Ep. 1238’s Andrew Clavin dissects Zoran Momdani’s divisive NYC mayor bid, comparing his rhetoric to Epstein-linked corruption—where a leaked DOJ memo (July 4th weekend) debunked blackmail claims despite prior warnings from Bondi, Patel, and Bungino. He critiques Trump’s silence on Epstein as a "cultural error," despite transparency elsewhere, while linking Hollywood’s reinstatement of controversial figures like James Gunn to systemic moral decay. Clavin ties Epstein’s alleged abuses to broader institutional failures, from churches to media, questioning faith in suffering amid tragedies like Texas’ flood. The episode ends with product plugs—Stopbox Pro guns, Journey to the UFC—and a membership push, framing cultural honesty as a counter to elite narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
Some political observers are saying that New York Democrat mayoral candidate Zorhan Mamdani is a sleazy, two-faced peddler of political snake oil whose communist agenda would only demonstrate yet one more wearisome time the capability of Marxism to reduce a city striving toward prosperity and peace to a rubble-strewn ruin of homelessness,
crime, and poverty in order to create an urban hellscape that would express through the human misery of others a leftist like Momdani's virulent hatred of God, America, the Jews, humanity, and himself,
even while he continues to disguise that hatred behind a smile of chilling insincerity and the sort of vague, Obama-like bromides of deceptive political oration that anyone but an idiot or a Democrat would recognize instantaneously as the mesmeric lies of a man whose heart has been poisoned by a diabolical socialist ideology that transforms every natural human instinct toward goodness into a bubbling black tar of destructive evil.
Other political observers are saying other things like, what's on TV tonight?
Or I wonder if it's too late to get a reservation for dinner, because watching Mamdani's rise to frontrunner in the New York Mayor race is so disturbing they'd rather think about practically anything else.
Left-leaning New York politicians are uncertain whether or not they should endorse Momdani and have been nervously tracking the opinions of a mob of naked, blood-drenched maniacs who at first seemed to be the extras who played the rage zombies in 28 years later, but instead turned out to be the Democrat base.
As New York Senator and career corruptocrat Chuck Schumer said, quote, I am 100% in favor of Zoran Momdani if that shrieking mob of naked, blood-drenched zombies supports him.
But if they would prefer to rampage down Fifth Avenue, killing and devouring anyone who gets in their way, then I'm in favor of that instead.
In other words, a lifetime of ideological pandering has left me a hollow doppelganger of the man God created me to be, and I'll basically do anything for just one more term in power before delivering the husk of what was once a human being into the hands of the satanic overlord who owns the flaming ashes of my former soul.
Unquote.
On the other hand, shapely but evil New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ecazio-Cortez has endorsed Momdani enthusiastically, telling her supporters, quote, men have sleepwalked into self-destruction while gazing at a hot rack like mine through all of human history.
I don't see why this mayor election should be any different, unquote.
Some journalists have temporarily roused themselves from the sleep of reason that produces monsters to report on some of Mamdani's little peccadillos, like the fact that he's a Jew-hating Islamist-appeasing anti-American dirtbag who once gave the finger to a statue of Christopher Columbus and wants to defund the police, seize the means of production, transform the state of Israel into a rerun of the Holocaust, and reduce New York to a socialist slave city on the order of 1970s Detroit.
But Momdani answered those accusations in a charming speech to a vast collection of Matrix-like pods that contained residents of Park Slope, Brooklyn, who were happily living in a dream that the world was like it is in the New York Times while their brains were being drained of electricity in order to power the Democrat machine.
Momdani said, quote, sure, I've got some ideas that would make New York City look like it had been trampled by a Stalinist Godzilla.
But you know, Ronald Reagan used to say that a person who agrees with you 80% of the time is a friend and an ally.
And in the same way, a person who agrees with me 80% of the time will soon be lying in the gutter in a pool of his own vomit, wishing he'd paid closer attention to that other 20%, unquote.
The Park Slope residents greeted this speech with thunderous applause and then went back to dodging bullets in slow motion because they were dreaming they were in a New York Times editorial that said, yes, Mamdani's crime-infested New York would be riddled with gunfire, but don't worry, just take this blue pill and you'll be able to dodge the bullets in slow motion.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Balance of Nature00:04:38
All right, we are back laughing our way through the Jeffrey Epstein cover-up.
And you'll notice, you know, there's a big fly in the studio today, and that I always take that as a sign that Satan is trying to throw me off the track because I'm going to deliver the pure truth.
And he just wants to stop that by having this fly annoy me.
I will do my best to show off my incredible reflexes by killing it during the course of the show.
Also, I just, I got this in the mail today.
This is the new cover, and this is called an advanced reading copy.
This is what they send to critics before the book comes out.
This is the new Cameron Winter mystery, which you can now pre-order on Amazon.
You can pre-order it on Amazon, and it will be out in October.
It's called After That the Dark, and it is number five in the series.
And I just finished a draft of number six, so we're going to get to number six.
That's the last contract I have.
I think this is the best book in the series, and I think it's a great place to start.
I think you could read this book and then go back to the first in the series.
And I feel a little bit bad promoting it after just promoting the Kingdom of Cain.
You guys put it on the bestseller list, which was this close to being a miracle.
I mean, you performed an actual miracle.
You can tell your spouses, I performed a miracle by putting Kingdom of Cain on the New York Times bestseller list.
I'm going to ask you to do it again.
The way we did it was by pre-ordering in such numbers that it rushed onto the list.
And I think we can do that again with After That the Dark.
And I feel a little bad promoting myself so much, but on the other hand, I know you will love this book.
I think, like I said, even if you've never read a Cameron Winter mystery, this is the one, one you can start with because it is, I think it's the best.
And it's the one he falls in love.
And it's a really good story all the way down the line.
Also, if wherever you are watching this, whether it is on Daily Wire Plus, where you should be a subscriber, of course, or on YouTube or just in your dreams in the darkest place of your soul, you might want to leave a comment in the darkest place of your soul.
And if it represents a darkness even greater than the darkness of your twisted soul, we will read it on the air because that's why we're here.
Today's comment comes from Maytown Michael and says, my love for America is in no way diminished by my decision to emigrate to the Republic of Clavinon.
It's just that I prefer the Trump happiness montage to the Star-Spangled Banner as a national anthem.
Also, the taxes are lower here.
Many such cases.
And of course, the Trump happiness montage is also easier to sing.
But let us now get to today's episode, The Epstein Blunder.
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Chapter one, how I became Socrates.
Now, because you are my audience, and I know you're just steeped in the classics and incredibly well-read and not like the rest of the Daily Wire owners.
I know you must all know, or at least should know, how Socrates discovered to his surprise that he was the wisest man in all of Athens.
With the Bible, this is, I think, one of the two foundational stories of Western civilization.
And it's very, just very briefly, I'll recount it for you.
If there's just somebody who's wandered on from the Michael Knoll show who doesn't know anything, the Oracle at Delphi said that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens.
FBI Memo: Unmasking Truth00:14:48
And Socrates said, How can that be when I don't know anything?
I don't know anything.
I'm not sure of anything.
I know that I don't know nothing.
I know nothing, but I don't know anything.
And he found out by going around interviewing all the other people in Athens, he found out that nobody knew anything, but everyone else thought they knew something.
So he was the wisest man in Athens because he alone knew that he knew nothing.
That's the way I feel when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein.
I seem to be the only person in America who does not know what the truth is.
And that makes me uniquely wise because every other person I listen to has got it just absolutely nailed.
They have got this figured out right down to the ground.
It's the CIA, it's the Jews, it's the Jews.
Everything's the Jews.
It's a blackmail scheme.
It's nothing.
It's just a conspiracy theory.
They all know how, you know, and I keep looking at this and thinking, how the hell do you know that?
Why are you so sure of that?
Why are you so completely, you've got it all figured out?
I just, I wish I had their sources, except I think that they can only hear the voice in their own heads.
I think they can't, I can't hear the voices in their heads.
But here is one thing that though I know nothing about what has happened in the Epstein story, I do know something about this.
I do know this.
This is one of the most successful presidencies I have ever seen.
We celebrated it last week in the July 4th show.
It's amazing.
The closing the border, deporting the illegals, passing the One Big Beautiful Bill, which happened after I recorded last week's show, opposing child mutilation and racist DEI and stopping men from stealing women's sports trophies.
What a bunch of bullies they are.
Defunding Planned Parenthood in the One Big Beautiful Bill that's been held up by the court, but I'm sure that will actually win through.
That's just one of those rogue courts things.
Cutting government fraud, you know, through Doge and other methods, winning a bunch of Supreme Court cases.
He's still winning cases.
Putting communist Ivy League universities on notice so they have to change some of the policies that have produced a generation of little Hitlers, turned our elites into these little Hitlers who don't know anything except for the fact that the Jews must die and Hamas must live.
That's all they know.
Breaking, obviously, bombing Iran's nuclear facilities, negotiating peace deals here and there, you know, even in the Congo, maybe in Gaza, strengthening our military, starting to rejigger trade and manufacturing, acturing so we can stand up to China, on and on and on.
And this is six months.
This is six months into his presidency.
This guy is on track to be a great president.
He is on track to get his face on one of the dollar bills, right?
He is a great president, and I think he's made a mistake.
And we all make mistakes.
This does not detract from him.
It doesn't mean I suddenly hate him.
It doesn't mean I think he's betrayed America or anything like this.
But I think he is not seeing this.
He usually has one of the great cultural eyes in the country, but I'm not sure he's understanding that this is what a cultural error it is, what happened with Jeffrey Epstein, which I'll talk about in a second, and recently, which I'm sure you've heard about, but I'll just go through it.
But I'm just going to say this in the event anyone from the White House is listening.
I think there are a few people who are listening.
And anybody else who knows anybody, I think they should reconsider the way they are handling this.
So at the end of the July 4th weekend, I think it was Sunday, right?
So it's like the time when you bury things.
That is when you want to release information that you don't want anybody to know.
It's on Friday afternoon or it's at the end of a holiday weekend.
A memo is leaked to Axios, which is a kind of a center-left site.
It's not a bad site.
It's not a virulently anti-Trump site, but it's not a right-wing site at all.
The Justice Department and the FBI release a memo saying they have concluded they have no evidence that convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein blackmailed powerful figures or kept a client list or was murdered.
And the investigation is over, and that's all we're going to know, and it's done.
So aside from the fact that this is dumped in the middle of nowhere, it comes after many statements from people we know and love, and we respect them.
And again, just like with Trump, just because we feel that they're making a cultural error doesn't mean we think that they are suddenly, their entire personalities have changed.
So Attorney General Pam Bondi, you know, former prosecutor, she defended Trump during his impeachment.
We have no reason to feel that she's suddenly become a crafty, horrible human being.
That's not what's happening.
But when we look back at the past, we hear her saying, not the distant past, even while she was Attorney General, all of this stuff is going to come out.
Here she is, just a brief clip of her with John Roberts on Fox as a cut two.
The DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients.
Will that really happen?
It's sitting on my desk right now to review.
That's been a directive by President Trump.
I'm reviewing that.
I'm reviewing JFK files, MLK files.
That's all in the process of being reviewed because that was done at the directive of the president from all of these agencies.
So have you seen anything?
You said, oh, my gosh.
Not yet.
Okay.
Well, we'll check back with you.
And then we remember that she made a big show of releasing these binders, invited all the press and even the new press out there.
And in the binders was stuff that we had all seen before, especially the Wall Street Journal had released basically the names in his black book.
And that doesn't mean anything.
The guy was a social item, moved among powerful people.
And just because you were in his black book doesn't mean you did anything wrong.
We all know that.
We all understand that.
So all of that information come out.
It was embarrassing.
It was humiliating to everybody who had thought this, oh, look, we have taken back the Department of Justice and the corruption is over.
Kash Patel, also, I think, a good man, a guy we can trust.
People don't just suddenly change character.
This is the guy who wrote the Devin Nunes memo.
A lot of you might not remember that.
It was a huge deal that exploded the Russian collusion hoax.
The media went absolutely nuts and beat up Nunes, you know, saying, oh, this is all nonsense.
He's just working for Trump and all this stuff.
But he was absolutely right.
And that was written by Kash Patel.
And it was just the media was lying about the Russian collusion and they hated being exposed.
And here's something that he said before.
This is before he took over the FBI, before he became the head of the FBI.
He was talking to Benny Johnson.
This is Cut Three.
Why is the FBI protecting the greatest pederist, the largest scale pederist in human history?
Simple, because of who's on that list.
You don't think that Bill Gates is lobbying Congress night and day to prevent the disclosure of that list?
And why is it that the Senate, you know, and good for Senator Blackburn to try to get it out, but then Dick Turbin comes over the top and says, no, we're not going to release the names.
I don't care about the list itself, but he've released the names, right?
What the hell are the House Republicans doing?
They have the majority.
You can't get the list.
So this is two years ago.
Now suddenly, nope, nothing there, nothing to see.
And again, released in the dead of night, basically.
Dan Bungino, another guy, I've listened to him a million times, always liked his show.
He was NYPD.
He was Secret Service.
He built a podcast empire.
He's making maybe 20 million bucks a year and he put that aside in order to go into service in the FBI.
You can see on his face how weary he is, how hard he's working, and they're really doing great stuff over there.
He doesn't change his character, but this is what he was saying on his show before he became the deputy director of the FBI.
It was cut four.
There are a lot of people who are knee deep in the Washington swamp who are not telling you the truth about serious allegations out there that Epstein may have had video and audio of people out there doing things they shouldn't have been doing.
And you should be asking yourself the question, how is it that all these people, the CIA director, the Obama fixer, Bill Clinton, all intersected past with Jeffrey Epstein?
Jeffrey Epstein isn't with us anymore and nobody seems to want to talk about it.
Okay, that's Dan before.
And now this, again, this memo coming out leaked in the middle of the night.
And then Trump is asked about it.
You know, he does those public cabinet meetings where everybody sort of sits around and he kind of, you know, ad libs and talks.
They go on for hours and all this, but sometimes a lot of good news comes out of it and certainly good video comes out of it.
And a reporter asked Pom Pambondi about this and she was about to answer and he interrupted her.
It was cut five.
Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?
This guy's been talked about for years.
You're asking, we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things.
And are people still talking about this guy, this creep?
That is unbelievable.
Do you want to waste the time?
Do you feel like answering?
I don't mind answering.
I mean, I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein at a time like this where we're having some of the greatest success and also tragedy with what happened in Texas.
It just seems like a desecration.
So I'm convinced all of these people are good people who want to do the right thing.
I truly am.
And, you know, I mean, if you're listening to Ben Shapiro, and you should be, you know, he's saying this is a nothing burger.
And now I'm completely convinced there's nothing there.
And even if there was there, it's not important.
If the facts change, I'll change my mind.
But this is not, I disagree with him.
I think that this is a cultural error of large proportions.
And I'm going to tell you why.
Look, another thing about Trump, by the way, whatever you think of Trump, like him, love him, hate him, you know, whatever you think of him.
I don't think he's being controlled by anyone.
He's not even being controlled by himself.
He can't even control himself.
The words just come pouring out of his mouth all the time.
And now he's going to tell a reporter after all this buildup from Dan, from Cash, from Pam, all this buildup, all these years we've gotten.
It's suddenly a desecration for someone to ask, how did this just vanish?
How did it vanish over the July 4th weekend in the middle of nowhere?
Because here's the thing.
It may be that this memo that was released is the absolute truth.
It may be.
There were no on Epstein Island.
Maybe there was no blackmail.
Maybe it was just, you know, there were no intelligence agencies involved.
It was just Epstein abusing young people.
Obviously had some kind of thing of her child and he was just a sick sick, terrible man and it was just really him and other people you know.
He sucked other people into his orbit, but maybe they didn't do anything, or if they did do anything we don't know about, maybe it's the truth, but it doesn't sound like the truth.
This is not what the truth sounds like.
We all know.
After, after Pam and Cash and Dan, they've been telling us about this for years, telling us that this information was there and was being hidden, and then suddenly a memo is leaked to a center left outfit at the end of a holiday weekend, which is where information goes to die, and then that's followed by the president telling a reporter he should be ashamed for even asking about it.
That is not what the truth sounds like.
We all know this and again, I I love this administration, I think they're doing wonderful work, but let's, let's face it, that's not what the truth sounds like and we all know it.
Okay, and it makes everything else sound suspect.
That's one of the, that's one of the things about when you don't take care to not just tell the truth.
You have to seem to tell the truth, you have to show that you're telling the truth and act like you're telling the truth.
So so FOX Digital got a scoop that former CIA chief John Brennan and former FBI chief James Comey are under investigation.
Brennan for lying to Congress under oath that he wanted to keep the Steel document out of CIA intelligence, when we now know from a CIA document that John Ratcliffe released we know, we now know that he was the one insisting to put this Steel document, which was a complete fabrication, a piece of, uh you know of uh opposition uh, you know info from Hillary Clinton that she had paid for and it was complete nonsense.
And now they're, he's under investigation and we think, like well, is that being released now to distract us, because this is the kind of thing that right-wing conspiracy theorists like, and now we'll be distracted thinking oh, they're going to go after John Brennan.
We, you know, we're going to forget about Epstein.
Uh, you know that.
That, I think you know it.
It makes everything sound like it's being released.
Trump put out a truth social uh post saying, look at the great work the FBI is now doing under Kash Patel.
And this is true because they've stopped terrorizing parents who are trying to keep out of their elementary schools and calling them terrorists and saying we're going to investigate them as possible potential terrorists.
They've stopped investigating Catholics who want to hear the Latin mass, this beautiful Latin mass that has been around for thousands of years.
They've stopped investigating them as potential right-wing extremists and they're investigating criminals and because of that their numbers have gone up spectacularly.
Absolutely, release that document.
All praise to the FBI, all praise to Cash for, for cleaning out the dirt in there and get and making sure they get back to business, the business that they're supposed to be in.
But are you releasing that now to to distract us from the Jeffrey Epstein, this Jeffrey Epstein memo, released in the dead of night after you told us that there was all this information there?
The truth sounds different than this.
I I mean i'm sure.
No, even if you worship Trump, i'm sure you know that what i'm telling you right now is is right.
It sounds, the truth sounds.
What would the truth sound like?
It would sound like officials and maybe Trump, coming before good reporters.
You know, Brett Bear, somebody like that who will ask tough questions and answering those questions.
How did you get it so wrong before you came on the FBI?
Was it just that you were making stuff up before you know was it.
Were you just guessing?
It just seemed that way and then you found out, oh my goodness, I was totally wrong.
When did you know what?
What was it that gave it away?
Why are there no men named?
If women were if if, if were girls not being, was it only Epstein who was people?
Because, if girls were being, why didn't you show them uh, photo arrays uh, you know, why didn't law enforcement show them photo arrays of perennial sex offenders like Bill Clinton and say, is that, Is that the guy who you write?
Why is Ghelane Maxwell serving 20 years in prison?
Could nobody offer her 10 years in prison in response, in return for the names that she was serving on Epstein Island?
Or was it all untrue?
And you got in there and lo and behold, you were shocked to discover that there was nothing there because you told us before what you thought.
Tell us now what you think and why you changed your mind.
That's what the truth sounds like.
Debunking Conspiracies00:05:02
And, you know, here's the other part of this.
Well, there's a couple of other parts of this, but one other part.
All this stuff about conspiracy theories.
Yes, there are conspiracy theorists on the right.
I don't happen to be one of them, but there are plenty of them.
There are people who are completely immeshed in conspiracy theories.
But, but we have been lied to and lied to and lied to.
And a disturbing number of conspiracy theories have turned out to be exactly the truth.
We were lied to about Russian collusion, right?
That's why you're investigating John Brennan.
We were lied to about the prostitutes urinating on beds for Donald Trump.
A total lie.
Good people on both sides, total lie.
Trump took down Martin Luther King's bus, total lie.
COVID, one lie after another.
You heard last week's interview that I did with Scott Atlas.
If you haven't listened to it, it's a fantastic interview.
He told the COVID task force that lockdowns were a disaster, that they would destroy young people, that all the evidence was there to know what lockdowns would do.
Vaccines for young people, untested vaccines for young people, where it was a travesty.
You don't try them out on young people.
You can try them out on old people.
Just disastrous.
They didn't listen to him.
And they not only shut him down, they lied to the rest of us.
And then anybody who tried to tell the truth was silenced, was kicked off social media, was doomed.
Basically, you could lose your career.
I was kicked off social media for saying some of this stuff.
And we all knew it came from the Wuhan lab.
No, that was racist.
That was a conspiracy theory.
And that turned out to be exactly the truth.
We were lied to about Joe Biden's cognitive decay.
Remember, it was fake news.
It was fake videos.
All just us making that stuff up.
And then suddenly it was totally the truth.
His doctor, Kevin O'Connor, who just went before Congress and took the fifth like a gangster because he's because he's obviously, to me, it's obvious to me he's continuing the cover-up.
He doesn't want to come up and say, yeah, if Andrew Claveland on the Daily Water could diagnose him as having dementia, I probably could have done it too after examining him.
Why does it matter?
We're in an information crisis.
I've been saying this for maybe most of a decade.
It's an information crisis.
It's not caused by the internet.
It's caused by the corruption of the media and the deep state that has been revealed and exposed by the internet.
And that's given a lot of power to people who come up with all kinds of nonsense.
Everything's the Jews.
They're space lasers.
They're killing it.
People who say that now sound like credible because we've been lied to so much that the people, that the conspiracy theorists are too often right.
This crisis has caused a lack, a crisis of trust in experts and scientists and in our government.
And the thing is, there are such thing as experts.
There is such a thing as science.
And there is such a thing as a government public servant who is doing the best he can.
And the thing we love most, I think, about Donald Trump is that he won't shut up.
He won't shut up.
He will not be told to stop talking.
He says what he thinks.
You know, he tells us what's going on.
And, you know, and he's the guy.
He's the guy who does it.
You know, if you listen to this show, I always tell you, you get tomorrow's news today.
The minute Trump won re-election, I told you that this was a triumph because it was the Minutemen of the new media, Daily Wire, Megan Kelly, Joe Rogan, all of those people who were defeating the empire of lies, just like in the revolution.
We popped up from behind the trees.
We took pot shots.
We debunked them.
We debunked what they were saying in real time.
And with Donald Trump debunking them in front of us as the leader of the pack, you know, we followed on and we took them out.
We beat them.
And that means that now, that means now Congress can pass laws.
Republicans, Martin Swame in the Wall Street Journal wrote this thing saying, now suddenly Republicans are acting like a regular political party because they don't have to be afraid of the news media.
We did that.
We won.
Trump led the way and the rest of us followed and we won, right?
So we beat them.
And now for Donald Trump to lose that advantage is to lose the most important thing he has, to seem to be covering up, to not at least say, he could even say, yes, I'm covering up because there are security issues involved.
I'm not protecting my friends, but I'm covering up because there are security infrastructures.
Anything, anything that sounds more like the truth than what it is.
You know, some people are saying, this is a small story.
What's the big deal?
I will tell you why this story matters.
But not seeming to tell the truth matters most of all.
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Chapter two, why this story matters.
So this week, yet another boring remake of Superman is coming as came out.
I wanted to go see it just so I could talk about it, but the shows were all sold out and I don't like these things, so I didn't go anywhere.
And I basically believe this superhero stuff has infantilized a generation of men.
I think it's time to take the blankie capes off and grow up and watch stories about real people.
All right.
But it's directed by James Gunn.
And James Gunn started a controversy by saying, oh, it's about the story of an illegal immigrant and the basic human kindness, a value of something we've lost.
And they seem to have changed the slogan from, you know, Superman upholds truth, justice in the American way.
And they're saying, no, it's truth, justice in the human way, which is a total lie, because if you want to see the human way, you can go to Iran where women are oppressed and beaten up and homosexuals are killed.
That's the human way.
That's been the human way since human beings were thrown out of Eden.
The American way is something that has been built over millennia of freedom and decency and civilization.
It is not the human way.
It is a special, special thing.
This is not the only place that it happens, but still, Superman is defending the American way, which is a very specific and not entirely pure natural human way.
So there's the controversy.
But does anyone remember the real controversy about James Gunn?
This happened in 2018, 2019.
He was kicked off the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise for a series of tweets he had sent out in 2009 when he was in his 40s, right?
So he said, oh, I was a young man then, you know, and I didn't.
Well, he was in his 40s.
And he sent out tweets that said things like, I like when little boys touch me in my silly place.
The best thing about being is when you're done being it's like, whew, this feels great not being.
I remember my first Nambla meeting.
This is the man-boy love association, right?
Where they celebrate.
little children.
He says, I remember my first Nambla meeting.
It was the first time I felt okay being who I am.
Some of those guys are still my best friends.
So he said he was joking.
They fire him off the franchise.
And all the people in the cast immediately, the entire cast of Guardians of the Galaxy said, no, no, no, please bring him back.
He's a wonderful guy.
We need to forgive him for these stupid tweets.
Instantaneously, and he was brought back into the franchise.
And now he's lecturing us on morality and kindness and the human way.
Beautiful story of redemption.
And, you know, but why were they so quick to brush that off, right?
You know, I'm willing.
Maybe it's just a joke.
You know, who doesn't joke about little boys?
Right?
Don't we all do that?
But let's say it was just a joke.
The swiftness with which he was forgiven and the completeness with which he was forgiven.
Interesting.
2010, director Roman Polanski is a fugitive from American justice.
He's been convicted of drugging and sodomizing a 15-year-old girl.
But before he can be sentenced, he leaves the country he's arrested in.
This is how he described it.
Here's a clip of Polanski at the time, how he described what happened when he drugged this little girl.
It's cut six.
I was about to make a series of photographs of young girls of that age for a French magazine called Vogue homme.
And I found it quite an interesting enterprise because I like the girls of this age and because the girls of that age for some reason like me.
And just it went a little bit too far.
A little bit too far.
Just drugged her, sodomized her, a little bit too far.
So he's arrested in Switzerland 2010 and instantly a petition is signed by some of the top names in Hollywood, including deeply moral people like Harvey Weinstein, who is now a convicted, and Woody Allen, who made a movie called Manhattan celebrating the affair between a middle-aged man and a high school girl.
And the script was nominated for an Oscar.
And the Swiss let Polanski go.
They said, we're not going to extradite him.
And Polanski himself won an Oscar after his conviction for doing this.
Another great story of redemption.
George Stephanopoulos went to a dinner honoring Epstein after his first conviction for human trafficking, no big deal.
Every few years in Hollywood, a story comes to the surface that the gay mafia in Hollywood is passing boy actors around, that directors are little girls.
A documentary called Quiet on the Set details sexual abuse on the sets of Nickelodeon.
That's out now.
Billie Eilish, this is kind of interesting because she's the singer, obviously, who famously dresses in baggy clothes that hide her shape, which is something that women do.
I know nothing about Billie Eilish, but it's something that women sometimes do when they feel bad about their bodies.
They've been made to feel bad about their bodies.
She says sexual abuse of minors is everywhere.
She wrote a song about it called Your Power.
And she said, the song is really not about one person.
You might think it's because she's in the music industry that I'm saying this.
No, dude, it's everywhere.
I don't know one girl or woman who hasn't had a weird experience or a really bad experience.
And men too, young boys are taken advantage of constantly.
That's Hollywood, the Catholic Church, not singling them out.
This is the opposite of singling them out.
I'm saying they're part of a bigger thing.
Thousands of children by priests and priests who thought it was okay, okay, to just pass those on somewhere else without revealing them so they could do it again elsewhere.
Again, wonderful story of forgiveness and redemption.
You know, I don't know if you've ever watched the movie Spotlight.
It's a really good picture about how the Boston Globe helped break the story of the pedophile priests.
And it has one kind of famous scene.
Mark Ruffalo is one of the reporters who's trying to talk Michael Keaton, the editor, into releasing the story.
And this is that speech.
It's time they knew and they let it happen.
Two kids.
Okay?
It could have been you.
It could have been me.
It could have been any of us.
We got to nail these scumbags.
We got to show people that nobody can get away with this.
Not a priest or a cardinal or a freaking pope.
So that's the thing, right?
Because it could be anyone.
It could be anyone.
These are people who don't have power.
You know, young people don't have the power, these old people.
And by the way, not just the Catholic priests.
There's many instances of this in Protestant churches.
In Britain, Pakistani Muslims are organizing gangs where these thousands of girls are being.
And these are poor girls who have nowhere to go.
And when they go to the police and when their fathers go to the police, the accusers are arrested so the Muslims won't be offended.
That did happen, is happening now.
And then there's Jeffrey Epstein, who hung out with some of the most powerful people in the West.
Here's what Alan Dershowitz.
Alan Dershowitz was accused of being one of Jeffrey Epstein's clients.
He has vehemently denied it.
He said he knew him.
He was on a case with him, but he never did anything wrong.
But this is what he told.
This is what Dershowitz told Sean Spicer, Cut 14.
I know for a fact documents are being suppressed, and they're being suppressed to protect individuals.
I know the names of the individuals.
I know why they're being suppressed.
I know who's suppressing them.
But I'm bound by confidentiality from a judge and cases.
And I can't disclose what I know.
But I hand to God, I know, I know the names of people whose files are being suppressed in order to protect them.
And that's wrong.
Just out of curiosity without names, are these politicians, business leaders, both?
They're everything.
Everything.
There's a corruption in our society that expresses itself in the sexual abuse of young people.
And again, these are defenseless people most of the time.
These are mostly poor people being used by rich people.
And they're being used for pleasure and their lives being ruined and their bodies being, you know, abused by the most powerful and respected and wealthiest among us in Hollywood, in churches, and maybe in government as well.
We don't know.
And this same corruption, it's the same corruption that expresses itself in the slaughter of unborn children.
People don't abort children because it's morally justifiable, because there's an argument that you can make that killing a person for your own personal convenience is right.
You can't make, there is no argument about that.
They do it because they can.
They do it because the baby has no voice.
It has no vote.
It doesn't have a visible presence.
It can't stand up for itself.
So we have got, as I said before, we've got a crisis of trust, and that crisis of trust is well earned.
We have been lied to and lied to and lied to.
And we've got an epidemic abuse of power through sex.
And in order to protect, and it's there in order to protect sexual promiscuity, is so the powerful can get their rocks off without having to pay a price, without having to ask people, without having to buy flowers, without having to, you know, have a relationship.
That's what it's there for.
And this is something, by the way, that was predicted by Nietzsche in his book, The Birth of Tragedy.
He predicted that this is what it's going to be like when people lose their faith in God.
I talk about it in the Kingdom of Cain.
I expose some of my own sins.
It was very painful to write what I wrote about myself in Kingdom of Cain.
You know, not crimes, but things that I wish to hell I hadn't done and that were degrading to me, just to show that sex naturally degenerates into sadism and cruelty and abuse without God.
You know, we've got a great president.
I really do believe this.
He's surrounded by good people, but this is an important story.
It goes to the heart of our culture and what our culture is and how we make movies and how we think about each other and how we think about women and our wives and wives in general.
We've got to break them all.
It's time to break the pattern.
I don't care.
I don't know what the truth is.
I know I know nothing.
I know I don't know what the truth is.
But come forward and tell us.
Don't dismiss us.
Whatever you can tell us, tell us.
If you can't tell us, tell us why you can't tell us.
Tell the truth.
Have you heard of the audience effect?
That's when people change their behavior simply because they know they're being watched.
They get more rigid and performative without even realizing it.
This doesn't happen to me because I'm being watched by you, and who cares what you think?
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Chapter three, The Materialists.
So this is a movie I saw over the fourth weekend.
Instead of going to see Superman and wasting my life, my rapidly dwindling time, I went to see a movie with my wife called The Materialist.
And this sounds like a tangent from what I've been talking about before, but it actually isn't.
I will make the connection.
But this is a movie by the playwright and screenwriter Celine Song, and it stars Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal.
And it's a really interesting movie.
It's pretty good.
It's a small movie, but it's a good, smart movie, well-written, really entertaining.
Dakota Johnson is absolutely spectacular in it.
Really thoughtful, interesting performance if you watch her closely.
And a lot of people were disappointed because the trailer makes it sound like a rom-com.
It's about a matchmaker who's torn between the perfect guy, Pedro Pascal, who's rich and handsome, and he's everything a woman is looking for.
And on the other hand, she has this long-term love affair with Chris Evans, who's a perennial, perennially starving wannabe actor with a short temper.
And she's caught between those two.
So the trailer made it sound like a rom-com.
Let's take a quick look at the trailer cut nine.
In the world of matchmaking.
This weekend, your client is getting mad.
Somebody's kissed me.
No one plays the game better than Lucy.
6'2, Doctor, lawyer, anchor.
I get along much better with girls in their 20s.
But love isn't part of her equation.
I don't want to fight about money with my boyfriend.
How hard it is to make you happy.
Lucy M., the eternal bachelorette.
I'm a guy alone.
Forget a rich husband.
You're the matchmaker.
You must know a lot about love.
I know about dating.
So it's all about the fact that when women come to her as a matchmaker, they have a list of material things they want from a man.
They want him to be tall.
They want him to be handsome.
They want him to be rich.
It's very important.
The more money he has, the better they can take care of him.
And yet, you know, in the event, some of them are willing to settle because they're afraid of dying alone.
And there's two things I want to say about the film.
You can go watch it.
It's not a complex film to understand, but there's two things I want to say about it as a cultural object.
This is outside of whether I think it's a good movie or not, which I did.
I thought it was a good movie.
The first thing that's kind of touching is the film assumes that rich New Yorkers are still the arbiters of culture.
And this is a really, really interesting thing that is almost invisible to people.
When I was in England, I worked in the film industry in England for a while.
And someone in the film business once said to me, why is a movie big when it takes place in New York, but not in London?
He was thinking of Michael Douglas and Glenn Close and Fatal Attraction.
He says, a guy has an affair.
She stalks him.
The Spiritual Core of Society00:07:50
If we made that picture in London, it would be a small, interesting thriller.
In America, you make it in New York and it's big.
And I said, that's because New York is where the culture is made.
That is where our opinions come from.
That's where the people who make opinions, the chattering classes live.
And we think about that.
And it makes the opinions for the world.
So London gets the opinions after they come out of New York.
And I don't think that that's true anymore.
I think because of what I'm talking about, because of this victory of the new media over the big media, suddenly the rest of the country has a voice.
And that voice is Donald Trump, but it's them too.
And if we had the brains God gave a goose, if conservatives had the brains God gave a goose, there would be a studio paying a screenwriter to make a film with a title like Trad Girls or Trad Wife, in which the Trad Girls and the Tradwife are the heroines and the things that they have to go through to find a husband, to live in a world of not trad girls, you know, anything.
That's what's happening now.
That is the culture now, but they're still talking about New York because they're living in a dream.
They're living in the matrix where New York still matters to anybody, which it really doesn't.
So that's one thing about it.
That's just a side.
Well, that's actually part of what I'm talking about, about taking control of the culture and the way you take control of the culture, which is by not lying, by not covering up, by not managing the public by saying, well, the public should know this, but not that.
The public shouldn't feel this because then they'll do that.
You know, not doing that would be a great way for conservatives to take control of the country.
So they can say, yeah, you call Donald Trump a liar.
How come he keeps telling the truth?
And the Biden administration and everybody in it and every reporter who covered it lied.
How come?
If they can come back and say to us, well, you didn't release the Epstein files, you know, then we lose the culture.
If they can keep making these movies, eventually New York will be the cultural capital of the world.
And once again, if we don't start to make them out of Nashville and out of all the other places in the country.
So that is one thing.
But the other thing is this, is what this movie says about women.
Throughout the movie, throughout the movie, the Dakota Johnson character and other people point out that having a man ask you to marry him makes you feel like you have value.
And this is an obsession throughout the picture.
I mean, it must be mentioned seven times, six, seven times throughout this under two-hour movie that women are desperate to feel valued.
And when a man asks you to marry him, he is saying that you are valuable.
And that's true, by the way.
I mean, men give up something for marriage.
They give up variety, sexual variety.
And, you know, people get angry at me when I say this, but it's just perfectly true that men have just as strong an urge for sexual variety as women have for childbirth.
Men deeply desire to sleep with different women.
And the church, basically, the Catholic Church, taught us that we should follow the women's urge, that men should be faithful to their wives.
That was not an idea before Christianity, that men should be faithful to their wives.
That women should be faithful was definitely an idea, but that men should be faithful is a church, a Christian idea.
So why do these women feel so valueless?
Why do they feel so valueless?
It's because of the materialist rejection of femininity, which the film participates in.
It never answers the question.
It never answers the question of why women feel valueless.
These are women in New York who are making money, so they should feel valuable, right?
That's how men feel valuable.
They have successful careers.
Dakota Johnson plays a woman with a successful career.
Why should she not feel valuable?
A man would feel valuable if he had a successful career, but a woman doesn't.
You know, when women lost, I've talked about this a number of times, just say it very quickly, when women lost their economic power during the Industrial Revolution, they were left with nothing but their spiritual power, their angel in the house idea from the Victorians, their power of homemaking, their power of motherhood, of nurturing, of bringing gentleness and spiritual value into life.
And yes, I believe the computers can bring back women's cottage industries and power, but the spiritual asset remains.
The spiritual asset of femininity is the most important thing women have.
When a woman comes into your life and you want her to be the mother of your children, you want her to be the mother of your children.
You want her to make a home for you.
Say homemaking like it's some kind of offhand thing that you do, but no, to have a home to go home to, when guys say, well, it's time for me to settle down, they mean in a place that means something to them.
Home is at the heart of the American experience.
That's why we have the national game baseball where you try to get home.
It is where all of these people have come from all the different places in the world trying to find a spiritual home.
Women and only women have the power to make that a real thing.
Women and only women have the power to make children, both as physical individuals and as spiritual human beings.
It is in the relationship between a baby and its mother that it finds its individuality.
It is the most important thing that women have is their feminine spiritual power.
When you give up that feminine spiritual power as a woman, you may have all kinds of, you may be a doctor, you may be a soldier, you may be a lawyer, you may be all these things, but your only value as a woman now is your sexuality.
And that is why you see these girls walking down the street almost undressed.
That is why you see them handing over what is natural to women, which is a sense of modesty and a sense of being decorous and protecting herself and respecting herself.
And they have gotten rid of that entirely.
We're living in essentially, I think it was Knowles who first said this, but he was quoting somebody else.
We're living in essentially in a gay culture because these women are medicated into sterility.
So they don't have babies anymore when you sleep with them, which used to be something that happened when you slept with women.
I know that's before your time, but that actually was a thing.
And so we hate femininity because it calls us out of the material world.
That's why.
That is why.
We hate it because it's sacrificial.
It's non-profitable.
At-home mothers are the moral core of the society.
They are the spiritual core of the society.
And we don't want to go.
We want to go out here and live with Jeffrey Epstein.
And without that core, without that core femininity, building homes, building people, creating people, shepherding people into life, everything is materialism.
Everything is Jeffrey Epstein.
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Reflections on Beauty and Grief00:07:51
Oh my Lord, I forgot to ask how to spell Clavin.
It is K-L-A-V-A-N.
Final chapter, God Bless Texas.
So in the same vein, I have to mention this horrible, horrible flood in Texas that swept away, among other people, a group of little girls at a Christian camp, 27 girls, I think, and their counselors.
And the counselors are just girls too.
They're like 16, 17-year-old.
Close to 170 people are still missing, I think, the last time I looked.
The stories of mind-boggling tragedy in the faces of these children, I'm sure I don't have to tell you.
I don't have to tell you what that does to your heart.
I've been thinking about in 1755, there was an earthquake in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal.
There were floods and tsunamis.
Tens of thousands of people died, upward of 50,000 people.
And if you count the dead in nearby Morocco, it may have been even more than that.
And this was right in the middle of the Enlightenment and had a huge, huge effect on the Enlightenment.
Immanuel Kant, who's the philosopher who's usually credited with beginning the Enlightenment, was a student then, just an obscure student, and he wrote essays about it for a local paper in Konigsberg, which is now in Russia, but was then in Prussia.
Voltaire wrote about it.
Rousseau wrote about it.
The great writer Goethe was six years old, but people said it had a huge effect on him.
And he was a guy who was, he had many different views on religion, but he doubted and reasoned.
According to the philosopher Susan Nieman, people used to use the word Lisbon the way we use the word Auschwitz as an expression of incomprehensible evil that challenges your faith.
So it was a watershed and the shift of the West toward materialism and the loss of faith because it's very hard to understand a good God who is all-powerful and all-knowing who allows these things to happen.
It's easier to understand Auschwitz because you can say, well, he wants people to be free and free people are going to be terrible things, but he's got you on the other side that you can sort of tell yourself, but why does the ground just open up?
Why does this water just flood, you know, flood and carry children, the most beautiful and innocent of us away and most beloved of us away?
And I'm not going to waste my breath condemning wicked people like George Stephanopoulos and Dana Bash at CNN, who both issued, you know, immediately rushed to blame Donald Trump because it's a sin.
It's a wicked thing to do because we want to find somebody to blame.
And I'm not saying there was nothing done wrong, but we want to find somebody to blame to take the tragedy out of it, the incomprehensible tragedy out of it.
And to use that natural urge for a political point is just a wicked thing.
And I've been around rivers all my life, been a fisherman and a rafter, a whitewater rafter, and water three feet high.
If the current is strong enough, just carry off.
Grown man, just knock you off your feet.
So it's a tremendously powerful thing.
So it's very hard, obviously, to understand how this can happen and how a good God can let this happen.
And I'm not going to give you the answer because anybody who gives you the answer is stepping out of his lane.
You know, talk about Socrates talking about knowing what you don't know.
This is a good time to say you know what you don't know.
But here's something I believe that at least has a direction in which you might find an answer.
I believe that beauty is one of the ultimate expressions of God's love.
I don't believe, you know, Dennis Prager once told me that he couldn't rationally believe that God loved us.
You know, that wasn't a rational thought.
And I said, well, we were having a cigar and I said, well, then why did he create the world?
And Dennis, who's always a tremendously honest guy, said, I don't know.
I don't know.
And I believe that God's love is the answer to that question.
God's love is why there's something instead of nothing.
And there's no greater beauty in the world than nature, whether it's the nature of a baby being born or just the things that we see in the natural world.
But nature is vastly cruel and it is unreasoningly cruel.
And the same nature that gives us sunsets and fills the wildflowers also gives us floods and diseases and death, which comes for everybody.
And it's not enough to talk about free will and original sense.
It's not enough to talk about anything.
Nothing makes up for the grief.
But the beauty of nature is something that takes place in the human heart.
Nature is just a fact until we see it.
That's when it becomes beautiful.
Now, I don't know what it is to God.
I don't know what God sees, but I know that the beauty of a rainbow, the rainbow doesn't exist until we see it.
It's something, a phenomenon.
It's a real thing, but it only exists in the eye.
And the beauty that we see at sunsets and all those things only exist in the human heart.
And that is true of grief, too.
You know, nature has killed many children.
It's killed many children and it never grieves for those children.
But we do because we love those children and we find them precious.
And so the beauty through which we experience God's goodness and the grief through which we experience the fact that we love each other and we cherish each other and find each other human and indelibly, infinitely important.
Those are both things that take place in the human heart.
And if those things relate to nothing, if they are just sensations, just little electronic chemical reactions, some of which feel good and some of which feel bad and then you die and they stop, then man is nothing.
But if, as I think is almost certainly the case, they reflect our hearts, the things that we experience our heart, the beauty and the grief and the suffering, if they reflect the heart of God, if they are part of how we are made in the image of God, then they are telling us something about the world, about our value, about our infinite value that is experienced sometimes in love and sometimes in grief and sometimes in both.
And that the beauty is real too, the beauty and the grief that express the worth of things.
One of the main reasons I'm a Christian is because the man who is our analog for the unknowable father God, Jesus, is a suffering man.
He's a man of sorrows who says, yes, the grief in which you express the value of life is as much a part of God as the love that connects us.
We are, you know, grieving, fleshly, dying people, and the love is stronger than death.
That's from the Song of Solomon, love is stronger than death.
Now, we only see this through a glass darkly now.
You know, we don't see it fully, but I believe there will come a time when we see the beauty of the full design and we will understand that even the kind of incomprehensible sorrow that they're feeling in Texas, that even that is part of the beauty.
I don't know what that's going to look like.
All we know now is that our fellow Americans, our fellow humans, are in terrible pain, and the God who made us and who loves us is suffering with them.
That is what Christianity teaches us.
And he's suffering with us all.
And that is a measure of our worth.
And I think if you don't think that, if you want to plunge into the world of materialism, you're going to end up a nihilist and you're going to end up in a very, very dark place.
If you think this place is dark, where you have to have faith to know the answer, just wait till that faith is gone and you'll know what really darkness means.
So here's the thing about gun storage.
It's like trying to have your cake and eat it too, except the cake is your personal safety and eating it might get someone hurt.
You've got two lousy options.
Darkness Without Faith00:08:37
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It has been a big week here at the Daily Wire.
On Monday, we introduced Isabel Brown as the newest voice in our growing lineup.
And today, we've got something else brand new for you.
It's the first look at an upcoming documentary, Journey to the UFC, the true story of fighter Joe Piper and what it really takes to rise from nothing.
Take a look.
I don't care what you did in your career the last five years.
What are you going to do tonight?
Be fired up to fight.
Try to finish the fight.
If you want to get into the UFC and this is where you want to be, be Joe Piper.
I knew what the goal was.
I knew where I wanted to be.
I never envisioned anything else other than getting to the UFC.
You're not really shocked by the moment when you're expecting it to come.
Incredibly toxic relationship with his father.
Left home at 16.
Spent the next few years homeless bouncing around.
A lot of different people come from broken homes and they hold so much anger inside.
Huge right hand!
Fighting isn't something you do.
Fighting is something that chooses you.
This is an unforgiving sport.
When you're the man, everybody loves you.
The second you lose, everybody forgets you.
You can see how disappointed Pfeiffer is.
I've taken a lot of pain.
I've had a lot of hurt.
I've had a lot of depression.
I've taken a lot of abuse.
I've had a lot of doubts, but one thing always has stood true, and that is I'm going to show that I'm somebody that never gave up.
to be aggressive after battling back 16 months to get here.
That's Journey to the UFC premiering July 25th on Daily Wire Plus.
If you're not a member yet, now's the time.
Go to dailywireplus.com and join today.
Clavin Clapax.
All right, guys, it's official.
They're throwing me into the lion's den.
Morning, folks.
Still here.
And they are too.
That one's been staring at me since sunset.
Yeah!
I love this guy.
It's really funny stuff.
All right, Clavin Clapbacks at DailyWire.com.
That's Clavin with a K, a clapbacks with a K at dailywire.com.
Please send in your questions, whatever they are.
I will try and answer them.
If they're personal questions, religious questions, political questions, whatever I can do, I will do.
From Arnold, Dear Andrew, how can pacifism be immoral if Jesus was a pacifist and Jesus defines morality?
I said last week that pacifism is not a moral point of view.
He says, I agree with you that pacifism is immoral.
Christianity's imperative to pacifism is a reason why I could never subscribe to it.
Your fan, Arnold.
Well, Arnold, thank you.
And I don't mean this as an insult.
I really don't.
I just mean it as a fact.
That is not a good reading of Jesus' philosophy.
It's a shallow reading of Jesus' philosophy.
And I suspect it is a reading that doesn't come from actually reading the gospel.
And I think it comes from what you have heard about Jesus' philosophy.
He's not a pacifist.
You're probably thinking of his instruction, if someone slaps you in the face to turn the other cheek.
First of all, Jesus always, often talks in absolutes and hyperbole.
He often does that.
But he said a very important thing.
He says, if someone slaps you in the face, that is an act against your dignity and your honor.
And what he is saying is that he wants you to model yourself on God.
That's what he's trying to get you to do.
Model yourself on him.
And we slap God in the face all the time.
And God doesn't just strike us down.
You know, I mean, he could, right?
It could be like, you know, where you say, like, I don't believe in God.
Bang, you're hit by lightning, but that doesn't happen.
He just, he loves you and he lets you go through your path because each of us has a path of his own.
Each of us has to go his own way.
And he lets you do that.
And Jesus is trying to get you to see what the world looks like to God by seeing it through God's eyes.
That's what he's trying to get you to do.
He never says, oh, and if somebody slaps your wife, turn her other cheek.
He doesn't say, if somebody invades your country, don't take up arms against him.
You know, C.S. Lewis, one of the great Christian apologists of the 20th century, was in World War I and said, you know, he actually believed that the moment after a British guy kills a German in the trenches, if they kill each other at the same moment, they would both might both be in heaven laughing in the next split second.
So, you know, if you want to know Christianity, you have to got to, you got to read the Gospels and then you got to read about the Gospel.
You got to read people who know the Gospels.
Read C.S. Lewis is a good way to do it.
But to reject God, to reject the faith that I think is the only faith that will take you where you need to go because you heard something that didn't sound right or you think something or you glanced through the gospels and you saw that and you pulled it out of context, not the best move, not the smartest move.
From John says, I have recently gotten into reading the classics in large part due to recommendations and inspiration from you.
I'm reading many of the great dystopian novels, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Animal Farm, the Giver.
I've realized that they all seem to include an authoritarian government and they contemplate the destruction of the family unit, parents' roles in rearing children, and other similar controls on thought, speed, and religion.
All or most of them also seem to be, A, written by progressives, maybe not Lowry, if not outright socialists, and B, are often cited by modern leftists and political discourse.
I'm left bewildered by these last two points, it seems, a conundrum since it's leftists who want to break down the family and who censor people and who are necessarily authoritarian because they want to take your money and redistribute it.
So that is necessarily authoritarian.
The fact is that any philosophy can be oppressive.
And it's true that 1984, which is an expose of communist Russia, is written by a socialist, right?
He didn't like Russian communism, Soviet communism, but he remained a socialist.
But I don't think he was thinking that clearly because I think that socialism is always going to lead to misery and communism.
But you're right about this.
And I remember once.
So the thing is, if you write a great novel about oppression, it applies to every ideology, right?
I mean, the right can create a big brother just like the left can create a big brother.
And to say that it's all on one side is only a function of the left owning the media for so long and owning the culture for so long that there was nobody smart enough to talk back.
I was once doing an interview after I published True Crime with an obviously socialist interviewer on the BBC who just was angry that I'd made so much money off the novel.
That was his big complaint.
And I said at one point, I don't believe that a novel is a political instrument.
And he said, well, George Orwell would disagree and slam the phone down.
But the thing is, George Orwell was a great enough novelist that even though he was attacking specifically communism, it does apply to the things that he wrote does apply to any ideology that becomes oppressive.
So that's, but you're right.
George Orwell's Legacy00:00:22
That is a conundrum.
All right.
So become a member today because we are now going into member block, which means the rest of you are going into a hell beyond my capability of describing the clavenless week will begin here unless you become a member today by going to dailywire.com slash subscribe and use code clavin at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.