Ben Shapiro critiques mainstream media’s biased framing of Trump—ignoring his inflation slowdown, Saudi deals, and India-Pakistan ceasefire progress while amplifying fears—before pivoting to Kingdom of Cain, his book on darkness in literature, which Zondervan and Epic PR propelled to the NYT bestseller list. He defends Christianity’s resilience against moral fragility, contrasts Trump’s commerce-first Middle East policy with Obama’s interventionism, and slams Apple’s China dependence via Apple in China, calling Tim Cook’s India expansion a betrayal of U.S. interests. JD Vance’s potential role in MAGA hinges on avoiding extremist influences like anti-Semitic Catholic integralists, while Ben After Dark—a Daily Wire Plus uncensored show—teases wild interviews and COVID spending outrage. Art, like Game of Thrones, thrives by mirroring life’s brutality, and love, not judgment, should guide family conflicts unless harm is present. [Automatically generated summary]
Recently, the news stories in the media have been coming so fast and furious, they're almost like a group of muscular bald men driving hot cars out of airplanes, landing them on top of other cars, and then driving away at high speed while firing a rocket launcher out the window.
Because they're fast and never mind.
Anyway, I began to wonder, how can the news media report all this news in a way that reflects the outlooks of Americans everywhere across this great land?
From the pine forests of Vermont to the golden wheat fields of Kansas, across the vast expanses of Texas to the sun-baked beaches of the Pacific coast.
So I decided I would take a look at the headlines of news outlets from 40th Street in Manhattan all the way to 47th Street, because that's about all of them.
So for instance, in the news, inflation slowed to its lowest rate in more than four years.
Here's the headline from the Wall Street Journal.
Trump's tariffs to cause massive inflation very, very soon.
Experts who predicted massive inflation because of Trump's tariffs very soon say.
Here's one from the New York Times.
Hard-working migrant Juan Ortega may lose his chicken farm as Trump's policies cause the bottom to fall out of egg prices.
And here's the report from NPR, How Lower Inflation Spurred the Rise of Hitler, a historical report read by a person with a very soft, sleepy voice that will make you want to hurt yourself just to make it stop.
Another news story.
Trump negotiated a ceasefire between hostile nuclear powers, India and Pakistan.
From the Wall Street Journal.
Nuclear devastation averted, leaving millions alive to suffer massive inflation very soon because of Donald Trump's tariffs.
Experts who predicted massive inflation very soon because of Donald Trump's tariffs say.
Or from the New York Times.
Environmentalists worry that Trump's reckless actions on the Indian subcontinent will leave Earth's population at levels sure to cause devastating climate change.
Or the story reported by NBC News.
Biden's policy of mindlessly prolonging foreign wars to no effect finally pays big dividends by bringing peace deal between India and Pakistan.
In other news, Trump negotiated the release of Idan Alexander, the last living American hostage being held by vampiric Palestinian monsters.
The headline in the Wall Street Journal reads, released hostage finds himself in a world soon to be wracked by massive inflation caused by Trump's tariffs, according to experts.
The New York Times headline was, sad little Palestinian boy, Jihad Muhammad Sharia Jihad Jihad Muhammad, shed sad tears of very sad sadness as genocidal Israelis steal the wonderful friend his parents kept chained up for him in the basement.
And of course, CNN featured an interview with a Columbia University professor who once read part of a book on Israel and says the Jews sound genocidal to him until Scott Jennings knocks him unconscious and jumps up and down on his face.
Then there was the news that Donald Trump had negotiated several trillion dollars in American investment by Saudi Arabia.
The Wall Street Journal reported the story with the headline, Saudis want to invest in America, but woe Nelly, just wait till they see the massive inflation that's going to be caused by Trump's tariffs any day now, experts say.
The headline in the New York Times reads, sad Yale historian who studies fascism says he is leaving America because Trump's presidency will look just like fascism as soon as it looks like fascism.
And CBS reported, weak Trump caves to Saudi demands that he take their money.
In other news, Trump struck a deal with China to free us from their hammerlock on our supply lines, brought down drug prices, bombed the Houthis into submission, opened UK markets to American farmers, made progress on a nuclear deal with Iran, and the headlines say, screw it.
We're Going to Win So Much00:05:18
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 healthcare and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay.
My, oh my, what a wonderful day.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
Yay!
You 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.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
All right, we are back, laughing our way through laughing and even more laughing.
If you are listening or watching on Daily Wire Plus or YouTube, wherever you're watching it, if you're just watching it in your imagination, it's coming in through like a, you know, an aluminum foil hat on your head.
Leave a comment.
And if the comment is as crazy as you look, we will read it on the air because we're as crazy as you are.
Today's comment is from Wolfgang Draven, maybe Wolfgang D. Raving, 1127.
He says, I tune in every week for the Trump happiness montage, but does anyone know who the bald guy is?
Maybe he'll go away if we buy his new book, Kingdom of Cain, Finding God in the Literature of Darkness.
I will if you buy it.
And we're not playing that anymore.
We're not playing it on the show.
We're done completely playing the Trump happiness montage.
I got to share some big news with you about the Kingdom of Cain, since we're talking about Kingdom of Cain, Finding God in the Literature of Darkness.
And I want to share it with you because you did it.
The book was on the New York Times list, that wonderful paper.
It's, you know, that prints all the news that's fit to print.
It's just an absolute fine journalistic institution.
They have put the Kingdom of Cain on the New York Times list.
So I'm now a New York Times bestseller.
And that is an amazing, I mean, if you look at the list, it's not, I do not disdain books on the New York Times.
They're just of a different sort.
You know, they're Nate Bargazzi, you know, really funny comedian.
You know, Uptown Girl by Christy Brinkley.
You know, they're popular things.
And sometimes I'll read a book on the list.
And then you have The Kingdom of Cain, about literally about finding God by watching, you know, Janet Lee get killed in the bathtub during psycho.
And that's an amazing thing to put a work that basically is trying to reclaim the arts for Christ and for people who love Christ and for people who love God and believe in God.
And you put it on the list.
And, you know, I don't want to make an Oscar speech, but I got to say, Zondervan, the publishers, it's unbelievable.
I've been published by a lot of people because you may have noticed I have a big mouth.
I get kicked out of every place.
But I've been published by a lot of people.
Most of the marketing departments in publishing houses are just a little bit better than the DMV.
Sometimes it's a competition.
Zondervan, they are so good.
They are so hardworking and involved and enthusiastic.
I feel like I'm hallucinating.
I feel like I took some drugs and now I'm having a hallucination about what publishing could be like.
And they brought in a great PR team, Epic.
And the Daily Wire, the Daily Wire, like they don't have to help me promote the book as much as they do.
It's not my contract.
I mean, I do a lot of things that aren't in my contract too, but so do they.
And that's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
And so, you know, it's just great.
I'm really moved by it.
I so appreciate your doing it.
If you haven't bought it yet, please go out and order it.
If you have bought it and loved it, leave a five-star review on Amazon and also buy a copy for your friends.
I got the best review I think I've ever gotten in my entire life on Kingdom of Cain, which was from my daughter who said to me, it's like reading you if you were a book.
So if you enjoy the show, I keep telling you, if you enjoy the show, you will love Kingdom of Cain.
I hope you will get a copy now and put it on the list for another week.
Let's put it on the list for another week.
It's just an amazing thing you did.
And I'm genuinely appreciative.
If you can't tell, I really am.
We will get to today's episode, Truth and Consequences.
So 20 years ago in the Claremont Review of Books, I wrote a review of Sam Harris's first book, which I didn't like.
I didn't think he was, I've never liked his work, and I don't really agree with him.
And here's the first few sentences of that review.
Of all the silly pop songs ever written, perhaps the silliest is John Lennon's Imagine.
A whop, bopaloo ram, a lop bam boom has more philosophical depth as a lyric and indeed contributes more to the happiness of human society than Lennon's thudding inanities, which are rendered truly inspiring only by being reduced to a one-word poster on a teenager's wall.
Dream Powder Discussion00:04:17
Lenin, you'll no doubt remember, asks us to imagine humanity without faith, countries, or possessions with nothing to kill or die for.
He promises the world will live as one.
Now, you may call me a dreamer, but it seems to me just such a world was imagined long before in the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Their aliens begin to transform the human race into Lenin's world, a soulless army of automatons living as one without any of those bothersome passions that give rise to religions, nations, or private property.
Love, desire, ambition, faith, one of the aliens in tones perfectly perfiguring John Lennon.
Without them, life is so simple.
That John Lennon imagination was the exact imagination of the globalists, the Davos crowd led by Klaus Schwab, who's now under investigation for embezzling money, allegedly embezzling money and allegedly mistreating blacks and women in his Davos meetings.
It was the same imagination of the EU leadership that flooded countries with Muslims and now wants to arrest anyone who says this is not a good thing for our country.
It's the same imagination of the Democrat Party who flooded our country and butchered our children and killed our unborn babies to make sure they could enslave us with meaningless sex and drugs while they made all the important decisions and had the real life that the elites have by getting married and going to church and doing all those things.
What we are watching is the death of Imagine.
We're watching the death of that idea, the death of management from the top, the death of global trade that doesn't look out for the country that the elected officials are sworn to protect, global trade that is great for the rich, and you get a cheaper iPhone made by slaves in China to play, you know, that you can buy with your guaranteed income in a life without work and dignity and meaning.
No country, no religion, no positions, possessions, just like John Lennon said.
So the failure of that idea and the failure of the elites who propagated that idea is what we're watching now.
And the fact that we now want to evict them.
We want our God back.
We want our women and babies and marriages back.
We want our freedom back.
And there's only one problem facing us.
The failed elites don't want to go.
So I just want to take a look at that situation and where we stand.
So I never sleep, but sometimes I sleep.
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And this country needs more people like that.
Chapter one, Women Take the Wrap.
So all week long, I've been doing these interviews to promote Kingdom of Cain.
And, you know, I actually like, I get a little tired of my own voice, but I actually like it because most of the people who interview me are people I like.
Matt Frat over at Pints with Aquinas and Ali Beth Stuckey at the Blaze.
And, you know, I've already talked to Glenn Back.
And, you know, these are people I actually enjoy talking to.
And so it's fun to talk to them.
Heil Hitlerportunism00:05:11
But again and again, you know, this book is about how art transforms evil and how art about evil is not the same as evil.
And we can find God even in reading dark books like Crime and Punishment or watching movies like Silence of the Lambs and things like that.
And it explains why.
And this shows you how.
And I keep getting asked the same question, especially on the Christian venues.
People keep saying, aren't there some things we shouldn't look at because we're Christian?
And, you know, obviously I think pornography is toxic.
I mean, I think it's bad for you.
And some works of supposed art are evil at their hearts and all this stuff.
But my deep down feeling when I'm asked that is, I don't think believing in Christ is supposed to turn you into a fragile old lady.
You know, I don't think it's supposed to turn you into a fragile prig who can't look at anything because I'll be corrupted.
My experience is that my faith has made me stronger.
It's made me less corruptible.
It's made me more capable at looking at the truth about the world without despairing or becoming cynical or anything like that.
Certainly much more stronger and solid in my head than before I had faith.
So I want to look at where the current elites have left the state of manhood and womanhood, because obviously I think that's the most basic building block of society, but also of life.
And I think when that is not working, and it's clearly not working now, nothing is working.
And as you know, I believe that homemakers and mothers are the bedrock of a healthy society and that honor for them and respect for them in the hearts of men is where those women live, but it's also what guides men in their living.
And because men lead us into the future, the future is male.
I think we want to take a look.
We know what the globalist left wants.
But I want to talk about what we are supposed to be because I'm looking around.
See, you know, it's so easy to attack the left.
They're so bad and they've sunk so deep in evil and they're defending child molesters and gangsters and they've got this kind of elaborate philosophy of why we're supposed to love these evil people who just should be shocked out of the country like sort of like a shovel.
You know, we should just toss them across back across the border whence they came.
But I also know that there is a tendency for the right to be reactive.
When they call the right reactionary, there is a reason.
And I'm looking, I see nationalist thugs marching in France, these big, burly, you know, guys walking around saying the nation, you know, the white men and all this stuff.
And I see some of these guys rising in Germany and America.
And listen, I prefer them to the people who are in charge, but that doesn't make them who I want us to be.
And that doesn't mean they are what the future should look like.
The reason is this.
When you are reacting to the left, you're controlled by the left.
They created you.
I think this is true of Hitler, by the way.
I don't think Hitler would have existed or risen to power if it hadn't been for the threat of socialism.
They call it communism.
Now, same thing.
I don't care what they, I don't care what Bernie Sanders says.
The difference is there's no difference.
Because that thing, you know, socialism sucks the life and the manhood out of a society because it's this bureaucratic for your own good.
Everything's going to be fair.
Little pansy world that no man wants to live in.
And I don't think women ultimately want to live in it either.
And the reaction to that is, yes, well, I'm going to kill everybody who stands in my way.
And that is actually a creation of the left.
It's the same.
It's the other side of the same coin.
Creativity, which I believe is the great force of love.
It's the purpose of love.
It's creativity, whether it's creating babies or art or businesses or whatever you do with your life.
Creativity and originality says, this is where I stand.
I don't care what you think.
You're wrong.
You're just wrong.
I'm not even going to deal with it.
Call me racist, call me whatever you want to say, or call me, you know, a wimp on the other side.
I don't care.
I stand here because this is what's right.
I believe that's the MAGA way.
I think that that's what Trump does.
And that's why he has people who don't like him on both sides.
So I'm watching today here.
This was a big week for rappers.
Kanye brings out this thing, N-word Heil Hitler, right?
And they've got people going Heil Hitler.
And I'm listening to people kind of, I don't know, trying to make it disappear.
I mean, if you listen to the lyrics very closely, which I did, it's Kanye saying, oh, I'm sick and I'm angry and I'm furious.
And that's why I'm being sucked in to this, you know, Heil Hitler thing.
But come on.
I mean, Tui, you know, I mean, like, I spit on this stuff.
You know, that's how you're going to get attention.
It's like saying some guy shows you his backside, you know, pulls down his pants and shows you his backside.
What he's really saying, you know, what he's really saying by showing me his offs, you know, it's like, no, you know, he's got these women dressed up and they're saying Heil Hitler and people, you know, are imitating this.
You know, how cheap?
How cheap?
How slow?
How low?
And, you know, I'm so sick of making excuses for people like this, you know, just so that your audience doesn't get angry at you.
Oh, but I like Kenya.
You know, that guy's a bum and he's an ill man.
And it's just, these are reaction bots.
You know, is this really who we are?
Really?
Seriously?
Is that what you think a man is?
He can say anything, including demonic crap.
You know, wow, how cool.
Diddy's Freak Offs00:06:02
You know, and part of this, this is not disconnected from this P. Diddy trial, this rapper who has been holding what he called freak offs, I guess, really just orgies.
And this poor girl, Cassie Ventura, who was his girlfriend, now she's eight months pregnant with another guy.
And this is the girl, I believe it's the same girl, yeah, who he beat up in that video.
She was trying to get away from him, and he drags her back in the room and kicks her while she's down like a real man.
Yeah, you know.
And what's interesting to me is now the prosecution, I mean the defense, is cross-examining this girl who said, oh, I was forced into these orgies and forced to do abusive, terrible things with lots and lots of men.
And obviously a lot of bisexuality in this rap world, a lot, a lot of gay, really gay stuff.
It's like, you know, P. Diddy likes watching men screw his girls and all this stuff.
And now the defense gets up and says, well, here are, you know, emails and texts where he says, you can say no if you want to, but you say yes.
And she says, well, I love them and I wanted to keep him and all this stuff.
And so the feminists are arguing about this.
And feminists on both sides, right and left, are arguing and saying, well, we shouldn't let her off the hook because what she's saying is she was helplessly manipulated by this guy.
But isn't she an adult, a grown-up person with her own, you know, power?
And isn't she a strong woman who could have stood up to P. Diddy?
And here's my answer.
No, no, she's not.
That's not what women are like.
Andrew Tate is exactly right about this, as I've said a hundred times.
You can use love and affection to degrade and destroy a woman.
They need it.
They are built for it.
They are built to be loved.
They are built to give love.
They are built to surrender themselves to love.
That's how pimps use them.
That's how pimps convince the girls who have no father, no father to love them.
That's how they use them.
And we've been lied to about this.
We've been lied, oh, that's not a feminist thing to say.
You're saying women are weak.
Yes, I am.
I'm saying women can be manipulated.
Andrew Tate is right.
Obviously, there are going to be exceptions.
That doesn't mean it is not a general rule.
Women's psychology, and I've talked to psychiatrists about this, it's built like their body's built, built like Pac-Man.
It is looking for something to fill it in.
And they're built like that so they'll take care of babies.
That's their crowning glory.
That is their superpower.
And so what's the difference between using love and affection in between supplying that love and affection in order to control and dominate and manipulate them and supplying that love and affection in order to lead a household of creativity and more life and beauty and surrender.
Okay, there's a subtle difference between those two things.
Abusing and dominating women and leading a family.
Two different views of manhood.
Stick with me here because you may not notice the slight difference is one is evil and one is good.
I know that's tough.
That's a tough one.
It's very, very subtle.
But, you know, and I know it's especially tough on social media, you know, because they're reactive.
Social media is reactive.
That is where people, you know, the feminists have been kicking men in the groin for 30 years and the men want revenge and they're anger.
They're controlled by their anger.
Anger is the devil's cocaine.
It feels like righteousness.
It feels like manhood to march down the streets of France and say, you know, yeah, the whites are coming.
I get it.
And I get that people turn up when you say those things and they listen to those things.
But there is such a thing as manhood.
There is such a thing as manhood.
And it is free.
Men are free.
They are free to follow their lights.
Andrew Tate is a creature of feminism.
He's being controlled by feminism.
Okay.
And what is happening when the feminists win?
Well, we know because that's where we are.
The feminists won.
Here's from the Wall Street Journal.
At bars and dinner tables across the U.S., women are throwing back more drinks, raising concerns about the health consequences of their alcohol consumption.
Women in their 30s and 40s have increased their alcohol consumption in recent decades as their lifestyles have changed.
Women who turned 35 between 2018 and 2019 were nearly 60% more likely to report recent binge drinking or alcohol use disorder symptoms than women who turned 35 between 1993 and 19.
Wonder what the difference is.
What is the difference?
You bet, you bet.
That's what feminism looks like.
You know, I mean, this is what feminism looks like is women drinking themselves to death because they're so unhappy.
They're girl bosses.
Yeah, I'm a girl boss.
And now could you carry me home?
And maybe I'll wake up somewhere I didn't know I was going to be.
You know, there's a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is a kind of nonpartisan place.
And this is a big study that they're reporting.
It tracked over a million children across 50 years.
Here's the abstract.
Nearly a third of American children experience parental divorce before adulthood.
Okay, a third.
I knew one family when I was a kid, when actually I was a teenager, I knew one family where there was a divorce.
Nearly a third of American children experienced parental divorce.
To understand its consequences, we use linked tax and census records for over 5 million children, not a million, 5 million children to examine how divorce affects family arrangements and children long-term income.
Following divorce, parents move apart.
Household income falls.
Parents work longer hours.
Families move more frequently.
Households relocate to poorer neighborhoods with less economic and opportunity.
This bundle of changes in family circumstances suggests multiple channels through which divorce may affect children's development and outcomes.
In the years following divorce, we observe sharp increases in teen births, child mortality.
To examine long-run effects on children, we compare siblings with different lengths of exposure to the same divorce.
We find the parental divorce reduces children's adult earnings and college residence while increasing incarceration, mortality, and teen births.
Women need men like a fish needs a bicycle.
A lot of kids out there who could use a bicycle to go with their fish.
Cultural Resistance00:14:41
Everything the feminists told us was wrong, and nobody wants to let it go.
Nobody wants to let it go.
And one of the problems is that the women who are girl bosses, the women who maybe feel most comfortable on television, they're the ones with a voice.
Moms at home don't have the same kind of voice as if you're on TV, as if you were, you know, I mean, look, you know that I love Carolyn Levitt.
I think she's one of the great, one of the, she is the best White House spokesperson. person I've ever seen.
But we did a story at the Daily Wire where he said she's a super mom.
And I thought, you know what?
She's a great, great White House spokeswoman.
Super moms actually aren't on TV.
They actually aren't.
I'm sorry.
You know, the super moms are at home.
And like they may be doing stuff from their home.
They may be podcasting from their home or something like that.
But super moms are where the kids are.
And, you know, look, I know, I love her.
I think she's great.
I'm glad she's not at home.
I'm glad she's doing what she's doing for my sake, but not for the kids' sake.
And I think we just got to say it now.
You know, we got to say it.
The feminists were wrong about everything.
You know, my friend Jesse Lee Peterson, one of my favorite people, because he doesn't care about anybody.
He's not afraid of anybody, Jesse Lee.
If you ever listen to him, and he always makes people sweat, but he says, God over man, man over women, women over children.
And he'll ask you, do you agree with that?
He'll ask you on the radio and you start to sweat, right?
Because nobody wants to say it.
But you know, what if instead of seeing that as a power dynamic, you saw it as a love dynamic?
Because women will die to protect their children.
Men will die to protect their women.
And God died for everybody, you know, died for all of us.
So maybe if we start there, we can start to build something new and toss these people out on their butts where they belong.
Aging creeps into everyday life in ways you hardly notice at first.
Like for me, it was when I woke up and my wife was pouring dirt over me.
I think that was a giveaway for some others.
You know, the mornings maybe take a bit longer.
You find yourself needing more recovery time after activities.
You start choosing comfortable shoes without a second thought.
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How do you spell Clavin?
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Chapter two, Donald of Arabia.
So to show you what I mean about MAGA being creative, you know, I wasn't joking.
I was joking in my opening about those headlines, but it's really true.
I don't want to pick on the Wall Street Journal.
There's so many good writers there, but they're a business paper and they would have just become an epic success.
All they had to do was cover Trump fairly when nobody else was doing that.
But they just, they are so wrapped up in their philosophy of things.
They can't see him clearly.
And I'm not making these headlines up.
Lowest inflation in four years.
Their headline is, Mild April Inflation Captures Early Stages of Tariff Effect, meaning inflation.
My favorite headline, they release this hostage, Edon Alexander.
You know, the people are dancing in the streets.
They're singing Haba Megillah.
They're doing the horror and all this stuff.
And their headline is, Hamas releases last living U.S. hostage from Gaza.
It marks a diplomatic win for Trump, but has brought mixed reactions in Israel.
I thought, I'm watching Israel on television.
What's their mixed reaction?
Well, the mother of one of the other hostages is sad because they're prioritizing the release of Americans.
And my feeling is, hey, Donald Trump is our president.
He's the president of the U.S.
He cares about Americans first.
You know, go ahead and complain.
But there's no mixed reactions.
They're happy the hostage is released.
And yes, we should.
Donald Trump is our president, the U.S. president.
He should put our hostages first.
And then they had one, this one, I was reading this on Member Block last week.
Gerard Baker, a good guy.
Have we dodged the tariff disaster?
Where the real headline should have been, were we wrong about the tariffs, right?
Because Trump is doing a new thing.
This is not a trade war.
It's not protectionism.
It's negotiation through tariffs.
He sees tariffs as a negotiating tool, as I said from the very beginning.
And this is, again, the death of an idea, the failure of an elite, that management from the top, the global trade, great for the rich, not so good.
You know, you get a cheaper iPhone made by slaves to play with on your guaranteed income by the life of work and dignity and meaning.
That's not for you anymore because you're just a nobody in the Midwest.
So you don't count.
So what is Trump doing?
Trump goes to the Middle East.
This was one of the, I thought, one of the biggest stories of the year.
And literally, the Wall Street Journal.
And again, I hate to pick on them because there's still a paper I subscribe to, and I don't want to turn around here.
They had a paper, didn't even cover it.
There was nothing.
You couldn't see on the front page any sign that Trump was in the Middle East.
He goes to the Middle East, you know, Saudi Arabia and Qatar and all these places, and he upends everything.
He changes everything.
And he starts out, and this is what he says.
Listen to the speech that he made in Riyadh, I guess it was, in Saudi Arabia.
Listen to what he says about our relations with the Middle East.
And remember, don't forget Obama's apology tour, where it was our fault for kind of feeling bad about the fact that they bombed New York, you know, and we're sorry, we felt bad about that.
We should have understood your point of view.
That's not what Trump says at all.
Let's hear what Trump says, cut to.
Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos, where it exports technology, not terrorism, and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence.
We don't want that.
Now, if you listen closely to that, right?
He's not saying you are doing that.
He's saying some of you want to do that, and that's why I'm here.
He's talking about a change, right?
He's really good at this.
He really is good at this.
He's been so friendly, and he's slapping them on the shoulder, and he's shaking hands and making fun of them in a friendly, funny way.
But he's not saying this is a great place.
He's saying, come into the modern world.
That's where we want you to be.
But, but, then he adds this, this is cut three.
And it's crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from Western interventionalists or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.
No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabal, Baghdad, so many other cities.
Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves, the people that are right here, the people that have lived here all their lives, developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions and charting your own destinies in your own way.
He's talking to a specific group of people, the people who in fact have built this culture, built these cities, right?
He's saying, you know, you didn't need us to come in and tell you.
I mean, that is just absolute respect.
And we all know what he thinks of George W. Bush's wars.
He's tired of the whole thing.
He's tired of the neocons.
But he's also pointing out that there is this other faction that is being wrong-footed by this endless Palestinian-Israel conflict, which is not Israel's fault.
It is not Israel's fault.
Israel is fighting for survival.
I'm a big supporter of Israel, but as I've said a million times, this is my country.
I only have one country, and I only care what happens to America.
But I think one of the good things we can do is obviously be on the side of people who are free, people who treat women with respect, people who treat other religions with respect.
These are not things that happen in Muslim countries.
But, but we can't make everybody look like us.
If there is one mistake that every single president has made since the end of World War II, it's really since Woodrow Wilson in a lot of ways, it's that we somehow were on a mission to make the world safe for democracy and only democracy.
So here he goes on.
This is cut four.
In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.
They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves.
So he's taking the responsibility and all this.
And then he says this.
This is cut five.
In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it's our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins.
They loved using our very powerful military.
And now it's really the most powerful it's ever been.
We just are getting a budget-approved $1 trillion, highest budget we've ever had in history for military, $1 trillion.
And we're getting the greatest missiles, the greatest weapons.
And, you know, I hate to do it, but you have to do it because we believe in peace through strength.
You have to have the strength, otherwise bad things could happen.
But hopefully, we'll never have to use any of those weapons.
Seems to be an awfully big waste of money if you're never going to use them, but hopefully we'll never have to use them because the destructive power of some of those weapons are like nobody's seen before.
I believe it is God's job to sit in judgment, my job to defend America and to promote the fundamental interest of stability, prosperity, and peace.
That's what I really want to do.
So let me just parse that for you.
Let me unpack that for you.
Okay.
What he said there was, yes, we came over.
We were going to turn you all into democracies and that was wrong.
You know, we shouldn't have done it.
You have your culture.
We have our culture.
We think your culture is wrong.
You think our culture is wrong.
Fine.
Fine.
We're going to do business.
And if you don't stop causing wars, we are going to bomb the bleeping bleep out of you.
I mean, that's basically what he's saying.
If you want to mess with us, you are messing with the biggest tribe.
You are messing with the worst.
And I'm not Joe Biden.
I'm not Barack Obama.
I'm Donald Trump.
When I draw a line in the sand, you're not going to like it if you cross over it.
I mean, that's what he's saying.
He's saying it in the nicest possible way.
He's saying, oh, my God, our military.
You've got to see this, guys.
If we unleash this military on you, your sand would be turned to glass.
You would be living on a plane of glass, and that would be it.
You wouldn't even be living there because you'd all be dead.
However, luckily, I don't want that.
I don't want that.
You don't want it.
Nobody wants it.
And we're not going to bother you.
You want to dress up your women like the ghost of Christmas yet to come.
Go ahead.
We're not going to talk to you about rights.
We're just going to do deals with you, do business with you for our advantage.
We're going to do it for our advantage.
We are not your mommy.
We are not your daddy.
We're just the biggest business in town.
We're just the biggest business in town.
You need us if you want to make.
So, you know, people are saying all this stuff.
This is it.
This is globalism because we live on a globe.
You know, the world is the size of a marble.
It is globalism, but it's globalism with nations in it.
So we are different nations, different businesses that are actually rivals that can cooperate and do things for one another.
He's not saying, oh, you take our factories and we'll just let the Midwest turn into a rust belt.
He made that first inaugural address and he said, this American carnage has to stop.
And all the papers were, that's dark.
That's dark.
That's dark.
I was in the Midwest.
I traveled in Obama's Midwest.
I couldn't believe what I was saying.
I couldn't believe the boarded windows.
I couldn't believe the rusting factories.
I couldn't believe the people shuffling down the street on whatever drugs they were taking.
It was, I mean, I had spent a lot of time.
I spent a lot of time in the Midwest when I was a kid traveling around.
And it was completely transformed by the globalists who were having a great time.
They were reading the Wall Street trying to, yeah, you know, let's not have any of those tariffs, those tariffs, it's not going to be good for business.
You know, they just abandoned this.
And so all he's doing is bringing in a new globalism of competing and cooperating nations.
You're a nice nation.
We can cooperate with you.
You don't have to change your culture.
You don't have to be a democracy.
You don't even have to be nice to your women.
We wish you would, but that's not what we're here for.
We are not here to transform you into us.
We're just here to help us and do business that is mutually.
And believe me, the Middle East, who's it filled with?
Jews and Arabs.
If anybody knows about that kind of business, it's Jews and Arabs.
This is something they knew naturally.
So all he's saying is let's do mutual business.
Now, let's take a look at the way it was before, because this is the way they cover Trump as if there's no context, as if nothing else was ever happening in any other way.
Everything was just absolutely tickety-boo until Trump got there and ruined it all with MAGA.
Let's take a look at the way it was before.
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China's Hidden Gain00:15:05
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Chapter 3, Red Apple.
Now, I want to look, like I said, what we were doing before.
One comment Trump made, I think still in Saudi Arabia, was he said he'd been having a conversation with Tim Cook, who runs Apple.
And Tim Cook had announced that they were moving something like 30% of their iPhone production to India, which obviously is the biggest democracy on earth, and it's not a slave state like China.
Now, this announcement, as I will explain in a little bit, is complete BS.
Tim Cook is, this is all finagling.
But Trump, this is what Trump said about it, Cut 14.
Yeah, I said to him, Tim, you're my friend, I've treated you very good.
You're coming here with $500 billion, but now I hear you're building all over India.
I don't want you building in India.
You can build in India if you want to take care of India, because India is the highest, one of the highest tariff nations in the world.
It's very hard to sell into India.
And they've offered us a deal where basically they're willing to literally charge us no tariff.
So we go from the highest tariff, you couldn't do business in India.
We're not even a top 30 in India because the tariff is so high, to a point where they have actually told us, I assume you too, Scott, you were working on that also, that there will be no tariffs, right?
Would you say that's a difference?
They're the highest, and now they're saying no tariff.
But I said to Tim, I said, Tim, look, we've treated you really good.
We put up with all the plants that you built in China for years.
Now you've got to build us.
We're not interested in you building in India.
India can take care of themselves.
Apple can't make its products here.
They can't afford to make their products here.
And the best they can afford, we can have them do is to make their products in countries that are friendly to us.
I mean, to make part of their products in countries that are friendly to us, and that will be part of the supply chain instead of having China, our antagonist, be in charge of that supply chain.
But the thing is, this India Dodge is a Dodge.
What they're doing is they're manufacturing the phones in China using slave labor and then sending them to China to put in like a couple of screws and sending them to India, I'm sorry, to put in a couple of screws and then saying, well, you know, we're having them manufacture in India.
It's complete nonsense.
It's to hide the fact that they're stuck in China.
You know, there's a new book out by a guy named Patrick McGee.
It's called Apple in China.
I've asked him to come on and he says he will and hopefully it'll be either next week or the week after.
But in the meantime, I'm going to play a little bit of an interview he did at The Hill, I think it is.
Because we keep hearing that if we don't want our iPhone built by slaves, the iPhone will cost us $9,000, okay?
And so every single person, including me, who's got an iPhone is basically using slave labor, right?
That's what's happening.
But here's what McGee says.
He says, it's not that the Chinese, I mean, the Chinese is a slave state.
I mean, they control people's minds.
control people's opinions, their speech, their religion, everything.
But the fact that they are working these people in slave-like conditions is on Apple, he says, not necessarily on China.
Here it says cut six.
Our understanding of Apple in China is very narrow, right?
So reporters might think they're doing the hard-hitting reporting by going to a factory and showing that workers are working 12-hour days, 100 people are sleeping to a room back in the early 2000s.
And there's a sense that Apple is exploiting workers.
I flip that script on its head, not to say that the workers are treated well, but the reason Apple is allowing, or the reason Apple is allowed to exploit its workers is that China is getting something even greater out of this relationship.
So Beijing is allowing Apple to exploit its workers, if you will, so that Beijing can exploit Apple.
So what he's saying here is that basically China lured Apple into their country by giving them slave labor, by saying these people were going to work for nothing.
They're going to be sleeping on the factory floor.
They're going to work their fingers to the bone.
All of that stuff.
All you have to do is send in your best technicians to teach us to do what you do.
That's what they did.
So now Apple is dependent on China and China is getting all our best technology because Apple hires the best people on earth, right?
If you're a guy who can fix tiny little numbers and turn them into magic, you're going to go to Apple because they are going to pay you to do that.
So what happens?
They take this and not only, the Chinese are great at this, right?
So they take this and they become so proficient at producing things that with the exception of the United States of America, they have driven everybody else out of business.
They have left them without any technological skills at all.
Because if they can buy their phones from China, they can buy their technology from China, there's no way for them to even begin to become the kind of productive societies that can rise up, right?
So let's hear what he says about what China has done with the technology we've given them.
This is cut seven.
They don't just participate, they deindustrialize other countries with how good they are at this stuff.
And I argue the reason they're so good is that we willingly taught them.
I mean, the line I use in the book is that this isn't a story of globalization, but Chinification.
And the Chinese weren't stealing IP.
They found a way for Apple to voluntarily give it to them in a certain sense.
And so like when Apple goes to, Tim Cook goes to Zhang Nanghai, the citadel of communist power in Beijing, in May 2016, my argument is here's Apple playing the role of Prometheus, handing the Chinese the gift of fire.
What can you do with those gifts?
Well, you can build more than smartphones.
You can build smartphones on wheels, right?
EVs.
This is why China is so dominant in electric vehicles.
And you can also build drones and military weaponry.
I mean, if you are a master at semiconductors and robotics and automation, you are building a military with those capabilities.
So we're essentially sleeping with the enemy, right?
We're sleeping with the enemy.
And this is, you know, Tim Cook, obviously a brilliant businessman, not really thinking about the good of America, thinking about the good of Apple.
That's his job.
It is the government's job to think about the good of America.
And, you know, I believe that businessmen should be thinking about the country that gives them everything that they have.
I think that if a business is going to say, well, we're a person with rights, then it ought to act like a person.
This is the problem with Ayn Rand world on the right.
This is my problem with Ayn Rand World on the right.
Business is a beautiful thing.
It really is.
Capitalism, beautiful thing.
Creative, wonderful.
Lifts everybody out of poverty.
Amazing, amazing system.
But it's not the first system.
The first system is the things that you, the moral things that you do, the values you do.
You know, everybody's complaining because Trump is dealing with Qatar and they're worried that he's going to give them this, they're going to sell chips to them and we're worried they'll get their technology and they'll send it to China.
China already has it.
They have it from Apple.
And this is the thing.
I don't trust Qatar.
I don't think Trump should take that jet from him.
Only worry about Trump's safety.
I don't really care if he takes the jet.
He says he's going to take a jet from Qatar to uses Air Force One and it's a beautiful jet and all this stuff.
And everybody says, oh, this is corrupt.
My feeling is I don't know about if it's corrupt.
We always take gifts from people, but how are you going to find out whether there's bugs planted in the metal?
How are you going to know?
How are you going to debug it?
How are you going to make sure there's no bomb that they can put off?
I wouldn't do it.
But let us do business with the world for our benefit, not for theirs.
And let us do business at least with people who are not trying to kill us.
China is, China is so huge, so smart, so powerful.
And the people there are so much under the thumb of their government that they have a lot more flexibility of motion than we do.
We have got to use our strengths.
What are our strengths?
Freedom, creativity, capitalism.
Those are our strengths.
And do it with the morals that say, hey, you know what?
I'm an American business.
I'm going to make my stuff here.
That's what Trump is teaching people.
It's the stick.
Trump is using tariffs as the stick to say, hey, you're an American company.
You're thriving off American rules.
You're paying American taxes.
Build your stuff here.
Treat your workers fairly.
It's like this failed old order made a lot of money off this.
They made a lot of money off Apple.
I made money.
I'm sure I've got some investment in Apple somewhere in these funds that I invested.
This is the thing.
I want people to make money, but don't you have to believe in your country first?
All of these people who want us to never side with Israel or other allies, that's ridiculous.
Of course, you have to be a good friend to your allies or at least be a good ally to your allies.
But still, to take care of yourself, you have to have businesses that care about America.
And that's what Trump is using tariffs for.
Trump is an original.
You know, he's a new thing.
And I think he really is in the same way that Reagan kind of embodied the values of the time he grew up in.
Trump embodies the values of the time he grew up in.
It's a coarser time.
It's a rougher time.
It's a time, a much more practical and cynical time.
But still, if we can get that kind of business back in place, then we can start to think about what happens next.
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Final chapter, Wither Maga.
So I want to, because I'm so uninterested in what the left is doing and I'm so tired of pointing out how evil they are and terrible they are, and I want to start pointing out where we can go, what we can become.
I want to talk about the future of the MAGA movement, because I think the old conservatism is gone, the old Republican Party is gone, the old not, you know, whatever you want to call it, soft right or rhino is gone.
And MAGA is the thing that is going to be in place.
But what it looks like is going to be up to the people who make it happen, right?
And so there was, I always tell you, you get tomorrow's news today here.
Now you're going to get news from a couple of years down the line.
Now, I don't know the future, but let's face it.
If anybody knows the future, it's me.
So let me tell you what I think is going to happen next.
There was this article in the Wall Street Journal weekend section that I sort of thought it was written by the people who are the elites who don't want to be thrown out.
So it was very, took a very dark view of the Trump administration.
But it also said some things that I thought had some kind of weight to them.
It said, the ideological gurus battling for the soul of Trump World.
Okay, that was the headline.
Techno-libertarian Curtis Yarvin and Catholic conservative Patrick Denin have just one thing in common, a desire to destroy the American establishment.
Now, that's so common.
We all want to destroy the American establishment.
The American establishment failed.
And I don't want to see your charts.
I don't want you to tell me how great everything is.
I don't want you to tell me like, oh, you know, things are great.
They have not been great.
We're not having children.
We're killing ourselves with drugs.
People are smoking dopes the minute they get out of bed in the morning.
We are not in a great situation.
But we can be.
We can be.
All right.
So this is basically a scare article meant to make you think that MA will necessarily lead to tyranny.
And anything can lead to tyranny.
But the idea is that there's two camps.
One is exemplified by Elon Musk and the Tech Bros.
That's Tech Bro MAGA.
And their guru is Curtis Yarvin.
And on the other side, there's JD Vance and the Catholic Integralist MAGA.
And their guru is Patrick Denin.
Now, I interviewed Curtis, and I want to talk about this because sometimes on the air and in social media, you're not allowed to disagree with anybody without making it sound like you hate them.
And I actually liked Curtis.
I would sit down with Curtis.
I'd have a cigar with him.
I think I would enjoy his company.
I thought he was a bad guru, though.
I don't think he makes a good guru.
He has a capacious mind.
He uses that mind to filibuster and kind of dazzle you with all the interesting information he knows.
But when it comes down to what he's really saying, I just don't think it's true.
He says, he's quoted in this article of saying, I'm like, do you want democracy, this abstraction, this ideal that people are talking about?
De Tocqueville's Warning00:05:19
Or do you want to be in a competently governed country that is not in a state of cold civil war?
This is what he said to me when I interviewed him, Cut 8.
Why would anyone call themselves a monarchist in the year 2024?
Well, if you look around you, you know, I'm looking into some very delicate computer hardware right now.
When I opened the box that contained that computer hardware, it said designed by Apple in California, made in China.
Now, those are three brand names there.
Apple, California, and China.
Okay, two of these things are monarchies, and one of them is something else.
So what he's saying is Apple and China are efficient because they're monarchies, and California is a mess because it's not.
But the fact is, you know, you have to have a broader view of history than that.
I mean, I know he's got all this information in his head, but in fact, you know, Greece rises to greatness when it's free.
Rome rises to greatness when it's free.
America rises to greatness when it's free, and then they lose the plot.
That's really what happens.
So, I mean, freedom is an enormously powerful machine for building its abundance, it's the prosperity that you get from freedom that makes people throw their freedom away.
So I do not think that the fact that China and Apple do well has anything, you know, Apple.
Apple is alive because of America.
They would not have been invented anywhere else but in the freedom of America.
So yeah, freedom is chaotic.
It's uncertain.
That's one of the reasons the businessmen don't like freedom.
They keep saying it's uncertainty.
Well, yeah, it's uncertainty because when you go out of business, if you do the wrong thing, you go out of business.
And then they say, oh, bail us out.
Suddenly they believe in welfare when their businesses go down, but they don't believe in it when some poor guy wants to eat, right?
This is the problem.
You know, freedom is good.
If it's good for the poor, it's good for everybody.
Okay.
So I just do not agree with him.
And I don't think that Elon Musk, I think Elon Musk is a brilliant man who should be allowed to do all his crazy businesses and take us to Mars.
Wonderful, wonderful thing.
He is not the model for America.
He is not the model.
He is an American.
He is what America is meant to nurture, but he is not the model for America, how it should be governed.
Now, then there's Patrick Denine.
Now, Denine, I read his first book, which is the, what is it, Why Liberalism Failed.
And, you know, his point is that we lost control of our values and started to worship freedom.
It's kind of like Polybius says, you know, in his cycle of regimes, that after a while, freedom devolves into chaos, and then you need a tyrant, a strong man to come in.
And he has a following.
Denine has a following of Catholic integralists, people who sort of want to bring back throne and altar.
But I don't think that's who Denine is himself.
That is not the way he talks when I listen to him.
What he is actually saying comes less from the Pope than it does from Alexis de Tocqueville.
And let me just read you a little section of Alexis de Tocqueville that I know that Denine likes.
Here's what de Tocqueville said.
And obviously he came and visited early America and wrote one of the great books about it.
And in that book, he says, in the United States, the influence of religion is not confined to the manners, but it extends to the intelligence of the people.
Amongst the Anglo-Americans, there are some who profess the doctrines of Christianity from a sincere belief in them, and others who do the same because they're afraid to be suspected of unbelief.
Christianity, therefore, reigns without any obstacle by universal consent.
The consequence is, as I have before observed, that every principle of the moral world is fixed and determinate, although the political world is abandoned to the debates of the experiments of men.
Thus, the human mind is never left to wander across a boundless field, and whatever may be its pretensions, it is checked from time to time by barriers which it cannot surmount.
So what is he saying?
He's saying in America, the law lets you do anything, but not everything is acceptable because of Christianity.
Now, where have we heard that before?
From St. Paul, right?
I have the right to do anything, you say, but not everything is beneficial.
I have the right to do anything, but not everything is constructive.
No one should seek their own good, but the good of others.
That was the America that became mighty.
That was the America that ruled the world.
That was the America that stopped the Nazis.
That was the Americans that stopped the Soviets.
That was the America that became the greatest thing on earth.
Everything was allowed, but not everything was recognized as good.
And that's what Denin says is cut nine.
What keeps us free of tyrants is our capacity to limit ourselves, is our capacity to limit our temptation to be revolutionists.
And the American condition and situation makes us susceptible to that.
And yet Tocqueville, observing the America of the 1830s, says, they've done it.
They succeeded in governing what is otherwise a constant temptation in front of them.
And I would say, if we seek to conserve the American tradition, this is the tradition we should look to be conserving.
Now, I agree with that.
I do not agree in bringing back the throne and altar, but I agree on free men whose hearts are governed by Christian morals and Christian ideas.
Even if they don't believe in them, they have to be worried that they will be canceled if they say they don't believe in them.
That's essentially what de Tocqueville says.
Free Men's Hearts Governed00:07:59
So I don't know the future, obviously, but if I had to guess, and I always guess right, I think the next election is going to be between AOC and VPJD.
That's what I think right now.
Everything can change, and any accidents can happen, all this stuff.
But I think a great deal of the future of MAGA and the future of this country depends on who JD Vance is.
And I think there's a lot of people who don't know who JD Vance is, and I think one of them is JD Vance.
I think he has got to figure himself out.
And he's got a lot of people whispering in his ear that I don't think are very good for him.
There are the people, the kind of anti-Semitic Catholic triumphalists, and I don't think that they are the future of America.
But I think something like what Denine is really talking about, talking about people whose hearts are formed by Christianity, Catholic and Protestant Christianity, but who are free by law to make choices.
I think that's the America of the future, where we elect our leaders, but we serve our God.
Ben After Dark is now a full-length show.
So put the kids to bed because this thing is just so hot.
It started as a 12-minute monologue.
It's now a members-only spectacle of unscreened guests, unsolicited opinions, and unchecked sarcasm.
That's members-only, not only fans.
Check out the trailer right now.
This Friday night, Ben After Dark returns.
Why hello?
And now it's not just a terrible segment, it's a full-blown disaster.
It is great to be here, Ben.
That's right.
We took a perfectly short, manageable late-night bit, and we turned it into a full-length show.
I'm sure it is.
Why?
Because no one asked us to.
And that felt like the right reason, which makes sense.
Now, exclusively for Daily Wire Plus members, Ben After Dark delivers more of everything.
More uncensored tapes.
Oh, God, that's rough.
More cultural chaos.
Have you seen Lena Dunham?
Unvetted questions from celebrities who should know better and more segments that probably should not exist.
I know we have a professional writing staff.
This week, we asked Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee if he knows about Bill Belichick's new girlfriend.
And everybody else is glaring at her, not Bill Belichick.
I found out if America actually has talent.
What is the clapping guy gonna do?
Like, where is that used for?
And someone, let a mystery guest ask me whatever was on their mind, totally unfiltered.
So nothing about the Declaration of Independence or the territorial incorporation doctrine.
Oh, and there's a brand new Ben Destroys because it's either this or I started throwing things at my TV.
There are 330 million people, and that was the best we came up with.
It's the all-new, definitively worse, absolutely more.
Ben After Dark.
Friday night only at DailyWirePlus.com, only for members.
You're welcome.
Don't miss the all-new Ben After Dark tonight at 7.30 p.m., Eastern only on Daily Wire Plus.
All right, Clavin Clapax.
I'm going to bomb the shit out of him.
Yeah!
That's every speech you make should be that speech.
Listen, before I start, let me just one last time, thank you for putting Kingdom of Cain on the New York Times bestseller list.
Great paper, the New York Times.
I love it to death.
But mostly I love you, and I really appreciate your doing that.
And I hope if you haven't gotten it yet, I hope you will.
I think you will love it.
If you like the show, I think you will love the book.
Please go out and get Kingdom of Cain, Finding God in the Literature of Darkness.
It will take you by surprise, but you will really enjoy it.
If you want to write to Clavin Clapbacks, it's Clavin Clapbacks, Clavin with a K, Clapbacks with a K, Clavinclapbacks at dailywire.com.
Ask us anything.
Your personal life, politics, religion, art will happily answer whatever letters we get and we have time for.
From Rory, oh, great and all-seeing Andrew, you have mentioned many times that you fully support term limits for Congress.
It seems to me that if you make them lame ducks from the beginning, they will have zero incentive to represent constituents and will simply grab all the money they can during their short time in office, becoming nothing more than shills for the lobbyists.
Please explain to me where I'm wrong, Rory, in Las Vegas.
It's not that you're necessarily wrong.
It's that it can't get worse.
It's like Trump said to black Americans, what do you have to lose?
Congress is now virtually just a stumbling block.
It does nothing.
They're trying to get a budget.
They can't cut anything from the COVID spending.
I mean, the COVID spending is worse than World War II, and they can't cut it because each person is fighting for his little, you know, his little fiefdom, and nobody wants to give up the money.
It's obscene.
It is obscene that we have a Congress that can't cut a couple of bucks from our budget when we're drowning in debt.
That is disgusting.
Whatever comes, it's at least a way, a chance of making things better.
Your worries are absolutely taken on board.
I have worries about it too, but I think it's got to be better than what we've got now.
Guy says, Drew, every time you mention Game of Thrones, I spiral to the point that I can no longer listen to your point, so I'm just going to try to get this out.
Why do you use Game of Thrones as a reference for a good show that features sex and death?
I watched the first season, they killed off the only character I liked.
It became clear to me that this was a story where the honorable people die and the bad people triumph.
So I stopped watching.
So explain to me why Game of Thrones is good art and not just a polished turd.
Well, first of all, it's because I think of art differently.
I think art should represent all of life.
The idea of Game of Thrones is that you either win or you die.
If you don't play the power games, you lose.
It's not that there are no honorable people in Game of Thrones, but they have to play the power game.
And the people who are good people who don't play it are mercilessly wiped out.
That to me seemed very realistic.
That's what I found so gripping about it.
That's why I couldn't stop watching.
That's why there were weeks when I actually cared more about who was going to win the Iron Throne than I cared who was going to win the White House.
I mean, that's how wrapped up in that show I was.
I'm not looking to be told that life is great.
I'm not looking to watch things that make me feel, oh, everything's nice and the good people win and all that.
You know, if you like that, that's great.
Some stories should be like that.
Other stories should not.
Their stories should be true.
That is what I care about.
I think anything that is true speaks about God.
But only what's true.
From Garrett, my family was shaped by fundamentalist Christianity.
One of my brothers recently came out as gay.
Since then, the family has fractured.
My sisters refuse to attend gatherings.
If he brings his partner, he won't attend unless his partner is welcome.
It's left my parents feeling forced to choose between their gay son and their grandkids.
My wife and I are committed Christians and hold conservative values, but we have no issue with our kids being around my brother and his partner a couple times a year.
We trust our parenting and believe showing love matters more than avoiding a few brief interactions.
If you were in my shoes, how would you handle this?
I'd really value your advice.
Thanks, Garrett.
I'd handle it just like you are.
I mean, I feel the way Trump feels about the Middle East.
I'm not the judge of the world.
I'm not God's policeman.
You know, I think people live in different ways in ways that I approve of, in ways that I disapprove of, in ways that I sort of, you know, think might be a good idea and sort of think it might be bad.
I think people should be allowed to live.
They are not responsible to me.
They are responsible to God whether they know it or not.
I hope they know it and I hope they work that out, but that is not my problem.
I mean, I invite people to my house who have all kinds of feelings and ideas that I hate a lot worse than I, you know, I mean, I've worked with gay people all my life.
I'm an artist.
You know, I'm like the straightest artist I know.
You know, most artists are involved in all kinds of things.
I'm sorry.
I just think you should love people and accept them if you can, if they're not doing evil, if they're not doing evil to other people.
And yeah, they have to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling.
That's it.
And so do you, and so do I.
But I would do what you're doing.
I got to move into member block, which means you are plunged.
If you haven't bought the kingdom of Cain, you are just plunged into a clavenless darkness that is darker than any darkness can be dark.
So become a member today.
Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Use code Claven at checkout for two months free on all annual plans or else.
I'm not threatening you, but or else I'm threatening you.