Andrew Klavan argues the 2023 government shutdown was a tactical retreat by Democrats, forced to reopen when welfare funds ran dry—exposing Chuck Schumer’s "toughness" as election pandering while praising moderate senators like King and Durbin for ending it. He frames leftist radicalism (e.g., Zorhan Mamdani’s socialism) and right-wing "Groyperism" (30–40% of Zoomer conservatives, per Rod Dreher) as authoritarian threats to freedom, both tied to economic alienation: college debt from poor education and housing barriers. Klavan counters materialist culture wars with faith—religion as purpose over ideology—and gun responsibility via the Stopbox Pro lockbox, while urging listeners to resist extremism by creating life, art, or wealth, not just consuming. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, the longest government shutdown in U.S. history is finally over, and many of you are asking questions like, why would Sidney Sweeney make a movie where she plays a fat boxer?
What was she thinking?
Also, why do women play with their hair when they like a guy?
And here's another one.
You know how the screen just went dark in the last episode of The Sopranos?
What the hell was that about?
I mean, they're paying the screenwriter good money.
Shouldn't he be able to come up with some kind of ending?
And don't even get me started on how I met your mother.
Okay, some of you may have questions about the government shutdown.
And holy moly, I can't even imagine what your lives must be like.
But hey, here at the Daily Wire, it's not our place to mock you for being pathetic.
So as part of our mission to give you an in-depth understanding of the news, we're pleased to provide you with this handy Q ⁇ A about the government shutdown.
Q. Why did the government shut down in the first place?
A. The government shut down because Chuck Schumer is the Senate leader of the Democrats and he's a demon.
Q. Wait, really?
A. Yeah, look at him with those dead eyes and the widow's peak you could cut your wrist with.
The guy's a hell dweller, probably crawled out of a crevice in the earth somewhere.
Q. But weren't there like political considerations?
A. I don't know.
I'm still trying to figure out how Sidney Sweeney looked in the mirror and thought, oh good, I'm a super hot white girl.
For the next 10 years, I can literally have anything I want.
I know I'll make a movie where I'm a fat paluka.
People will flock to the theaters to see that.
I mean, who knows why people do the things they do?
Q. Could we get back to the shutdown?
A. Sure.
You obviously have nothing better to do.
Q. What were the results of the shutdown?
A. During the shutdown, the government couldn't perform its very important functions like, I don't know, making speeches and putting up signs and whatnot.
Q. That's it?
They couldn't make speeches and signs?
A. Signs are actually very important.
Otherwise, they tow your car and you're like, what did I even do?
Q. Well, what about healthcare?
A. Right.
Democrats want to gradually lure the United States into a government healthcare system like they have in England and Canada, where more and more of your money goes into increasingly outdated medical treatments until finally they have to legalize medically assisted suicide so they can kill patients off in order to keep treatment expenses down.
So then you're like 12 years old and you go to the doctor with a splinter and he's like, wouldn't you rather just kill yourself?
The Republicans didn't want to fund that, so Chuck Schumer closed the government.
Q. Wait, Chuck Schumer wants to suicide 12-year-olds?
But that's demonic.
Oh, I get what you're saying.
A. This is why we provide these helpful Q ⁇ As.
Q. Well, what happens to stuff like taxes during a shutdown?
A. You still have to pay taxes during a shutdown so Congress can get paid.
Q. Get paid for doing what?
A. Well, the government shut down, so they're not doing anything.
Q. So Congress doesn't do anything and we still have to give them our money.
A. Correct.
And that continues even during the shutdown.
Q. So why exactly did the shutdown end?
A. The shutdown ended because the money for welfare payments ran out.
So pretty soon, welfare recipients would have had to find jobs.
Then to keep their jobs, they'd have had to improve their behavior, which would have helped them find spouses and start families and increase their sense of self-worth until they wouldn't even need Democrats.
So basically, the Democrats had to reopen or they'd become irrelevant.
Q. Well, frankly, I'm glad.
I need to get home for Thanksgiving, and when I saw all the delays piling up at airports, I wanted to kill myself.
A. Unfortunately, if you want to kill yourself legally, you'll just have to wait till the Democrats are back in power.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
All right, we are back laughing our way through the rebirth of the nation.
I hope you have already gone out and bought a copy of After That the Dark so you can go out and buy a second copy because you loved it that much.
You want to give it to a friend or you want to give it to someone for Christmas.
I don't think we're going to make it onto the times list.
It was just too tough this time.
But buy it anyway.
Maybe, who knows?
Who knows what can happen.
We had a great, great night at the mysterious bookshop in Manhattan and did a reading there.
And so many people showed up, a lot of them bringing their babies to prove that they are carrying out their Andrew Clavin show homework.
I mean, what a great podcast, right?
I mean, the only thing you have to do to qualify for this podcast is have unprotected sex with your spouse.
That's it.
That's all we ask of you.
It's getting, look, the book is getting great reviews.
It's selling well.
I think it's selling even better than the last one, which is great.
It got a wonderful review in Book Reporter.
These are not people I know.
They just wrote a review saying Andrew Clavin has long been a superior writer of crime fiction and psychological thrillers.
Recently, his terrific series, starring Cameron Winter, has given us stellar stories told in classic hard-boiled style.
After that, the dark is no exception.
It's the darkest and most suspenseful entry in the excellent series.
Go to dailywire.com/slash Clavin, and it'll send you anywhere you want to go to buy it or go to Amazon and buy it there.
I'm telling you, you will really like it, and I would like to see this book really make it up the ladder because that will help the series continue.
Also, leave a comment wherever you are, even if you're just wandering in the street, even if you're sleeping in the street, even if you've been sleeping in the street for months and you think you're talking to Martians, just write it with an imaginary crayon on the empty air.
And if it is sufficiently insane, we'll read it right here because it'll fit right in.
Today's comment is from Dutch Gradient.
He says, We are now a full year after President Trump was elected.
How long are you going to keep that dumb Trump happiness montage going?
I can't stand to listen to your show knowing you might ambush us any second with it.
I actually, I feel your pain.
It's gone.
It's enough.
Enough is enough.
So we will drop the Trump happiness montage and just go on with our show with today's episode, Take the Win.
Now, I called it that because there's one thing I, one of the many things I hate about politics, about paying too much attention to politics, is that you're never supposed to be happy.
I don't know why this is.
For some reason, even when you win something, you're not supposed to say, ah, that was great.
You're supposed to worry about what's going to happen next.
And these last couple of weeks, even though no one is reporting it this way, I will be reporting it this way on this show.
The news has been full of excellent things, signs and wonders politically and culturally that are pointing to good things up ahead.
Now, no one knows the future.
Anything can happen.
But with these good signs, we should be rejoicing.
We should be upbeat.
Instead, you're always supposed to worry about what happens next.
And if you've been reading your Bible between having unprotected sex with your spouse, if you've been reading your Bible, you know that that is the exact opposite of what the Bible teaches us.
Jesus says, take the win, basically.
He says, take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
And that's the King James Version, which some people nowadays find hard to understand.
There's a more accessible translation, the New International Translation, which says this.
Winning Economically00:15:04
We're going to win so much.
We're going to win at every level.
We're going to win economically.
We're going to win with the economy.
We're going to win with military.
We're going to win with healthcare.
And for our veterans, we're going to win with every single facet.
My, oh my, what a wonderful day.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
Yay!
You say, please, please, it's too much winning.
We can't take it anymore.
I feel pretty.
Oh, so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and gay.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
We're going to win more!
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Chapter 1, Why the Shutdown Mattered.
So by the time Thanksgiving comes, you yourselves are going to forget that the shutdown ever happened.
Nobody's going to remember it.
They'll talk about it the next time the government shuts down.
And even though, I mean, listen, I think it's a big win for the Trump administration, for the Republicans.
And even though they're only reopening till the end of January, they only agreed to keep the government funded till the end of January.
I think we may be done with these for a while.
It was just a complete embarrassment.
And it was, for us, for the rest of us, it was kind of an annoying nonsense.
It wasn't about healthcare.
It's important to know this.
Obamacare does not work.
And the money, because it can't work, because it basically says insurance can cover you for things you already have, which is not insurance.
Insurance is a betting game where the insurance company is betting you'll stay well long enough for them to get paid enough money so that when you have to have health care, they'll have that money to spend and more and a profit.
That's what insurance is.
So it's not really insurance at all.
It's government healthcare, which is what they're trying to do.
And government health care always falls apart eventually because, well, I'll tell you why.
Let me go off.
Let's start with this.
Obamacare was sold on a pastle of lies.
Obama just lied and lied and lied as he was selling this to the public.
This is cut three.
We will keep this promise to the American people.
If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor.
Period.
If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan.
Period.
If you like your doctor or health care plan, you can keep it.
Nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage of the doctor you have.
The only change you'll see are falling costs as our reforms take hold.
If you like your health care system and your doctor, the only thing reform will mean to you is your health care will cost less.
I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits.
So all of that, all of that was lies.
And what they had was they had this individual mandate where you basically had to get insurance or the government could penalize you, a tax.
And that was overturned finally and thrown out.
And so now there's no way to keep it funded.
So they poured all this money into it.
The Democrats poured all this money into it.
Remember, no Republicans voted for Obamacare.
So the Democrats poured all this money into it during the pandemic, saying, well, it's emergency funding and it will end right about now.
And now they don't want it to end because the thing doesn't work.
You know, the reason it doesn't work, when I was working in Hollywood, I had to watch movies and I had to, you know, I couldn't constantly be going out to the theater.
So I built a home theater and I got really top-notch stuff and it cost me about $10,000.
So this is now, it's well over, it must be about 15 years ago.
I bought myself a home theater, cost me $10,000.
Now with inflation, that same home theater would cost $2,000.
Okay, the price has gone, has plummeted for those things because the government doesn't promise you a TV.
If the government promised you a TV and you knew you had to buy a TV and the government would pay for the TV, the price would never go down.
But as it is, once you've sold to idiots like me who buy at the top end of the line because I needed it, once you've sold it to me, you've got to make it for cheaper so people can get, you know, so you can keep selling it and keep making money.
And the same thing would be true with health care if you had to pay out of pocket.
Just like with a car, they raise the price if they know you're covered with insurance.
Now, people say, yes, but you don't have to have a TV, but you have to have health care.
That's true, but it doesn't necessarily change the underlying economics.
And the economic fact is that rich people will get better health care than poor people.
Rich people will pay for things that poor people can't have.
Things will be available to them that poor people can't have.
And that's going to be true whether there's Obamacare or the National Health.
I lived in Britain.
The National Health had health care that was right up to date.
If you were living in Charles Dickens' time, if you were living in the 19th century, their health care was right up to date.
When I needed something, I paid for it and I got up-to-date American-style health care.
And so that's always going to be true.
And a non, what would fix things, the best thing they could probably have is a non-government insurance system that only ensures catastrophic care.
So, you know, when you go for a checkup, you pay for the checkup, and that way they can only charge you what you can afford, and you'll get a good checkup, and you can keep your health.
And then if you have something catastrophic, you've been paying into insurance and they can afford to cover you for all that.
So it had nothing to do with anything.
Barton Swain, writing in the Wall Street Journal, my favorite political writer for the moment, says, from the beginning of the dispute, everyone seems to have understood that Chuck Schumer forced a shutdown because he needed to show his state's progressive voters that he could take it to Mr. Trump and so avoid a primary challenge from the left, perhaps from AOC.
The Senate leader's Democrat colleagues went along with the shutdown for a parallel reason.
The whole stunt was about Trump's authoritarianism, wrote Ezra Klein of the New York Times.
It was about showing their base and themselves that they could fight back.
Jack Blanchard of Politico observed that Democrats achieved their primary political objective, showing a furious base that they can actually work together effectively and are prepared to fight with every tool at their disposal.
And Barton Swame ends by saying it was all for show, literally.
So finally, about eight moderate Democrats went in to negotiate with John Thune and the Republican side.
And many of these Democrats, it's important to note, were former governors like Angus King of Maine and Gene Shaheen of New Hampshire, Maggie Hassan.
They were all former governors.
And governors know something that senators don't know.
Things have to work.
Things have to work in order for you to get reelected and in order for people to keep your party in power.
If you're the mayor, things have to work.
If you're the governor, things have to work.
The only time that happens is when all the sane, sophisticated middle-class people leave your city and you're left with a bunch of thugs who don't care what happens and then you get Chicago or Detroit.
So it's important to remember this.
So these moderates couldn't go along with this idea that we're going to make people suffer until we get what we want.
So even Dick Durbin, who is a lefty, he voted to reopen.
Here's Durbin explaining why, cut four.
Many of my friends are unhappy.
They think we should have kept our government closed indefinitely to protest the policies of the Trump administration.
I share their opinions of this administration, but cannot accept a strategy which wages political battle at the expense of my neighbor's paycheck or the food for his children.
So in other words, he's afraid his constituents are going to vote him out of office.
Trump is, of course, crowing as he signed the document to fund the government again.
This is what Trump said is cut to.
They deprived more than one million government workers from their paychecks and cut off food stamp benefits for millions and millions more Americans in need.
They caused tens of thousands of federal contractors and small businesses to go unpaid, and the total effect of the damage their antics cause will take weeks and probably months to really calculate accurately, including the serious harm that they did to our economy and to people and to families.
So I just want to tell the American people, you should not forget this.
When we come up to midterms and other things, don't forget what they've done to our country.
I also want to call for a termination to the filibuster so that this can never happen again.
So, you know, all of this, of course, is great because we love to see the Democrats get it.
But the most important thing is that the moderates stood up to the radicals.
Now, the radicals are vowing revenge.
Maybe they'll get revenge, but they might not.
And if the people show up for the midterms, for instance, and the Democrats lose some seats, that would send a message that people are not ready for socialism outside of New York and Seattle.
And so that's an important thing, and it's a good thing.
It is a good thing to have two parties.
It's a good thing to have a Democrat party that is a little to the left of center and not have these radical socialists who could destroy the country if they get too much power, as we'll see soon when Mamdani takes power in New York.
Now, the reason this is especially good is the week before that, kind of the same thing happened on the right.
We've been talking about all the Jew hatred from Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes.
And, you know, you remember that Kevin Roberts over at Heritage said Heritage would never abandon Tucker.
And now he's taken that back because the mainstream of the Republican Party stood up.
And, you know, there's a lot of people who never want to forgive anybody.
They want to spread the guilt.
You know, so if Tucker Carlson is doing anti-Semitic things, and he is, they want to blame anyone who doesn't denounce Tucker Carlson.
That's not, I feel like take the win, take the win.
People are governed by self-interest most of the time.
Politicians are especially governed by self-interest.
If they will stand up against this stuff and basically abandon it, even if it's out of self-interest, I'm fine.
That is fine.
And the thing is, again, this is not about the Jew hatred.
The Jew hatred is the devil's flagpole, as I keep telling you.
It is always a hatred of God, and it's a sign of incipient evil.
And there is incipient evil on the right, just like there is on the left.
The incipient evil on the left is communism.
The incipient evil on the right is, we'll call it Groyperism.
It's fascism, it's Jew hatred, whatever you want to call it.
And look, if it were just about Jew hatred, you know, we'd throw Shapiro out the door, lock the door, and they could take him off and have a human sacrifice or whatever these guys want to do, and everything would be fine.
But the way, but we know it's a sign of evil because it's on both sides.
The Groupers and the socialists all end up hating the Jews.
They all end up supporting the enemies of America, like Iran, and the enemies of Western civilization, like Iran.
That's because the Jew hatred is blinding because it's evil.
They end up taking this support away from Israel, whose military strength allows us to shift our military strength out of the Middle East toward China, which is where we need it, just like NATO increasing its defense spending means we can defend Europe less and make sure we're concentrating on China because that's where the next threat is coming from.
And they're all left and right authoritarians.
They are all about no freedom.
And it's just the left wants the state to own your time and money so they can redistribute it.
And the right wants strongmen or they want kings or the post-liberals, they want to bring back kings.
It's not about necessarily the Jews.
That's the signpost.
That's the flashbang that lets you know what's happening.
It is about maintaining the rights and responsibilities of freedom, which are the gift of our God, specifically our God.
The Christians, you know, the Jews know him through the book.
They call him Jehovah, whatever, or just the Lord out and I.
The Christians know him face to face as Jesus Christ, but it's the same God.
That is absolutely rock-solid Christianity.
It is the same.
The God who is incarnate in Jesus Christ is the God that Moses talked to on Mount Sinai.
And freedom with its rights and responsibilities is God's great big thumbprint on your forehead.
It's like a brand that he puts on you.
Freedom and its rights and responsibilities, the freedom to choose to love God, not love God by force, is the mark by which God brands you as one of his own.
And the radicals on the left and the right, they're the same people.
The Groupers and the Socialists are the same people.
In fact, sometimes they even change sides.
And this is why the victory on the left of the moderates and on the right of the establishment conservatives against the Jew haters is a victory.
It's one victory for everyone and for our country.
And the stakes are high, so I want to lay out exactly what I think the battle is about.
The holidays are actually here, which means your calendar is probably packed with hosting duties, shopping lists, and endless to-dos.
When life gets this hectic, sleep often takes a back seat, but that's exactly when you need it most.
Quality rest is what keeps you energized for holiday prep, helps you stay patient with family, and lets you actually enjoy the season instead of just surviving it.
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Why Thiel Critiques Young People00:14:43
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Chapter two, Jokers and Clowns.
Does anybody remember that old song, Stuck in the Middle With You, Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to My Right?
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
That's pretty much our situation.
And it's a situation that you can look at in different ways.
You can be very grim about it.
If you're a conservative, you probably think it's an incipient catastrophe.
But I don't see it that way.
I see it as a threat.
I think it's a real thing.
And I think we have to understand it.
And I think we have to stop talking crap about it.
You know, we have to stop talking nonsense and face it squarely.
So there were two letters that came out this week that I think were really important, or two articles, whatever you want to call them.
And one was about and by Peter Thiel.
Now, I've spoken to Peter Thiel a couple of times, and I always feel a little sorry for billionaires because there is literally no one who will just tell them when they're wrong.
It just doesn't happen.
If you have a billion dollars, you're always right.
And so sometimes I listen to them and I think that's not making any sense.
But Peter Thiel, among billionaires, is one of the smartest of them as a human being.
You know, they all have some kind of brilliance that helped them to make their money, but they all think that makes them brilliant about everything.
But Peter Thiel is a widely read, intelligent guy.
And in 2020, he wrote an email to the executives at Facebook warning them, this is five years ago, to take young people's attraction to socialism seriously.
The email has went viral in the wake of Zorhan Mamdani's victory in the New York City Marilla race.
I'm reading this now from an article from the Free Press by Sean Fisher.
He said, when 70% of millennials say that they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they're stupid or entitled or brainwashed.
We should try and understand why.
And one of the reasons he gives, he says too many people go to college and they don't learn anything and they end up with incredibly burdensome debt.
So here he is in 2020 explaining this to Peter Robinson.
This is cut five.
We should internalize the costs onto the universities.
We should redo the bankruptcy laws.
Yes, you can discharge the student debt.
And when you discharge it, it's the college that gave you a bad education that gets stuck with a bill.
There's a non-socialist alternative.
And then, you know, I think the other basic problem of a lack of capital or inequality is that it's very hard for people to get onto the housing ladder.
You know, the main way that the people in the middle class in this country accumulate capital is through owning real estate, through owning your house.
And if through a series of urban zoning laws and bad planning and impossibility of building things, it has become impossible for people to get onto that.
And if you could find ways for people to own more houses, you would have much less of these sort of millennial crazed socialism.
So, you know, he goes on to say, I think you can reduce, as Thiel talking, he says, I think you can reduce 80% of culture wars to question of economics like a libertarian or a Marxist would.
And then you can reduce maybe 80% of economic questions to questions of real estate.
So he's saying the two big things that sort of stand out for him are the college debt, where you don't learn anything, you don't get an education that helps you do anything, you learn how to, you know, find, you learn how to curse out people who have been dead for 200 years, basically.
And then, and then you're saddled with debt that you can't get out from under for 10, 15 years.
And then the other is that people can't buy houses and it's very difficult for them to buy houses.
And this is something that a lot of people who are not just my age, but even younger than I am, you know, who are in their 50s, say, look at and they say, oh, you know, it's hard for me to get a house too.
But the median age of a first time home buyer now is something like 60 years old.
I mean, that's the median age.
So it's not the average age.
It's a median age where the center is, but it shouldn't be that high.
The median age should not be that high.
And it means that young people can't buy a home.
And one of the things that Thiel said, and this is a really insightful thing to say.
He says, if you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn't be surprised if they eventually become communist.
If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn't be surprised if they eventually become communist.
Let me kind of unpack what I believe that means because most people haven't read Marx and he's actually a deep thinker.
He's not just a complete evildoer.
He's a horrible, horrible human being and everything he says ends up doing evil.
But he wasn't like just a wild man spouting out stuff.
He talks about the proletariat.
Who are the proletariat?
They're the people who work for a living, but they never can get enough to have capital or property, right?
They don't have savings.
They don't have bonds.
They don't stock.
They don't have property.
And so they sell their labor.
All they have is their labor.
And the thing about your labor is you sell it for the moment, right?
You sell it to a factory, say, and you help put together a car.
Maybe you put on the same piece every day or do a little job.
You know, most factory jobs aren't like that anymore, but maybe it's some kind of repetitive work.
You know, the kind of thing I'm talking about.
And you never get anything for yourself out of it, right?
So you become alienated from the work of your own hands.
And the work of your hands, especially to a man, is vastly, vastly important.
I am my work.
When I sit down to write, when I sit here and talk to you, you are getting me.
You are getting what I have to say and who I am.
And so, you know, I'm making enough to own property and all that stuff, but I'm also connected to my work.
My work is me.
If you're doing, you know, manual labor and it's kind of repetitive and it's for somebody else, and he gets, the owner, your boss, gets all the benefits of your work, you become estranged from yourself and from your work, right?
You are no longer who you are.
You're no longer a full person.
Now, you know, you can't get something.
You begin to feel like a widget, you know, in a machine.
And, you know, you're putting food in your mouth.
Maybe you're putting food in your family mouth, but it passes away.
It's not, it doesn't get anything that is solid where you can say, I built this.
I made this.
I made this home by the work I do.
The work I do is hard and I do it for somebody else.
But ultimately, I own something of my own from my work.
So you become alienated and you could see why that would make you a socialist.
Why you say, well, why should this guy, you know, who's sitting in his office, get the benefits of the work of my hands instead of me getting benefits?
Now, a lot of companies are solving this problem without socialism by giving their workers stock options.
I mean, this happened to me when I was a kid.
I worked for Columbia Pictures, which was owned by Coca-Cola.
I got Coke stock as part of my payment and that became very valuable to me.
And so that was really worthwhile.
That means when you have a piece of the stock, that means you're participating in the thing you build.
So even if every day you go on and turn a screw on an assembly line, you know, and again, I'm exaggerating, but still, if that's what you do every day, at least you're getting part of ownership of the thing that you're making.
And that's a wonderful thing.
But you can still see why a young person might not figure that out, why that's not happening enough.
Maybe at lower levels, it's not happening at all.
And you can see why they would be enchanted by a guy like Zorhan Mamdani who promises free this and that, okay?
And this is a place where I disagree with Ben Shapiro.
Ben is a really good observer.
And I know this because he agrees with me about the facts most of the time.
We both see the same facts.
But you can't dismiss people because even freedom, even capitalism has to work.
You can't just say, you know, oh, well, you know, if your town falls apart, move.
There are times when you have to move.
I think people are going to have to move out of New York.
That's, you know, that's one thing.
But a company should feel responsible to the people who work for it or they don't have any ownership of anything.
And the proletariat theory of Marx comes into play.
And that's what Peter Thiel is saying.
And I think that that is really a brilliant thing to know.
But freedom has to work just like everything else.
If it doesn't work, people won't be free.
If it doesn't work for people, it won't be free.
And right now, capitalism is not working for young people.
And I think we should take that seriously and solve it, as Thiel said, by non-socialist means, like giving stock options to workers.
Now, the other article that came out, it was kind of a newsletter, was from Rod Dreher.
He's a very thoughtful, soulful guy.
When I was overseas recently, he and I had a drink together and had a long talk.
And it was, you know, he's a really interesting, thoughtful person.
He was on the show.
He's been on the show a couple of times, I think.
And he was in D.C. while I was in New York doing my signing.
He was in D.C. with the president of Hungary.
He lives in Hungary.
And he had a sit-down with JD Vance and a bunch of other poobahs from Hungary.
And he had a chance to kind of interview some of the young people in government.
And this is what he wrote about.
He says, this Groyper thing is real.
This is Rod talking.
He says, it's not a fringe movement in that it really has infiltrated young conservative Washington networks to a significant degree.
And he estimates that 30 to 40 percent of Zoomer conservatives, these are conservatives in their 20s, are Groypers.
And they hate Jews.
He says, a rational hatred of Jews and other races, but especially Jews, is a central core of it.
And it's evil.
And it will alienate people.
And it will destroy the Republican Party.
And he says, at the same time, the gatekeepers on the right, you know, the older folks, the more solid folks, aren't going to be able to make it go away because they have no influence over these young people.
And he says a couple of important things.
One, he says, the Groypers cannot be negotiated with because the Groypers don't have traditional demands.
They just want to burn the whole system down.
So they're just like the left.
I'm telling you, the Groypers and the communists are the same people.
They always were.
They always will be.
They were in Weimar, Germany.
They are today.
They just want to burn the system down.
When Barack Obama says we're going to fundamentally transform this country, he doesn't – he's not talking about reforming the country.
He's talking about burning the system down.
And now, Rod, talks about something that you've heard me talk about a million times on the show about the lies.
And, you know, lies have been my theme for 30 years, right?
Empire – I wrote a book called Empire of Lies.
I wrote an article called The Big White Lie.
I wrote all kinds of things about lies because I know that they take away the authority even of good people trying to do good things if you do it by lies.
And this is what Rod writes.
He says, the institutions of our society, as the Groypers see it, have lied and lied and lied and still lie.
And that's not just as the Groypers see it.
That's the truth.
That's me talking.
They still lie in many ways about race, e.g. refusing to be honest about black crime.
They lied about COVID.
They lied about males and females.
And they forced the insanity of gender ideology on us all.
The military lied about Iraq.
The universities embraced and enforced ideologies of lies.
The Catholic Church lied about sexual abuse and the connection to the prevalence of sexually active gay priests honeycombing the institution.
Now, I don't know if you were watching Friendly Fire, the last one we did.
I think we're doing another one maybe next week, but we did one a couple of weeks ago.
And I was kidding because we'd hired Matt Fradd, yet another Catholic commentator.
And I said, this place is getting to be like the Vatican, only straight.
And I make believe, because the Groypers, a lot of them are make believe Catholics.
They're Catholics without being Christians.
They're Catholics without following Christ.
They really are.
And they were furious.
Oh, he's saying there are gays in the Vatican.
How did that heretic?
He's saying that rotten Jew.
He's not really a Christian.
He's saying there are gays in the Vatican.
Give me a break.
It's funny because it's true.
And it's not funny because it's the reason they had that horrible, horrible sexual scandal that damaged the church so badly and continues to damage it today.
So that kind of lying ultimately empties you of authority.
He goes on, Rod, he goes on to say they lied about the benefits of mass migration and diversity.
They lied about Trump and Russia.
The political parties and their corporate allies lied about what globalism would mean for ordinary people.
That's another thing.
Our Midwest was gutted by globalism during Obama's administration.
I traveled throughout the Midwest and the doors were boarded up.
The shops were closed.
It was awful.
And he says the media have lied and do lie about most things.
And this, you know, we just saw this big shakeup at the BBC where people quit because they they felt somehow felt empowered to edit a Trump speech to make it sound like he encouraged violence on January 6th when he was doing the exact opposite.
And Barton Swain, going back to the article he wrote in The Wall Street Journal, he makes a point that there's a difference here between Democrats and Republicans.
He says the Democrat base consists mainly of cash flush foundations, unions and activist groups like the American, the ACLU, the Sunrise Movement, Planned Parenthood, abortion rights people, the American Federations of Teachers and Southern Poverty Law Center, Black Lives Matter, other racial justice things, LGBTQ people.
And he says, and he says, and he says, and he says, and he says an array of immigrant rights organizations, some of them so radical as to be almost insurrectionist.
And he says this has no counterpart.
ACLU's Moral Authority00:02:02
Those people run the party.
They bully the left and they power the far left.
He says this has no counterpart on the right.
The Heritage Foundation, the Koch Network and Turning Point USA have nothing like the influence over elected Republicans that left wing nonprofits have over Democratic colleagues.
Now, part of that, to my mind, is because of the media.
The media imbues evildoers like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ACLU who are evil now.
They give them an aura of moral authority.
So the GOP, the Republicans, are afraid to cross them like they're afraid to cross the NAACP, which is no longer a black rights group.
It's now a leftist group.
And they're afraid to cross them because the media will say, oh, these wonderful ACLU has American, it's civil, it's liberties, it's union.
You know, how could you possibly go against it?
Whereas the press will demonize the Heritage Foundation and all the other things on the right.
So the Democrats don't have to be afraid of them.
But all the same, both sides want to tear the system down.
They want authoritarianism.
They hate Jews.
That's the flagpole.
That's the sign.
And they hate Jews because they hate God and they hate freedom.
You know, so I think one thing that Roger Ayer says that I believe is that JD Vance, who is the hope, I think, of the Groypers, is going to rise above this.
I think he's going to leave these guys behind when he is elevated to the presidency, as he will be if present trends continue.
I think he'll come around.
He says things that I think are sort of little sops to the Groypers, like he'll say that we shouldn't put other countries before America and they all hear Israel.
But I'm hoping that he doesn't have that kind of hatred in his heart.
I look in his eyes and I don't think he does.
So we don't know what will happen.
But I am very positive.
I have a positive attitude that Vance is going to be elevated to the presidency and that he's going to dump these guys like, you know, Henry V dumped, you know, the guy, the bums that he hung out with.
So I want to now turn to the culture because we don't know the future, but the culture often tells us the future.
Frankenstein's Monster Experience00:17:14
And I want to take a look at this new film, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein.
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Chapter 3, Monster Meets Girl.
I've been giving these little talks at these book signings I did, one in Nashville and one in New York, and I started out by telling a joke.
I'm going to tell it very quickly because I don't have time, but about a screenwriter who has gone dry and he doesn't have any ideas, but he keeps waking up in the middle of the night with a fantastic idea, and then he goes back to sleep and he forgets the idea.
He wakes up in the morning, can't remember what his great idea was.
So finally his wife tells him to leave a pad and pen next to the bed, and he wakes up, he can write the idea down, then he'll remember it in the morning.
So he does that, and sure enough, 3 o'clock in the morning, he wakes up, has this fabulous idea.
He's blurry with sleep, but he manages to scribble it down, goes right back to sleep, wakes up, says, oh, no, I had the same experience again.
I woke up in the middle of the night, had a fabulous idea, and I can't remember now.
His wife said, well, do you write it down?
And he says, yes, my God, I did.
I wrote it down the pad, and he looks at the pad, and the pad says, boy meets girl.
And the reason I think that joke is meaningful, and it can be funnier when I tell it right, but the reason I think the joke is meaningful is because every story, every story, and in some ways every work of art, is about boy meets girl.
Every story is about whether there can be a man manly enough to win a woman womanly enough that they come together and start the world again.
That is the center of human life.
That is the center of physical human life.
And even though you can say, well, not every story is a love story, not every story is a romance, every story in some way is about, for instance, a man finding himself.
I'm just giving an example.
A man finding himself so that he can become, in another story, the man who finds the girl or a woman finding herself so she can become the woman worth winning.
Now, the reason our culture has died is because that relationship is out of whack.
The relationship between men and women is out of whack.
It's been destroyed by feminism.
It's been destroyed by leftism.
It's been destroyed by all of these things.
Women are absolutely miserable.
Men are absolutely enraged.
They are not having babies.
The human race is literally dying in the West because of this problem.
So Frankenstein is an interesting story.
I write about this at length in my book, The Truth and Beauty, and I point out that Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, which is supposed to be the first work of modern science fiction, she said it's about a man trying to play God.
And I point out that it is, in a sense, about a man playing God, but the way he's playing God is by creating a man without a woman, which, of course, God does when he creates Adam.
That's why Frankenstein is compared to Adam in Paradise Lost in the book.
And he does it without a woman, and he does it because his mother has died, and in some ways he's kind of becoming like his mother.
He wants to take over the role of his mother, which, of course, is a theme we see in transgenderism today.
And that theme runs through all of the descendants of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, all the science fiction and horror movies.
It frequently recurs.
If you look at the films, I think I've talked about this before, and like I said, it's in The Truth and Beauty if you want to get the details.
But if you look at the films in the 70s, like The Exorcist, which is about a really secretly about a young girl's budding sexuality, and it's portrayed as demonic possession.
Carrie, by Stephen King, a girl's first period, gives her magic powers and makes her a vengeance machine.
I mean, Rosemary Baby and The Omen are both about the devil becoming involved in childbirth.
Alien, where there's a she monster who turns men into women by planting her babies inside them, and that means that the female has to take on the male role and save the world.
And all of these films are bookended by two horror movies that, at the beginning of that period and at the end, that are both of these horror movies are inspired by Ed Gein, who inspired the movie Psycho, where a guy becomes a woman and commits murder.
And Silence of the Lambs, where a guy is killing women in order to dress up as them, as Ed Gein does.
And I write about all of that, the Ed Gein murders more in The Kingdom of Cain.
So Truth and Beauty and Kingdom of Cain both cover this stuff.
But this fretfulness about motherhood, this kind of repulsion from women's bodies and women's key work of creating the human race becomes apocalyptic in films like The Terminator, in which The Terminator comes back, not to kill the rebel leader, but to kill the mother, who's just an ordinary girl who's going to have a baby and they want to stop.
That's the process that separates people from machines in Terminator and The Matrix, a word that derives from this Latin for womb, in which the people are enslaved in these little pods.
And this was made by two transgender brothers who now call themselves sisters, and The Matrix, the womb, becomes a prison.
So Frankenstein is really a genius book about a man who sort of tries to become his own dead mother by creating life.
Now, del Toro loves this book, and he loves gothic imagery like I do.
This movie, del Toro's movie, is so visually beautiful that it is stunning.
I mean, you stare at it with your mouth hanging open, and it doesn't even make any sense, the beauty.
Some of the costumes are ridiculous.
It's supposed to take place in about 100 years after the real Frankenstein takes place.
But it is, like Nosferatu, it is just a beautiful, beautiful movie.
But del Toro also has this obsession that ruins the film utterly.
I mean, once you start paying attention to the script and the words in the script, the film, about an hour in, the film stinks.
And this is a two-and-a-half-hour movie.
But it's so beautiful, you almost don't care, and the performances are great and all this stuff.
My daughter, Faith Moore, has a podcast called Storytime for Grownups, where she reads books and kind of explains classic books to people who have a hard time interpreting the classics.
And she just finished reading Frankenstein.
You can go and find her podcast, Storytime for Grownups, and you can go back and listen to it.
And she's really good at it, and she explains it to her.
And she said about this movie, it's just del Toro's old thing in the shape of water.
He wants the monster to be the good guy.
He wants men to be monsters.
And he wants, most importantly, the woman to love the monster, just like in The Shape of Water, right?
And so the part of the woman, Elizabeth, in the movie is so badly written that it's sort of, you sort of wake up and go, like, this woman makes no sense as a character.
So here she is, she meets the monster, and she confronts Victor Frankenstein, who created the monster, with his cruelty toward the monster.
It's cut seven.
If I could force myself to believe it, it would be my inclination to see attraction.
In those eyes, they saw pain, and what is pain, if not evidence of intelligence?
Now, that makes no sense.
And she talks like that the whole time.
I saw pain in his eyes, and pain is a mark of intelligence.
The hell you say.
The hell you say.
You can torture a squirrel and see pain in his eyes.
It has nothing to do with intelligence.
And the script is filled with lines like that.
I created life, therefore I created death.
You're like, what the hell does that even mean?
It's filled with stuff like that, because he doesn't know what he's talking about, because he wants to maul Mary Shelley's work into a work about women loving monsters.
And in that scene, Victor Frankenstein accuses Elizabeth of loving the monster, and she says, no, I just understand him.
And then, in this scene, she actually admits she loves the monster.
This is cut eight.
My place was never in this.
So, in the book, the monster is rejected by his father, the creator, Victor Frankenstein, because he's horrified by what he's done.
And he runs away, and he hides out in a peasant's house, and all this stuff is in the movie.
And this is what he says in the book.
He says, as he's listening to the peasant's talk, he says, I heard of the differences of sexes and the birth and growth of children, how the father doted on the smiles of the infant, how all the life and cares of the mother were wrapped up in the precious charge or children.
I learned of brother and sister and all the various relationships which bind one human being to another.
And so, he learns about what human life is about, about sexuality and this divide between men and women and the family that comes out of it and the life that comes out of it.
And he finally goes to Frankenstein and says, make me a bride.
And that is how the film climaxes.
And everywhere that the movie diverges from the book, it's worse.
Everywhere it's worse, not just philosophically, but in terms of plot and action and excitement, it is just worse.
Everywhere it diverges, which is the whole second half of the movie.
And in the book, the monster says, I want a bride.
In the movie, he says he wants a companion.
He wants a companion, and the woman loves the monster.
The woman loves it.
She doesn't want a man.
She just really wants the monster because only the men are monsters, but the monster is the man.
Del Toro always does, and it's just not true.
It's a male fantasy that the woman is going to love you as your monster self instead of wanting the man who is, you know, a creative agent and a leader and somewhat of an animal but not an animal.
You know, all the things that men are.
This is a male fantasy of what women are like, and that's why her dialogue is laughably bad.
And, you know, I've always said this.
I believe that the sense of alienation from the feminine is connected to a falling away from faith because motherhood may be the perfect example of self-sacrificing spiritual values above materiality, right?
Of physicality, there's nothing more physical than seeing a woman, you know, give birth.
It's an incredibly material thing, but out of that comes human life and all its spiritual things and the gift of motherhood.
But Frankenstein is essentially the opposite of the nativity.
It's the opposite of Christ's birth because when God wants to become a human being, when he wants to become fully human, he doesn't just appear.
He has the power to do that.
But the first thing he does is he chooses a mother because mothers make you human through their spiritual tenderness and self-sacrifice.
And that's why mothers are so important.
And that's why this anger of men against women and this alienation of women from men is destroying human life.
It's just ending our society because the only country in the West that is still reproducing is Israel because there are the people of God.
So let's, I want to talk about why, why it is that religion, why God, a relationship with God is the answer, but not the way that some people think it is.
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Final chapter, why religion?
So there's a very famous study of religion by an early psychologist named William James, who was the brother of one of my favorite novelists, Henry James.
And it's called The Varieties of Religious Experience.
And one of the things he says in that book, he says, in critically judging of the value of religious phenomena, it is very important to insist on the distinction between religion as an individual personal function, your relationship with God, for instance, and religion as an institutional corporate or tribal product.
And he points out that religions start when some individual religious genius has a direct experience of enlightenment or connection to God, and that draws people to him, and that becomes the church.
And then the church becomes codified into the corporate church that has concerns like organization and maintaining power and maintaining order and getting funding.
And that's the difference between the gospels and acts, right?
And the epistles, the gospels are Jesus giving us the full experience of God, and acts and the epistles are people putting their church together, and those are actually different things.
And so once the church is established and once it establishes its orthodoxy, the next individual figure to have that incredibly intense relationship becomes a heretic, right?
And the only thing the church can do is it can incorporate him into its orthodoxy, or else it has to expel him and actually persecute him.
And that's why, you know, oftentimes I come on here and I read to you and say, this is what Jesus said.
And angry people from Protestants and Catholics start attacking me saying, no, that is not what my church says.
And it's true a lot of times that Jesus is saying something different than your church is saying.
And what I believe is that the church is there to contain, to bring you to Jesus, but it's Jesus who is the figure that you're supposed to ultimately follow.
And the church is supposed to be the body of Christ, so you can experience Christ in the flesh before you.
But once you experience Christ, it may be that he leads you places that the church doesn't want you to go.
You know, it's the difference.
You know, I'm not comparing, believe me, believe me, I'm not comparing myself to Jesus in any, any way at all.
But if you read some of my books, if you go out, as you should, even as I'm speaking and get after that, the dark, you may say, gee, you know, he's all about gangsters.
He's all about murder.
He's all about evil as well.
And then you meet me and think, wait, this is a totally different guy.
Maybe I misread this book.
That's the experience of meeting Jesus after you've been reading the Old Testament.
In the Old Testament, you're thinking, ah, you know, things are going bad.
Maybe we were being punished.
Maybe this is happening.
Maybe we have to follow all these rules.
And then you meet Jesus and think, oh, wait, maybe those rules were different than we thought they were.
Maybe we're supposed to, when it says stone and adulterous, it means only stone and adulterous if you are without sin and nobody is.
Maybe it means something like that, that you can only get through a human being.
You can't get that.
You can't write those rules down.
You have to have a heart that is in keeping with God.
And so that's, that is the individual experience of your relationship with God.
And I believe the church is supposed to make that happen.
And if it doesn't, it's not doing its job.
And the experience of God, what is it you find that solves problems?
See, so many conservatives think, well, you go to church and they tell you to be good.
And they tell you to go to hell if you're not good.
And that keeps order in the community.
And that's a good thing.
Okay.
You know, fine.
But I don't think that that's the important thing.
I think the urgent thing is this relationship with God, where you understand that life is a created thing.
Freedom To Create Beauty00:04:48
It is created by a person, a person named God.
It is created by the Father, and it is incarnate in the Son, and it is a made thing.
And once you realize something is made, you realize, A, it's an expression of character.
Any book I write is going to express my character in some way.
The universe that God has created expresses his character in some way, and you have to figure out what that way is.
And it's created with a purpose.
People do things because they have a purpose, which may just be beauty.
It may just be glory.
You don't know what it is, but you have to start to find that out.
And so then you start to think about things that you want very desperately that maybe are bad for you.
How does that happen?
How can you be in conflict with yourself?
And which is it that you want?
Like your flesh wants something, and you think, yeah, but if I do that, I'm going to ruin my loving relationships.
I'm going to ruin my family.
You know, I'm going to do all kind of bad things.
I'm going to sell out my principles for money or for power or for celebrity or all the things that the flesh yearns for.
And then you start to realize that there are differences between, oh, let's say a man sitting in front of porn all day and a man making love to his wife and created a family.
One is a demonic cartoon of the other.
That's like a writer who writes crap to get a big sale because he knows that most people want to read crap, so he writes garbage.
That's a demonic version of somebody who writes because he wants to express this vision that he believed was given to him purposely to express.
The world is an intentional place.
It's a place with a telos, with a purpose, with an end, and you have to find out what that is.
So then when you realize that and you look at the Groypers who think that getting rid of Jews is going to solve their problems, or you look at the communists who think stealing other people's money and giving it out, you know, doling it out as they see fit is going to give them a sense of virtue and make everything right, then you realize these people are talking crap.
They're actually babbling idiots because now you see that, no, the world is made a certain way, and it is made so that it has a purpose, and it's made so that you have a purpose.
You know, my daughter once asked me, what is the meaning of life when she was a teenager?
That's what I get.
A lot of people get like, you know, how do you drive a car?
What is the meaning of life?
And I said, that's like asking, what is the color of hair?
Because the meaning of life is the same for everybody, but it's different for each person, which is a very strange thing, right?
And I sometimes think that before God sends each of us into the world, he whispers in our ear, come back with something beautiful.
Make something beautiful.
Add something beautiful to my beautiful creation.
Maybe a child.
Maybe a family.
Maybe a marriage.
Maybe a work of art.
Maybe an act of charity.
Maybe a business that helps people in some way and creates more wealth in the world.
Anything that helps your soul become the mirror of its maker, right?
That makes you into a maker of things instead of a taker of things.
And so, you know, the new feminist trend I've noticed is choose yourself.
A woman must choose herself.
Never do that.
That's just the exactly wrong thing to do.
Be free and in your freedom, add something beautiful to God's creation.
And you have to choose to do that.
That's why freedom comes first.
Freedom isn't a good in itself.
Freedom is a good because it allows you to choose to love God, to choose to serve God, to choose to make something beautiful.
And there are two ways to be free.
There are only two ways you can be free.
One, you have to have so much courage that you can stand up to the Gruyper fascists and the leftist communists when they cancel you or kill you or torture you or whatever they plan to do.
You've got to be so brave that you can stand up to the king even when he cuts your head off, you know, and choose to do the thing that will make you more like God.
Or you can live in a country that was dedicated to preserving your freedom from its very founding.
And then you can choose the work of God and live in peace.
See, the Gruypers and the communists and all of the post-liberal authoritarians, they want to take that away from you and they tell you that's going to make you good.
And I am telling you that it's freedom that makes you good.
And freedom is awfully hard if you have to face the authorities who want to kill you for making the choice of God.
But it can be very beautiful if you live in a free country.
The Gruypers and the communists are out there.
They are threatening our polity from both sides.
But they will not win if you choose right.
So let's be real about guns.
Owning a handgun for self-defense comes with serious responsibility.
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And too often that means choosing between locking it away or leaving it out where kids or guests or intruders can get at it.
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Secure Access Solutions00:07:26
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Having a gun, you know, I know I keep one.
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I want it there.
I want to be able to reach it fast, but I want it safe, especially when my grandkids are around.
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Please support our show and tell them we sent you.
Our new live show, Friendly Fire, returns Wednesday night at 7 p.m. Eastern on Daily Wire+.
Join Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and myself as we do what we do best, debate, discuss, and disagree on the biggest stories in politics and culture.
Plus, we are world-premiering the first official trailer for the Pendragon cycle, Rise of the Merlin.
Don't miss it.
Friendly Fire, Wednesday, November 19th at 7 p.m. Eastern, only on Daily Wire+.
Klavan Clapbacks.
Woo!
If you're blue and you don't know where to go to, why don't you go where fashion seems?
K!
Ah!
The greatest version of Frankenstein ever made.
That's the real Frankenstein.
All right, Klavan Clapbacks.
Klavan with a K. Clapbacks at DailyWire.com.
Clapbacks also has a K. Klavan Clapbacks, both with a K, at DailyWire.com.
Ask any question you like about anything you like, and I will try and answer it.
Obviously, the more interesting it is, the faster I'll, the more willing I'll be to answer it.
A fan writes, I will try to keep this as short as possible because I'd really like this answered.
I'm nearly 21 years old, struggling with porn, which I also think is rooted in attachment issues.
I'm quite depressed and medicated for it.
I find it hard to deal with my porn addiction while single because I don't have that love and fear of my girlfriend or losing her, driving me to be better.
I pray that I can find love again soon, but just feel so hopeless.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Best, a fan.
Yes, I have some advice.
Stop watching porn.
This is your problem.
Your problem is the porn.
And I don't even know, I'm not going to tell you to stop taking your medication because I'm not a doctor, but if you're stuffing poison in your brain, what good is medication, right?
As long as you're stuffing that porn poison into your brain.
And here's the thing.
You keep using these therapeutic terms.
I'm struggling with porn.
I have a porn addiction.
You are watching porn.
Now, I understand that it's an internal struggle, that you don't want to be doing that, and you do.
Here's what you do.
Don't do it.
Stop watching porn, and your porn addiction will stop instantaneously.
It will be gone.
Your porn addiction doesn't exist.
It doesn't exist.
It is just you, you watching porn.
Don't do it.
It screws you up so badly, you might as well just pour acid on your face.
You know, it is just the worst thing.
And it really does just destroy everything.
And, you know, you're saying, oh, I have attachment issues.
You want your attachment issues to go away?
Stop watching porn.
You know, and that's the thing.
It's like it is taking you away from life, right?
And it's also, you know, it's degrading, pal.
You're a man.
Be a man.
You're 21 years old.
Be a man.
Stop wanking in front of the computer and go outside and touch some grass.
And every time you want to do it, shake your head no and don't do it.
You know, there's a site – let me send you this site.
It's for November, but I'm sure it can still work for you.
It's called thenovemberproject.org, thenovemberproject.org.
And I know the guy who's running it, and he's a friend of Spencer's, and so I know he's a good guy, thenovemberproject.org.
And it is – you join this club of people getting rid of stopping porn, and you get support from them, and, you know, you can make pledges, and it'll show you how to deal with some of your urges.
But the thing is, in the end, it's going to be hard.
It is going to be hard because you want to do it, but you shouldn't do it.
That's the problem.
It's not you're struggling.
It's not this or that.
You want to do it, and you shouldn't do it.
And, look, there's stuff – we all have stuff like this in our lives, and you have to not do it.
That's what discipline is.
And discipline, you know, all of the stuff about manhood being about tearing off your shirt and roaring and swaggering around and fighting, discipline.
It's about self-discipline.
Women do not need the kind of self-discipline that men have.
They do not need it.
They are not, like, tied to a rocket like we are.
They are not tied to all these urges and this ambition and all the stuff that men are heir to, and they don't need the kind of day-by-day discipline.
All of my life is discipline.
All of it is discipline.
I wake up in the morning, and I go to work, and I write, I don't have a boss except for me, but I do it because I'm the boss, right?
And you are the boss of you, and you have to say, no porn.
You know, it's ridiculous waiting around from some girl to make you feel ashamed of doing something that is poisoning you.
It is poisoning you.
And it just kills me to hear this therapeutic talk come out of your mouth, you know, when really it's like just you've got to do it.
It is hard.
It's hard.
Don't do it.
And if you do it, stop doing it.
You know, if you try to do it and you do it, stop doing it.
Then don't do it again.
You know, I mean, that is the way it works.
It gets easier over time when you see how much your life will improve.
It is an amazing thing when you give up your addictions.
But stop thinking about it as an outside thing.
It's just you doing something that's bad for you that feels good.
That's what it is.
It's, you know, it's like cheating.
It's like any, you know, it's like lying to get ahead in life or screwing your friend to get ahead of him in some way, you know.
It's like all that stuff.
It gets you something you want, in this case, you know, easy pleasure without personal relationships, and it's bad for you.
So stop doing it.
That's my advice.
That's my advice.
Become a member because we're going into member block.
And if you're not a member, you're now screwed.
I mean, you're now screwed to the Claven.
And, you know, Thanksgiving is coming up when I'll be off.
So, you know, you've got to get all the Claven in you can.
So go to dailywire.com slash subscribe, dailywire.com slash subscribe, and use code Claven at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.
Do it now, or the Claven-less darkness will come down on you like a shroud falling out of an evil heaven.