All Episodes
Jan. 16, 2026 - Andrew Klavan Show
01:11:50
Ep. 1262 - Democrats vs Reality

Ep. 1262 – Democrats vs Reality mocks the Supreme Court’s transgender athlete debates, where Justice Alito dismissed biological distinctions and Jackson faced divine backlash, while exposing leftist detachment—like Hakeem Jeffries’ ICE extremism claims or Ilhan Omar’s defund push—contrasting it with Mississippi’s test score gains despite weak unions. The episode ties media bias (e.g., Knives Out’s anti-conservative framing) to broader cultural shifts, praises Scott Adams’ conversion via Pascal’s Wager despite media smear campaigns, and pivots to Rise of the Merlin, a Daily Wire Plus epic framing Merlin’s return as a last stand against Saxon invasion. Reality, they argue, is being redefined by language—while true revolutionaries risk death, Democrats weaponize words in a hollow crusade. [Automatically generated summary]

|

Time Text
Mr. Klosterfocalis' Tearful Argument 00:04:01
The Supreme Court this week heard major cases on whether men who think they're women because they're mentally ill should be able to play sports with women who think they're women because they're women.
The cases were a chance for the court to explore the question, is it fair for men who feel like women to play women's sports, or are we living in reality where that would be the sort of question only a nerdy nine-year-old boy would ask just before cracking up at his own joke and then making a series of snorting noises that ends with his accidentally blowing snot on his iHeart Stranger Things t-shirt.
In the event, the case was argued before a gathering of fine legal minds and Katanji Brown Jackson.
The trans athletes were represented by the famous attorney Foster Clarker Fockelus, who was hired by the Roland Dinghead Memorial Fund, which was named in honor of the famous trans athlete, a girl who identified as male and joined a men's boxing club, then sadly died.
Mr. Klosterfocalis made the argument that, in theory, there are no real advantages to men who play women's sports, so we should all live in theory instead of on Earth, where the idea is completely absurd.
Judging by their responses to his argument, the justices seemed divided between those justices with IQs higher than a bowl of Cheerios and Katanji Brown Jackson.
The highlight of Mr. Klosterfocalis' argument was when he conjured up the cherished memory of transgender athletes from the past, like Abner Skullfogg, a girl who identified as male and joined the local men's ice hockey team, then sadly died.
Mr. Klosterfakalis said that to ban boys who identify as girls from girls' sports would be to betray the memory of such pioneers who gave the last measure of devotion to free us from the shackles of sanity and common sense.
Mr. Klosterfocalis actually fought back tears as he went on to tell the story of another historic transgender innovator, Henry Blither, a woman who identified as a man and managed to join an NFL football team, then sadly died, though not before breaking through the Steelers' offensive line to sack Aaron Rodgers.
When Mr. Klosterfocalis concluded his arguments, he was peppered with incisive questions by the brilliant justices and one from Katanji Brown Jackson.
Jackson asked, quote, If a man wears a skirt that's a really soft shade of pink and has girly pleats with maybe a flower pattern like little roses weaving in a kind of floaty, dreamlike feminine way, and that skirt makes him very attractive to the sort of burly man who walks around with his shoulders and arms swinging and then suddenly he sees this boy in his pretty pink skirt and okay, it doesn't develop into anything, but he takes a second look before becoming disgusted with himself,
couldn't we then say that the first boy is as much a female as that gruff detective on the HBO show about East Town?
Or is the whole scenario of three different local women getting kidnapped by the same man just too unbelievable?
Unquote.
The next probing question came from Justice Alito, who asked the attorney, quote, what the hell is that moron talking about?
How in God's name did she get on the Supreme Court?
Unquote.
Throughout the questioning, the justices tried to be respectful to the defendants by using their preferred pronouns without giggling, which unfortunately proved impossible.
After the question period was over, the attorney for the states banning men in women's sports, Joan Dark, stood before the justices and wept quietly for 20 minutes before answering questions, including another intricate inquiry from Alito who said, quote, why couldn't that dementia-riddled puddlehead of a president find a black woman who had been to law school or could at least form an English sentence, unquote.
But the final argument startled the justices when it came from a resonant, disembodied voice that shook the courtroom, saying, quote, I created mankind in my image, male and female.
And if you're wondering why I didn't ask your opinion about it, it's because I'm omniscient and I knew there would one day be a justice on the Supreme Court who was dumber than a bowl of Cheerios.
Clavenless Weekend Dream Powder 00:03:03
Trigger warning from Andrew Claven.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
All right, we are back laughing our way through the birth of the American Empire.
Wherever you are watching, I hope you're watching on Daily Wire Plus.
I hope you're a subscriber.
But if you're not and you're watching elsewhere, anywhere you're watching, please leave a comment.
Even if you're just pretending to be watching, even if you're pretending to be watching while looking at something filthy on your other screen, leave the comment on the other screen because I'm probably there too.
And if it's sufficiently degraded and ugly and racist and sexist and all the rest, we will read it on this show because that's the kind of content we're looking for, as it turns out.
Today's comment comes from the aptly named 17531-P.
He's exactly like that.
He says, a communist dictator got overthrown while we were clavenless.
I can't wait for the next clavenless week.
I love this comment because the reason I started talking about what was then the clavenless weekend, I was doing shows four days a week, and I said, you know, you're now going into the clavenless weekend is every single weekend I took off.
Something absolutely disastrous happened.
So maybe we've turned the corner now.
Good things will happen when I'm gone.
They're going to have to since I'm only here one day a week.
Let's get to today's episode, The Democrats versus Reality.
You know, the new year used to mean something simple, taking stock of your life, promising yourself you'd do better, and then failing, work a little harder, be a little stronger, and then stop, show up for the people who depend on you, and then stop doing that too.
But it's hard to do any of that when you're not sleeping well.
That's where our sponsor, Beam, comes in to help.
That's why you need to try their best-selling dream powder.
It's a healthy nighttime blend packed with proven ingredients, shown to improve sleep so you can wake up refreshed and ready to take on the day.
Dream is made with a powerful blend of all natural ingredients, reishi, magnesium, l-theanine, epigenin, and melatonin.
And unlike other sleep aids, there's no next-day grogginess, just great restful sleep.
I'm somebody who struggles with sleep, but I drink it because it puts me to sleep.
And so at least I get some sleep.
And it's got great flavors too.
It's got like chocolate, peanut butter, sea salt, caramel, brownie batter, cinnamon, cocoa, and it is delicious.
It's the perfect hot cocoa before bed, and it makes a difference when you try to pass out.
So if you've been waiting for the right time to try Dream, this is it.
They're offering my listeners an exclusive discount going into the new year.
Go to shopbeam.com slash Claven, use code Claven and to get my exclusive offer for up to 40% off Beam's dream powder.
So with my discount code Claven, you can get their best-selling dream powder for just $39.
Think about it.
How much would you pay for a truly great night of sleep?
With my discount, it's just a buck 25 per night.
Go to shopbeam.com slash clavin today, but you have to know how to spell clavin.
Haskell's Warning 00:15:22
Some of you don't.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Chapter one, medium cool.
So back in 69, I called this chapter Medium Cool, thinking no one would know what that meant, but my producer Tom instantly recognized this as a movie that came out in 1969.
He was a film student, so he knows these things, but he's got to be the only, he and I have got to be the only living people who actually know what this movie is.
It came out, it was by a filmmaker named Haskell Wexler, who was an Oscar-winning cinematographer and really good visually.
And he used to make this movie Medium Cool, he used what was then kind of a shocking new style called cinema verite, where you would use handheld cameras and you would use real footage and you would let people, the actors, you know, improvise and just tell them what the situation was and let them act their way through it.
And in Medium Cool, he mixed scripted scenes with actual documentary footage.
And it was hailed as a classic, but now, as far as I know, it's completely forgotten.
I haven't thought of it in years.
And it was a good, it was innovative.
It was interesting and innovative and influential.
I don't know if it was a great film or not, but it was certainly different and had a lot to say about the moment.
And the film was basically about the 1968 riots at the Democrat Convention in Chicago, which was a clash.
For those of you who don't know, it was a clash between the sort of hippies and these idiot radicals who thought the age of Aquarius had come and some Chicago cops who thought it would be interesting to crack them over the head and shoot tear casts at them.
And maybe that would be the age of Aquarius for some Chicago cops.
So let me just, just for the fun of it, I got to play just a little bit of the 1960s, like I said, 1969 trailer for Medium Cool is one.
Innocence is a feeling.
Awareness is a feeling.
How does it feel to stop feeling?
You may discover violence at a time when an entire country learns to feel nothing.
America's wonderful.
Wonderful, Rubber cool.
It really makes sense.
How pictures presents medium cool.
That's Robert Forster.
I think it's probably his first role in a movie.
Now, the thing, the movie was about, I'm going to tell you why this is relevant in a minute, but the movie was about a theory by a guy, a media philosopher, I guess you'd call him named Marshall McLuhan.
And he's the guy who, his most famous line was the medium is the message.
And he talked about TV being a cool medium.
And what that meant was that there was something emotionless about what you were watching on TV.
And that required you to supply the emotion so that you became immersed in what you were seeing and it became very real to you.
And the line between reality and non-reality got blurred.
And this was his theory.
And this is kind of what the film is about.
And there's one scene that I remember most about this film.
In fact, this is the only thing I really remember about it.
I remember, I had this vague memory of it.
And like I said, I haven't thought about this film in years.
But as the closing titles come out, remember it's by this guy, Haskell Wexler, but he's not in the movie.
It's got actors playing parts.
But at the end, the final titles, as they roll, there are pictures of the riots and the riots are going on and the titles are rolling and a canister of tear gas.
I'm saying this from memory, so maybe I'm getting some of it wrong, but a canister of tear gas is launched into the air and you hear somebody shouting in the background, watch out, Haskell, it's real.
Now, this is why this came back to us.
In other words, Haskell Wexler himself, the filmmaker himself, had lost his sense of where film ended and reality began.
And that was kind of the message of the film in some ways.
And like I said, I hadn't thought of this in years, but I was listening to this eyewitness video of the fatal clash between Nicole Goode in Minneapolis and the ICE agent who shot her, fatally shot her when she stepped on the gas in a car that was pointed in his direction.
And I was on Megan Kelly's show and she played it on her show.
And here's this very brief video that was shot at the disturbances with ICE as ICE was trying to carry out its duties.
It's cut two.
So why did you have real bullets?
It's my fault I made her come down here.
It's my fault.
Some people said that this was her partner, her quote-unquote wife, but I don't know if that's true or not.
But you can hear me chuckle in the background as Megan was playing this.
And I'm obviously not chuckling at the tragedy, but I was instantly reminded of medium cool.
Watch out, Haskell.
It's real.
And the way in which the media, a cool medium, can draw you in and make you forget what is real and what is not.
And I think we're living through medium cool in spades.
And I think that that is combined with the fact that there has been a lot of theories over the last few years that reality is in effect a social construct, that the things we think of as written in stone or part of nature or part of God's plan, whatever we think makes it solid and real is really just a prejudice, that, you know, the idea that one country is better than another, that, you know, one moral code is better than another, all goes away.
And so that's Shakespeare's prophecy that one day people will say nothing's either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
And so now you've got this dual thing of this cool medium that is now every day and every minute that is sucking us into it, blurring the lines of reality and medium.
And the fact that we are in a place where having lost our faith, having lost our basic center of reality and God, we think that we can control reality by changing the meaning of words, by declaring that the social construct no longer exists and so forth.
So the so-called resistance in this country, by which I mean the Democrats, have lost all sense of where real life begins.
And that difference is spelled out in the difference between the leftist violence that is once again being instigated by Democrats, spreading, protesters are spreading, but they're not just protests, remember.
They're not just people with signs saying, please don't enforce the law, even though you're law enforcement officers.
It's not just that.
It's people throwing things at armed law enforcement officers, running them down with cars, which has happened numerous times, and endangering them, throwing fireworks at them, and thinking that this is somehow all right, that you can do this.
And it's just protesting because they think they're in a game.
They think they're on TV.
They're in theater and it's not real.
And when this woman saw this other, Nicole Goode gets shot with real bullets.
It's like, why are you using real bullets?
And the answer is simple, because he's actually in reality, a law enforcement officer in reality where the bullets bullets are real, not a protest in this woman's head, where who knows what reality is.
And, you know, as I say, the left has got all these philosophies that grow out of godlessness.
They are a direct result of our faith going away, where they think that if you change the language, you know, if you change the language of what a man is, what a woman is, and all this, the actual reality changes, and there's no price to pay for that.
So this is why you see things that are so shocking to the rest of us, like this idiot New York Times editor, Nicole Hannah Jones, who created this wholly fake history of the nation's founding, was caught out having created a lie, that the nation was founded to preserve slavery, which is just completely untrue, and was caught out, then said, I never said that, though she had,
and then was given the Pulitzer Prize to lock down the fantasy as the fantasy was then piped like a toxin, like sewage, into the schools around the country and turned into a show, I think, on Hulu, to spread this lie around in the hopes that if we bought into the lie, that would then become our image of the country, which can happen.
You can become deluded about reality, but it still will not be reality.
And that's why when Minneapolis burned to the ground during protests over the death of an armed robber drug addict who died resisting arrest and custody, that's why this idiot, Nicole Hannah-Jones, could go on TV and say, oh, that's not violence.
It's only property.
Here she has cut three.
Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man's neck until all of the life is leached out of his body.
Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.
And to put those things, to use the exact same language to describe those two things, I think really it's not moral to do that.
So this is, you know, Nicole is another, this is a syndrome.
I'm not saying it because it's true of everybody, but it's a syndrome that she's half white and she's desperate to establish her black identity like Obama, and that radicalizes her.
And she doesn't think or care about the reality of what happens when you burn down people's homes and stores and neighborhoods, and not to mention the tens of people who did die during the George Floyd riots.
So, you know, and it's the same thing with the way people are reacting to this shooting.
I talked about this a little last week with saying things like, oh, why didn't he jump aside?
Why didn't he fire, you know, to wound her, you know, and all this?
And the answer is because he wasn't in a TV show.
He was in real life where in kinetic situations like this, you have to make decisions in the confines of the second.
And you should privilege the life of a law enforcement officer if he is doing his duty, if he's not just beating people up and going crazy.
I privilege the life of the officer over anybody who's trying to drive a car even vaguely in his direction.
So now Democrats are moving to incite these riots, hoping to burn the place down again, to go back to the glory days of George Floyd, when at the time I told you they thought they had won and were shocked to find that Donald Trump was going to overcome all the prosecutions and all the impeachments and all the demonization and become president again.
They were shocked that that happened.
They thought they had won the day and the socialist paradise was on its way.
But listen, just listen to Hakeem Jeffries.
Now, I picked him.
There's so many I could have picked, so many clips I could have picked, but I picked Jeffries because he is the House minority leader.
Listen to what he says about this shooting.
It's cut four.
The American people thought that the Trump administration was going to target violent felons who are here in the country illegally.
But instead, we see American citizens like Renee Nicole Good being gunned down in cold blood without justification.
Taxpayer dollars are being used by the Department of Homeland Security and ICE To unleash extremism on the streets of America by individuals who are showing depraved indifference to human life.
Now, first of all, it's not extremism to send federal law enforcement officers to enforce federal law.
I don't know what the definition of extremism is exactly, but I'm pretty sure it's not that.
Remember, it's immigration and customs enforcement, and that's what they're doing.
And so I don't think that that's extremism.
Secondly, to call this in cold blood in the midst of that chaos that was going on, it's only in cold blood if you're watching it on TV.
It's not in cold blood if the car is pointed at you, and it's not depraved indifference to life.
I'm sure he's very upset about it.
Nobody wants that situation to happen.
So this is just incendiary, and we saw with Tim Walsh threatening civil war by saying he was going to deploy the state National Guard against federal agents, which is the definition of civil war.
But he's not real.
It's not real.
He's not really going to do that because it's all happening in his imagination.
And he's talking about, they're talking about defunding law enforcement.
Here's the lovely and talented Ilhan Omar.
The fact that this woman even has a leadership role in Congress tells you just how far gone these guys are, how, in fact, extremist they are.
She is speaking for the progressive caucus in the House, which is about half the Democrats in the House.
Here's Ilhan Omar saying, defund ICE, cut five.
And so today, I am glad to announce that the Congressional Progressive Caucus has adopted an official position to hold ICE accountable.
Our caucus members will oppose all funding for immigration enforcement in any appropriation bills until meaningful reforms are enacted to end militarized policing practices.
So this is, it's interesting.
There are even now some Democrats, because the midterms are coming.
There are even now some Democrats going, no, you know, defund the police was a big loser for us.
You know, remember, they took that survey about why they lost, but they won't release it.
And part of it was, I'm sure, was this.
And part of it, I'm sure, was transgenderism.
And it's like the last thing they want is this stuff coming back, but they can't stop 100 members of the progressive caucus, which is dominating the Democrat Party.
And they're revolutionaries.
And I want to be really specific about what I mean by that.
There was a really interesting article in, I think, in Tablet magazine, it wasn't tablet, by Bernard Henri Levy, I think he's pronounced.
He's a BHL, they call him in France, and he's a philosopher.
I'd put him in the middle left.
You know, he's not a right-winger, but he's a centrist, I would guess.
And he's talking about a place where a real revolution is threatening, namely Iran.
And he says, what has been happening for the past eight days in the cities of ancient Persia is not a revolt, it's a revolution.
The difference, both tiny and immense.
A revolt, Iranians have known at least five revolts in the last 15 years, demands reform, the mitigation of misery, negotiation.
A revolution expects none of that and does not accommodate at all the hated order of things.
It does not seek the adjustment of the regime, but it's replacement.
And this is what how the Democrats picture themselves in their fantasy of what's happening.
They are going to replace capitalism with socialism.
They're going to replace, what was it, Zorhan Mamdani said, the coldness of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.
Have you ever seen collectivism?
He's known the warmth is that fire burning your ass because that's what they do to make sure you're a collectivist.
So, you know, they don't, the Democrats don't want a better America.
They want a different America.
They want another America.
They always, they never say what a great country this is.
They always say the promise of America, the promise of America has not been fulfilled.
Well, you know, that's absurd.
The promise of America has been more than fulfilled.
What hasn't been fulfilled is the promise of an ideal state, which of course is never going to happen.
The Promise Unfulfilled 00:04:16
But it's really important to understand that in real life, in real life, where words mean what they mean, This is pure authoritarianism.
Socialism, whether it's democratic socialism or not, is always authoritarian.
Why?
Because it depends on the redistribution of wealth.
And that is a passive term, the redistribution of wealth, as if the wealth were going to get up and redistribute itself.
But no, here's the big surprise in real life, where it's not on TV, where it's not in a book, where it's not in a university class, where it's actually happening.
Someone has to redistribute the wealth, which means you have to give the power to the government to take the money you earn and give it to somebody that the government thinks should have it more.
Okay, and you can just imagine, since power corrupts and absolute power corrupts, absolutely, you can just imagine how that works out all the time.
And why?
If you vote for that, it's still oppression, right?
You can vote for all kinds of things.
I can vote to have you killed and the majority can come along with me.
It's still murder, and this is still stealing and still taking away people's time and dominating their lives through government.
The Democrats are revolutionaries who want to whine and cry when they're treated like they're acting like revolutionaries.
Why are you using real bullets?
And that's because they're unreal revolutionaries in an unreal world of their imaginations.
The Iranians are real revolutionaries in a very real world where they're being slaughtered by the thousands.
Now, President Trump Wednesday said that he had heard the murders had stopped, but it's really hard to tell.
They've cut off the internet.
There's a no-fly zone over.
It's really hard to keep track of it.
I'm assuming we have spies over there, but still, it's really hard to know what's going on.
We don't even know how many people have died.
The numbers have gone from 2,000 to 12,000, but obviously they were mowing people down.
And what is the left revolting about?
America is a place where laws are made by elected officials, where they can be overturned peacefully by vote, where the leaders can be thrown out by vote, and where, until Barack Obama and Joe Biden, they obeyed the decisions of the courts and the laws and enforced the laws of the legislators.
You may remember that Obama said he would not enforce the laws against gay marriage.
And I said at the time, well, that makes him king, right?
If the legislator says this is the law, the Constitution, Article II, says the president must take care that the laws be faithfully enforced.
That's the law of the land.
The president's job is to take care that the laws be faithfully enforced.
When he says, yeah, we're not prosecuting for that anymore.
That's not prosecutorial discretion.
That is actually being a king.
And of course, we know that Biden said he wouldn't enforce the Supreme Court's ruling that he couldn't cancel student debt.
He bragged about it.
So except for those guys, this is still a free country.
This is a country where we make the decisions.
We can change the Constitution.
We can do all these things.
Instead, they're out there throwing things at law enforcement officers and pretending that they are in a revolution and then being shocked when they're treated.
Because when you're in a revolution, the regime kills you.
That's what they do.
That's why when our founders pledged their lives in sacred honor, they weren't kidding.
They'd be hanged if we lost the American Revolution.
So that's really happening in Iran.
And I think it should be humiliating there.
The Democrats, of course, are comparing Iran to what's happening in Minneapolis.
Ha ha ha.
They should be ashamed of the courage that the Iranians are showing.
And Trump is in this interesting position.
What's he supposed to do?
He's threatened violence if they keep killing people.
He now seems to be holding back because he's heard they haven't killed people.
I don't think anybody, certainly not me, wants to go to war in Iran.
I may have said Iraq before, but I mean Iran.
Nobody wants to go to war in Iran.
Again, we're done fighting in the Middle East.
We don't want soldiers on the ground.
And, you know, we've been, I was talking to Rob Finnerty at Newsmax yesterday, and he made an excellent point.
He said, you know, this amazing, these amazing, successful, efficient missions we had in Venezuela and the bombing of Iran's nuclear facility, you know, things can still go wrong.
Our military is fantastic, but still, this is very, very dangerous situations.
Liposomal Glutathione Defense 00:02:17
Things can go terribly wrong.
And we don't know what it would set off to topple the regime.
But I do think it's time to find out if the CIA ever does anything besides write letters saying that Hunter Biden's laptop isn't real.
Instead of running games on American citizens, it would be interesting to know if they're still capable of implanting themselves secretly in a country like Iran and maybe helping the people who love freedom.
Meanwhile, here, the people who do not love freedom but want to replace it with socialist authoritarianism should be arrested and put in prison for the way they're treating our law enforcement officers.
This episode is brought to you by Roe Nutrition and their liposomal glutathione.
And my listeners can get 20% off by using code Clavin at checkout.
And I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, what are you talking about?
Well, here is the uncomfortable truth.
You are exposed to toxins every single day, whether you want to be or not.
Industrial chemicals, heavy metals, pesticides, plastic residues, they're in the air, the water, the food supply.
And over time, they don't just disappear.
They accumulate.
And when that load builds up, your body pays the price.
Fatigue, brain fog, slower recovery, systems that just don't work the way they used to.
Glutathione is the body's primary detox molecule.
It's what your liver uses to bind to toxins, neutralize them, and get them out of your system.
If glutathione levels drop, detox slows.
And for most people today, levels are depleted.
The problem is that most glutathione supplements don't survive digestion.
They never make it into your bloodstream.
Roe's liposomal glutathione is different.
It's liquid and liposomal, designed to protect the glutathione so your body can actually absorb and use it.
This isn't about magic.
It's about giving your body the tool it already relies on to defend itself.
If you believe in personal responsibility and strengthening yourself instead of ignoring the problem, this is a practical, intelligent step, and we value intelligence here.
I just received some of this Roe in the mail.
I'm excited to try it and see how it works.
You can go to RoNutrition.com and use code Clavin and get 20% off today if and only if you know how to spell Clavin, which is K-L-A-V-A-N, no ease in Clavin.
Chapter 2, Medium and Sane.
Living in Theory 00:11:24
Now, this separation from reality is not just a modern phenomenon, but it actually highlights the way that screens emphasize a flaw in the human mind.
There's a story I read a long time ago, and I wish I could find it, and I just cannot remember where I read it.
I read it in a history book, but it's a really good story, so I'm going to tell it from memory, and I'm probably not getting exactly right, but it's the basic idea of the story.
In the Middle Ages, the philosopher Aristotle, right, was absolutely revered by Muslims, by Christians.
They just thought he was next to scripture.
He was the truth.
Dante called him the master of those who know.
But Aristotle lived in the 300 BCs, and so he didn't, you know, all this science wasn't up to date.
And he didn't really know how blood worked in the human body.
He thought the heart was the center of all thinking and emotion and that created blood and sent it out to nourish, you know, the body.
But he didn't really know how it worked.
And the story was about a doctor in the Middle Ages who got a chance to study the inside of a corpse.
And he said, you know, it would almost seem like blood circulates if I didn't know my Aristotle.
So in other words, I would believe in the reality that's right in front of my eyes if I weren't enslaved to this theory.
And this happens in America and everywhere every day.
This is a flaw in the human mind.
Jason Riley wrote an interesting column at the Wall Street Journal this week. pointing out that Mississippi is going through an educational miracle.
I mean, this is really interesting.
This is, you know, throughout America, ever since we got the Department of Education, reading and math skills have tanked.
And for fourth and eighth graders recently, they were assessed, they showed the lowest test score in decades on reading exams.
A third, this is nationwide, a third of high school seniors scored below basic, which is the bottom threshold, and nearly half lacked the ability to perform rudimentary math computations.
So our children are falling through the cracks because of the teachers' unions, which want the rules that they want and have all these theories about how you teach that don't work, including theories like, well, we just won't test them anymore.
That'll make things better for them.
You know, which really, of course, leaves, especially poor kids and black kids, poor black kids, it leaves them just absolutely stranded.
It's ridiculous.
So what did Mississippi do?
And this was noticed by, hold your breath, it was noticed by the New York Times.
They said it did not triumph in education.
Mississippi didn't triumph by relying on some of the most common proposals held up as solutions in education, like reducing class sizes or dramatically boosting student funding.
Rather, the state pushed through a vast list of other changes from the top down, including changing the way reading is taught in an approach known as the science of reading, but also embracing contentious, meaning controversial, school accountability policies other states have backed away from.
In other words, they expected the children to learn and they taught them and they tested them and they overcame the teachers' unions weren't that strong in Mississippi and they're spending less than almost, I think, any other state in the country doing this.
You play the reality card and you break out of your theories and everything works out better.
And this is one of my favorite lines from the great, great German writer, Johan Goethe.
He said, theory is gray, but the golden tree of life springs evergreen.
So I'm watching the Supreme Court this week, and obviously I opened with making fun of them, but it really did deserve it.
The justices had to somehow keep a straight face while discussing whether states could ban men in skirts from stealing the achievements of girl athletes.
These are cases from Idaho and West Virginia where men pretending to be girls sued in order to be able to play girl sports.
Now, just to show you why I was making fun of Katanji Brown Jackson, here is one of the questions she put forward, the argument she made.
This cut six.
You have the overarching classification.
You know, everybody has to be play on the team that is the same as their sex at birth.
But then you have a gender identity definition that is operating within that, meaning a distinction, meaning that for cisgender girls, they can play consistent with their gender identity.
For transgender girls, they can't.
So for those of you who speak English, I'll translate.
What she's saying is it's not fair that a girl should be put in a girl category, but a man who thinks he's a girl can't be put in the girl category.
And she does that by using language like cisgender and gender identity and all these things that don't exist, that only exist in the language.
That's like dragon is a word and we know what it means, but it doesn't exist.
It has no reality.
And my question is, why are our justices wasting their time with this?
Why don't they just say this is not a reality?
Why do they have to be polite and use the preferred pronouns?
It's just absolutely ridiculous.
And the whole thing doesn't make any sense.
I mean, Gorsuch made this inevitable in the Bostock case where he said you couldn't refuse to hire a transgender person because that's treating a person differently because of his sex, right?
So if somebody comes in, a guy comes in wearing a skirt, a woman can come in wearing a skirt.
Why can't a guy come in wearing a skirt?
He says it's discriminatory, but that's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
It's living in this theoretical world.
Here's Justice Alito saying the obvious thing is cut seven.
He's talking to an ACLU lawyer.
Is it not necessary for there to be, for equal protection purposes, if that is challenged under the Equal Protection Clause, an understanding of what it means to be a boy or a girl or a man or a woman?
Yes, Your Honor.
And what is that definition for equal protection purposes?
What does it mean to be a boy or a girl or a man or a woman?
Sorry, I misunderstood your question.
I think that the underlying enactment, whatever it was, the policy, the law, we'd have to have an understanding of how the state or the government was understanding that term to figure out whether or not someone was excluded.
We do not have a definition for the court.
And we don't take issue with the, we're not disputing the definition here.
What we're saying is that the way it applies in practice is to exclude birth sex males categorically from women's teams and that there's a subset of those birth sex males where it doesn't make sense to do so according to the state's own interest.
Well, how can a court determine whether there's discrimination on the basis of sex without knowing what sex means?
Yes, how, indeed.
Here's the thing.
Reality hasn't changed at all.
They're just theorizing it into a different position.
So let's just take a look.
There are traits that women have, speaking very generally.
There are traits that most women have that we think of as womanly because we like women and we think, gee, these are nice traits that most women have and we benefit from them and they're part of the beauty of life.
And there are traits that men have and we think we benefit from those and they are part of the beauty of life.
And of course, there are negative traits that go along with those traits.
And we all roll our eyes at the opposite sex sometimes because of the things that they do that we don't understand.
But those are basic things that are generalizations that we make.
And so then we use words like feminine, acting like a woman.
We use words like masculine, acting like a man.
So then somebody comes along and says, well, if you're acting like a man, you are a man.
But we always knew there were women who didn't have feminine traits.
We always knew there were men who were effeminate.
We know those things.
And we kind of look down on them a little bit because we like the blessing of the divisions of the sexes.
We find it's a blessing.
We find that if you put the two of them together, sometimes new life appears.
It's magic.
I don't know how it happens, but sometimes new life appears and life goes on and the generations continue.
What they're doing is they're turning it ass backwards.
They're saying that because we found out these generalized traits are there and used a word to describe them, the word then becomes the thing itself.
And it's the way that the, I mean, if I came in and said, you know, I identify as a lion and I want to live in the lion cage, civility would not require that I be eaten alive.
The justices say, well, you know, Mr. Lion, you know, no, it's delusional.
It has nothing to do with reality.
And how is it possible, you may ask yourself, how is it possible that a professor who's unhappy at being a lesbian, Judith Butler, and who believes in German idealism, which of course is an interesting stuff, but not, you know, doesn't change reality either.
Why that she writes a book in which she says drag queens are essentially what all sex is.
That's what she basically says.
Drag queen is just like everybody else.
We're all dressing up as the sex we are, but we're not.
We're just emphasizing the sex we are because we like the division, the vive le difference.
You know, we like the difference between men and women because it's the source of all our happiness, all our joy, and all of us, and the source of all of us.
So why does this theory just wipe away the reality such that these justices, who are very learned men in Katanji Brown Jackson, why that they have to make fools of themselves operating in these questions?
And this is the world that we're living in now because of the Democrats, because of their theories that have detached from reality, and because we live in this media world, this world of medium cool, where we are sucked in to that reality so that even the people who know it's untrue, like Justice Zelito, have to speak as if they respected what is entirely a delusion.
You know, many people get life insurance because they're thinking about how important their family is in their lives.
I got it because I was thinking how important I am in their lives, you see, because they need to have somebody around who is taking care of them and bringing in some dough.
And, you know, there's this weight that sits on you when you've got a family.
You want to make sure they're taken care of and that everything is in place if something bad happens.
Life insurance, it can feel overwhelming to even know where to start.
And that's why you want to hear about Policy Genius.
It's an online marketplace where you can compare quotes from top insurers side by side, completely free.
No jumping around between websites, no endless phone calls.
What really stands out is their team actually works for you.
They are licensed agents who help you figure out what you need, not what some company wants to sell you.
They walk you through coverage amounts, prices, all of it, no guesswork, just straight answers.
They handle the paperwork, answer your questions, and honestly take that weight off your shoulders.
You get clarity on what you need and can move forward fast.
It's the perfect time to lock this in and start 2026 with real peace of mind.
Check out Policy Genius.
They've got thousands of five-star reviews from people who finally found the right policy for their needs.
You'll thank yourself later with Policy Genius.
Real users have gotten 20-year, $2 million policies for just $53 a month.
Ease the weight of protecting a wonderful life.
Head to policygenius.com slash Clavin to compare life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you could save.
That's policygenius.com slash, how do you spell it?
K-L-A-V-A-N.
Chapter three, The One-Eyed Man is King.
Ryan Johnson's Impact 00:10:01
You know the old expression, right?
In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
It means when everyone's a fool, somebody who's only half a fool will rule over them.
The problem we have in America, though, is that for at least 30 years, we have been a kingdom of one-eyed men.
We're like a deck of cards that only has one-eyed jacks in it.
And it creates a different problem that we are being ruled by what we see, essentially.
The news, I mean, this is old stuff, but just to reiterate, the news, education, Hollywood, they can only see out of the left eye.
And yes, I'll talk about the fact that this is changing, but it's still true.
And it skews the world, even for those of us who see out of our right eye or out of both eyes, you know, who can see clearly because we are being sucked into the reality of our screens and because there's a glitch in the human mind that allows the organizing principle of theory to seem like reality.
We start out having generalizations like men are like men and women are like women.
Most of them kind of sort of, you know, we start out with that generalization and then that hardens into a concept and then you're allowed to take that theory and change it and then change the way people see the world.
But the world itself doesn't change.
And if you're not, I cannot emphasize this enough, if you are not seeing reality truly, your life is not going to go well and neither is your polity.
So let me give you an example of how this works that just was part of what was happening to me.
I watched Ryan Johnson's latest Knives Out story on Netflix.
It's called Wake Up Dead Man.
And I want to emphasize that I really like Ryan Johnson's work.
I was very touched when the first Knives Out came out.
A lot of young people were coming up to me and saying, I never saw anything like that.
And I was laughing because it's a very old mystery trope, a big house with a bunch of related people in it.
All of them are suspects.
And the great detective comes in and software.
It's Agatha Christie.
If you've never seen Then There Were None, you should watch that film or read that book.
It's a classic of the craft.
But even that is sort of a commentary on the genre.
But young people had never seen this before.
And so Ryan Johnson did very well with it.
And he's now got it into a series.
And this is the third one.
And they're very entertaining.
And they're filled with the actors love being in them.
And they're filled with really good actors who some of them are not like stars.
So they are happy to get big parts where they get to play stuff.
And they're all just so much fun.
I had a great time watching it.
A little long, but it was a great time watching it.
But Johnson's story push a left-wing agenda.
They represent a left-wing agenda.
If you saw the first Knives Out, it was the story of corrupt white people.
They were just, they had aged out of their riches, and they were corrupt white people, and they had to be replaced by the virtuous Hispanic daughter of an illegal immigrant.
He's pushing this idea.
So in this new one, in Wake Up Dead Man, this is about an evil Catholic priest gathering people around them and corrupting them through their anger and through their fears.
And it's tons of fun.
And the lead character of the good priest, there's a good Catholic priest, and he's played by Joshua Connor, who's just great in it.
I think he played Prince Charles and the Crown.
And the whole cast is terrific.
Anyway, and to Ryan Johnson's credit, it gives religion a chance to make its case.
Daniel Craig is the big detective, Benoit Blanc, and he's a total atheist and he dismisses all belief with very, with great disdain.
And at first you think, oh, this is going to be another left-wing rant against religion.
But no, he lets the priest have his say and he shows you that beautiful things can happen through the right kind of religion.
But the evil is defined entirely through conservative politics.
Everything evil in it is because of, identified as, conservative politics, right?
So I'll give you a perfect example.
Here is a failed conservative politician who, in his bitterness, has become part of this little cultic Catholic, outlying church, which I doubt the Catholic Church was allowed to exist very long, but so what?
It's a movie.
And it's played by Darryl McCormick.
And he explains to the good priest, he explains why he failed to win elections.
This is cut eight.
I was the GOP Golden Boy, the great hope.
I've got connections and ins and outs.
I was on the cusp, but I just couldn't engage voters.
I didn't have that cult of personality thing, I guess.
It's hard connecting with people in a genuine way.
I know.
And I tried everything.
Believe me, I hammered the race thing.
I hammered the gender thing, the trans thing, the border thing, the homeless thing, the war thing, the election thing, the abortion thing, the climate thing.
Thing about induction stoves, Israel, library books, vaccines, pronouns, AK-47, socialism, BLM, CRT, the CDC, DEI, 5G, everything.
All of it I did.
Nobody, just nothing.
So, again, a funny speech, and there are things on the right, and things overdone on the right, and it's always legitimate to attack political parties.
That's not my problem.
Like I said, I enjoyed it.
But if, if there's never a show in which the guy comes in and says, well, I tried DEI.
I tried selling transgender people, but they wouldn't buy it.
I tried censoring people and pretending it was misinformation so I could shut down the right.
None of that, obviously, would get on the air, especially on Netflix, which is a world company.
I pointed out that there's a picture on Apple TV.
I pointed this out a long time ago, years ago now, a picture on Apple TV with Tom Hanks called Greyhound, I think, where he plays a captain, a ship's captain during World War II, and all he does is read the Bible and kill Nazis.
And I said on the air, I said, why aren't right-wingers supporting this?
This is a great show.
And all he does is read the Bible and kill Nazis.
What's not the like?
And all I can say about that show is that it's never been reviewed.
Nobody else has talked about it.
Nobody else on the right has praised it.
And yet it's in the top 10 of their movies now, right now.
It is in the top 10 of Apple TV movies because that's what people want to see.
They want to see people read the Bible and kill Nazis.
That's a good show.
But you can only get talented guys like Ryan Johnson writing entertaining films on the left, talented guys writing entertaining films that are openly on the right and that don't have people in masks like the Dark Knight.
They're just not going to get made or they're going to get made at much, much smaller rates.
And to sum up what I'm saying, there is a glitch in the human mind that allows ideas to erase reality.
There's a feeling of truth about film and TV that plays into and emphasizes that glitch.
And they are cool mediums that allow us to supply the emotion which sucks us into the reality.
And we are only getting one side.
And it is distorting.
And every, you know, I would say if you exclude, you know, disease and natural disasters and the normal corruption generated by original sin, almost everything that is dysfunctional in our country grows out of this cyclops culture that we're in that only sees things out of the left side of their face.
Entertainers who only, you know, the fact that every late night comedian, I know I hammer this, but it's important, every late night comedian has the same ideas, thinks he's a radical, thinks he's brave, thinks he's speaking truth to power because he's saying the same thing as everybody else, the same damn thing.
And if you put on a pro-Trump late night comedian, he skyrockets.
You only have to watch Gutfeld on Fox, who's got better ratings than anybody else.
But why can't he be on CBS or NBC or ABC?
If Barry Weiss goes in and says, let's play fair, Barry Weiss, a middle-of-the-road leftist.
If she comes in and says, let's play fair at CBS, oh my God, oh my God, oh, this is the death of news.
This is the worst thing ever.
And they are going to give her hell and then report on it as if it were just something that happened.
Oh, it's her controversial tenor at CBS.
It's not controversial tenor.
This is a concerted effort to silence one half of the country and take it out on Barry Weiss, who doesn't even represent that half, who's just trying to be fair.
She's just trying to give you the news.
So, you know, what does that do?
It makes one half of the country self-certain.
It makes the left self-certain so they think they can go and burn down Minneapolis in the full knowledge that the New York Times will then go on TV and say, well, that's not violence.
And that the TV reporters will go on and say, it's mostly peaceful.
You know, there's fire over the whole city, but it's mostly peaceful.
They know that's going to happen.
So they feel completely entitled to destroy this beautiful country that's given them everything they have.
And you notice they're all white people.
You know, they're all people who are sitting around watching too much TV.
But it gives them that entitlement.
And what does it do to the right?
It makes us angry.
It makes us retaliatory.
It makes us reactionary.
So that instead of saying, hey, you know, I don't want to silence Ryan Johnson.
I just want Ryan right-wing Johnson to also be able to make his mysteries.
Instead of saying that, we start to turn off our TVs.
We start to stop watching and we just become a culture unto ourselves.
That is not the way we want to go.
I don't want to live in a country where I can't turn to the guy next to me and say, you know, you're a left-winger.
I disagree with you.
Explain to me what the hell you're doing here because he's too busy throwing rocks at police officers.
You know, you can't talk to a person who is doing that, and he's doing it because he sees only one thing.
And this is, if you wonder why I hammer at the culture, if you wonder why I keep saying this, this is why.
This is what it does to the human brain.
It makes us angry.
It makes us separate.
It makes us entitled.
It makes us act as if we were living in reality when we were really living on TV.
And the future of this country, especially after Trump is gone, the future of this country depends on our changing that situation.
Getting a wide variety of whole food ingredients into my diet is key.
And for me, our sponsor, Balance of Nature's whole health system, makes it simple.
Living On TV 00:11:14
With their convenient blend of fruits and vegetables in easy-to-take capsules, I can ensure I'm getting essential nutrients every day without the hassle of prep work or meal planning, which is exactly my style when it comes to wellness because I don't know how to make a meal.
Balance of Nature's whole health system supplements are incredibly versatile and easy to work into your daily routine.
The fiber and spice supplement blends smoothly into your favorite drinks, adding a warm aromatic depth from its spice blend.
And if you prefer, you can even open up the fruits and veggie capsules and mix the powder directly into a smoothie or sprinkle it over your meals.
I can't be bothered.
The whole thing about a capsule is it's easy.
What makes these supplements special is that they're packed with 47 ingredients from 100% real whole fruits, vegetables, spices, and fibers.
Everything from xylem husk and flax seed to cinnamon, turmeric, mango, pineapple, wild blueberry, shiitake mushrooms, spinach, kale, cayenne pepper, and so much more.
It's a simple way to give your body the nutrition it needs every day.
I mean, look at me.
I died three weeks ago from old age.
I'm doing great.
This New Year's, lock in 50% off for one year.
When you subscribe to the Whole Health System Supplements as a preferred customer, go to balanceofnature.com.
Final chapter, Scott Adams Goes to Jesus.
The ultimate reality on this earthly plane, of course, is death.
And I actually want to talk about death a little bit as a guarantor of reality.
One of the ways, one of the reasons I write about murder is because it's how you know you've become evil if you start to approve of murder, to participate in murder or even just cheer on murder.
That's how you know your philosophy is wrong.
That is one of the ways you know your philosophy is wrong when you start to say, like, yeah, just kill that guy.
That was great.
So Scott Adams died.
And I did not know Scott well.
I interviewed him very early on when he went from change from being the Dilbert cartoonist to talking about politics.
I had him on my show almost immediately.
I think his first book about that subject came out.
But I really liked him.
I really liked him when I watched him.
He was charming.
He was gracious.
He was very, very rarely mean to the people he disagreed with, though they were absolutely brutal to him.
He was original and eccentric, and I just enjoyed him.
I must have disagreed with him.
Well, I disagreed with his premises almost always, but then he gave very good advice.
It kind of reminds me of Jordan Peterson, who I don't agree with his Jungianism, but he gives very good advice, and I think he's very helpful to people.
And I thought the same thing about Scott Adams.
People loved him.
And I think, like I said, his advice on how to deal with things and how to be a success were really good.
Even though when he would explain them, I would just sit there and think, well, you know, he's an eccentric and it's different and it's original.
I like hearing original things even when I disagree with him.
And, you know, he also managed to be very popular while being gracious, which is really hard in this society.
I remember when Glenn Beck nearly ended his career because he wrote a book saying we should break our addiction to anger.
And it's like, you know, no, absolutely not.
You know, there's nothing people defend more fiercely than their addictions.
You know, they say, give up pot, give up porn, give up anger.
No, I hate you.
I hate you for saying that.
All right.
All right.
Destroy yourself.
Good.
Now I like you again.
But Scott actually pulled that off.
And he made the internet better.
You know, the internet can be a really ugly, terrible place.
And he made it better.
And I have a rule about making jokes about people dying.
Like I almost very, very, very rarely, if ever, will I do an opening satire around somebody getting killed, you know, or somebody dying young or something like that, because it's not funny and it happens to all of us.
And it's because it happens to all of us, it should remind us that, you know, that maybe graciousness is a good thing because none of us is going to be around all that long and all of us are going to need help in the end and all of us are going to go down that dark hole into we don't know what.
And assuming my faith is true, which of course I believe it is, people will now enter into a judgment that is far beyond our understanding.
I mean, everything we say about it, I'm sure, is inherently false.
I do not believe we know one whit of the love and mercy and beauty of God.
I think all our rules go down the drain when you're actually facing God.
And look, I'm not going to pretend to shed a tear over, you know, Adolf Hitler or Ayatollah Khomeini or whatever, but I'm not going to pretend, oh, you know, they were people too.
No, I'm glad they're gone when they're gone, but I don't know what God sees when he sees them.
And if I get to heaven and they're there, I'll be startled, but I won't be shocked.
And, you know, we've become so separated from reality and maybe the reality of death most of all, maybe that's what we're running away from.
We now greet it like it's some kind of punishment or, you know, as if our judgment holds good.
We should just keep pounding away at people.
And the petty cruelty and dishonesty and wickedness with which Scott's passing was greeted on the left just tells you everything you need to know about the degraded, violent, lawless, and petty, especially reality of leftism.
The New York Times says Scott Adams, creator of the satirical Dilbert Comet, dies at 68.
His Chronicles of a Corporate Cubicle Dweller was widely distributed until racist comments on his podcast led newspapers to cut their ties with him.
Washington Post, his three-panel comic strip was once published in more than 2,000 newspapers.
Publishers cut ties with Mr. Adams after he made racist comments on a YouTube live screen.
People magazine, Scott Adams, disgraced Dilbert Creator, dies at 68.
You know, shame on these people.
I do not know.
In fact, at People Magazine, they actually took the person's name.
I think Matt Walsh said the person's name, and they took it off and said, staff, because they're ashamed of themselves.
You don't have to hide.
I don't say anything anonymously because I'm not ashamed of anything I say.
And if I am ashamed, I come back and apologize for it.
But they took the name off because they want to say it without facing the consequences of what small, petty, wicked, mean, stupid people they actually are.
Scott never said a racist thing.
He was talking about a Rasmussen poll that said that more than 50% of black people thinks it's not okay to be white.
And this is what he said, cut nine.
If nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people, according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll, that's a hate group.
That's a hate group.
And I don't want to have anything to do with them.
And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people.
Wherever you have to go, just get away.
All you have to do is reverse the colors and you understand that that's not, it's a controversial thing to say, but it's not a racist thing to say.
He was talking about a poll, very clear.
And, you know, the left has another theory with which they hope to trace reality where they say, well, black people can't be racist.
But yes, they can because they're people.
That's the operating word in black people, right?
And in Jewish people and in Catholic people and all of it, it's their people.
They're all going to be exactly the same in their hearts of hearts.
So it's just terrible.
But there was another thing that happened.
And at the end, Scott accepted Jesus Christ.
And he did it in a Scott Adams eccentric original way, which is not that original.
It's what was called Pascal's Wager, a famous mathematician who wrote a beautiful book called Pensee Thoughts.
And he talked about the fact that you get so much, namely eternity in heaven, from believing in Christ and you lose nothing by believing in Christ.
Why not risk the bet?
So this is the way Scott put it.
After he died, his first wife, I can't help but notice this.
It was his first wife, Shelly, who came back to take care of him after his hot younger wife, second wife, took off and was nowhere to be found in his moment of crisis.
And I just, I don't want to say that as a criticism of Scott Adams, as a warning to the rest of you.
I think it's remember, you know, that first wife is your wife.
And she's the one who came back.
And she read Scott's final statement.
This is just a little bit of it, cut 10.
Many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go.
I'm not a believer, but I have to admit, the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks so attractive to me.
So here I go.
I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and look forward to spending an eternity with him.
The part about me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven.
I won't need any more convincing than that.
I hope I'm still qualified for entry.
So very, obviously that's his statement that he wrote before he died because he knew he wasn't going to be able to deliver it himself.
Very moving.
I was very moved by it.
But there were some people online where everybody is, right?
There were some people, Christians, who said, no, that doesn't count because he's not a believer.
Believer.
All I could think, you know, and they said, this is how you have to do it.
And you can't do this if you haven't done that, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And that's not going to count.
So I have to say, I looked at that, you know, and I thought, like, with friends like Christians, Jesus doesn't need enemies.
I mean, again, this was an original thinker, an eccentric guy.
He's something obviously I identify with in the thought outside the box.
And his conversion was in keeping with this tradition of Pascal's wager.
And I would say, if I had to guess, and now this is my theory, this is my theory of the case.
I would say that if there's anyone who's not going to be startled and shocked and offended by the fact that an eccentric, original guy had an eccentric, original way of accepting Jesus Christ, it's going to be Jesus Christ, who made him what he is.
And, you know, God is not, this, I can tell you, and it's my theory, but it happens to be true, all right?
God is not shocked or surprised by anything you think or anything you believe or anything you've done.
And like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, if he sees you even turn in his direction, if he sees you even come over the horizon, he will put down what he's doing and rush to welcome you home.
So Godspeed, Scott Adams.
The wait is almost over.
Episodes one and two of the Pendragon cycle, Rise of the Merlin, begins streaming on Daily Wire Plus in one week.
A legend, 1500 years in the making, brought to life as a full-scale cinematic epic after three years of production across two continents.
Set before King Arthur, before Camelot, before the legend you think you know.
Episodes one and two premiere January 22nd, exclusively on Daily Wire Plus.
Be among the first to experience the Pendragon cycle, Rise of the Merlin.
Join now at dailywire.com slash Pendragon.
Clavin Clapbacks.
Feelings of Abandonment 00:06:33
As of today, I'm going to re-identify as white.
Yeah!
I'm going to do that too.
I'm identifying as white.
Clavin clapbacks, Clavin with a K, clapbacks with a K, Clavinclapbacks at dailywire.com.
Write in, we'd love to hear from you, and we'll answer anything we can.
We don't have a lot of time, but we'll answer the ones that we can.
And you can ask about anything you want, personal questions, religious questions, political questions, anything else that comes to your mind.
One is from Joshua.
He says, Hi, Andrew.
I wanted to comment on what you said about Megan Kelly, which I said I thought that she was in a different category than guys like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes.
I thought that in her anger at being criticized in part by Ben Shapiro, who I completely agreed with, by the way.
I completely agreed with what Ben Shapiro said about Fuentes and Tucker and all the rest.
But by bringing her into it, I thought he was making a category error that she is not the same thing.
She has been trying to play all sides.
And, you know, I don't agree with her, but I don't judge her either.
It's her life.
So he says, and I agree with your point in general, says Joshua.
However, I believe there's more to it.
Megan made her name as a no-BS journalist who challenges everyone irrespective of the side they're on for refusing to do so with Tucker or Candace is her abandoning the very thing most people appreciated about her.
Should she not be called out for that, even for her own sake, since many people are looking for that kind of commentary?
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this, Joshua.
I answer this because I went on her show and was not, you know, I would say some people attack me for it.
And I explained my reasoning that I expect certain things of me.
I expect myself to speak the truth.
And even if it cost me, you know, my Hollywood career or some of my listenership.
And you have seen me do that again and again.
And I will continue to do that because that is what I think is required of me.
But when I was in Hollywood, for instance, there were a lot of conservatives I knew who were big mouths behind the scenes, but then would go out and just do whatever they were told, including participate in pictures that had a left-wing slant.
And I never did that, but I never unfriended those people because they weren't the origination.
They weren't originating those ideas and doing those things.
They were just trying to make a living.
And I don't judge people for what they get themselves involved in.
And we all, I've seen, there's no one I haven't seen compromise his values at a moment when their ambition, their money, their careers were at stake.
Everybody has made that error.
And I try to make it as little as I possibly can.
So I think, yeah, do you have to watch Megan Kelly?
No, you don't.
You can say, I don't like her anymore.
She's not doing her job anymore, and I'm not going to watch that.
And I think that's fine.
And I hope that she gets the message because I think right now, in her anger, she's saying things that she shouldn't be saying.
And she's giving Tucker and Candace credence that they don't deserve.
And they are actually doing something wicked.
And somebody else wrote in and said that I'm obsessed with Tucker.
No, I think he's in danger.
I think he's going to ruin JD Vance's chances to be president.
And I think that they're betting that that's the future, that anti-Semitic, you know, identitarian, which is a word for racism, stuff that they're doing, but it's not the future.
And spoiler alert.
And I think it's going to drag JD Vance down if he doesn't put on his big boy pants and separate himself from it.
I know they get a lot of listeners, by the way, but they're have you noticed that, like, is anybody paying attention to Candace anymore?
No, because no matter how many listeners she has, they're the kind of people who listen to Candace, and nobody cares about what they think because they're not thinking very clearly.
And I think eventually that's going to happen to Tucker, too, when it becomes clear what he's doing.
Dear Clavin, I desperately need advice.
I recently gave birth to my third child, an adorable boy.
I love him.
The pregnancy was unplanned and extremely difficult.
I'm asking for help because I'm struggling with feelings of bitterness in the aftermath.
Normally, the ladies in my church bring meals for the week following a birth.
I don't know if it was because I had them right after Thanksgiving, but no one brought me anything.
My husband refused to take his paternity leave.
He's apologized, and I know he feels guilty about it.
Still, I can't help feeling like everyone turned their backs on me when I needed them most.
I find myself not even wanting to pray or read my Bible because I feel like God also abandoned me when I needed him.
I know I just need to get over it and suck it up, but I can't seem to move on.
I can't even type this out now without crying.
If you can give me any advice, even if it's to tell me to just get over myself, it would be greatly appreciated.
Yeah, no, I'm not going to tell you to get over yourself.
Giving birth is a big deal.
It's from a woman, obviously, but I don't know the name.
So I'm not going to tell you to get over yourself.
What I do think you have to get over is your bitterness, or at least you have to lay it aside.
Giving birth is a tremendous experience.
It's a huge experience that men don't understand, but that stays with women all of their lives.
They will discuss it with each other all of their lives.
It is a major event like being in a war or something like that.
And you had a bad experience, and that's very unnerving and painful and hard.
And it affects the entire experience of bringing this new life into the world because it didn't go as you wanted.
When you say that you think God has abandoned you, you know that's not true, right?
If you think about it clearly, you know that's not true.
So maybe you should rethink what was happening with other people.
It was the holidays.
They're not living your life.
They thought you could take care of it.
You had other children, so they thought you were going to be okay.
So they made a mistake in not running to your side.
And your husband certainly made a mistake and feels bad about it.
What you should do is not get over yourself.
You should lay your bitterness aside and approach a friend, probably a female friend, because guys don't really get this.
Approach a female friend and say, you know, can you help me?
I'm having a hard time.
I am having a hard time.
And I feel a little bit abandoned.
I know that everybody's busy and all this stuff, but I feel a little bit abandoned.
I need some help.
I need somebody to show up and have sympathy for me and talk to me and maybe, you know, help me with the baby a little bit because I had a really bad experience.
And if you have a friend and if it's a female friend, I think they will respond.
And then you should sit down with your husband and not go for the guilt.
Don't go for the guilt, but just say, you know what, I could use a little bit of sympathy and attention here.
This is really hard.
And I felt, as I told you, I felt abandoned.
I don't want you to feel guilty about it.
I get it.
You know, maybe you didn't see it happening.
That's fine.
But I could use a little bit more attention and sympathy and help with the baby.
See if they show up then.
Because you know what?
This is a trait with women too, that women expect people to know things that sometimes they don't always know.
You know, guys deal with this all the time.
You know, why are you upset?
You should know why I'm upset.
Come to Member Block 00:03:33
Well, people can't read minds.
And sometimes they have their own lives and their own problems and their own things.
And sometimes you got to go to them and say, hey, you know, I'm in trouble.
And this goes for men too, but in this case, I think it's a very profound thing when you have a baby and it doesn't go as planned.
And so that's what that would be my recommendation.
My recommendation to the rest of you is that you should subscribe.
Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Use code claven at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.
You will find it's worth it.
We've got tons of new content coming out and it will be great.
You'll be so happy you did it.
If not, you get plunged into the clavenless week immediately instead of getting to come to member block.
And the darkness of clavenlessness is like infinity.
So it's like that, you know, there's no coming back from that.
But if you do, we'll see you next week.
And the rest of you who are members, come to Member Block.
Oh, this is an illusion.
An echo of a voice that has died.
And soon that echo will cease.
They say that Merlin is mad.
They say he was a king in Dovid.
The son of a princess of lost Atlantis.
They say the future and the past are known to him.
That the fire and the wind tell him their secrets.
That the magic of the hillfolk and druids come forth at his easy command.
They say he slew hundreds.
Hundreds, do you hear?
That the world burned and trembled at his wrath.
The Merlin died long before you and I were born.
Merlin Emirus has returned to the land of the living.
Vortigen is gone.
Room is gone.
The Saxon is here.
Saxon Hengist has assembled the greatest war host ever seen in the island of the mighty.
And before the summer is through, he means to take the throne.
And he will have it.
If we are too busy squabbling amongst ourselves to take up arms against him, here is your hope.
A king will arise to hold all Britain in his hand.
A high king who would be the wonder of the world.
You to a future of peace.
There'll be no peace in these lands till we are all dust.
Men of the island of the mighty!
You stand together!
You stand as Britons!
You stand as one.
Great darkness is falling upon this land.
These brothers are our only hope to stand against it.
Not our only hope.
They say Merlin slew 70 men with his own hands.
At Cathay, he slew 500.
No man is capable of such a thing.
Export Selection