcia was pulled over driving an SUV belonging to Jose Hernandez-Reyes, another illegal alien who in 2020 confessed to human smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border.
So a trooper saw this car weaving back and forth and noticed that there were eight people in the car with Obrego Garcia driving.
And he told the trooper that he had begun driving three days prior from Houston, Texas to Temple Hills, Maryland via St. Louis to, quote unquote, perform construction work.
The report on the stop states that the trooper suspected it was human trafficking as there was no luggage.
Additionally, the individuals in the car reportedly gave the same address as Obrego Garcia's home address.
So they were all living at his house.
So White House smoke show Caroline Levitt says this, Cut Three.
Well, the Democrat Party is full-blown crazy.
Their motto should be illegal immigrant criminals first and American citizens last, because that's exactly what they are doing.
You have seen Democrat-elected officials who swear an oath to stand up for their constituents and law-abiding American citizens, spending more time advocating for illegal alien criminals, gangbangers, and wife beaters in the case of Obrego Garcia from Maryland.
It's despicable.
It is disgusting.
And we are going to continue to call them out.
And this administration is going to continue to fully enforce our nation's immigration laws.
And how can we live in a sovereign country where the previous president, Joe Biden, was allowed to illegally traffic tens of millions of illegal aliens into our country?
And the courts did nothing to stop him.
But now you have President Trump, who is duly elected overwhelmingly by the American people to deport these illegal criminals from our communities.
And you have rogue district court judges that are trying to stop him at every turn.
That is exactly right.
How can you let one president break the law continuously without doing anything about it?
And then when the other new president tries to enforce the law, oh no, that's illegal.
You can't enforce the law.
You know, I have to say, I make jokes about Caroline Leavitt because I have stupid sexist jokes about how pretty she is because that's my job.
I'm here to make stupid jokes and sexist jokes because to remind you that stupid jokes are one of the joys of life and we shouldn't have to walk on eggshells.
She is the best White House press secretary of my lifetime.
She is doing an amazing job communicating the Trump agenda and defending the Trump agenda from hostile media.
And you could just hear, I mean, she's not reading off a script.
You know, she's talking.
She's incredibly eloquent and articulate and just really nails the important points.
And so I will continue to make silly sexist jokes about her.
Like I said, that's what they pay me for.
But I want you to know I respect her incredibly.
She's just doing a great job.
So last week, I always also give you tomorrow's news today here.
And last week I told you that Congress can and should limit the scope of these judges' power because they're not in the Constitution.
There are no federal judges in the Constitution except for the Supreme Court.
And then Congress has the right to create them and give them the powers that they have.
And what I said was I thought that they should limit them by law.
And even if they can't get that law through the Senate, they will at least let the judges know that it's coming, especially because if they don't get the law through the Senate, Trump will, as I predict he will anyway, win the midterms and then they will get it through.
And apparently now a Darrell Issa congressman has done that in the House, has passage a law in the House, and Grassley is taking it on in the Senate.
I heard Newt Gingrich say that he thought it would pass in the Senate.
I don't see how it can, but I still think judges will take notice if they get close enough, if they get enough support for it, and it will keep them from doing what they're doing.
But let's just take a listen to what JD Vance says.
He also gets to the heart of what's going on here as Cut2.
And I think there's actually a deeper issue going on, which is that you see some radical judges at the district court level who are trying to layer so much quote-unquote process on top of the immigration system that it makes it impossible to function.
We have over 20 million illegal aliens in the United States of America.
Are we not allowed to deport them?
Because if we're not allowed to deport them, then what these district courts are saying is fundamentally they reject the will of the American people as it was expressed in November of 2024.
We just reject that.
I believe the American people elected President Trump to do many jobs, but perhaps the most important job was to bring down the number of illegal immigration in this country.
That's what he's trying to do.
We're going to keep on doing it.
It's absolutely true.
And it's not just rejecting the will of the American people.
It's rejecting the existence of America.
It is rejecting the existence of America, just as Pope Francis is rejecting the power center of Catholic Christianity by letting Europe be taken over, just as we are ending life itself by telling women that motherhood is a second-rate job instead of the glorious center of all human civilization and human life.
I'm going to read Jefferson one more time.
A strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest.
The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger are of higher obligation.
To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law would be to lose the law itself with life, liberty, property, and all those who are enjoying them with us, thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means.
A movement, by which I mean leftism, that uses the precepts of religion, the precepts of fairness and the precepts of the law to get rid of religion, children, and the law is not, it's not doing it by accident.
Faith Standing in the Way00:04:08
This is moving our culture towards suicide, and they are doing it on purpose.
One more time, their idea is that if they could rule, everything would be absolutely perfect, but the people are standing in the way.
Love of country is standing in the way.
Faith is standing in the way.
And more than anything, so help me, mothers, at-home mothers specifically, are standing in the way, and they mean to get rid of them.
They mean to talk them into killing themselves by using the very values that they cherish.
It should not be done.
It cannot be done.
It must be stopped.
I believe it will.
Aging creeps into everyday life in ways you hardly notice at first.
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You start choosing the comfortable shoes, and before you know it, you've turned into me.
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Final chapter, a time for men.
One reason I wrote The Kingdom of Cain, and really, please pre-order this book.
You're going to love it.
If you like the show, if you like the show even a little bit, you're going to love this book.
And as I used to joke all the time that when you say something's going to change your life, you should first ask, will it change my life for the better?
Yes, it will change your life for the better.
You will like this book.
I think you'll love this book, Kingdom of Cain, Finding God in the Literature of Darkness.
Pre-order it on Amazon.
It is very helpful.
But one reason I wrote this book is to answer the question, why do you write the things you write?
I get this all the time.
You call yourself a Christian and yet you write books full of murder, full of obscenity, full of evil women, evil men.
Why do you do that?
And the reason is, is I don't believe in God because I think God is good for me or because I think society is a better place if people are religious.
I believe in God because God is real.
And it simply stands to reason that if God is real, he is the core and nature of reality.
It's his creation.
It expresses his nature.
And so we know reality only when we know God.
In the same way we know how to behave only if we know that gravity exists, even though we haven't seen it.
And experience and faith will tell you that God exists.
And one of the chief sources of knowledge of God, obviously there's scripture, but what is the scripture?
The scripture is literature.
And when Jesus was resurrected, the first thing he did was come back and teach the people how to read their literature.
And I think that literature and the arts are a source of knowledge of God.
And if an artist or a writer speaks truthfully and well, he will tell us something about our relationship with God.
And that's what the kingdom of Cain is about.
It's about even when you're writing about evil things, if you write truthfully, God will come through or something about our relationship with God will come through.
Now, the last great upsurge of an art was the golden age of television, which was the 2000s, early 2000s.
And you had a lot of stories, I've mentioned this many times, a lot of stories about bad guys, sopranos, breaking bad, the shield, deadwood, even a show like House were about outlawed men.
Writing Truthfully About Evil00:07:47
And the reason for that was because men had been outlawed, so only outlaws could be men.
And men essentially set the terms of the future.
If manhood goes down the drain, it's not like the future is female.
It's like the future is down the drain.
That is simply the way it works for reasons I'll talk about in a second.
But still, that's the way it works.
Now, the arts went dead for a minute for about five years.
The arts have been virtually dead, except, of course, for my Cameron Winter novels, because the arts are seeking for ways to show men being good men, but they can't find those ways because it requires women to be women, to be worth fighting for, to be worth standing up for, to be worth being good for.
Women who are sacrificers centered on love instead of power are going to move men to use power to protect good women.
And just as the most gripping stories about women are about them in relation to love, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre and even Sex in the City in its way, it's gripping because it is about women seeking love in a sexualized world.
The greatest stories about men are about the stories of men using power for something beyond themselves.
And this is what my Cameron Winter mysteries are about.
How do you move from using power one way to using another, from being a bad guy, an anti-hero, to being a hero?
Now, I've talked about this too, but it's been a long time since I've talked about it.
I want to bring it back.
As you know, Casablanca is, in fact, the greatest movie ever made.
And it is a, you probably know the story.
It is about a man who has become bitter because he's lost his love.
He's living in Casablanca in Morocco, in Vichy, France, in France that has basically not been, is not under conquest by the Nazis, but is basically in service to the Nazis.
And he's just said, I'm not sticking my neck out for anybody.
I'm too bitter about it.
And then the woman he loves, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart plays Rick, and Ingrid Bergman plays Elson.
She comes back into his life.
And in the end of this book, which was the Oscar-winning best picture for 1944, he sacrifices their love for a greater cause.
Here is what possibly maybe next to the shower scene, it's like, it has to be the most famous scene in movies where he tells the woman he loves to get on the plane with another man, her husband.
This is cut 19.
Inside of us, we both know you belong with Victor.
You're part of his work, the thing that keeps him going.
If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it.
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.
But what about us?
We'll always have Paris.
We didn't have, we lost it until you came to Casablanca.
We got it back last night.
When I said I would never leave you.
And you never will.
But I've got a job to do too.
Where I'm going, you can't follow.
What I've got to do, you can't be any part of.
Hills, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
Someday you'll understand that.
I'm giving up the thing I love best in life because the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
50 years later, the English patient is the best picture, wins the best picture of the Oscar, a picture I despise, which also takes place during World War II, and is about the fact that the only thing that really matters is love, the love between a man and a woman.
And in fact, the hero, quote unquote, of this story, in order to save his love, gives up secrets to the Nazis.
And Jews are depicted.
The Jews are depicted as well.
They were kind of annoying the Nazis, so they had the right to, you know, torture them and kill them.
There really is an anti-Semitic picture as far as I'm concerned.
And here is what the woman says at the end of the English patient.
This is cut 20.
I want all this marked on my body.
We're the real countries.
Not the boundaries drawn on maps.
the names of powerful men.
I know you'll come and carry me out into the Palace of Winds.
That's all I've wanted.
To walk in such a place with you.
So in Casablanca, you have a man telling a woman, look, we love each other, but unfortunately, I've got to go fight World War II.
In the English patient, you have a woman telling a man that countries don't matter.
It's just our body.
It has been shown by some of these transgender experiments that when you inject men with female hormones, they become less interested in the news and more interested in domestic matters.
This makes sense.
Women are made for home and family.
Men are made to look for threats coming to the home and family from outside.
And as a result, men are built to protect and serve, and women are built to live in that protection.
So right now, things are kind of difficult with the Trump administration.
His polls are looking bad besides his border enforcement.
His polls on the economy are looking bad because he has committed the great sin of looking beyond the profits of the moment to correct our path for the future.
And I've explained this before.
I can't go into it now.
But he's looking at China.
He's looking at our trade deals and he's saying, no, we've got to bring this in.
We're no longer the country we were in 1945 when not only our enemies were in tatters, but our rivals, our friends, friendly rivals, were also destroyed so that we had a clear field.
We don't have that anymore.
Other countries have to compete.
We have to compete.
The competing level has to be fair in order to not put us in a position where China tries to take over the world and we can fight them as long as they'll sell us the bullets.
That's not the position we want to be in.
And that means that sad things are going to happen.
You know, there's going to be men who were deported and maybe it wasn't entirely fair.
There are going to be people in the bureaucracy who are good people who get fired.
And then the world is going to be unfair because women are going to have to produce babies instead of being anchor women on TV reading off of a teleprompter.
But that's the way it is.
And sometimes men have to explain this to women.
Sometimes men have to explain this to women.
Sometimes men have to stay a little cool, a little calmer, not be affected by every teardrop and say, yes, this is bad.
This is tough what Trump is doing.
It is tough what Trump is doing.
And he may fail because sometimes when you take on big things, you fail.
I hope he won't.
I don't think he will.
But he may fail.
But this is a time to stick it out, to see if we can save the future.
Because I'll tell you something.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact.
The Bible is not a suicide pact.
Feminism is not a suicide pact.
Life is not a suicide pact.
Life is for life.
Life is to make more life.
That is what life is for.
And ultimately, it is eternal life that is the target of life.
The future is male, and men better step up and learn how to become good men, not tough guys, not big muscular guys, but good men, no matter who they are, no matter what their job is, no matter what their level of musculature is.
Men better learn to be good men or there will not be a future.
At the Daily Wire, we not only ask the hard questions, we go out and get the answers.
That's why Ben Shapiro went to Ukraine, a nation under fire, for an exclusive sit-down with President Vladimir Zelensky.
From U.S. aid and corruption to Putin's ambitions in the battle for religious freedom, nothing was off limits.
This isn't spin.
This is clarity in the fog of war.
Part two of the Ben Shapiro President Zelinsky interview drops today.
An all-new episode of the Ben Shapiro Show streaming now on Daily Wire Plus.
Ode to the West Wind00:05:46
All right, Clavin Clapbacks.
Please welcome Al Gore.
I'm here to educate you about the single biggest threat to our planet.
I'm talking, of course, about Manbear Pig.
Yeah!
All right, remember at the end of the clapbacks, the letters, I will be giving you something to read if you want to, so that next member block, we can talk about that.
If you would like to send in a clapback, it's clavinclapbacks at dailywire.com.
Clavin with a K, clapbacks with a K at dailywire.com.
Ask us anything you want about politics, your personal life, whatever you want.
We will be here and we will try and answer the question.
First letter is from Ty, Supreme Chancellor Clavin.
You responded to my mailbag on April 29th of 2022, in which I detailed that my wife Alyssa had miscarried a baby girl and lost another daughter prematurely in a seven-month period.
You outlined that there was not a philosophical answer other than seeking God in prayer.
I write to update you that my wife and I now have two twin girls that just turned 18 months and that I can attribute our blessings as the outcome of prayer specifically for twin daughters.
I was incredibly moved by your message to us amid our deep grief and wanted to offer up those as just one more example of God's grace, even when we cannot see a way through.
Well, I usually don't read these letters on the air because I don't want to make a fool of myself, but that was the glory is to God, and that is a great.
I'm so happy to hear that.
That is a wonderful, wonderful thing.
Life is life.
Life is beautiful.
From Kurt Andrew, my wife has completed the first book of what she desires to be a published series.
It's a Christian novel.
She's now struggling to navigate the process of publishing the entire process, has her head spinning.
What advice would you give a writer that is seeking to publish their first book?
Thanks.
I love the show, Kurt.
You know, there are lots of books about this and lots of online information about this.
There's a book called Writer's Market, and there are versions of that book, like Christian Writer's Market.
And the thing is, to start out with, you should really follow the process.
You write a query letter to an agent.
Maybe you'll see in the book exactly how to do it.
Maybe including the first five to ten pages of your work and wait and see if they'll ask for another.
The books will tell you how to do it.
I can't explain it.
And then there are self-publishing things, but that's a very different process, very, very difficult to make that work.
But there are Christian publishers.
They do publish fiction.
I publish with Thomas Nelson.
They still have a very healthy fiction department.
But you should find out how to do it because people do it wrongly and it just makes them look bad.
So that's the answer.
From Dean McKinley P, I have perhaps a special problem which has caught me between personal and geopolitical issues.
My wife is from Ukraine.
We've been married seven years.
She's beautiful, resourceful, educated, a great housekeeper, and cooked.
We were very happy for years.
She helped me rebuild my life after some serious setbacks, including a heart attack.
But then the war with Russia started.
She steadily became obsessed with the war, spends hours a day listening to the news and bloggers from her home.
Meanwhile, my wife lost her mother to a heart attack during a Russian air raid.
The conflict is affecting our marriage.
The war is a dark cloud over our house.
I feel powerless to improve things.
Do you have any suggestions?
I will try anything.
Thanks.
You know, yeah, my suggestion is that you have some sympathy for her.
You know, this is a horrible event in her life.
Her mother died in this.
You know, she has been there for you when you had a heart attack.
And I think that it sounds to me like, you know, you're being annoyed that she is obsessed with this.
And yes, maybe she is too obsessed, but she would be a lot less obsessed, probably, if you would give her a little bit of sympathy, if you would share her concerns with her.
You know, this is a real thing.
There's a trauma for her.
And you may disagree.
You know, you write in the letter that you disagree with some of the things that were done before and thinking maybe it's time to pull out and all that.
But, you know, this is where political opinions are not the main thing.
I mean, she lost her mother and her homeland is being bombed wrongly and terribly.
It's injustice, wrong.
And, you know, try talking to her about it and sitting with her over it and listening to her concerns because I think this is a real thing that's happening to your wife.
And she is your partner of your life.
All right.
Next week in the member block, I'm going to talk about a poem.
It is called, you've probably heard of it, Ode to the West Wind by Percy Byss Shelley.
If you go online and just search for Ode to the West Wind, the Poetry Foundation will come out and they print very, very clear, readable copies.
It's a short poem.
So here's my suggestion.
Poetry is harder to read than prose.
You know, if in prose you say he walked into a room, we all get it right away.
But poetry is meaning condensed into music, essentially.
And so it's a little tougher to understand.
If you read it for the music, read the poem first time for the music without worrying about the fact that you don't understand it, which you won't if you read it quickly.
Go through it slowly, look some stuff up, and then after you understand it a little better, go through it carefully one more time.
Should not take you more than 15 to 20 minutes to do that.
So again, I can only offer this to members only.
I'll be talking about it in the member block.
It's one of the most beautiful poems ever written.
It's fascinating.
It has really interesting things to say and reveals interesting things that the poet didn't mean for it to reveal.
So please become a member.
You know, we want you to support us.
We need you to support us.
As I say, where the money comes from, that's where the trouble comes from.
We want the trouble to come from you because you're why we're here.
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You will also learn about the Ode to the West Wind, one of the most beautiful poems ever written in English.