Andrew Clavin argues Trump’s MAGA movement triumphs over leftist "anti-freedom" culture—defunding NPR, canceling Colbert—while mocking baseless conspiracies like Epstein cover-ups blamed on "the Jews" or Mossad. He praises John MacArthur’s defiance of COVID mandates and contrasts it with the left’s hate-speech labels, warning against right-wing extremism while pushing for transparency on Epstein’s grand jury testimony. Clavin promotes Ethos life insurance ($2/day, $3M coverage) and Stopbox Pro (10% off with code AndrewClavin), framing freedom as virtue without hatred, and celebrates The Daily Wire’s 10th anniversary with UFC fighter Joe Pfeiffer’s July 25th documentary, emphasizing faith over anger. [Automatically generated summary]
Knowledgeable sources say the Trump administration is being torn to pieces by its mishandling of the Epstein scandal.
Although in its first six months, the administration has scored a string of successes so long you couldn't read it in the time it took to achieve it, knowledgeable sources on both the left and the right are saying that the poor handling of the Epstein story should erase all those successes so that commentators can continue to scream in outraged tones with the veins in their necks bulging out while their audience clenches their fists and shouts, yeah, in gravelly voices, even though they're listening to complete crap.
Although Trump has tried to argue that all is well in an administration that has closed the border, helped neutralize Iran, and operated the government at a surplus for the first time in over 20 years, knowledgeable sources report that in fact, everything is coming apart at the seams, if indeed everything has seems, which remains just one more open question in the Epstein case.
One knowledgeable source, for instance, says that FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino recently clashed with Attorney General Pam Bondi, vowing that he would unleash a vengeance more horrible than her wildest imagination if Bondi did not release more information about Epstein or at least stop wearing those pantsuits that keep reminding him of Hillary Clinton, which is just making him crazy in the head.
The knowledgeable source says Bongino then put Bondi in a chokehold and the two rolled around on the floor in a cloud of dust with various articles of jewelry and clothing flying out of it until a stalemate was declared and they moved on to the next agenda item, which was a potato sack race.
Another knowledgeable source reports that FBI Director Kash Patel's girlfriend obviously must have enlisted him in the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, because how else can anyone explain why a woman that beautiful would go out with a guy who looks like Kash Patel,
especially when the knowledgeable source was sitting right there in plain sight and would have gladly worked for Mossad or anyone else if Kash Patel's girlfriend or just some woman who looked like Kash Patel's girlfriend had simply leaned in close to the knowledgeable source and murmured in a sultry voice, come and work for Mossad.
Still, another knowledgeable source reports that a voice coming from somewhere within the administration has spoken to him through the fillings in his teeth and revealed that the end of days has come.
Or possibly a friend of Dave's has come.
It was hard for the knowledgeable source to hear because the reception in his fillings has been very spotty lately, despite the fact that he's been wearing rabbit ear antennae on top of his tinfoil hat.
In any case, if it turns out that it's not the end of days that has come, but a friend of Dave's, then no action is currently required, except maybe putting out some snacks and a pot of chamomile tea, which Dave's friend particularly enjoys.
Another knowledgeable source has revealed exclusively to Tucker Carlson that the Epstein cover-up is all the fault of the Jews.
Although Tucker's knowledgeable source loaned his rabbit ear antennae to the end of Days' knowledgeable source, so the cover-up may have actually been all the fault of the Jews, since no one's seen OJ around recently, and who knows what he's been getting up to.
In any case, Tucker gave an impassioned speech to TPUSA, saying, quote, why should it be forbidden to blame it all on Israel?
Somehow, Israel is the only country on earth you're not allowed to blame for anything.
That's why you have all these Israelis walking around happy-go-lucky without a care in the world.
It's because no one ever blames them for anything.
Well, I'm not afraid of being called anti-Semitic.
After all, that's where the big money is, unquote.
Trump supporters are hoping the president will see to it that more information is released soon, because knowledgeable sources are going to continue to spread the inside story about the Epstein scandal until someone finally tells us the freaking truth.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
All right, we are back laughing our way through the complete destruction of the reasoning mind.
You may have noticed that we've changed books here.
This is my second book of the year.
I'm not usually quite that prolific, but I know I asked you a lot to put the last book, Kingdom of Cain, on the New York Times best-selling list, and you did.
And that was an amazing thing.
And it's actually kind of miraculous that you did that.
Now, I feel bad asking again, but I know for certain that you will love After That the Dark.
It's the next Cameron Winter Mystery.
I think it's the best.
I think you can start with it happily.
And if you like it, which I'm sure you will, you can go back and read the rest of the series After That to the Dark.
If you will, please go on and pre-order it on Amazon.
It doesn't come out till October, but if you pre-order it early, all of those pre-orders go on to the sales list on the first day and can help push it onto the Times list, which would just make me laugh hysterically to get two books on the Times list in one year.
And it would annoy the New York Times, which I think would be great.
Also, if you want to leave a comment, you can leave it anywhere you get the show, whether it's on Daily Wire Plus or on YouTube or just in your imagination, or sometimes it may come and visit you in your sleep.
You can leave the comment in your sleep and we will pick it up.
And if it's, you know, if your subconscious is spewing out hate and racism and sexism, we will read your comment on the show because that's how we roll.
Today's comment comes from Eddie Thomas 831.
He says, the only thing worse than the dark, empty void of a clavenless society is a world where Clavin actually didn't play the Trump happiness montage.
Yes, it's time to move on.
We can't constantly be playing the Trump happiness montage.
And, you know, it's just at some point, the joke is over and you've just got to move on.
So let's move on and get to today's episode, The Battle for MAGA.
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Chapter one, the freedom culture.
So I want to return to a subject I've hit on before, but I think it's the most important subject that's facing us right now, much more important than what they're doing in Washington, D.C. or anywhere else, which is the question of who we, you and I, are going to be in what is an epoch of transition, the biggest political transition of my lifetime, because it's essentially the transition out of the baby boom universe that has dominated politics and culture for as long as I've been alive.
I think it's about five years since I told Jeremy Boring, the founder and God-King of the Daily Wire, that I no longer wanted to do my show four days a week, but only one.
And I said this because Jeremy was great about it.
The minute I said to him, I'm not having fun anymore, he said, well, if you're not having fun, don't do it.
And the reason I wasn't having fun, well, a couple of reasons.
One was writing these incredibly brilliant satires four days a week was simply too hard.
It was just the hardest thing I'd ever done.
It was killing me.
And I wanted to concentrate on my own writing and my fiction and everything.
But chiefly, the big problem I had is that I had to show up four days a week with an opinion on every little thing that was happening because you have to have something to talk about.
And I don't really have an opinion on every little thing that is happening.
I only have one political opinion, which is that men should be free.
Like God, I believe that freedom comes before virtue because unless you freely choose virtue, it isn't virtue at all.
So you have to be free in order to be virtuous.
So God and I are on the exact same page with this, which is always a good place to be.
And when I first started doing political commentary, which came out of the blue, it was not nothing I expected to be doing at all, I thought that my commitment to freedom meant I was an individualist because freedom is an individual thing.
In order to be free, you, the individual, has to be free.
But I came to understand, and I remember it was a long time ago, because right after I started the show, I think I was talking to Spencer in Oxford.
We were taking a walk, or maybe right before I started the show, but I said that individualism is not going to make it because any individual can be completely free as long as he's willing to be crucified.
If you're willing to be crucified, you can say anything you want.
And I've always felt totally free because I'm not in a society that normally crucifies people for talking normally.
And I was willing to lose my Hollywood career and audience levels and good reviews.
I was willing to lose a lot of things in order to say what I thought was the truth.
So I always felt like I was a free man.
I could do whatever I wanted as long as I was willing to pay the price, which I was.
But I quickly realized that for a society to be free is much more complicated because a society requires a system and a culture and behaviors that cherish and encourage and uphold both freedom and virtue because you want to be free so you can choose virtue, but you have to be virtuous in order to be free.
If you're not virtuous, chaos comes and you need to have a heavy hand in the government.
Now, we had a culture pretty much like that when I was a younger man.
When I was a young guy, the culture of America was a culture of freedom.
Was it flawed?
Did we do bad things?
Yes, yes, yes.
I always get so bored with saying that because that's just life.
Every country, every culture is like that.
But we did have a culture where people thought, you know, they wanted to hear what other people had to say.
They weren't silencing people.
They understood that people would disagree and all these things.
And the reason I started opening my big mouth at all was because I felt we were losing that freedom culture.
So I joined what turned out to be a fight to crush the growing unfree culture that had taken over the high ground in all of our colleges and our outlets of entertainment, our outlets of news.
They just monopolized the world of information.
And it was a culture which was marked by an obsession with the fantasy of equality.
Equality is always a fantasy.
There's no such thing as equality.
But it kept taking different shapes, socialism, feminism, sexual liberation, so-called anti-racism, and so on.
And it was this culture that purportedly was going to bring equality, but really was just going to bring oppression.
It was an anti-freedom culture because you can't be both free and equal, right?
If you're free, then some people are going to excel, some people won't.
Some people are going to work hard, some people won't.
Other people are going to fall behind.
Freedom and equality are actually in tension with one another.
And I believe in freedom.
I don't believe in equality because I don't believe it exists.
The only way for me to be equal with somebody who's better than me is to bring him down because I can't rise to his level.
I can't play basketball like LeBron James.
So to be free, to be equal, LeBron James has to shoot fewer baskets so I can keep up with him, a lot fewer.
So as I'm speaking right now, this fight that I joined against the anti-freedom culture has been won.
I mean, dramatically, it's been won.
Trump basically became the leader of that movement.
The second time he won and had time to understand what had happened to him in D.C. the first time and has time to assemble a good cabinet and a good cast of characters and to learn what he wanted to do and to think about what he wanted to do.
He has been scoring one insane victory after another.
And many of them have been in the cultural sphere.
And in some sense, all of them have been in the cultural sphere.
But just yesterday, I think it was, the Senate voted to defund NPR and PBS and PBS.
Conservatives have been trying to do that for years.
There is no reason these two leftist propaganda factories that have been hiding behind Big Bird's feathers long after Big Bird went off and became a capitalist at HBO.
You know, they've been saying, you can't get rid of PBS.
That's where Big Bird lives.
They're just lying about it.
Catherine Marr, the super woke CEO of NPR, was on CNN and did the usual leftist shock and jive, which is, well, people say we're biased, or they say we're biased, but how can that, we're not biased at all.
Just listen to this brief quote.
It's amazing.
As far as the accusations that we're biased, I would stand up and say, please show me a story that concerns you, because we want to know and we want to bring that conversation back to our newsroom.
So Senator John Kennedy, the wit of the wit of the Senate, got up in the Senate chamber and read headlines from NPR calling birds racist and highways racist and suggesting Trump was in Putin's pocket.
But you don't even have to do that, which was very funny, but you don't even have to do that because I would like to see one single pro-Trump commentator or story on either PBS or NPR.
And the question is not, do they have a right to broadcast that stuff?
Of course they do.
The question is, why are we paying for it?
Why are we giving them anything?
And the interesting thing about both NPR and PBS is they both have excellent cultural content, which I would like to see continue.
And I don't understand why they can't correct this bias and be a, well, I do understand it, but I would like to see them correct that bias and continue to do that great cultural content, but do it for the whole country.
Let the whole country join in on their news stories by reporting fairly instead of what they are reporting, which is not just unfairly, but it's complete nonsense.
Paying For Pretending00:13:42
Then last night, I believe it was, Stephen Colbert's late night show was canceled.
CBS says it's completely for financial reasons.
And I'm shocked because I don't know where they're going to go to find anyone that smug and unfunny who can pander to one political party while alienating and angering the rest of the country by depriving them of network entertainment.
Here's Colbert announcing.
I mean, that's a lot of talents to have in one man.
Here's Colbert announcing the news.
Before we start the show, I want to let you know something that I found out just last night.
Next year will be our last season.
The network will be ending the late show in May.
And yeah, I share your feelings.
It's not just the end of our show, but it's the end of the late show on CBS.
I'm not being replaced.
This is all just going away.
And I do want to say that the folks at CBS have been great partners.
I'm so grateful to the Tiffany Network for giving me this chair and this beautiful theater to call home.
And of course, I'm grateful to you, the audience.
Just what he did was a bad thing.
And I love the Democrats.
Elizabeth Warren says, America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.
Okay, America.
Yes, it was.
Why shouldn't a network on airwaves owned by the public, the whole public, run by the FCC, fire a guy for dividing the country by only making jokes about one side so you can't laugh at yourself because you're always getting punched in the face.
So nobody, I'm sure, was watching.
And I'm sure that's why.
You know, Colbert, a lot of people are suggesting have to do with the fact that Trump sued them, that Paramount is trying to meld companies with, what is it called, Skyhorse?
Is that the name of the company they want to meld with?
And they need government approval.
And maybe it's all because of that.
But he was damaging to America.
And he wasn't funny on top of everything else.
So on top of this, these guys are disappearing, or at least, I mean, BBS and NPR won't disappear.
We don't have to pay for them anymore.
And Colbert will disappear, but not soon enough.
More importantly, formerly canceled comedian Shane Gillis was on the SPES, the sports awards, and he was killing it.
And remember, this is a guy who was too hot to handle for Saturday Night Live.
And now he's just letting himself go.
When Caitlin Clark retires from the WNBA, she's going to work at a waffle house so she can continue doing what she loves most, fistfighting black women.
I love this.
And I am totally in favor of racial humor, by the way.
I think it brings things out into the open.
There's always hostility between the races, always everywhere.
There's always some kind of tension between races and cultures.
And again, we should be able to laugh at each other.
I will tell you something.
I love the Daily Wire, and I've said a lot of nice things about the Daily Wire, all of which I believe.
But I will tell you the worst moment I had at the Daily Wire was when they asked me to give them a book that I had written or was writing called The Lefties Dictionary, which was a series of satires about the left.
And they published it and they put out a beautiful edition of it.
And then someone in the organization realized that N was an, you know, A is for this, B is for that, and N was for N-Word.
And they panicked.
The Daily Wire panicked.
And it's one of the few times I've seen them do that.
They got very frightened.
They went nuts.
They were talking about buying back copies of the books that had sold.
And they shut it down.
They basically unpublished it.
And now it's actually worth more.
I think you can get it for about 30 bucks or something, 40 bucks on Amazon, but hard to find copies of it.
And it's still worth, it's funny.
And my argument was this.
My argument was, I like living in a multi-ethnic country.
I like everybody.
I like everybody just the same, really.
I could not care less what race people are.
And so when I make jokes about people, there's no evil in it.
And I'm happy to defend it.
I'm happy to take the heat.
But they couldn't brass it out because that's how divided the left had made us over race.
So anyway, this old anti-freedom culture that I went out to fight is broken.
And now the fight to build a new culture is beginning and MAGA is on the march.
And now that they're on the march and now that we are winning, a lot of people who were hiding under desks before or pretending to be something other than what they're now saying are trying to hijack this freedom movement that's defined essentially and led by President Trump.
And they're trying to turn it into something else.
And these guys ride on Trump's back, but they're not MAGA.
They're not Trump.
They're not anything he's ever represented or spoken about.
They are, some of them, what the left has accused Trump of being.
And that's why I put Tucker Carlson in the satire.
I'm going to talk about him today.
Everybody on the right is always saying to me, you've got to be nice to Tucker Carlson.
Got to be nice.
And I think, like, why?
Why do I have to be nice to Tucker Carlson?
The guy has broken bad.
He has broken bad.
And I'm like, I'm sick of pretending that's not true.
You know, I was never pretending, but I'm not going to be quiet about it.
I mean, is he on our side?
You know, people, it's funny.
A lot of people online, they love to pick on Ben and they pick on Ben.
One time, Ben said, you should take the vaccine.
Don't be a dope, something like that in his typical friendly way.
And they just never forget this.
Even though Ben said, yeah, I was wrong.
He misjudged the depth of corruption in the U.S. establishment.
And that's why he said, take the vaccine, because vaccines are, many of them are largely helpful and prevent serious diseases.
Tucker Carlson went down to Mar-a-Lago to convince Trump to shut down the economy, which is one of the things that cost Trump the election, I think, more than any nonsense that was being done on the left to cheat him out of the election.
I think the fact that he crashed the economy and against his better judgment, against Trump's better judgment, is one of those.
Nobody blames, nobody remembers anything that Tucker has done.
He remembers he sent these secret emails at Fox saying, I hate Trump passionately.
There really isn't an upside to Trump.
He's a demonic force, a demonic force, a destroyer, all while pretending to support him on the air.
You know, people pick on me.
They come after me when I openly disagree with Trump and I say, I did something I disagreed with.
But that seems to me perfectly fair.
I mean, I've never claimed to be all MAGA all the time.
I just tell you what I think of things.
But it seems way different than hiding what I'm thinking from you the way Tucker did.
When somebody does that, how do you ever know if he's telling you the truth?
How do you ever know?
I mean, Tucker interviewed Putin and let Putin roll over him, steamroll over him with a nonsense history lesson that had nothing to do with the fact that he had invaded another country.
He interviewed this amateur historian who thinks the Holocaust was a mercy killing, Darrell Cooper, and called him just a very important, I can't remember the words, an honest historian, the very important historian.
He just interviewed the president of Iran, whose name is Masoud Pezashkian.
And he said to this guy, you know, it's being translated, he said, some people in America, you know, don't really like it when you say death to America.
What's your take on that?
And here's the president's answer.
I would like to remind you that Iran has never invaded another country in the last 200 years.
When they say death to the United States, it doesn't mean death to the people of the United States or even to the officials of the United States.
They mean death to crimes, death to killing and carnage, death to supporting, killing others, death to insecurity and instability.
Have you ever heard that Iranian killing an American?
Have you ever heard that?
Or a terrorist that was Iranian and he carried out the terrorist attack against the Americans.
No.
And Tucker just went on to the next question.
He just let that sit there.
And he puts it on you.
He says, he says, anybody who doesn't think we should hear both sides is not your friend.
He's your enemy.
That's not American.
Americans should hear both sides.
Well, okay.
You know, I'm not trying to censor anybody.
I don't want anybody to be silent.
But if somebody says that to me, I mean, isn't Tucker Carlson supposed to be a journalist?
The Iranians have killed at least, at least low number, 1,000 Americans.
Iranian terrorism has killed at least 1,000 Americans, maybe as many as 5,000 Americans, including the Beirut bombing back in the 80s.
It's true that they haven't officially invaded any countries, but their cat's paws have Hamas totally funded and armed by Iran, Hezbollah, totally funded and armed by Iran.
The militias in Syria, armed and funded by Iran, the Houdis, Houthis bombing our shipping, armed by Iran.
And no response.
We're not going to respond at all.
We're not going to respond at all.
Meanwhile, telling us that everything has to do with the Jews.
The Jews are to blame for anything.
Everything, Israel is to blame for, you know, whatever, the war in Gaza, which is absurd.
Why is that different from the left?
Why is that different from Zorhan Mamdani?
They have the same opinions.
They believe the same things: hate the Jews, elevate the Islamists.
AOC brings Mamdani to Washington so he can get endorsements from a Democrat Party who wishes he would go away.
And he says, well, you know, I'm discouraging the use of the term globalize the intifada, which means genocide the Jews.
That's what it means.
And he says, I'll discourage the use of that.
Well, I hope he doesn't discourage the use of the phrase, kiss my ass, because that's what he can do, because he hasn't changed.
That's a cosmetic change.
And how is Tucker, how are his opinions any different from that?
I mean, these guys pretend they're MAGA.
When have you ever heard Trump say, you know, ah, Iran, you know, what a great bunch of guys.
What a great, you know, he says they could be a great country if they could get rid of the revolutionary government.
You know, Dave Smith is another one of them.
Dave Smith was a TPUSA.
Josh Hammer debates Dave Smith, and he starts reading Dave's tweets because Dave is another guy who's always telling Trump what he should do and don't bomb Iran.
Oh, if you bomb Iran, this is going to be a disaster, just absolute disaster.
All of it, you know, run by Israel.
And here's what Hammer said.
He started reading tweets that Dave Smith had put out.
So I actually have a little bit of a highlight reel here of Dave Smith's tweets over the years.
Dave Smith, March 19th, 2024.
Donald Trump is responsible for around 500,000 deaths in Yemen and between the weapons to Ukraine and the Abraham Accords Jerusalem embassy.
He is at least partially responsible for the two worst humanitarian crises in the world.
He's a war criminal who should spend his life in prison.
He is calling Donald Trump a war criminal who should spend his life in prison.
You should be living at that.
I am living that as a Trump supporter.
Donald Trump, Dave Smith, June 16, 2025.
Trump allegedly had full prior knowledge of Israel's attacks and gave it his blessing while pretending to be negotiating with the Iranians as a cover.
If this is true, Trump is the most impotent bitch of a leader imaginable.
You know, as a guy who really is amazed, gleeful at Trump's successes, I look at this, and these guys, especially Tucker, are always calling Shapiro names.
They're always cursing him out, essentially suggesting that the Daily Wire supports Israel because Ben is a Jew, oh, and the things he's saying, he's just saying to him, because he's a Jew.
And all I can think when I hear that, you guys have heard me disagree with Ben a million times.
And if you've listened to Backstage, you've heard me get into shouting matches with Ben.
Nothing like the incredible shouting matches I get with him behind the scenes, none of them unfriendly, just all of them impassioned arguments.
But I'll tell you something, I've seen that little Jew walk into riots before Trump was on the scene, walk into riots on camp or college campuses to tell those students truths they'd never heard before.
I mean, the guy's like four foot two, you know, he walks into these things.
You know, where were they then?
Where were they?
They were pretending to be something they're not.
And now they're coming out with this what they call identitarianism, which is just race hatred.
It's just race hatred.
It's all it is.
You know, the anti-black, anti-Jew.
The right calls it identitarianism.
The left calls it anti-racism.
But it's hatred because hatred doesn't sell as well as those names.
So how many times are we going to bite into that poisoned apple before we come back to Jesus?
I mean, what the hell?
You know, what the hell?
Is that really what you think the future of the MAGA movement, of the conservative movement, of the country is going to be?
Like, I got to tell you something.
I think that the future could be a freedom culture.
And if it's going to be a freedom culture and a virtue culture, because freedom and virtue are completely intertwined, it's not going to be because of people like this.
It's really not.
I don't think they're the future at all.
I think they're trying to hitchhike a ride on a steam train that is going into the future.
It's not going to be because of the people on the right, the commentators on the right, who are afraid to call out these guys.
How do you think the left turned into the monsters they are?
Attacking Ethos's Insurance Coverage00:02:51
It wasn't because we weren't attacking them.
We were attacking them all the time.
Conservatives were always attacking the left.
They turned into these monsters with only one opinion, this one-headed monster, this one-headed beast, because middle-of-the-road Democrats, sane Democrats, handed their cohoners over to the radicals like Nancy Pelosi and wouldn't speak up because they were afraid to lose their audience.
They're afraid to lose their base.
And obviously, as you know, I'm not afraid because I'm on a mission from God.
But if the new culture is going to be a freedom culture, it's going to be because of you.
Not just people who listen to this podcast, but people who should listen to this podcast because they're the kind of people who'd like this podcast.
These are the people who understand the intertwining needs of virtue and freedom.
In order to be free, you must be virtuous.
In order to be virtuous, you must be free.
And this kind, this racism, which is rejecting, as far as I'm concerned, the image of God, is the opposite of virtue.
And I've told you, I think I said this last week.
People like you are the light of the world.
You are the torch of freedom.
And you can't be distracted by these guys who are trying to get your attention and sell you this old, the oldest medicine alive.
They're trying to sell you the oldest drug alive, which is hatred and anger.
You've got to keep walking and pass the torch on.
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And you're thinking, I can spell ethos, but how?
Why We Left Ethos00:07:07
Oh, how?
Please tell me how.
Do I spell clavin?
K-L-A-V-A-N. Chapter 2, The Good Shepherd.
Last night I was channel surfing and I went through Turner Classics and they were playing The Devil and Daniel Webster, which is an okay movie, but it's a wonderful short story, a short story written by Stephen Vincent Bonet in 1936.
And you should read it.
You can find it online for free.
I used it once before to show you that the anti, the true non-racist American culture and anti-slavery culture has been with us for a long time.
The left didn't invent it.
It was not part of the left.
It was really part of the right for a long time and now is again.
But I happened to turn it on just at this moment, just at this moment when Daniel Webster, great orator, famous Secretary of State and Congressman, ran for president, never quite succeeded, and who's a passionate fighter for his causes.
And this is just the moment that I turned on from this old film.
So you tell your father for me that we may be on opposite sides of the fence, but I'm always glad to hear of a man who holds to his own opinions.
As long as the people do that, this country is all right.
You understand, Martin?
Yes, sir.
I guess so.
I guess so.
I'm not sure he understands.
As long as the people of this country can hold to their own opinions.
So that, to me, is what it's about.
But how does that happen?
I mean, it doesn't happen.
First of all, it doesn't happen if you're just going to lie.
And it doesn't happen if you're just hating on the people you oppose.
So I just want to tell my only story about John MacArthur because he was a great pastor of Grace Community Church in Los Angeles.
He died this week at the age of 86.
I know a lot of people who are going to be brokenhearted at that news.
And he was a man I respected very highly and often deeply disagreed with.
And I'm sure he often deeply disagreed with me.
I know he actually did know some of my work, but so I know he did.
If he did, he disagreed with me.
He was an evangelical.
I'm an Anglican Catholic.
We had different theologies.
I mean, I read two of his books and I learned from them because he was a really good biblical scholar.
And he was a pastor and a theologian.
And I'm not.
I always tell you, you know, if you're listening to me, you're listening to a man who has a deep relationship with Jesus Christ as the center of my life.
And I have an idea of what I think Jesus says in the Gospels, which you can look up in The Truth and Beauty.
The end of that, the last third or so of that book is about that.
But my idea of what Jesus was telling us to do and how to live and what to see was different from MacArthur's.
And I live by it and he lived by his vision.
And God will be the judge of both of us, of course.
But I think both of us, with our differing opinions, may do all right, hopefully, on that final judgment.
And of course, he was very strong in opposing homosexuality, which is a cultural center, by the way.
I agree.
I think we should be a culture centered on mom and dad and children.
I think anything else is a perverse culture.
And I feel, but I do feel when it comes to persons, you know, people on the right like to say that homosexuality is a choice.
No one is born gay because God wouldn't do that.
Listen, people are born with spina bifida.
They're born with all kinds of things.
They're born with a genius.
They're born with all kinds of things, good and bad.
And so they are born gay.
I'm sure, you know, they say they can't find a genetic trace of it, but they're not looking in the right place.
You should look in the mother because I think it's something that happens in the womb.
But I'll just be honest with you.
I feel that nature produces a certain number of gay people.
And I basically agree, maybe about 5%.
And I basically agree with Maureen Le Pen, the French conservative who said homosexuals are like salt and soup.
If there aren't enough, it's a bit bland.
When there's too much, it's inedible.
And she was convicted of hate speech for saying that, but it's obviously the truth.
It's the way nature of the world, the world is built.
It gives you a little bit of gay in your soup, and it makes you taste better.
And I basically believe that people should be left alone and you should concentrate on your own sins, if indeed that is a sin.
But most of you know my brilliant son Spencer is gay.
A lot of people think that that's why I changed my opinions.
I've never changed my opinion on this.
I've been working with gay people all my life.
And I trust Spencer and I trust other gay people that talk to God, do what God thinks is right in their life.
And if they don't talk to God, then that's on them.
I can't do anything about that unless they ask me, and then I'll tell them what I think.
So it makes people angry.
But John is very, obviously very strongly opposed and thought she should confront homosexuals about their homosexuality.
So here's my story: COVID hit.
And my doctor said to me, and I've had my doctor for decades, and he knows me very well.
He said, you're a prime target to get killed by this thing because of your age and because you have a bad lung, which I, you know, I have a collapsed lumby because I got pneumonia, wouldn't stop exercising, so my lung is a little broken.
So I was more cautious than I felt younger people needed to be.
And I'm a writer and I don't mind being alone, so I was staying home for a little bit longer.
But when California Governor Newsom, from his headquarters in the French laundry restaurant where he was dining with no mask with friends, decreed that churches should be shut down, MacArthur, I think, was he was not the only one, but he was certainly the largest church that stood up to Gavin Newsom.
And he kept his church open.
He barred the health inspectors, wouldn't let him come in.
He fought off petty attacks like giving parking tickets to his parishioners, which they did.
And he defied them in spite of being threatened with all kinds of fines and jail.
And I had him on my show while he was fighting.
I had him with his lawyer, who was my friend Jenna Ellis, and he won that fight.
And I just loved him.
I talked to him.
We had a great discussion.
And he radiated faith.
I admired the joy that came out of him with his faith.
And I knew after I talked to him that even though my lung is bad, even though I was worried about COVID, I had to go to his church to support him, which my wife wasn't happy about because she feels if I'm going to die, she wants to be the one to kill me.
So I go to his church one Sunday with Jenna, and the place is packed.
It's absolutely packed.
I mean, there's overflow, people out in tents and all this stuff.
And people recognize me.
And so they're shaking my hand and they're kissing me on the cheek.
And it's right as the height of COVID fear.
And my doctor has told me I'm going to die like that if I get it.
And he's an expert, by the way, on these kinds of epidemics.
And so I thought, well, everyone has to die sometime.
I'm supporting John MacArthur in keeping this open.
So someone, it may have been Jenna, but it may have just been one of MacArthur's people, came up to me and said, John wanted to meet me.
And so we went up to his office.
And after a while, he comes out of his inner office and he comes over to me, shakes my hand, looks me in the eye, and gives me a meaningful look in the eye and says, I just want to tell you how much I like and admire Spencer's work at the Daily Wire.
Spencer was writing stuff at the Daily Wire.
And I knew exactly what he was telling me.
I knew exactly what he was telling me.
He was telling me that he too believes, as I believe, that no man falls out of the sphere of God's love.
Why Olive Oil Matters00:03:30
And the first thing we're supposed to do is express that love in imitation of God.
And I know the left has decreed that any disagreement with their horrible agenda is hate speech.
But I think now the right, these hitchhikers on MA, these limpids who are sticking themselves to MA, are coming out with this stuff as well, against gay people as well.
I mean, there are plenty of important gay people in Trump's administration.
He has been really good about this.
He has always supported gay people.
He's a New Yorker, like me.
He's a New Yorker.
You live with all the crazies.
You live with all the different things, all the eccentrics, and they actually give flavor to life.
And if they give flavor to life, you have to think, well, maybe this is the way it's supposed to be.
Maybe this is the part of the variety of life.
But Trump has also been good in fighting the gay cultural agenda, which is exactly what I think he should do.
You know, freedom is hard.
Freedom is hard.
It's much harder than people think.
People think that standing up and saying, I hate black, I hate gay people, gays, that's disgusting.
They think that's hard.
That's easy.
That's easy.
That comes naturally to every human being.
Hating each other comes naturally to every human being.
They did not crucify Jesus Christ because he said hate one another.
Freedom is hard.
It's hard.
And I think that that's what we should be sticking towards and looking for in this movement because this is a big change.
An old way is going out.
A new way is coming in.
And it's going to be very different than anything we've had before.
But it should be the same in this.
Men should be free.
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Chapter 3, The Epstein Blunder Continued.
The Epstein Blunder Continues00:11:38
This is part of this story that I'm talking about, this fight for what MAGA is and what the future of the conservative movement or whatever you want to call it is going to be.
I have to return to this Epstein story.
I talked about it last week.
I pointed out that neither I nor anybody else outside of the Justice Department really knows what is going on.
There may be some people in the legal system who knows what's going on, who know what's going on.
But all of the people who are telling you absolute certainty, it's this one or that one who's to blame, they don't know either.
Okay.
And I said that Trump was wrong to allow this story to be dumped in the dead of night after people had been very urgently wanted to get this out.
And I pointed out that people make fun of the right for saying everybody is sleeping is a pedophile.
Everyone's not a pedophile, but the abuse of young people, sexual abuse of young people, is absolutely epidemic on every side, anywhere there's power, Hollywood, the churches, you know, politics, anywhere there's power, young people are being used and abused.
And I think we have a right to be horrified by that and shocked.
I think that that is not a bad thing.
And I think that, you know, Trump made a mistake.
And, you know, now, because it won't leave the news, the latest development is the Wall Street Journal has published what it says is a birthday greeting from Trump to Epstein on a big card with a lot of people signing it.
And it was a naked woman, and it had this what they call bawdy talk where it says a voiceover, there must be more to life than having everything.
And Donald says, yes, there is, but I won't tell you what it is.
And Jeffrey Epstein says, nor will I, since I also know what it is.
And Donald says we have certain things in common.
Jeffrey Jeffrey says, yes, we do come to think of it.
I got to say, it does not sound, Trump is much funnier than that.
It does not sound like Donald Trump.
And he says it's BS and he's going to sue.
I hope he does sue if it's a lie.
But I got to be honest also, I don't care.
I don't care.
Epstein was a socialite.
He wormed his way into the lives of lots of people in high society.
Lots of people know him.
I want to know who was raping the kids.
That's what I want to know.
I want to know the names of people raping the kids.
And if it was an intelligence operation, which I suspect it wasn't, I suspect it was just rich people abusing young people.
You know, that's what I want to know.
So now Trump says he wants Pam Bondi to release grand jury testimony, that some of which has been redacted by court order and let the press file FOIA complaints and try and get the names out of that.
I think that's a good thing.
I want to see, you know, I want to see just a frank press conference.
I want to see Dan Bongino, a guy I trust, Kash Patel, somebody I trust, look in the cameras, answer the questions, say, this is what we found.
I said there was a list.
I was surprised to find there wasn't.
This is what happens.
But this is, you know, Trump is right about one thing.
This is a minor issue compared to what he's doing.
The big story is a big story.
The story of the abuse of children and how many people shrug that off and how often it gets covered up.
That is a big story.
But Trump's administration, Trump's not in charge of that.
He's not in charge of the evil of the world.
He can't make the sin of the world go away.
That's not his job.
It's not what he's doing.
This is an incredible, incredible administration.
Trump could turn out to be the greatest president of my lifetime.
He could turn out to be as great as Ronald Reagan.
It is amazing what he's getting done.
And if he gets more of it done in Congress, through laws, through defunding and things like that, it will be just incredible.
Some of the people calling for him most loudly, keeping this alive.
The left is obviously calling for all this, which is just ridiculous because they didn't release anything.
So why should they suddenly be shocked to find there's secrecy going on about Jeffrey Epstein?
But there are these voices on the right who are doing it because with the bombing of Iran, guys like Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith and all these other guys who said, oh, this is a disaster.
It's just the Jews control.
The Jews are controlling America.
All of those guys who said it's going to be World War III.
Americans are going to die.
They look like buffoons.
And they're trying to get back.
They're trying to define themselves as MAGA influencers.
You know, I think it was last night, Tucker Carlson had this guy, Darryl Cooper, this historian.
And I think I told you once before, before anything came out about Darrell Cooper, I listened to a show he did about Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, because I was writing Kingdom of Cain, which deals with Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.
And I was listening to him and I was thinking, gee, he gets a lot of facts wrong.
He gets his timeline wrong.
He's not getting, he's not a very careful historian, but he made a good point.
So I quoted this good point that he made.
And then he came out and basically said, you know, that Hitler killed people, killed the Jews because he didn't know what to do with them.
And it was just a big, all the big mistakes.
Sorry, oops.
And I just thought, well, I got to cut this quote out because it's just, this is a beautiful book.
Kingdom of Cain is a beautiful book.
And I don't want this ugliness and stupidity in it.
And now Tucker Carlson is making hay out of the fact that people are saying this guy is bad.
Oh, everybody hates him.
Oh, my God.
He's going to destroy people's minds.
Well, I'm not afraid to talk to Darrell Cooper.
Well, again, I don't want to censor anybody.
Darrell Cooper can say stupid, unlearned, hate-filled things all he wants, but so can I.
And I can say things and answer what I think he's saying.
So what you have, you have Tucker Carlson interviewing Darrell Cooper.
So this is the guy, Tucker, who said bombing Iran's nukes would lead to the deaths of thousands of Americans and World War III and maybe World War III, interviewing the guy who said the Holocaust was a mercy killing and we should bomb Tel Aviv instead of bombing Iran.
So we know where he stands.
And he then said in this interview that the Mossad, Jeffrey Epstein is all about the Mossad and Israel is the boss of America and a haven for pedophiles.
I mean, this is, you know, this stuff has been going on since the Middle Ages, since medieval times.
They have been spreading these lies about the Jews.
You know, all you have to do is go to Israel and you realize what a great country it is, what a free country it is.
And this is why I want President Trump to just say, hey, get this stuff, get whatever we have, get it out there, and then move on.
It's not his job.
It is not his job to make sure this gets released.
But whatever he can get released through the Department of Justice, he should get released.
And listen, you know, Trump, I have just come to just, I've been so gleeful at this administration.
It's been hard to suppress my glee.
But we all have flaws.
We all have character flaws.
And all our flaws, not all our flaws, but many of our flaws are the flip side of our virtues, right?
I mean, like I proved myself willing to take some very big hits to speak the truth as I saw it.
That's a virtue.
But I've also opened my big mouth when I should have kept it shut.
It's the same trait.
It's the same character trait.
Often it's a virtue.
Sometimes it's a flaw.
So President Trump is a guy who will not be bullied off of a position that makes sense to him.
Bring on the media, bring on the snipers, bring on everybody who will not change.
But the flip side of that is he won't admit when he's made a mistake.
January 6th was a mistake.
I know it wasn't as bad as the left said it was, and there's all kinds of gray areas, but it was a political error, and it gave the left a lot of firepower that he didn't have to give him, thinking he could oversane.
He said, I'm going to overturn the election and be reinstated, which was just nonsense.
It's a mistake, you know, and his administration made a mistake in the way they handled this, and he won't admit it.
And now he's blaming conservatives, who want this to come out, which is kind of ridiculous.
It's cut three.
This is what he says.
I know it's a hoax.
It's started by Democrats.
It's been run by the Democrats for four years.
You had Christopher Wray and these characters and Comey before him.
And it's a bad group.
It started, actually, look at the steel dossier.
That turned out to be a total hoax.
The 51 agents, the intelligence, so-called intelligence agents, it was a hoax.
It's all been a big hoax.
It's perpetrated by the Democrats.
And some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net.
And so they try and do the Democrats' work.
You know, in some ways, if he's talking about Tucker, who he called a kooky, which I thought was polite, if he's talking about these guys, maybe he has a case.
But I also think there are many honest people, I'm one of them, who are just saying, yeah, just get it out.
We're crying out loud because there is too much of this sexual abuse going on.
It is endemic in Hollywood.
Obviously, in churches, it's come up too often.
And, you know, I do want to clarify that Trump has always been a little bit hesitant about that.
He's always said, I'm not sure.
Here's an interview he did.
I think this was during the campaign, what he said about this.
He was being questioned with Fox.
Would you declassify JFK files?
Yeah.
I did.
I did a lot of it.
Would you declassify the Epstein files?
Yeah, I would.
I guess I would.
I think that less so because, you know, you don't know.
You don't want to affect people's lives if it's phony stuff in there, because it's a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.
But I think I would, or at least I...
Do you think that would restore trust?
Help restore trust?
Yeah, I don't know about Epstein so much as I do the others.
Certainly about the way he died.
It would be interesting to find out what happened there because that was a weird situation and the cameras didn't happen to be working, et cetera, et cetera.
But you'd go a long way toward that one.
So he's always been a little hesitant about that.
And you can understand that.
You know, I'm sure there are powerful names in there and maybe they're there wrongly and anybody who's associated with him is tarred, which is not fair because, like I said, he was adept at worming his way into high society.
Listen, this is a hell of a president.
Maybe truly a great president.
We can't say that yet, but maybe he is.
And the things that make him great sometimes wrongfoot him, sometimes make him wrong.
And that's life.
That's true of your friends, true of yourself.
It's true of all of us.
It's politics.
And we should say, come on, Mr. President, release whatever you got.
Let's see it.
Hey, you know what?
If it's Mossad, you'll hear from me.
I'm not afraid of that at all.
I could care less.
I mean, I want to know.
I would be disgusted if it were.
I would be disgusted if any intelligence agency were involved in trafficking children for some kind of power play.
But I don't see any real evidence of that at all.
You know, I don't want the anger peddlers, the guys like I think that Tucker has now become.
I don't know why he's become like that, but I think he has.
I don't want them peddling the devil's cocaine.
Anger is the devil's cocaine.
And I don't want to turning our guys into addicts who miss the freedom train.
So I hope Trump changes his mind on this.
But whether or not he does, I mean, he has said he wants the grand jury testimony let out.
That's an advance.
I'm glad.
He'll remain a good president, maybe a great one, but I think he needs to make sure that he maintains the trust.
His polls are going up, by the way.
It is not hurting him in the polls.
But I think he needs to make sure that he maintains this movement that he's leading, that he maintains control of this movement, because he is not selling the hatred that other people are.
As we celebrate Independence Day this July, we are reminded of the freedoms our founders fought to protect, especially the fundamental right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But here's something that might surprise you.
Imagining Freedom Rightly00:07:43
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Final chapter, The Social Imaginary.
So one of the reasons I feel that culture is so important, the reason I write books like Truth and Beauty and the Kingdom of Cain, the reason I write novels, in fact, but the reason I wrote those books, I was trying to show how the arts point to God because I think the arts help shape our imaginations.
And shaping your imagination rightly is crucial.
Imagination is an organ of perception.
And just like you want to see well with your eyes and hear well with your ears, you want to imagine well because that's how we see the invisible world, which is the world of morality, the world of faith, the world of God, the world of prayer.
All of those things are only perceived by the imagination.
And that doesn't make them imaginary at all.
They're very real, but it means they are spoken in the language of the imagination, which is symbol and imagery and stories.
And that's how we perceive the things that we can't perceive and how we describe the things that we can't describe.
And it's important, you know, you can see the imagination at work in good ways and bad.
For my birthday, my birthday was last weekend, and I'm, I think, 177.
My wife took me to a Broadway show.
We went to see this show, Operation Mince Meet, which was lots of fun.
It was kind of light, but it was lots of fun.
Some very talented performers.
But it's about this operation, MI5 operation during World War II.
And there's a moment in it when somebody says, I'm in the packed Broadway theater and I'm sitting in the nice seats because it's my birthday.
And my wife is very generous.
And I'm sitting in the nice seats with very, very high-toned New York people.
And there's a moment when somebody says, if you just follow, and this is a comedy, just a light comedy, but if you just follow orders, the fascists have already won.
And the audience roars and applauds and applauds.
Why?
Because they're currently living under fascism because Donald Trump is a fascist.
That's why.
I can tell you.
I can guarantee that that's why they're roaring and applauding this kind of light line in this light play.
They think in their imaginations that Trump is a fascist.
These rich people living privileged lives, watching a show that if Trump were a fascist and they were saying that about him, he wouldn't be playing.
So the whole thing is just imaginary.
So the imaginary is really important that you imagine things rightly as opposed to wrongly, as opposed to what you wish they were, as opposed to what you fear they were, as opposed to what influences are telling you they are.
You have to imagine things rightly.
And that's one of the things I think religion is for.
I think religion, taking communion, going through ceremonies, praying.
I think these are ways of training your imagination to see God's world, the world of faith and the world of the spirit, so that you understand it.
And we tell each other stories.
That's why I tell stories, to communicate what I see with an imagination that hopefully I've trained well so I can tell you the truth.
This is a moment of transition.
The elites have fallen.
The culture of unfreedom has fallen.
It is a moment when my generation, which dominated the culture and really ruined, I think, two generations after us, is dying off.
I hope I don't have to go with it.
I'm hoping it'll go without me, but it might not.
And a new culture is going to be formed.
And, you know, Tolstoy, the novels have this theory that great men are just reflections of history.
They don't cause the history.
History finds them.
If it doesn't find a Napoleon, it'll find somebody else.
I think that that's a half-truth, but still, it's an interesting thing because I do think this moment is represented, symbolized in our imaginations by two people, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
And I think they represent both the end of the era and the beginning of the new era because every end of something is the beginning of something.
And Obama is the end of liberalism in leftism, the sinister, anti-colonial, anti-American, anti-freedom, pro-Islamist madness that I keep feeling that guys like Tucker are signing on to when they tell us that the West, the America bombed Nagasaki to kill Catholics.
I mean, Tucker keeps saying, I love America.
I love America.
I was born here.
I have my ancestors here.
But we lost World War II.
We bombed Nagasaki to kill Catholics.
And we're run by Israel.
So I don't know what he loves about us.
But Trump is different.
He's not a conservative in the way I understand conservatism.
He's a non-ideological, common-sense person with a lifetime of Americanism.
That clip you saw from the devil and Daniel Webster, that's part of the fabric of his soul.
That's part of who he is.
And he loves the country, and he loves the culture that brought him up, which is a culture of freedom.
Now, obviously, you don't have to guess, I'm for Trump.
I want a MAGA future.
But in the end, these people are the tools of history.
History is lived out by you.
It's lived out by individuals.
And so you have to be careful what you imagine and what you imagine the revolution to be like and what you imagine the country should be.
And then you have to live out what you imagine.
You don't have to hate anybody to do this.
You don't have to hate blacks to live out our British tradition of freedom.
That's the left's line.
That's not what we believe.
We don't believe that we have to exclude blacks to live out our British traditions of freedoms.
You can be black and live out British traditions of freedoms.
Welcome aboard.
That's the thesis of America.
If it fails, the theory fails.
But that's the experiment.
That's what we're trying to do.
You don't have to hate gays to bang your wife and save the country, you know, by producing more children, which is what you should be doing.
Instead of, I want you to listen to this show, but you should be having sex with your wife and creating babies because that's what you're supposed to do to fight back against the baby by producing more children than the baby-hating left.
You don't have to hate people who disagree with you to speak out courageously and loudly and bravely in favor of the genius of the founders, which is, I think, what we're trying to defend.
So you have to imagine what you want this country to be like.
You have to imagine freedom.
You have to imagine America.
And then you have to live out what you imagine in your life.
That's how the future comes.
A culture of faith and family, a secular government that's run by people with Christian values, a government that is strongly limited in its powers, more and more limited, hopefully, free markets, free minds.
Men should be free so they can choose to be virtuous, but they have to choose virtue if they want to be free and stay free.
Imagine freedom, imagine America, then live out what you imagine, and MAGA will be ours.
Imagining Freedom00:04:57
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.
Lock your firearm away so securely that you'll need a treasure map and three different keys to access it in an emergency, or leave it sitting around like it's a TV remote.
Neither option is exactly what you'd call ideal.
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When seconds count, you're not fumbling around, risking your safety or security.
You do not want, I can tell you myself, you do not want your gun lying where you can't get to it and you don't want it lying where little people or people who don't know anything about guns can get their hands on it.
This is the box you want.
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Discover a better way to balance security and readiness with StopBox.
We are celebrating a decade of the Daily Wire.
That's 10 years of saying the quiet part out loud and building something that actually matters, something the left can't cancel or burn down.
And we're not slowing down.
We're scaling up with new talent like Isabel Brown and her new show premiering this fall, new docs like Journey to the UFC, the Joe Pfeiffer story premiering Friday, July 25th.
And here's the thing: members get all of it first.
The drops, the trailers, the truth uncensored.
Plus, you get to connect with a community that doesn't think biology is optional.
Celebrate 10 years with us.
Join now at DailyWirePlus.com.
Clavin Clapbacks.
Sugar Ray Leonard's here, Elliot.
Sugar Ray, you're the man, but in 10 years, Jake Paul is going to try to knock you out.
So take it easy.
Yeah!
All right, Clavin Clapbacks at DailyWire.com.
Clavin with a K, clapbacks with a K. Ask anything you want.
We love hearing from you, and we will answer what we can.
From Ian, I often hear you mention how Israel is a free country compared to everywhere else in the Middle East.
I deeply love the country, but I do feel that how free it is is often misrepresented.
The Jewish bureaucracy often makes life quite difficult for non-Jews, and opening a church can be next to impossible.
It is not legal to get married if you're an atheist.
That's not quite true.
It's not legal.
You can't have a civil marriage, but you can be an atheist.
The Jewish state does not meet the standard of freedom that most Americans actually want.
I agree with that.
I understand that.
It's not here to live up to our country.
Saudi Arabia doesn't have to live up to our country.
But of the two, I prefer a culture that respects women and respects people's rights and thinks very, very hard about human rights and ethics instead of some of the Muslim cultures around them.
But none of them has to live up to American standards.
That's not the point.
It's what kind of cultures we're willing to support.
And I think Israel is one of them.
But perfectly fair point.
Magdalena says, My husband and I both love your show.
Part of why our marriage is so wonderful is because we both are the kind of people that agree with you on everything.
But there's one topic that we can't find common ground in, which is exactly what you wrote about in The Kingdom of Cain.
I absolutely devoured the book just as I did your other nonfiction books and your Cameron Winter series.
It really spoke to me because I'm a deeply believing Christian who happens to have a great fascination with dark works of art, especially in literature and classic cinema.
My husband, on the other hand, is totally different.
We take turns picking out movies, and whenever it's my turn, we watch a film noir.
My husband is sure to say, I hate this movie.
This movie is awful.
As soon as the first immoral action is shown on screen, he reminds me a lot of Alyosha and the brothers Karamaslov.
I love him this way, and I don't want to change him a bit.
I just want to be able to share with him what is meaningful to me without feeling hurt that he tunes out.
How do you explain what you explained so well during the course of your book using only just a few sentences?
Magdalena, Magdalena, I'm going to tell you something: leave him alone.
You are blessed by God to have a husband you love and who gets along with you.
He doesn't have to like the movies you like.
He doesn't have to believe what I say.
You know, for me, if you want my argument, art is a spiritual exercise for me.
That means that I wanted to touch on every aspect of human life, including the dark parts.
And I was explaining in Kingdom of Cain how that can be a source of light, not darkness, even though it's dealing with darkness.
But still, leave him alone.
He loves you.
You love him.
My wife doesn't like the movies I like either.
And so I just go and watch them alone or I see them alone.
A Journey to UFC00:12:05
So just count your blessings.
You have a great blessing.
Jesus says, hey, the decision on the Trump happiness montage is yours, but I do appreciate you're one of the only people celebrating our wins.
Other right-wing pundits sometimes make it seem like it's only bad news.
I get it.
They want to keep us informed about the ongoing challenges, plus bad news sells better.
Still, it's good to celebrate the wins, and you seem to be one of the only people doing that.
Oh, all right.
Go ahead.
We're going to win so much.
We're going to win at every level.
We're going to win economically.
We're going to win with the economy.
We're going to win with military.
We're going to win with health care and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
My, oh, my, what a wonderful day.
We're going to win so much.
You may even get tired of winning.
Yay!
You'll say, please, please, it's too much winning.
We can't take it anymore.
I feel pretty.
Oh, so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and gay.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
We're going to wait for more!
I just can't help myself.
The guy is good.
What can I tell you?
We're going to go to members block.
Let's leave it open to everyone so we can celebrate this new documentary, A Journey to the UFC.
Joe Pfeiffer.
He is a UFC fighter, obviously, and he has an amazing story to tell.
We're going to interview him in the member block.
No reason not to become a member.
Become a member today.
Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Use code Clavin to check out for two months free on all annual plans.
We're going to let you listen this time because we want you to hear this interview, but become a member.
Darn it.
All right.
Welcome to Members Block.
And we're here with Joe Pfeiffer, the subject of a new documentary, Journey to the UFC, Joe Pfeiffer, which premieres July 25th right here on Daily Wire Plus.
Joe is a rising star as a UFC, UFC, obviously, the ultimate fighting championship.
He's a rising star, middleweight, known for knocking people out, basically.
But he's got an incredible story.
It's an incredible documentary.
Joe, thanks for coming on.
It's good to meet you.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for taking the time.
You know, the thing about your story, the first thing that grabs you is your upbringing.
I mean, your whole life has been a fight in some way.
Yeah, I mean, even till this day, man, there's things going on.
And, you know, I feel like it's God's test, at least for my own journey, to, you know, see how strong I am and see how much I really want this.
And I've put all my eggs into one basket in doing this sport, right?
And, you know, I made it to the UFC and I still got a lot of work to do.
But yeah, it's definitely been the trials that have been very tough to overcome.
But I'm a stronger man for every experience that I've overcome.
Some of those, I mean, in childhood, when you were obviously not old enough or big enough to defend yourself, your father really put you through it.
I feel like he never really valued having children.
You know, I wasn't the only one that got abused, but I got a double because I was the only boy.
And I'm not really sure what his gripe was with me.
You know, I think he had kids and he didn't really want to see them surpass what he expected for his own life that he never got to achieve.
And that may have been some of the frustration along with popping narcotics since the time that I was about six or seven years old.
And I think that contributed to the anger problems that he had along with just the mean temperament he already had.
So, yeah, the beating started about a year old and continued until about 16 as I left home.
So pretty brutal stuff back in the day.
Yeah, I mean, that's incredible.
Did that contribute to your wanting to be a fighter or was that something natural to you, do you think?
So I started jiu-jitsu at four and a half years old.
My dad started learning from a guy named Steve Haig who used to own this gym called Fight Factory.
It's basically the OG of Philadelphia, as far as MMA fighters and like real talent coming out of Philadelphia and that scene.
And as he was learning, he got me into it.
So, you know, on one hand, that I talk about the abuse, it's completely separate from, you know, the good thing that he did do unknowingly, which was, you know, put me in jiu-jitsu.
So he gave me tools and I went and built the house that I have now.
But I don't think he ever expected me to be able to continue or get to the level that I'm at now, especially without him in the picture.
And he hates every moment of that.
So, you know, I wouldn't say, I would say I fought out of anger, but I didn't fight because I had anger or I was tired of getting beat.
You know, I fought because I fell in love with the sport.
And about 13 years old, I really started to enjoy this sport.
I really felt like I was coming into my own and really able to have my own journey, my own success within competing.
And, you know, I stopped doing it for him because it was never good enough that I always was in trouble or I was getting beat because I didn't perform good.
And if I did perform good, it was because, you know, I didn't beat anybody of note, according to him.
So it was always, you know, shortcoming trying to compete for a guy that you could never please.
And yeah, I got tired of that, man.
So I started developing a love for myself and it was the best thing that I ever did.
But I will say I had the dream of fighting in the UFC and walking out.
My dream specifically was walking out to a crowd of 20,000 people chanting my name in the UFC.
Not even so much the fight itself, but that was my dream that started about eight years old.
So again, we're talking to Joe Pfeiffer, who's the subject of a new documentary, Journey to the UFC, Joe Pfeiffer, which will premiere July 25th here on Daily Wire Plus.
So how did you make it into the UFC?
It had something to do with Dana White, I know, who's a very cool guy.
Yeah, so me making it to the UFC actually has nothing to do with Dana White.
It has to do with the resume of my career fighting regionally and obviously racking up a couple good wins.
And then you have a manager or a management that goes and reaches out to the matchmakers of the UFC.
And then they have, I fought what was called on Daniel White's contender series, right?
So you go on there, they have five fights, 10 fighters, and you get an opportunity to fight for a contract.
So you can come away with a win and get chosen to be in the UFC.
But it's not guaranteed.
You know, he has to pick you.
You know, you have to have everything that he is looking for, obviously, in a fight.
And I wound up having one of the greatest performances, I think, in Daniel White Contender Series history, just because of the emotion behind it, the resilience of building back to the UFC after a nasty injury, being told my career was done.
And I wound up getting a knockout over a guy who was a champion of another regional organization from California.
And the whole G Joe Pfeiffer statement was made by Dana himself.
And I was the only one that got a contract that night.
So, you know, I did it big.
He said, if you want to be UFC, you have to be Joe Pfeiffer.
And he said that, I mean, because you skirted over that injury, but it was brutal.
I saw the pictures.
I mean, before you got to that victory, you really went down.
I mean, you looked like you were done.
Just looking at the pictures, it looked like anybody would be done.
What got you through that?
Hope.
Hope and support, love of the people closest to me and and just them still believing that.
You know, I could make that run back, just knowing the kind of person that I am and everything i've already endured leading.
You know, obviously I had my past uh, of abuse and the childhood that I came through um but, you know it, I still dealt with problems.
Aside from that, you know, I was still becoming a man and dealing with things uh, in my first go around and then getting to the contender series uh, I believe I was only 23 or 24 years old and then having that catastrophic injury, you know it really set me back.
They told me I wouldn't fight again and yeah, my elbow snapped right in half but it exploded what's called the radial head.
So the rotation of my arm was different, the length of my arm was different um, the risk of injury again was, you know, 10 times greater for the simple fact that it could still pop out of place and um, you know, they didn't really think that it was possible for me to come back.
So, you know, it was definitely a dark time, man.
And then um, you know, I hope to never go through something like that again uh, but it was all worth it and it was all part of my story.
You know.
It paid off and I came back and I made a huge wave when I got into UFC.
So i'm grateful for everything i've been through and I wouldn't have it any other way.
I have to ask you I mean, you come from this incredibly abusive uh household which never relents.
I mean, even as you grow up it.
You never get the sort of oh gee, I made a mistake, what a terrible thing I did.
I'm i'm, changing my ways from your father.
You get into this incredible injury, as I say, the pictures are are horrific.
You triumph in uh, an amazing comeback.
Uh is do.
Are you a man of faith?
Are you a man who who, believes in god?
Is that something that that you have in your life?
Or do you just do this off, pure crit?
No, i'm a faith pH man.
Um, i'm a Christian.
Uh, you know, I believe in god and and?
Um, I think that's definitely why I wouldn't take anything back, you know, is because i've trusted in his plan and I think what is meant to be is already written, and sometimes we don't get to see our future selves right, but you know, we have to trust and hope.
If you do have faith, part of it is just trusting that things will will turn out maybe not in your favor the way you want them to, but there's a bigger plan um, in the end.
And um, like I said, I believe it was already written and I think this was my story and i'm unveiling it and i'm i'm reading page by page and going through my own book.
So, and um, you know, I think it's it's been a great one so far.
You know, needless to say, without struggle um, that's always going to be there um, but no storm lasts forever man, and as long as you have self-belief and you have a good support system and you have people that you know love you and you can fall back on um, I think it makes it that much easier um, but you know just also, it is grit.
You know I, I could, I could have literally turned the other page and said hey yeah no, this isn't for me and I can't do it um, because the, the odds seem very slim.
You know, if you lose your first contract opportunity and you get a second one, if you lost the second one, that's that like, you're probably not getting another shot.
You know people don't understand how hard it is to make it in this sport and um, you know, I hope that this, this can show how hard it really can be sometimes to make it.
But you know, i've made it and I still have a lot of work to do and I'm excited for it, man.
You know, I'm cracking the top 15 in the world in my weight class.
And yeah, I'm excited to see what the future holds, but it is definitely not easy.
But I am a faith-based man and I consider myself a Christian.
Yeah, it's an amazing story.
People can see it in Journey to the UFC, Joe Pfeiffer.
It premieres July 25th on Daily Wire Plus.
Joe, it's a really a pleasure to meet you.
I'm so glad you came on.
Thank you very much.
It's nice talking to you.
Yes, thank you for having me and thank you for taking an interest in my story and giving me the opportunity to talk to somebody like yourself.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks.
All right.
Well, that, you know, that he did go through some trials, but you notice that he never went through the kind of clavenlessness that you will now be plunged into.
So keep the faith.
It won't do you any good because, you know, the darkness is just too great.
But keep it anyways.
It's kind of a souvenir.
And I'll be back.
I'll be back next Friday with the Andrew Claven Show.