Ep. 1246 – Fake News, Real Art dissects Cracker Barrel’s logo controversy—later reversed after backlash—and media bias against conservative critiques, citing cases like a Minneapolis Catholic school shooting and Cabot Phillips’ bigoted X posts targeting Mormons. The film Eddington is mocked for its perceived lack of nuance, while Parade (Kennedy Center) is praised for exposing mob-driven injustice. Shapiro’s new book Lions and Scavengers is promoted, but the episode warns that unchecked polarization risks violence unless truth prevails—urging restraint over emotional manipulation. [Automatically generated summary]
Recently, some of you may have noticed the Cracker Barrel restaurant and gift store chain changed its logo.
They removed the picture of the so-called old-timer who was meant to represent the chain's southern-style comfort food and old-fashioned country store feeling and left that space blank to represent the pit of fiery eternal damnation loud with the shrieks of the condemned into which the chain had fallen by supporting child sex changes, drag shows for children, and racist hiring practices.
The move was supposed to help the struggling chain's finances by ensuring that no conservative customers entered one of their venues ever again.
Those alienated customers would be replaced by large numbers of imaginary progressives just waiting for an old-fashioned down-home southern-style restaurant catering to pedophilia-adjacent homosexuals with a hankering for crunchy fried chicken.
But right-wing activists loudly protested the logo change, and when it turned out the new imaginary customers were paying for their imaginary meals with imaginary money, Cracker Barrel was forced to replace the old-timer in the empty space in the hopes they could keep their usual customers and avoid the eternal shriek-filled pit of sin-tortured souls the empty space represented.
Now, at this point, the flaming shriek-filled pit of sin-tortured souls known as the American news media began to express their opinions, which were all the same opinion because all the American news media's opinions are decanted from a single brain, which is kept on a lightning-lashed altar in the fog-shrouded cave dwelling of Chernobog, who was the demon from Bald Mountain in Disney's Fantasia before he left to take a job in Disney's animation department.
The opinion of the news media was that conservatives were, oh, so very silly to make such a big fuss over a meaningless logo change at a failing chain restaurant.
And how far, oh, how very far American culture had fallen from those golden days when real intellectuals like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley exchanged sparkling ideas by screaming slurs and threatening to punch each other in the face while the left swarmed over our institutions like locusts, devouring everything from Christianity to the First Amendment.
Just how stupid could these Fox News-watching Neanderthrals be that they would waste their energies trying to cancel an innocent restaurant that was simply trying to take their customers' money to fund actions their customers found contemptible?
And I thought to myself, oh, American news media, how right you are.
Who cares about these little meaningless changes in the culture?
In fact, just for fun, I would like to suggest a few meaningless cultural changes of my own.
For instance, how about conservatives buy the rights to the gay situation comedy Will and Grace and reboot the show?
But this time, Will embraces Catholicism and hilarity ensues as gay Will struggles with his physical desires in order to live a life in keeping with his fate.
I'm sure the elite news media wouldn't mind a meaningless little culture change like that one tiny bit.
What about colorblind casting.
The current rules are it's okay to have Jesus Christ portrayed by a black woman, but it's very bad to have a deaf character portrayed by an actor who can hear.
So how about as a change of pace, we have Jesus Christ portrayed by a Jewish actor who's deaf.
And when the left says, hey, he's supposed to be a black woman, the actor can say, what?
I couldn't hear you.
I'm deaf.
I'm sure the media wouldn't complain about that at all.
Or I know.
Let's reboot the hit 1970s slavery drama, Roots.
Only in this version, instead of a white man heading into the African interior to capture slaves, the white slaver just waits in his ship, like in real life, until the black Africans bring their black slaves to him so he can take them to a country where hundreds of thousands of white men will one day die to free them.
About 50 years before white imperialists force their African colonies to free their slaves as well.
I'm sure the news media would love that fresh original take on an old favorite.
In fact, just for giggles, let's change all the left's favorite franchises so that they represent something the left truly despises, like the American people.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
All right, we are back laughing our way through the best presidency ever.
I want to dedicate that open, by the way, to Robbie Starbuck and Chris Ruffo.
They get ridiculed all the time by the media, both on the left and the right.
Oh, they're doing all this meaningless stuff because they're getting important stuff done.
And I just wanted to note that.
After that the dark.
Have you bought or pre-ordered After That the Dark yet?
You really should because I need you to, because that's the only way this series is going to survive into the next book.
After That the Dark, it's number five in the Cameron Winter series.
I think it's the best one.
Publishers Weekly, the trade publishing magazine, called it brilliant in a starred review.
American Spectator in a very early review called it a non-stop thrill ride.
Go to dailywire.com slash Clavin.
You can pre-order it on any venue or you can go straight to Amazon and get it there.
These pre-orders really help put the book on the bestseller list.
And I would love to get a second book this year on the Times bestseller list, especially a work of fiction.
Also, wherever you're watching the show, if you're watching on Daily Wire Plus the way you should be, or if you're watching it on YouTube, or if you're just watching it in your dreams, in your fetid, sleazy dreams, where it probably fits right in, leave a comment, even if you leave a comment in your fetid, sleazy dreams.
And if your comment is also fetid and sleazy, we will read it on the air because it'll fit right in with the rest of our material.
Today's comment comes from Sports Ghost.
He says, I play this fun game where every time Clavin plays the Trump happiness montage, I pre-order whatever book it is he wrote this week.
I'm $100,000 in debt.
The wife has left with the kids and mafia goons are on their way to break my thumbs.
But it's all worth it knowing Master and Commander Clavin's family will be able to afford that solid gold coffin for him when he passes in a day or two.
That's actually a completely plausible scenario.
So I will not, you know, I just can't afford to, I don't want you to have to spend money you can't afford.
So no more Trump happiness montage.
That was the last one, whatever it was last week, and we won't be talking about it anymore.
All right, today's episode, fake news, real art.
This is going to be a different sort of show today.
And the reason is on this Friday, when I usually do the show, or usually I tape it on Thursday, I'm going to be in New Orleans for BoucherCon, which is a writer's conference for crime writers and for mystery fans.
And I'll be on panels discussing highly politicized topics like how to write suspenseful scenes and how to create tough guys.
And I'll be interviewing the wonderful Brad Thor about his new book.
And so I have to record my show at the beginning of the week, which makes it kind of hard to talk about the news of the week.
So I thought instead what I would do is look at the general state of the nation, the political landscape, and then talk about some of the movies I've seen and other cultural experiences I've had this summer that can tell us about this moment.
Transgender Shooter in Minneapolis00:14:44
And the theme here, and I don't usually quote movie actresses with admiration, but this time it comes from Julia Roberts, who I've always liked.
She was kind of the last movie star.
And she was at the Venice Film Festival promoting her new film After the Hunt, which is about kind of part of the theme that we're talking about, about cancel culture and whether to believe a woman who says she's been sexually assaulted.
And people said, well, you know, this film is controversial.
And Julia Roberts said, not to be disagreeable because it's not in my nature, but the thing you said that I love is it revives old arguments.
I don't think it's just reviving an argument of women being pitted against each other and not supporting each other.
There are a lot of old arguments that get rejuvenated and that creates conversation.
The best part of your question is that you all came out of the theater talking about it.
That's how we wanted you to feel.
You realize what you believe in strongly because we stir it all up for you.
So you're welcome.
In other words, the purpose of art, and this is part of what I'll be talking about, is not to confirm you in your beliefs.
It's just to represent the world in a way that crystallizes your reaction and sometimes even changes your belief.
So let's start with where I think our country is at this moment.
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Chapter one, who's on second.
Last week, I refrained from commenting too much on this transgender guy who murdered children at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, because I think the simple decency demands we kind of just hold back a little bit and pray before we launch ourselves at each other's throats for political reasons.
But whenever this happens, I mean, it's time to talk about some of this.
If the media can't skew the motivation of the killer to condemn conservatives, it immediately turns to trying to seize our guns.
And to show you how far they're willing to go to do this, to make sure that we don't notice the fact that transgender people are, the transgender movement, it's not transgender people.
The transgender movement is a violent movement.
That's why Matt Walsh needs round-the-clock security.
I mean, that's because of the threats he gets.
And I just want to take a look at an exchange between CNN's Brianna Kyler, I think her name is pronounced, and Sebastian Gorka, who is killing terrorists for the administration as we speak, and listen to what Brianna Kyler says to him about the numbers on trans gun killings.
Here's cut one.
You know, 96% of attackers in when you're looking at the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center, looking at 172 mass attacks in the U.S. between 2016 and 2020, 96% were non-trans men.
So I know you're focusing on this shooter being trans.
The shooter was trans, and that is certainly of note.
But are you missing the bigger picture here when you zero in on that instead of more broadly the school shooters as an epidemic, and you perhaps miss the through line that connects them all?
So now I want you to listen to Sebastian Gorka, who should be busy.
He should be in the EEOB killing terrorists, but he's took time off to just rip this girl to shreds as if she were a piece of paper.
Listen to what Gorka responds.
Your facts obfuscate two things.
You are using data based upon the predominant gun violence, which is gang on gang violence with zero ideological content.
If you remove all of that, the gang violence on the streets of Chicago, LA, Detroit, then you come down to a much smaller data set.
So it's like those who say, you know, gun violence in America causes so many deaths and then fail to note that the majority of the stats they are using refer to also suicides by gun, which of course is not what we are talking about here today.
So let's concentrate on mass shootings at schools, specifically Christian or Catholic schools.
Then the data set is wholly different.
I mean, you know, if you're comparing this to gang shootings over like a drug corner, you're basically being dishonest.
And this is the way the media works all the time.
And the fact is they don't even see it themselves.
I know that liberals, leftists think that they are the culture.
Yeah, they make mistakes, they make mistakes, but they are telling you the truth.
The fact that this is completely dishonest is what we're getting all the time.
Now, so the purpose is always, the target is always, take away your guns, take away the Second Amendment.
Now, I want to be very clear that I strongly oppose political violence, especially in a place where there's still fairly decent elections.
And the reason is political violence almost always leads to tyranny.
It almost always makes things worse.
The American Revolution is a very, very rare exception.
And that, too, was a near-run thing.
If it hadn't been for George Washington, it also might have led to tyranny.
So I hate the idea that we should ever have to shoot each other over a political issue like we did in the 1860s.
So much of what is tyrannical in this country arose from the post-Civil War amendments and the civil rights laws that have been taken over by the left and used to silence people and strip us of our free association rights.
I'm obviously in favor of civil rights and that everybody gets treated fairly, but the left takes over every social issue.
And the Civil War kind of left us, in many ways, less free than we were.
So opposing political violence with all my heart, I still want to say that I believe the Second Amendment is as important today as when it was written.
The Second Amendment was enacted because the states asked the question, if the federal government is going to have an army, how would we defend ourselves against the federal government, right?
So last week I was talking about England.
I was talking about the things going on in England.
And it's very important what goes on in England because they're tied to us.
They're like a distant mirror.
And a lot of times the things we do, they then do.
And a lot of things that they do, we then do.
We're not really separated as much as you'd think.
So I was talking about how the elites of both parties in England have opened the gates to let in the barbarians from Muslim countries who are now raping their women and attacking them.
And people who complain, oh, that guy raped my daughter, that guy is arrested for being anti-Islamic.
So recently in Epping, England, there was a, which is, I think, in Essex County, there was a migrant hotel that was a crime magnet.
They're stuffing these people.
They're still letting people into the country at the same rates, higher and higher rates.
And they're stuffing these people in the hotel.
And the hotel was becoming a crime magnet.
The people of Epping got a temporary injunction to shut it down.
Then the government got that injunction overturned on appeal.
So a British Labor MP named Bridget Phillipson went on Sky News.
And the guy said, well, wait a minute, where are your loyalties here?
This is cut three.
Your lawyers, under your guidance, have said in terms that the rights of asylum seekers are more important than the rights of local people in Epping Forest.
Would you at least acknowledge that that is what they will hear?
And it's up to you.
Ministers can say we agree with that or we don't agree with it.
You can't simply say, let's balance things.
Do you agree with what your lawyers said or don't you?
Yes, of course we do.
Of course she does.
She believes that the rights of migrants overturn or are more important than the rights of British subjects.
That's essentially what she just said.
And that's obviously true.
They've reached a tipping point.
I mean, they just arrested a comedian, five officers, caught him in the airport like he was some terrorist because he had put out some tweets against transgenderism.
So that's what's happening in England now, right?
You cannot think, you cannot say out loud that the left is wrong, that they never should have left these migrants into the country, that they've opened the gates and let the barbarians in.
You cannot say it because it's true.
That's why you can't say it.
All right, now we come back to America.
And as you know, the Trump administration is trying to deport this guy, Kilmar Obrego Garcia.
Why?
Well, Homeland Security Secretary, Christy Noam, went on CBS's Face the Nation to explain why.
This is what she said, cut four.
This individual was a known human smuggler, MS-13 gang member, an individual who was a wife beater, and someone who was so perverted that he solicited nude photos from minors.
And even his fellow human traffickers told him to knock it off.
He was so sick in what he was doing and how he was treating small children.
So he needs to never be in the United States of America.
And our administration is making sure we're doing all that we can to bring him to justice.
So that's what she said on Face the Nation.
And this is what Face the Nation aired of that answer to the question is cut five.
And the one thing that we will continue to do is to make sure that he doesn't walk free in the United States of America.
So the news media, and these are network, you know, that's a network news outlet.
But the news media in general is covering up the violence of the transgender movement and why these people are being deported.
And the Democrats now, who are the news media, right, the Democrats and the news media are one organization, they're now making this guy, Kilmar Obrego-Garcia, into some kind of token.
You know, one senator went down and visited him and had Margaritas with him.
And now Senator Warner in the state of Virginia, who is supposed to be kind of, he's supposed to be kind of a moderate, this is Mark Warner.
He went and visited the guy in the Virginia detention center where he's being held, which, like I said, is like a Democrat rite of passage.
This guy, who you just heard Christy Noam say, suspected MS-13 member, a guy who his wife had multiple restraining orders out against him because he was violent against her.
according to Christinoam, so sick in his perversion for underage girls that other human traffickers were saying, dial it back a little, Garcia.
So here is Senator Warner driving away from his visit to the facility where he's being detained, got six.
I gave him letters from his family, and you can imagine how emotional he was.
He wants to keep fighting for justice.
And while I can't weigh in on some of the allegations from the Trump administration, I know this.
They wrongfully moved him to El Salvador.
And now, in an effort to retaliate, if he doesn't plead guilty, they're threatening to send him to Uganda, where he has no ties at all.
That's not the way the system works.
In October, he has another hearing on due process.
There should be no action taken on deportation of this individual.
This guy has had due process up the nose.
I mean, he's had all kinds of due process.
There is a deportation order already against him.
This is being stalled by the radical judges who are doing everything they can, throwing their reputations and their integrity under the wheels of the Trump juggernaut trying to stop it.
Senator Warner is talking about this guy like he's a political prisoner.
Like they just said, oh, yeah, we're going to arrest him because he sent out a tweet against transgenderism.
But no, no, we just heard, well, we didn't hear.
If we were watching the news, if we were watching the network, we didn't hear what in fact the reasons he's actually being deported.
So right to, what that woman said in Epping, that British Labor MP said in Epping, that the rights of migrants and the rights of criminals are more important to her than the rights of the ordinary people who make up her country, is true here too of the Democrat Party.
There is no difference.
They put the criminals above the people because, and the only reason I can think this is true, everybody has all these theories.
They're trying to replace one race with another.
They think these people are going to be their voters.
They want to fundamentally transform freedom-loving America into something else, because you have to be assimilated to America to understand why we do the things we do, why we have guns.
We don't have guns because we want to kill deer.
We have guns because we want to defend states' rights against an oppressive government when the government gets oppressive.
And again, the idea of having political violence in this country is horrific to me, but the threat has to be there because these people are out of control.
And, you know, they always pretend these things are about race.
The immigration is about race.
They say, oh, you're racist if you want that.
It's not about race to me.
It's about allegiance.
It's about assimilation.
John Fonte wrote a great piece about this in The American Mind, it was, saying, you know, it's about who you're willing to fight for.
Like the Japanese Americans and the German Americans who were willing to fight the Japanese and Germans in World War II, as opposed to someone like this Muslim guy from Dearborn, Michigan, who said this is a cut seven.
This empire, the American empire that's been hurting our people since the beginning, the imperial Western powers that have been hurting our people since the beginning, they must fall.
And inshallah, inshallah, they will fall.
And my message to the people of Gaza and other oppressed peoples across the world is that there are people here, both young and old, who are going to be willing to fight and are willing to put their lives and everything they can on the line to bring these empires down because they must come down.
So, inshallah means Allah willing.
This guy sounds like an American.
Joaquin Phoenix's Artistic Vision00:13:28
I guess he's one of these people that the government saw fit to pipe into our country.
And he's entitled to his treasonous opinion if he's an American.
But when he's supported by the news networks, when he's supported by one of the two major parties, right, over and above the American people, this guy who wants to bring our evil empire down, it makes you understand why you need your guns.
These people who are doing this are not worthy of governing us.
Now, I don't know if you remember Joe Biden used to threaten us and say, your little guns, your little rifles are no good against the American military.
Here's Joe Biden, just to give you a memory of, so you can thank God he's no longer pretending to be president.
Here's Joe Biden talking to an anti-gun group and telling him, oh, your guns are not going to do you any good because we've got you outgunned.
Let's cut eight.
Think about it.
How many of you heard this phrase?
The blood of liberty.
Caution, go.
Give me a break.
So I mean it, seriously.
And by the way, if they want to think to take on government, if we get out of line, which they're talking again about, well, guess what?
They need F-15s.
They don't need a rifle.
Folks, look, this is crazy.
So this is the same Biden who withdrew the American military from Afghanistan, where they were fighting cavemen in one of the most disastrous and humiliating surrenders in American history.
Not the fault of the military, who can take our military, can take on anybody, but a sign that when faced with an existential choice between a Joe Biden trying to put down the American people and the American people, a guy like Joe Biden might be surprised to find out which side the American military is on, right?
That's how revolutions work.
It's when finally people turn around and say, you have no right to govern us.
And the Democrats have shown they have no right to govern us because they're not on our side.
They're not on our side.
And so, look, if they can win an election, you know, then, all right, I can live with that.
But, you know, this is what keeps them honest.
Guns are what keeps them honest.
We need our guns to defend the rights of the people, just as we needed them at the founding.
The same thing is true today.
And the reason is because people haven't changed and people with power haven't changed.
People with power are still corrupt.
And our media on top of it is incredibly corrupt and will lie and lie and lie to keep us from seeing what's happening right in front of our eyes.
Look, again, I never, ever, ever want to see this become a shooting war, but they need to know that the people are sovereign.
They need to know that the people are sovereign and our guns make them remember.
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Chapter 2, Eddington.
Now, I think William Wordsworth said that poetry was emotion recollected in tranquility, emotion recollected in tranquility.
And I want to explain why I think that's important and why I want to talk about the arts today.
Nowhere was the need for guns made clearer and the need for our elites to fear the sovereign people than during the COVID crisis.
These people, and especially in Democrat states, there were Republicans who did it too, but it was especially true in Democrat states.
They closed our churches.
They wouldn't let us go to worship, though they would let us go to strip joints and liquor stores.
But you couldn't go to worship.
And they harassed anybody who tried to keep a church open in the name of God.
They forced children, little children, to wear masks they didn't need.
They made it virtually impossible not to vaccinate children who didn't need vaccinations, who may have been endangered, especially young men, by taking vaccinations that they didn't need.
They caused riots.
They said that racism was worth letting people out into the streets for.
We can't let anybody else out in the streets, but we can let rioters out into the streets.
And then they told us the riots weren't happening.
I mean, this was one of the most sustained acts of malfeasance by a government.
Truly the worst government behavior since the European leaders dragged Europe into World War I.
It really was despicable.
And then they come back to us and say, what do you need your guns for?
What, you naughty people?
You're killing children.
What do you need your guns for?
And, you know, it's like, I'm looking at it.
You know, I'm looking at it.
They have got to be afraid.
So that's the subject of Eddington.
It's Ari Astor's film starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, because all movies have to have Pedro Pascal in it.
It's a federal law.
And Emma Stone, who I love.
And Astor is the guy who made horror films like Hereditary in Midsummer.
Now, I know a lot of guys who loved Hereditary.
I saw it.
I thought it was needlessly grotesque.
You know, I mean, it's a horror film.
I'm not a big fan of horror films, but I thought it was needlessly grotesque and I didn't want those ideas.
And I don't really like his work because it's so unpleasant and disgusting.
He just puts his own problems on the screen without artistic distance.
There's nothing wrong.
I don't mind gore.
I don't mind sex.
I don't mind bad values in a work of art as long as the guy has artistic distance and is showing me something in order to create a true vision of human nature.
I have a very different idea than people who only want to watch good things or only, you know, I'm always teasing Gorko because he only wants to watch James Bond movies where the good guy wins.
But no, I'm willing to watch all kinds of visions of life if they are honest visions of life.
But I think that my problem with Harry Astor so far, I can see how talented he is, by the way, my problem so far is he cannot detach himself enough from the situation.
So I watched this movie, Eddington, which is about the COVID crisis.
And I hated it so much, I started texting my son Spencer Clavin, no relation, telling him how much I hated it.
And Spencer started arguing with me, and I decided that Spencer was right, because when I woke up the next morning, I was still thinking about it.
So I can't say I liked watching the film, but I have to say it was better than I thought it was while I was disliking it.
And the thing is, in Eddington, Joaquin Phoenix plays a sheriff in a New Mexican town, and he's a very inarticulate guy.
He's not terribly bright.
He is married to a crazy woman who never has sex with him, Emma Stone, and living with her mother because they've taken her in during COVID.
And she's a conspiracy nut.
So everything is connected and everything is conspiracy.
And Joaquin Phoenix, the sheriff, hates the COVID lockdowns.
They're in the middle of nowhere.
Nobody's got COVID.
The fake masks, he keeps pointing out that everybody's wearing them beneath their nose so they don't do anything.
And he's kind to people, like they try to keep an old man who has breathing problems.
They try to keep him from buying food because he's not wearing a mask and he has to go in and buy the food for him and all this stuff.
But he can't articulate.
He's not an articulate person, so he can't say what it is that's bothering him.
He can't be clear about what it is that's bothering him.
Pascal plays the mayor of the town, and he's a sophisticated, smart, articulate guy who's very charming, and he just goes along with everything.
But he's very appealing in a way that Joaquin Phoenix's character is not.
And here's just a little clip of the two of them arguing.
Finally, Joaquin Phoenix gets so frustrated, he decides he's going to run for mayor against Pascal, who is rumored to have once slept with his wife.
So they and they get into an argument over it.
And here's just a clip to show you that Phoenix can't get the words out of his mouth.
And Pascal, who's in the wrong, is much more appealing.
He's cut nine.
Can we just talk?
Can we just, just the two of us?
We are.
We are.
Okay.
So maybe I just talked to your video.
Ask where all your deputies went.
Okay.
Well, why not just ask your governor about her little catch and release policy, okay?
Because if it wasn't for that, maybe I could hold on to my deputies and the people we arrest.
I know.
I know one of them was fired for excessive force and another one was forced to quit by a YouTube First Amendment auditor.
Okay, yes, that is the same auditor that drove away your words.
You're under shooting.
She's driving the fentanyl.
From the handling fentanyl and your captain and your chief deputy took jobs in Rio Rancho.
I was devastated.
Keep your own office going, but you're going to run mine.
Leave your mess here and start a whole new one.
So the movie is frustrating to watch because it does remind me of the way that the left is always so articulate and has all the communications territory to use against conservatives, some of whom are just ordinary folks trying to live their lives by common sense and can't fight with them the way you just saw Gorka fight with CNN.
Gorka is an articulate guy.
He knows what he's talking about.
He actually is expert on the subject she was talking about.
So he could dismantle her.
But a lot of times, conservatives just have to sit and watch while movie stars make Oscar speeches and Emmy speeches and news people say things they know aren't true and movies tell them things they know aren't true, but they can't put it into words.
And even if they could, they wouldn't have the venues to express it.
And I think that that is something that Ariaster is trying to get at.
So finally, what happens in the movie, and you know, these are not really spoilers, but I guess it's a little bit of a spoiler, is George Floyd dies, and the white kids rise up and start lecturing black people on how oppressed they are.
The best line in the movie is a white kid is making a speech about whiteness and he says, he says, as a privileged white person, it's time for me to listen.
And that's what I'm going to start doing just as soon as I finish this speech, which is basically the left in a nutshell.
And finally, like everything Ariaster does, the movie just devolves into utter gore and violence, and specifically gun violence.
And it's a very, you know, I didn't like the movie.
I wouldn't watch it again, but it's a really smart, honest movie because it shows you that common sense Americans are not always the most articulate people and not always as articulate as the elites who have their own dishonest agenda and humiliate.
Pascal is continually humiliating Phoenix's sheriff in the picture.
And because of that, it ultimately devolves into gunplay, which is what I'm talking about and what I don't want to see happen in an America that's suffering from this crisis of information.
Now, the film, one of the reasons the film doesn't work is that Joaquin Phoenix, you know, the guy is a talented actor, but he never makes his characters likable.
And he doesn't do that here.
Anthony Hopkins, who I think was the best actor of his generation, could play Hannibal Lecter, and you kind of liked the guy.
You know, you knew he was a demon from hell, but you kind of felt like he was kind of charming.
Where Phoenix, no matter who he plays, he plays him with precision but without compassion.
You never care about the guy that Phoenix is playing and it hurts the movie because you need to care about this guy because he has nothing else going for him.
He just tries to be nice to everybody.
He tries to appease everybody.
He's kind of beat up, bullied by his crazy wife, and she humiliates him as well.
And you sort of understand why he's going nuts, but you don't feel for him because Joaquin Phoenix just does not make you feel anything.
But this is why the culture is so important, because you can step back and see, like the mother who's a conspiracy theorist, is kind of a right-wing conspiracy theorist.
And you can see that, yes, that too was a part of the right.
And the part did have conspiracy theories that turned out to be true.
They would call them conspiracy theories.
But the reason they could do that is because we also had conspiracy theories that were crazy.
And that, you know, that's part of being part of any movement that you're stuck with people who are not that viable.
But it really hurts the right because the left, as I say, has so much communication power.
But this is why I think what basically this movie shows you is how that situation, elites who don't care but have the power to communicate versus common sense conservatives who don't have that power is ultimately going to lead to horrible blowups and tyranny.
And that is a thing that's worth stepping back from.
And it's worth saying, okay, I hate these guys at CNN.
I hate these guys at CBS, but somehow I have to find a way to communicate so that we don't get into that situation.
If the Product Is Free00:02:21
Because as I say, once the shooting starts, your freedom's gone.
You can bet on it.
You can hope that it's not going to happen, but you can virtually bet on it.
So while I, again, we need to keep our guns as a last resort, but God help us if we should ever have to use them.
And seeing the world in an artistic way, recollecting emotion with tranquility is the way to get a more sensible approach to the people who are now our opponents and now hate this country.
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Leo Frank's Controversial Case00:13:42
Chapter three, The Trump Center.
So my wife and I went to the Kennedy Center over the weekend to see the revival of a Tony Award-winning, yeah, Tony award-winning musical called Parade, which was a musical in 1998.
So we had never seen it because we were out of the country.
And it's about the trial and lynching of Leo Frank.
And before I get to the play itself, I want to say that, first of all, the place was empty.
I mean, the Kennedy Center, which is not always packed, but it usually has a big crowd.
It was almost empty.
It was like ghostly there.
And I wonder if this is because Trump has taken the place over.
He has forced out the board, which was bringing in, you know, transvestite, you know, drag shows for kids and things like that.
It was doing all the things that the left does to poison our culture.
And when he took it over, Lynn Emmanuel Miranda, who did Hamilton, withdrew a revival of his popular musical Hamilton, because he said the arts are for everyone except those people who disagree with me.
We don't want to exclude anybody except people who disagree with me, except that half of the country.
We want to be inclusive, except for that half of the country.
So, you know, this is the way the left is.
They think the culture belongs to them.
They think they own it.
And they have reason to think that.
That's the way it's been for the last several decades, right?
And if they're not going to be in charge of the culture, they're going to take their ball and they're going to go home.
So my reaction to Trump taking over what was essentially a leftist enclave of culture, my reaction can be summed up something like this.
We're going to win so much.
We're going to win at every level.
We're going to win economically.
We're going to win with the economy.
We're going to win with military.
We're going to win with health care and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
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 win more!
Did I say that out loud?
That was just my private thoughts.
But anyway, so we went and saw this musical parade about Leo Frank.
And I want to talk about Leo Frank because he sort of holds within his story the themes that I'm trying to get at, which is acquiring the tranquility and the distance to find the complex truth and know what it really is when forces are always out there trying to wrap you up into their passion.
I think that that's the situation we're in.
We're getting information.
We can't tell one piece of information from another.
We're being flooded with information, but there's no way to parse the truth from the falsehood.
And always, always, we have very good reason to be angry and we can't let ourselves get angry because then we're going to lose the fight against people who don't like this country.
They're trying to fundamentally transform this country by piping in people that shouldn't be here and then defending them over us.
Basically, that's what's happening.
I mean, that's just the facts.
That's just what's happening.
So Leo Frank was a young Jewish man who was the manager of a pencil factory.
This is a very, very famous case, by the way, if you've never heard of it.
He was the manager of a pencil factory in Atlanta, Georgia.
And in 1913, he was arrested for the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl named Mary Fagan.
So it was a horrible, horrible crime.
She was, you know, this lovely child.
And he was arrested and tried in an atmosphere of Jew hatred.
And he was convicted in a trial that was definitely rigged, which is not saying that he was innocent.
I actually believe he was innocent.
Most historians believe he was innocent, but they're not sure.
And so I can't be sure.
I have no other way of investigating it.
But it is absolutely certain that he was railroaded, whether he was innocent or guilty.
And he was condemned to hang.
And rich Jews from the East mounted a defense of him.
This is where the Anti-Defamation League was formed to help him out.
And they had several appeals on procedural grounds, but they were turned down.
Procedural grounds will not get you out of being executed.
And under pressure from them, the governor, John Slayton, started to investigate the case himself.
And it was a very brave thing to do because everybody was calling for Frank's head.
And the prosecutor wanted to run for governor.
And the news, there was religious people, you know, saying that the Jew, the evil Jew, was taking over Georgia.
And John Slayton investigating the case himself became convinced that Trump, that Frank had been railroaded, and he commuted his sentence from execution to life in prison in the belief that he would ultimately be, in fact, cleared.
And that ended Slayton's political career.
He virtually had to escape from Georgia under guard because he got everybody so angry at him.
So it was a very brave thing to do, whether you agree with him or not.
So meanwhile, ginned up by the news media, the news media were just constantly playing to the bigotry, the anger of the South at that period and the anti-Jewish feeling, prominent citizens in Atlanta, these were not just street people, these were prominent people, got together, invaded the prison farm where Frank was being held, kidnapped him, and lynched him and killed him.
And many of those citizens, same citizens, went on to found the modern Ku Klux Klan.
So the case remains incredibly controversial.
One of the reasons it remains incredibly controversial is because the other main suspect was a black guy who testified against Frank.
Here's just a little part of that in the play.
This is a musical.
The book is by Alfred Urey, music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown.
And like I said, it won multiple Tony Awards.
The music is good.
And the cast, by the way, was absolutely fantastic.
But here's Joke, this guy, Joe Connolly, who was testifying against Leo Frank, cut 11.
Next thing I heard Mr. Frank yelling something, so I run upstairs and I open the door and Mr. Frank looks up.
He said you were playing a game, playing a game.
That's what he said.
That's what he said.
And little Mary's kind of crumpled in the corner.
He said, you don't understand.
She didn't want to play the game.
And so I went and hit her.
You see, I had to hit her.
He told me I should go and look.
He said she's acting like she's sick.
And I said, Lord, that child is dead.
That's what I said.
So that's the testimony.
Now, many years later, a child, a guy who was a child at the time, but was now in his 80s, came and seen, said that he had seen Jim Connolly, that witness, carrying Mary Fagan's body, and that Connolly had threatened him that he would be killed if he said anything, and he kept his mouth shut.
So in 1986, Frank was posthumously pardoned, but the pardon board did not rule on whether he was guilty or innocent.
As I say, most historians think he was innocent, but there's a lot of political reasons not to come out and say so.
And maybe he wasn't.
Who knows?
I mean, it's a very complicated case.
Now, the killing took place on Memorial Day, but the Memorial Day also came in the middle of Passover.
So people, including my former colleague Candace Owens, have used this to link the killing to the blood libel, this incredible medieval hoax that Jews kill Christian children and make their matzah, their Passover matzah, with their blood, right?
This is an old hoax that was popular, caused a lot of violence during the Middle Ages.
It's a complete nonsense.
It never has anything related to the truth.
And Candace has talked about this, and she relates, there was a cult in the 18th century called the Frankists, based on a guy named Jacob Frank.
It was this crazy religious cult that did come out of a sect, a Jewish sect.
And she links this to the founding of Israel and then says that it's linked to Leo Frank, which is not true.
There is no connection between Jacob Frank in the 18th century and Leo Frank in the 20th century.
Those things are just that kind of, that's just conspiracy.
That is literal conspiracy theory.
So, I mean, it's like saying, and Frank's Sinatra, too.
Anybody named Frank is going to.
Anyway, the show was a solid show.
I didn't think it was a great show, but it was a very good show.
And like I said, the cast was amazing and the songs were great.
But it was just recreated the fact that finding the truth is hard.
Finding the truth is hard.
And passion and hatred and mob rule makes it all the harder, especially when the press joins in as they did then and as they're doing now.
And look, it's not a competition.
People hate all kinds of people.
They hate Jews.
They hate blacks.
They've hated the Irish.
They've hated the Italians.
And now whites are being hated.
Everybody suffers from racial hatred.
And remember, because we're all sinners, racial hatred always makes sense and it always explains everything.
It always explains everything because it's always true.
You know, the people you hate are always terrible because all people are terrible.
What you're forgetting is you're just as terrible and they could turn it on you as now the left has done with whites saying, well, we'll solve black racism by hating whiteness.
And it always works.
It always explains everything, which tells you that it's not true.
That's how you know that it's not true.
It's a beautiful thing about the arts that they can remind you of this, that they can break you free.
So again, you're free of these passions.
You're free of these passions.
And you can see, oh yeah, the press is doing this again.
Oh, yeah, the people are doing this.
And not just the people on their side, but the people on my side, too, are doing it.
And I have an obligation, an obligation to find the truth.
You know, the Washington Post wrote this absurd review of Parade.
They do this.
The Washington Post does this with almost every review of everything.
And they said, this is a guy, I think the guy's name is Thomas Floyd.
And he said, it feels jarring but defiant to see this play at a place taken over by a president whose rhetoric has been repeatedly condemned by the Anti-Defamation League, which has now just become another left-wing outlet like the NAACP.
And I mean, this is how they gin up passions, right?
This is the first president who has ever prayed at the Wailing Wall, the remnants of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem.
He's got members of his family who are Jewish.
He stood with Israel so much that Candace accuses him of being controlled by Netanyahu, which is hilarious because Netanyahu is terrified of him.
You know, this is a play that can remind you, that can remind you of who you are, that you're not going to participate just because somebody is saying, you know, this Jewish guy is innocent doesn't mean the black guy is guilty, doesn't mean anything.
You've got to start to look for the truth and find people who will tell you those truths.
And we enter the arts.
This is why we enter the arts, to find that tranquility, to be able to disagree with people in tranquility, and to be able to see how people behave, because nothing has changed from that day when that man was lynched.
I mean, whatever else you would say, you know, the fact that these people lynched him and then started the modern Ku Klux Klan, you think that would give Candace pause, but apparently not.
So everything about the internet is designed to keep you from the experience of that tranquility.
And if you don't go to the arts, if you do not go to a church that takes you to a place of tranquility, if you do not do the things that you have to do to keep your mind free from these people, on all sides, right now the left has the power, there's the cultural power, but that doesn't mean there aren't people on the right doing it.
If you don't do that, you're going to be swept away.
And if we get swept away at this moment of transition and crisis, it will end in violence.
Maybe not for you, but for your kids.
And I think that that's a reason.
It is a reason to pull back and say, wait, wait, just a minute.
Let me go forward in tranquility.
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Final chapter, Rashomon and God.
Rashamon's Truth00:09:03
All right, so we started out talking about Julia Roberts' new film about a questionable case of child molestation.
We talked about Leo Frank about a questionable case of rape and murder.
Now I want to talk about the Ur movie about this subject, Rashamon, which I guess is 1950.
Akira Kurosawa, one of the truly, truly great masters of the cinema.
It is a great, great movie.
If you've never seen it, you should watch it.
It's just fantastic.
So the movie is about the murder of a samurai after a woman is raped.
And I'm putting it very quickly, but the whole story is that each person involved gives a different version of the murder, including the murdered samurai, who gives a version of the murder from his place in the next world.
So that the truth is impossible to know.
And there was an article about this, I think, that was in the Washington Post by Ty Burr, who also insulted Trump, but at least he insulted Clinton as well.
But he says, he begins his article by saying, When did truth become unreliable?
At what point did an event unfolding in reality become just another opinion?
When did we stop agreeing about what just happened?
My vote is the truth became truthiness in the waning days of August 1950 when Akira Kurosawa's Rashamon, the only movie to have an entire epistemological principle named after it, was released in Japan.
Now, Burr acknowledges that this idea of the difficulty of knowing truth is an old one, and there are different versions of it.
I mean, Socrates was clear that there was such a thing as truth, but we kind of approach it by half steps.
We never quite get to it.
We have to ask questions, and then we use reason to answer the questions.
If something doesn't make sense, we dispense with it and move on to something else.
We get closer and closer to the truth.
But Socrates is the guy who said, I know, I know nothing.
And that's what made him wise.
So the truth is there.
It's not that there is no truth, but we have to approach it with humility and not and never be entirely certain we know what it is.
Jesus also said there is a truth, but he said, I am the truth.
The truth is a living thing.
It is a mixture of humanity and God, right?
It is the God within humanity that is the truth, and you find that through love.
That consciousness expresses itself through love.
So it's a different view, actually, than Socrates' view.
Not entirely different, but it's linked.
It's like a Venn diagram.
And so those are two ways of approaching the kind of, I don't want to say the unknowability of truth, but the way that we never quite get to the full truth, or at least, as St. Paul said, we see it for now through a glass darkly.
And then in the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant said we can only know the manifestation of truth.
We can never know the thing in itself.
But that idea, which has kind of governed science and philosophy ever since the Enlightenment, is really falling by the wayside.
This summer, when I was watching Eddington and going to this play at the Trump Center, I read three books, and I've read two of them and still reading one, where really terrific philosophers, far smarter than I am, are finally coming around to something I said about 20 years ago.
This is one of the things I noticed.
If you're really, really smart, you catch up with me about 20 years later.
Don't ask me why that is.
But basically, they've come to understand that human knowledge is, in fact, such a reasonable facsimile of the truth that our consciousness is intimately wrapped up in what the truth is.
And it speaks to the fact that consciousness comes before matter, that a consciousness higher than our own, to whom our consciousness is connected, created reality, right?
It speaks to God, our old friend, Uncle God.
And that's why we can know the truth.
And we know it not just by logic, like Socrates, but also by love, like Christ.
Love and logic, Jesus and Socrates work together because Jesus shows us the godly truth, that he leads us toward that full, complete truth of the human situation.
But there are still facts on the ground that Jesus doesn't come down and say, oh, yeah, this guy's guilty, that guy's innocent.
You know, those are things that you need to get through the Socratic method of questioning and reason, right?
There's two things that have to work together.
And this is something that no AI can ever imitate because they have no body, so they can't love.
They can't really reason.
They can only pretend to reason.
But they can't love, so they can't see the full truth.
Now, I first saw Rashmon when I was a little boy, really young.
And I remember thinking the problem with this movie, it's a great, I remember thinking it's a great movie, but the problem with the movie as a statement is that the dead man would know the truth because he would be in heaven.
And now 125 years after that day, I still think that little boy was right.
So the three books, you know, that's the part of the movie that never made sense to me, that the dead man would have a different version and we wouldn't know if that was the truth.
I would think if he was dead, he would actually know the truth.
But anyway, the three books that I read were Ian McGilchrist's The Matter with Things.
And if you haven't seen my interview with McGilchrist, you really should watch it.
He's a terrific, brilliant guy.
And his book dismantles what he calls the nothing buttery of materialism.
He's pointing out the same thing, that this consciousness is real, that we see things in a way that tells us truths that we can't know through reason.
And his book sent me to another book called Madness and Modernism by Louis Sasse, that points out the shocking fact, but something that I only intuited until I read his book, that modernism, the art of modernism, the art of uncertainty,
the art of differing relative truths, is actually the artistic expression of something that's very much like the symptoms of schizophrenia, which leads me to an idea that's stated very succinctly in the book I'm reading now, which is an idea that I agree with completely.
This is a book called All Things Are Full of Gods by the philosopher David Bentley Hart, and he puts it together as a conversation among the Greek gods.
And psyche says, I tend to see the modern mechanistic view of things as a kind of psychological disorder, a psychosis perhaps, or a neurosis at the very least.
I intend no moral judgment, only a diagnosis.
It seems clear to me that the history of modernity's governing metaphysics is the tale of a tragic estrangement from reality.
I think that that's right.
I think that if you lose track of God, if you lose track of spiritual truth, you have lost track of the most important component of reality, and you've essentially driven yourself mad.
It's a self-imposed madness of materialism.
And, you know, I think the opposite of that, the idea that there is no truth, is people who know exactly what that truth is because their church told them so or it's in their catechism or it was written down somewhere and they know exactly what it is and they think that salvation is a short answer quiz and if you get all the answers right, you're going to heaven.
It's neither of those things.
It is neither of those things.
It is the fact that you can trust your spirit to know the truth if you move forward in love.
If you move forward in God's love, you can start to use your reason in a way where your reason will pay off.
And in this, I find this moment really dangerous.
I mean, this is a moment where we do not know the truth because we cannot parse the facts.
And we are instead being treated to people like Candace on her side and virtually the entire left on their side who are ginning up emotions and conspiracies and vast generalized statements of hatred that are taking us away from the truth.
And I think that this is an important thing.
You know, you should remember, I get a lot of letters from people and a lot of them are just saying, well, you know, I'm just this ordinary guy and all this stuff.
But, you know, when Christianity began, it was ordinary people.
It was just regular people.
They weren't Caesar.
They weren't famous.
They weren't generals, famous generals.
They weren't famous entertainers or writers who people came to see.
They were just ordinary people who had seen a great thing.
And they were a mess.
You know, Paul is always, you read the letters of St. Paul, he's always saying, you know, stop, you know, sleeping, stop being homosexual, which means that's what they were doing.
You know, stop having sex all over the place, which means that that's what they were doing.
Stop, you know, changing your mind.
Stop, you know, losing your faith.
Stop doing all the things that people do.
Because he knew those people, that people like you were the light of the world.
And he wanted to keep that light burning and that those normal, ordinary people were going to have to lead the way into a new era.
Prize Picks: Ben's Prize Picks00:07:35
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After four years, countless arguments destroyed and millions of liberals triggered, Ben Shapiro returns to doing something else he's obnoxiously good at.
He's written a new book, and it's about time.
The result is Lions and Scavengers, the true story of America and Her Critics.
And let's be clear, this isn't just another book release.
This is one of the biggest books of the fall, the kind of book that goes straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, which is especially fun because it means the Times has to put Ben Shapiro's name in bold letters again.
It's now available everywhere, Amazon, Walmart, Target, Barnes ⁇ Noble, but we've made it easy.
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All right, Clavin clapbacks.
I'm one of those people who can say you directed Trump before.
I could direct him now.
Now that he's president.
Yeah.
What do you have?
All right.
Hello, Andrew.
I've been watching your show for years, and I've always appreciated your open-mindedness and generosity with regards to Christianity and religion in general.
I wanted to ask your take on an incident this week where one of the Daily Wire editors, Cabot Phillips, posted bigoted and misleading comments on X about my religion as a member of the Church of Latter-day Saints.
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons.
When confronted, he doubled down and then said he desires that the Mormons turn from false teachings, repent, and embrace the truth of Scripture.
I wonder if Cabot would feel as comfortable posting this type of content on X when referring to Judaism.
Is he also willing to ask Ben Shapiro to turn from false teaching, repent, and embrace the truth of Scripture?
A wise man, Jeremy Boring, once repeatedly recommended we stop giving money to people that hate us.
Should I be applying this logic to the Daily Wire and unsubscribing?
Or can this company do a better job of policing the evangelical source bigotry that seemed to have infected it from Sean?
Sean, I've gotten a lot of mail about this and I didn't hear what Cabot said.
Cabot's a good guy and I've always, you know, I used to ski in Utah.
I met a lot of Mormons.
I did a project with a Mormon once and have always liked them and gotten along with them, even though I don't agree with them.
But let me say this.
Last week, I made a comment that I believed Paul and James had gotten into an argument, and many people don't agree with that.
And I said, you know, you can read this differently, but that's the way I read it.
And I think it's important because I think it's a beautiful thing, because I think it means that Jesus Christ includes all of our arguments.
He includes the things we disagree with, and he's actually bigger than those arguments.
And I saw immediately on X, I saw somebody, I'm never listening to Clavin again.
And I thought, dude, if you're never listening to me again because of that, you should never have been listening to me in the first place because I am going to tell you what I think.
I work at a place, the Daily Wire, where Ben Shapiro signs checks to Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles, who believe that Ben is damned because he doesn't accept the divinity of Christ.
And Ben Shapiro writes checks to people who believe that about him.
And I am taxed with the fact that when these guys die, I'm going to have to shepherd them into heaven under the cloak, hidden under the cloak of my universal love.
And I think that's the way it ought to be, right?
So you can say a lot of people who hate us say, well, you have no principles because you have people you disagree with.
That is our principle.
Our principle is in a free society.
The truth comes from all of us disagreeing.
That's how we start to move and stumble toward the truth.
So you didn't like what Cabot Phillips said.
I don't think he should apologize if he doesn't think he, if he doesn't feel he did you wrong.
I don't think you should leave the Daily Wire.
I mean, it's up to you, of course, but I don't think you should leave the Daily Wire because one of us doesn't like you.
There are plenty of people who love you here, and I don't see why that is the issue.
I don't even see why it's an issue that one person has an opinion don't like.
You don't come here to hear only things that you agree with.
You come here to hear things that are going to challenge you, things you may disagree with, things you may write to me about and say, I disagreed with you.
And I get a lot of those letters and I read a lot of them.
And, you know, I think that is the part of the search for truth that I'm talking about.
You know, you cannot find the truth if you hate everybody who disagrees with you.
Even hating people.
I mean, look.
It's a pretty big deal to Matt and Michael and to me, in truth, that if you don't accept the divinity of Christ, that's a big deal.
But it doesn't stop me from liking you, loving you, hanging out with you, knowing you, wanting to hear what you have to say, wanting to hear why you think those things.
I mean, my belief, my faith is not so delicate.
I mean, there are things that can try your faith, but someone disagreeing with me is not one of them, and someone disliking me is not one of them.
And I wonder, even though I can see this letter is a sincere letter, which is the reason I chose it, I think it's a sincere letter and it's somebody really expressing it.
But I wonder how much of this is also ginned up by hate bots who are trying to get people away from the Daily Wire because they know that we're telling them the path into the future where all the hate mongers are grabbing their attention for these five minutes and getting their money and getting their likes.
We're actually kind of working our way through things together as people in a free country who disagree.
So you want to leave?
You know, I'll truly be sorry to see you go.
You sound like a nice person.
And I'd be happy to just go up and smack Cabot in the back of the head just because that would be amusing to me.
But no, no, I don't think he should apologize.
I don't think he should change his mind unless he does change his minds.
I think he should listen to people who disagree with him.
But I think that that's it.
There's room for all of us here and there should be and there are going to have to be in this country as well because that's what a free country is like.
Now, having said that, I still have to plunge you into clavenlessness, which is just a state beyond my capability to describe.
I can't describe the horror of it.
It's like an Ari Astor.
It's like the last reel of an Ari Astor movie, except you can't see anything because it's just dark.
So become a member today.
Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe and use code claven at checkout for two months free on all annual plans or it's clavenlessness all the way down.