Clavin McCarthy mocks conservative and leftist love definitions, praising The Memoirs of St. Peter’s translation while dismissing mainstream media’s portrayal of films like Pillion. He contrasts MAGA coalition’s exhaustion—citing Free Press’ sex-frequency survey—with past NFL boycotts over anthem kneeling, framing cultural decline as tied to leftist suppression of Christian values. Trump’s blunt Europe speech and Rubio’s diplomatic tone clash with AOC’s global Marxist push, while Pre-Born’s ultrasounds ($28 per) and Pendragon’s fight scenes highlight his dual focus on faith-based activism and entertainment. The episode ends urging viewers to support Daily Wire Plus, framing membership as essential to preserving moral clarity amid societal upheaval. [Automatically generated summary]
When I ponder the deeper aspects of love and intimacy, I sometimes like to consult the wisdom of our left-wing thought leaders in the same way I sometimes like to stick a pencil in my ear to see if I can make it come out the other side of my head, then slam the ball peen of a hammer down on my kneecap with full force before finally jamming a lit stick of dynamite between my buttocks and blowing my own ass.
For far too long, stodgy conservative influencers like Matt Walsh and God have defined human love as that relationship in which a man and a woman come to realize that the jigsaw complementarity of male and female bodies has become a fleshly symbol of the harmonic convergence of their individual souls so that they seek to come together through the sacrament of an indissoluble, lifelong marriage in which she submits to the authority of a member of that gender with some semblance of a capacity for reason.
while he includes within the circle of his own happiness the happiness of a member of that gender.
That can never be made happy, or if they can, it just costs an absolute fortune.
But unlike the sluggish thought of conservatives, the wisdom of leftism never allows itself to become mired in the stagnant tarpit of moral and physical reality.
Leftism is progressive like emphysema or one of those horrible degenerative diseases that you don't even want to think about because it's so much like leftism it makes you wonder how a good god could ever allow such a thing to exist.
No, leftists have now moved beyond restrictive, outdated categories like the essential nature of the human condition, and they've discovered all kinds of new wrinkles to human love that past generations never even conceived of without getting arrested, for instance through the brilliant writings of leftist academics who have dedicated their lives to the selfless work of saying ridiculous crap that only some idiot like a journalist could possibly fall for.
We now know that your gender is not determined by what gender you are.
That wouldn't be fair, you didn't.
You didn't ask to be born, and if you did ask to be born, you sure didn't ask to be born, with every cell of your body evolved over slow millennia to either create and nurture the next generation or to drag your ass to work, so the next generation and their mother don't starve to death while they're home playing Candyland or whatever the hell they do all day when you're slaving away to keep them in onesies with maybe a few bucks left over for a date night at the Olive Garden, so you don't go out of your freaking mind.
Now, leftists tell us, you can change your gender by simply lopping off the relevant body parts, then bullying all the sane people into pretending that did the trick until the gnawing suspicion that everyone is lying to you causes you to spray a crowded room with gunfire before blowing your head off.
And for those people who aren't into meaningless self-mutilation, for some reason, leftists are also able to assist you in intimacy by recommending some fruitless sexual fetish that is sure to improve your love life if your love life currently consists of lowering baskets of lotion into an oubliette.
As an example, there's a new movie out called Pillion, which charts the sadomasochistic affair between two gay bikers.
The Wall Street Journal calls it a classic rom-com with warm and fuzzy feelings.
The Washington Post calls it a surprisingly sweet BDSM romance.
New Translation, Unbelievably Good00:03:36
And the New York Times hasn't reviewed it yet because their reviewer is still in the theater watching it over and over again.
Now, don't get me wrong, I have nothing against defining love as a man submitting to wear a dog collar for another man any more than I'm against defining dinner as repeatedly smacking a sirloin steak into your forehead.
I just wish our leftist cultural overlords would occasionally heap such praise on a movie about, say, a wife submitting to the authority of a husband who makes her happiness his own.
But they can't because no one ever makes that movie.
Trigger Warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
All right, we are back, laughing our way through the eternal struggle between good and evil, which I think right now, evil five, good nothing.
Before it, you know what?
Before I get started, I want to recommend, I don't usually do this, and this is completely unasked for and unpaid for.
But I was given by a pal of mine his book, The Memoirs of St. Peter, which is a new translation of the Gospel according to Mark.
That's by Michael Pakaluk.
We had Catherine Pakaluck, his wife, on the show a while back.
And this is just a new translation, and it is unbelievably good.
I'm losing most of the Greek I taught myself when I was writing The Truth and Beauty, but it seemed really accurate to Mark.
But it's this lively new translation that sort of presupposes that the Gospel of Mark is St. Peter dictating his experiences to Mark, the things that he actually saw.
And it's written like that, and it's just incredibly alive, incredibly vital.
If you love reading the Bible or if you've never read the Bible, I highly recommend it.
It is filled with also with commentary, and Michael is a Roman Catholic, so there are things in it you might say, well, I don't agree with that.
That's Roman Catholic, and I'm not Roman Catholic.
That didn't bother me.
But the translation is absolutely great.
Just really terrific.
The Memoirs of St. Peter, it's called by Michael Pakaluk.
Also, if you are watching the show somewhere where you can leave a comment, please do that.
And then if it happens to be in the UK, you might want to run for your life before they carry you away.
But if your comment is morally disgusting, we will read it on the air for obvious reasons.
Today's comment comes from Kevin Buja, 8105.
He says, my question has been, if conservatives were so outraged when Bad Bunny was announced in October 2025, why were the stadiums still filled and people still watching the games?
Until what was done to Budweiser is done to corporate NFL, this will continue.
We have become, for the most part, a nation that needs to be entertained.
That's an interesting comment.
I don't quite agree with it because I think I don't watch the halftime.
I've never watched halftime entertainment.
I think most men use that period to go to the bathroom and grab a sandwich.
And so I think it's like a lot of things that talkers are watching.
But I'm watching for the games.
If they ruin the games, as they did when people were kneeling during the national anthem, I stopped watching it.
I stopped watching it for two years, which was painful to do.
And I would do it again.
But as long as the games are the games, that's what you're really there for.
And the rest is for the ladies and for the writers in the world.
So just ignore them.
All right, let's get to today's episode, Eek.
It's Jesus.
Let's be honest.
Phytonutrients are important.
Inflation's Unemployment Myth00:14:50
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Chapter 1, Why So Serious?
So one of the weird phenomena, we were talking for the last couple of weeks about this transitional period and the kinds of things that come up in a period like this because people are afraid of the absolute dissolution of the country, but there's also the chance of renewal.
And one of the things that is just really strange is I think things have been steadily improving under the Trump administration.
I think Trump is, you know, Trump has got his personal style, which can be alienating to a lot of people.
But on substance, things are getting better all the time, and everyone is unhappy.
I don't know if I'm the only person who's noticed this.
Wall Street Journal says the economy, and this is, Wall Street Journal is no supporter of the Trump economic policies, but they say the economy may have stuck the soft landing.
This is like a mythic thing that when you have all this inflation, in order to bring it down, you have to have all this unemployment.
So in other words, you have to go into a recession in order to solve the inflation problem.
But they say inflation is easing, jobs are holding up, growth is solid, but nobody wants to jinx it.
So nobody wants to declare victory.
He says, just reading a little bit of this, the vital signs of the American economy are pointing in the same favorable direction more convincingly than at any point since before the pandemic.
In other words, since the last Trump administration, inflation is falling.
The labor market is holding.
Growth has been solid.
It is the closest the economy has come to achieving a soft landing, a moderation in inflation without recession.
Just four years ago, many economists said this wasn't possible.
So we should have known it was possible if you had that many economists saying it.
This past April, as the economy closed in on a soft landing, steep tariffs had forecasters bracing for a new surge in inflation.
That made up about 70% of the Wall Street Journal's copy.
Now it again looks plausible that inflation could return to the Federal Reserve's 2% goal without a recession.
And at the same time, that's happening.
You know, people's wages are going up.
So that's just as good as inflation going down as wages going up.
And what else?
Like there's some tension with Iran.
And so you have all the people predicting this is going to be world war that goes on for years and years.
I seriously doubt that.
It looks like, you know, Trump doesn't like that.
It's not his style.
But there is some tension there.
And there's certainly tension.
The Ukraine, Ukraine, and Russia are still fighting it out.
And that's a big deal.
But other than that, I mean, Trump has done remarkable stuff.
I mean, he's changed the structure of the Middle East, of Middle Eastern relations, so that there's now an open path toward peace, even though there's obviously going to be problems.
He's sent a shock of fear through the communists in South America and Canada.
He's sent a wake-up call to Europe.
He's closed the border.
Crime is way down.
The drug input into the country is down.
He's actually doing what everybody said could never be done.
He is lowering the amount of dangerous drugs coming into the country.
Deaths from fentanyl have dropped enormously.
He's dialed back racist DEI hiring practices, which were just morally offensive, but also, of course, an attack on merit and quality and all the things that go into that a free people can produce.
The Nazi-level atrocity of child sexual mutilation in the service of a theory is being discredited.
People are enlisting in the military again.
People are respecting America again.
But people are unhappy.
The poll numbers, Trump's poll numbers are still low.
A recent Emerson College poll found 43% of voters approve of Trump's job performance and 51% disapprove.
It's a slight improvement, but not statistically nothing.
Trump's net approval ratings declined two points in the latest Economist YouGov survey compared to last week with 37% approving of his job performance and 56% disapproving.
And I have to say, I assume a lot of that comes from the unpleasant visuals of deportation, that people, that there does seem to have been some kind of overreach in Minnesota that Trump dialed back when people started dying.
In various local elections, Democrats are winning, sometimes in Trump districts, sometimes with a two-digit swing from the last election, which suggests that people are so upset with Trump.
I guess it's stylistic.
They're so upset with Trump's style or the fact that he hasn't turned his full attention to the economy and the unsightly deportations that they're actually willing to turn the country over to the people who got us into this mess in the first place, who made the deportations necessary, who caused inflation.
And there's just this weird sense of exhaustion everywhere.
The Free Press had a story saying that a survey of 2,000 Americans in relationships found that one in four couples now have sex once a month or less.
14% described their sex lives as unsatisfying.
And the primary culprit wasn't infidelity.
It wasn't porn.
It wasn't attraction fading.
It was something far less scandalous, far more boring.
Exhaustion.
38% of respondents said fatigue was the single biggest barrier to intimacy.
And I've read this elsewhere that it's not health.
It's not work stress.
It's just people are tired.
There was another article in the Wall Street Journal that people, a growing cohort of Gen Z and millennial travelers are taking sleepcations where they just go away to sleep.
They go on vacation to sleep and you can choose your pillow and you can get your room.
You get some gummies that will put you out and you have all kinds of bath things and you just go away and you sleep.
This is bad.
There's something wrong with this.
You should be going on a vacation to have fun, to have excitement, to rest up and all that stuff.
And you should be having sex.
I'm not, I mean, with your married part, with your wife or husband, people should have sex.
You should not be having sex once a month.
I'm sorry.
Like, I don't want to tell you how to live your personal lives, but sex is important.
And the thrill of sex with a stranger is a one-time thrill.
But the thrill of sex with your spouse is something that takes place over a long time.
And so it's something you have to keep in practice about.
And I can understand people saying, well, we don't have money.
You have more money.
And so we have to work harder.
Listen, I used to work.
I went for a long period without making money.
And I used to work really, really hard.
But this is something you schedule into your life.
You forget about I'm not in the mood.
You forget about I have a headache.
You forget about, you know, like whatever, whatever is keeping you from doing it.
You know, this is not the day, whatever it is.
You forget about all that and you schedule it and you do it because it keeps you intimate.
It keeps you playful.
It keeps you from letting the sun go down on your anger.
You know, you can't really make love to somebody who's angry, you're angry with.
So you sort of work those problems out.
You don't go to bed angry.
And this is really a bad sign that people are this tired, that they're turning against Trump.
The MAGA coalition is falling apart when things are going well.
What would happen if things were going badly?
So I was thinking about this.
I was thinking, you know, there's a certain amount of anxiety and stress that go into a time of transition anyway, because we don't know what's going to happen because the future is not ours to see.
So we don't know if things are going to change and all our plans are going to be worthless.
And what are the kinds of things that give us anxiety?
If you believe in evolutionary just-so stories like the Rudyard Kipling stories, how the leopard got his spots and all that, how the human being got his anxiety, it's pretty easy to think of tell yourself an evolutionary story that the people who worry, the people who are hyper-vigilant, are going to see the saber-toothed tiger coming while the optimists are going to get eaten alive.
And so maybe that's part of it.
But there's also this thing about pervasive media.
The media gives you the sense, media gives you the sense that you are part of something bigger when you're not entirely part of something bigger.
I noticed this way back in the 80s.
I noticed that people were reacting to women as if they were all feminists because that's all they were hearing on TV was about feminism.
That's all they were hearing.
All the women who were interviewed because of the leftists' domination of the airwaves was all angry feminists.
And people were going, well, women are angry now.
I can't get a date.
And I would say, are the women you meet angry?
Because the women I know are perfectly lovely.
And, you know, there isn't a problem getting a date at all.
It's just these women on TV are frightening, you know, and you're thinking that you're part of that.
And now, think of that.
That was 1980 when you had TV.
Now that the media is pervasive.
It's every day all the time.
You're staring at the screen and this anger is coming out and this activism is coming out.
And I think it's what's happening to these people, these young people who think they're the wrong gender.
You're not the wrong gender.
That's ridiculous.
You may be an effeminate man.
You may be a masculine woman, but you're not the wrong gender.
You're still what you are.
And yet you have this pervasive media telling you that you're right.
It's like telling an anorexic that, yes, you really are thin.
It's like as if everybody were coming on, you know, like, let's interview.
Yes, he really is.
You know, he really is too fat, this 90-pound guy.
You know, I mean, this is like, that is what it's like.
And then they're shocked when they go into the real world.
They turn off their computer for 10 minutes and people are going, dude, you're not a girl.
I don't care if you put on a dress.
I don't care if you cut your bits off.
You're still not a girl.
And they go crazy.
You know, it's like this clown in Rhode Island who just slaughtered his son and his ex-wife and others at a hockey game.
He had all these texts telling people, you know, well, if you're not going to believe me, I'm going to go berserk.
He kept using this.
If you would just support my lie, my lie would become the truth and I'd be fine.
And that's a media thing.
And so that's a fictional view of the world that's created by left-wingers for left-wingers.
And when reality doesn't live up to it, they're absolutely furious.
You know, how many people, if you're a right-winger, do you know who say, gee, I met this guy and he voted for Trump, but he wasn't a total bastard.
If they have the patience to wait and get to know you and find out, oh, gee, you really care about some of the same things I care about, but you think there's a different way to achieve them.
And I think that that is this fictional life that we live with a pervasive media.
But there's one more thing about transitions.
And this is the thing that I kind of want to talk about today, is that in a period of transition like this, everything seems possible, including the worst disaster and including utopia.
It's a little bit like a midlife crisis.
If you're old enough to have gone through a midlife crisis, one of the things that happens is you literally wake up one morning and your values have vanished.
It's the weirdest thing.
I had a great midlife crisis because I didn't think it was, I thought this is a midlife crisis.
I'm not going to treat it like a crisis.
I'm just going to treat it like an experience.
And it actually was really educational.
But I woke up one morning having dedicated my life to art and to telling the truth beautifully, as I like to put it.
And one day I woke up, truly went to bed that way and woke up the next morning thinking, why am I doing this?
Why am I telling stories that haven't really happened?
Why did I spend my life doing this?
What a strange thing to have done.
Shouldn't I have been a fighter pilot instead, you know, because suddenly everything seems possible if all of the things that you based your life on are meaningless suddenly.
This is why people leave their wives and get a younger woman and they think I'm going to start again.
I don't know why I married that woman and I'm going to go back before my time runs out.
And 99 times out of 100, if not more, they find that they've married the same woman, just younger, you know, and now they've ruined their children's lives and things have become complex and they can't fix it anymore.
And that's something that happens because of just this moment where things have dissolved.
And I think we're in that moment when things are dissolved.
And because of that, we're in a struggle, not between liberals and conservatives, because liberals, old-style liberals and conservatives see the same world, but they have different values, priorities.
And that is built into the structure of the country.
Okay.
The oldest frenemies in this country were Thomas Jefferson, a radical, and John Adams, a conservative, and they fell out with each other and then they came back together before they died and sort of recognized that they were both a part of this country.
That is both a part.
Both liberals and conservatives are a part of this country.
I'm a conservative, but I understand that liberals have something to say.
But that's not the fight that we're in because everything has dissolved and everything seems possible.
We're in a fight between liberals and conservatives on one side, people who think America is good, but they want to tweak it this way or that.
And on the other side, people who think that the entire American idea should be scrapped.
And the problem with those people is not the people themselves.
It's the media and the academy and the entertainment industry that have signed on to that possible, to that point of view, so that we are now dealing with this gigantic information machine that wants America gone and thinks it's fine to have America be gone.
Why You Want Insurance00:02:37
And on top of this, the rest of the country is finally, finally catching up with that nice Mr. Clavin who has been telling you for over a decade that at the heart of that argument, that heart of that argument about the founding is our old friend, Uncle God.
All right, let's talk about insurance.
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You want it because one of these days you may fall down dead.
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I'm completely stopped.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Chapter 2, Good Cop.
So since we're going to be talking about God, let me just remind you theologically that there is a hierarchy.
I mean, one of the things about religion is a hierarchical structure.
There's God, obviously, at the top.
I would say that Mary is the queen of heaven.
Then you have the archangels, then you have the angels, and then you have Marco Rubio, because this guy is now one of the main stars of our government and possibly of the race of humankind.
Marco Rubio's Warning00:14:40
He is doing such a great job.
He already is the Secretary of State.
He's the National Security Advisor.
I think he's the dog catcher in Washington, D.C., and the future Shah of Iran.
He's got a lot of different jobs.
But one of them has been just bringing wisdom to the people at the Munich Security Conference.
Now, here's why this is important.
We've covered a lot Davos, the World Economic Forum.
And people keep saying Munich has now joined Davos as an important international conference.
That's not true.
Munich has replaced Davos.
Davos is now completely irrelevant.
It was actually always irrelevant.
They just didn't know it.
Davos is just a bunch of self-satisfied elites trying to convince us that the globalism that would make them even richer and make them feel more powerful and more important is good for the rest of us, which it's not, okay?
But Munich is our people who run countries and are responsible to countries and coming out basically at a time when their countries are falling apart and trying to pretend that that's okay, but it's not okay.
And so they are answerable to the people.
And they're answerable to people who stand up and tell the truth to them.
Because one of the things that's happening in countries like England is they're silencing people because they have screwed up.
You know, this is really interesting.
Last year, JD Vance got up, and he was great.
He made what until Marco Rubio's speech was the best speech in this administration.
He got up and he was the bad cop.
He gave it to him.
He said, you guys are failing at preserving the values that keep Western civilization together.
And he was saying things.
What's interesting about this is Christopher Hitchens, the wonderful atheist writer, just a brilliant, brilliant writer.
He warned Europe in 2009 that this was going to happen, that Islamism was going to destroy them.
Here's what he said.
This is Hitchens' cut one.
I beseech you, resist it while you still can, and before the right to complain is taken away from you, which will be the next thing, you will be told you can't complain because you're Islamophobic.
The term is already being introduced into the culture as if it was an accusation of race hatred, for example, or bigotry, whereas it's only the objection to the preachings of a very extreme and absolutist religion.
Watch out for these symptoms.
They are not just symptoms of surrender.
Very often ecumenically offered to you by men of God in other robes, Christian and Jewish and Smalmi ecumenical.
These are the ones who hold open the gates for the barbarians.
The barbarians never hold gates open for them.
All right, so now this is important because this is a watershed.
The reason Hitchens and the other new atheists became so popular was because before 9-11, intellectuals in America thought religion was over.
It was just a matter of time.
It was just people clinging to their Bibles, as Obama said.
It was just going to wither away because science and reason, blah, you know, all the arguments.
But in fact, when we got attacked by crazy Islamists, we realized that not everybody had given up their religion and some religions are bad.
So the new atheists, what they started out by saying was, you know, Islamism is just the worst of all the bad religions.
But that argument doesn't hold up because as Barton Swame at the Wall Street Journal pointed out, he said, if one of the new atheists were made to list 10 nations in which he would agree to live permanently, there's a good chance all 10 would bear the indelible marks of Christian belief and practice.
You would rather, and by the way, it's Judeo-Christian belief and practice.
You know, most of the people who are talking about, oh, you know, the gays for Gaza or whatever, gays for Palestine, Tucker Carlson, who keeps bitching and moaning about Israel, most of them would prefer to live in Israel rather than Saudi Arabia.
And there's a reason for that.
It's because one vision of God is better than other visions of God.
So Vance got up and essentially told the Europeans that Hitchens' predictions had now come true.
So this is Vance Cut 2.
The Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent.
And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections.
Were they the good guys?
Certainly not.
And thank God they lost the Cold War.
They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty.
The freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, to invent, to build.
As it turns out, you can't mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can't force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe.
And we believe those things are certainly connected.
And unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it's sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War's winners.
It's a slap in the face.
That's the bad cop.
And he comes in and he says, Schmock, you won the Cold War.
Why are you acting like the Soviets, silencing your own people?
And they're doing it because Christopher Hitchens was right.
They opened the gates.
They let the barbarian in.
The barbarian is destroying their countries.
So Marco Rubio, what was the phrase that Donald Trump used?
He said, you used a velvet glove, but it was still a kill.
Marco Rubio got up and he was the good cop.
Now, remember, when you have a bad cop and a good cop, they're both looking for the same thing.
They're both trying to get you to tell the truth.
And so Rubio was being the good cop and putting it in a positive connection, saying not what they're doing that's wrong, but what there is that connects us.
This is Rubio Cut 3.
We are part of one civilization, Western civilization.
We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.
And so this is why we Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our council.
This is why President Trump demands seriousness and reciprocity from our friends here in Europe.
The reason why, my friends, is because we care deeply.
We care deeply about your future and ours.
And if at times we disagree, our disagreements come from our profound sense of concern about a Europe with which we are connected, not just economically, not just militarily.
We are connected spiritually and we are connected culturally.
I'll get to the substance of that in a minute, but just in terms of the style, that brilliant piece of speech writing and well-delivered, where he says we Americans can sometimes seem a little blunt.
He's talking about, you know, Trump going there and saying, give me Greenland.
That's what he's talking about.
And he's saying, you know, it's not that we're mean, it's that we care so much.
And Trump's reaction was hilarious.
Here he is today that the meeting of the new peace conference is supposed to solve the troubles in the Middle East.
Trump said this to Marco's Cut 12.
And Marco, you really did yourself proud two days ago in Munich.
In fact, so proud that I almost terminated his employee because they were saying, why can't Trump do this?
I do, but I say it differently.
But Marco, don't do any better than you did, please.
Because if you do, you're out of here.
I just say it differently.
Give me Greenland.
But what he is saying is he's talking about culture, right?
He's talking about the fact that when you send people to war, you don't ask people to send their children to war for an economic system.
You don't ask them to go to war to fight for, you know, who we are, as Barack Obama said.
We ain't nobody.
We ain't no better than Muslim people.
Our system is better, and it's for systems, our culture is better, and cultures are what form people.
And the reason we used to have a country in which I would say I disagree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it, is because our system inculcated that in us.
And that system has been dismantled by leftists.
It has been dismantled by leftists taking over the school system, the academy, Hollywood, and the news media, and saying, no, here is where right thinking stops.
It stops right here with everybody who disagrees with me.
And anybody who disagrees with me is a fascist.
And it's just Hitler.
And we're not going to allow that at all.
And so at the same time, he was there making this claim that our cultures link us and our cultures, he said this repeatedly, are based in Christianity, which is simply true.
He talked about the fact that the people who came over here brought Christianity with them, brought their ideals with them.
And again, you know, sometimes people argue, oh, this founder was not a Christian.
He was a deist.
It doesn't matter.
They were all shaped by a thousand years and more, almost 2,000 years, of Christian thought and Christian thinking.
And you don't just give that away any more than the Christians of the medieval era could give away the classical inheritance they got from the Greeks.
So at the same time he was there, AOC and California haircut guy were also there trying to bring the Democrat thinking onto the world stage, which is really what they need.
So a lot of people make fun of AOC, who is a dangerous politician because she's a fascist with a nice body, which is, you know, if you don't, people say I'm sexist for saying that, but if you don't think that breasts have power, just look at all the clickbait things online and see, like even if they're talking about Nazis, they'll show you Nazis with large breasts.
So she's a dangerous creature.
And she was asked by a reporter whether we would go to war with China if they invaded Taiwan.
And here was her response that people were mocking Cut for.
Would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move?
You know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a this is of course a very long-standing policy of the United States.
And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point.
Larry O'Connor from Town Hall said it was like watching the Hindenburg crash into the Titanic at Chernobyl.
But it actually was, I hate to say this, but it actually was a little unfair.
Our policy toward Taiwan is basically not to say what we would do.
I mean, we say we would fight and we probably would fight, but we don't want to draw a red line that we can't get out of.
The real telling moment with AOC was when she said all this Jesus and culture stuff is thin.
That's not what life is about at all.
It's cut five.
It's also important to note how thin that foundation is.
Culture is changing.
Culture always changed.
Culture for the entire history of human civilization has been a fluid, evolving thing that is a response to the conditions that we live in.
And so they want to take this mantle of culture.
At the end of the day, though, is you know, it is very thin.
And so the response that we have to have is, again, it's material.
It's class-based.
It's common interest.
That's Marxism.
But in a larger sense, it's materialism.
I mean, Marxism is always materialist.
It's saying that these things, these vague feelings you have about God, about what's right, what's wrong, these are just, you know, manifestations of your physical state, your power structures, your money structures, all these things.
And that's what, if you solve those problems, if we spread out the money, all the other things are going to go away.
Now, this, of course, is complete nonsense.
It's provably nonsense.
I mean, you know, Freud said it was all sex, and Marx says it's alienation from your work because of money and so on.
But if you think about this, material things actually cloud your mind.
They don't clear your mind.
If you're turned on by a woman, you might miss the fact that she's really a murderous bitch, right?
Because it clouds your mind.
If you want money, you may do the wrong thing because you want the money.
It's when you think spiritually first, when you think culturally first, when you put God first, that all the rest of life falls into place.
And you get, as the Bible says, seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you because then you go after the things that matter and you do the work that matters and you make money.
You make enough money.
God will provide the money that you make.
You find the woman who's going to take care of you and be a good partner.
All of those things make sense.
If you live, if you live materially, you will be enslaved.
And that's why socialism always ends with people being slaves, essentially.
But then ask, so, and ask yourself this.
This is to add to that.
If culture and faith are so thin, why are they so afraid of it?
Why are they so afraid of Jesus Christ?
Why are they so afraid of remembering the Europeans won't even admit that they were Christendom.
They won't even put it in their constitutions.
You know, here's Hillary Clinton talking about just dismissing it and why she dismisses it, cut seven.
We haven't gotten to the more perfect union, and we fought a civil war over part of it.
And people have been protesting, you know, for hundreds of years that things were not as they should be, given our ideals and how we should be moving toward them.
So I think that's what makes us so special as a country.
And the idea that you could turn the clock back and try to recreate a world that never was dominated by, you know, let's say it, white men of a certain persuasion, a certain religion, a certain point of view, a certain ideology, it's just doing such damage to what we should be aiming for.
Path Toward Perfection00:03:19
And we were on the path toward that.
I mean, imperfectly, lots of, you know, bumps along the way.
But I agree with you, we were on the right trajectory.
It's amazing how stupid that is.
I mean, look, we have to give Hillary Clinton credit.
She murdered, had Jeffrey Epstein murdered, but that's good.
But no, where does she think those values came from?
This more perfect union, the idea of the perfect union, where does she think those values came from?
It's those white Christian men she finds so dangerous.
They're the ones that are holding us back.
And they're holding her back because she is like all radicals trying to destroy the thing that they made, which is the freedom and the ideas that do move us forward.
We do change.
We do progress, but we have to progress in keeping with the traditions that we were given by those white Christian men.
Their whiteness is incidental.
Their Christianity is not.
It is what formed them in their souls and made them see the vision that she's talking about that she is trying to turn into.
Oh, don't worry about the equality and the freedom.
We'll take care of that.
That's essentially what she's saying.
CNN, despicably, could there be anybody more despicable than CNN?
They are taking Charlie Kirk's murder and making a, Pamela Brown is making a danger Christian nationalism coming.
And it's all because Charlie Kirk died and the Christian nationalists are using that as opposed to the fact that a leftist killed Charlie Kirk and the Christian nationalists, as she likes to call them, are fighting back.
Here's a clip from this proposed documentary, Cut Six.
Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and prominent Christian nationalist, was assassinated.
It became a rallying call for those who believed in his message.
Our greatest evangelist for American Liberty became immortal.
And it was a call to action.
My charge to all of you, put Christ at the center of your life as he advocated for giving his memorial service was one of the most potent examples of the shift in our culture that we're experiencing right now,
where a large segment of American Christians are being activated by these ideas, radicalized by these ideas that say that they are the persecuted ones and that they need to stand up for Christians' rights.
Happens to be true, but okay, you know, it's radical, I guess.
The truth is radical.
Look, obviously, any religion can be used for bad purposes.
Christianity can be used and has been used for bad purposes.
But at the core of Christian religion and the thing that always brings it back to itself is this belief in sacrificial love.
And the purpose of love is creation.
The telos of love is creation.
I once got a bad review for Kingdom of Cain.
Somebody saying, no, the telos of love, a Catholic saying, telos of love is communion.
But the telos of communion is creation.
That's what marriage is all about, and that's what art is all about.
And so I want to talk about what I mean by Christianity by taking a look at some of the work of one of America's great artists who we lost this week, the actor Robert Duvall.
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Chapter three, Tender Mercies.
Robert Duvall died.
He was 95, a very accomplished life.
He was one of the greatest actors of his generation.
In fact, the only person I can compare him to is Anthony Hopkins, who has turned in the depth of performances he has done.
I'm not going to do an obituary for him.
You can get that anywhere.
I just want to take a look at some of the two scenes in which he deeply affected me and the brilliance because he was a conservative and he was a Republican and he had a real heart for the common man and for what people were saying.
And he really did movies about things that the rest of us care about and that Hollywood doesn't care about.
And he, you know, a lot of the obituaries about him said he was a chameleon.
And he said, no, he wasn't a chameleon.
He just did different versions of himself.
That's what screen acting is.
You know, I think there are some actors, character actors, who like to disappear into their roles.
But great screen acting, like Jimmy Stewart, Robert Duvall, they always play themselves, but they play different themselves as a psychopath, themselves as, you know, a country singer or whatever.
So there's one scene, and this scene absolutely destroys me every time I see this.
It's from a movie called Rambling Roses, tiny little 1991 film directed by Martha Coolidge, based on a novel by Calder Willingham, who wrote the screenplay.
Laura Dern plays essentially a nymphomaniac.
She comes to live with this family, this kind of all-American family of which Robert Duvall is the father of the Pedro Familias.
And she comes to live with his family to escape her home life in the Depression.
And I call her a nymphomaniac.
It would be kind of more accurate to say she's a girl who only knows how to express love as sex.
It's her only power.
She's very beautiful.
Laura Dern is very beautiful.
And so she comes to respect this upstanding father figure, and she makes a play for him.
There's this wonderful scene where she bares her breast and Duval reaches out to touch it with a vulture-like trembling hand.
And then in what any man will tell you is an amazing, heroic act of restraint, he pulls back because he's a married man.
And the scene that always just devastated me when I first saw it, one of the best pieces of acting on film as far as I'm concerned, they go, he and his wife, who's played by Laura Dern's real-life mother, Diane Ladd, they go to a doctor for various reasons for this girl.
And the doctor recommends giving Rose, Laura Dern, a hysterectomy so she won't be so sexual.
And basically, it's the Islamic burqa, basically.
It's cover the woman up to protect the man as the woman is the source of the evil because she makes the man feel this way.
And at first, Duval goes for it because he's been so tempted by her.
And his wife says, it just hits the roof.
And they have a normal relationship where he's the head of the family.
But she says, I think of you as a good man, this is evil.
And if you do this, I can't live.
She says, I can't stay alive because I've lost this man that I love and respect and admire.
And it's a tough moment because here's this guy's wife showing him up in front of this doctor who's very macho, you know, kind of male.
I think we should do this operation and all this stuff.
And Duval has this moment.
And if you watch it, you'll see it, but you can hear it too, where he realizes even though his wife has kind of humiliated him in front of this guy, she's right.
She's right.
And he has to do something to not be evil.
And here's just this clip of this amazing scene.
Well, I must admit, in Rose's case, it would be cruel.
She's so attractive and pretty, but, uh...
It would be bad for almost any young woman.
Whether it be Rose or Darby Crop or whoever.
I was wrong, and you were right.
And you are wrong.
Amazing scene.
Just makes me choke up because he's obliterating his pride, you know, his male pride.
He's obliterating it in order to do the right thing.
And that is what these macho morons like Andrew Tate would say is the act of a simp or a cock or, you know, whatever they call you, gay or whatever they call you.
But it is the act of Christian heroism, of setting your pride apart in order to do what is right.
An amazing, and he performs it with nobility.
You see the nobility of the struggle in his face, in his eyes, in his actions, and in the tone of his voice.
It's just amazing.
The other scene is from Tender Mercies, a movie which is a masterclass in how to make Christian art that doesn't suck.
It is directed by the amazing director Bruce Beresford.
If you've never seen Breaker Morant, you should definitely see it.
A great film, a great, great film.
And it's written by Horton Foote, who's a wonderful playwright.
He wrote the screenplay to Kill a Mockingbird, very, in his day, very, very successful, admired writer.
And it's about a washed up country singer who finds himself doing labor for this woman who's a Christian and falls for her.
And he, because he falls for her, she convinces him and her son, she's got a little boy, that they should be baptized.
And so this washed up country singer who's an alcoholic, who's lived his life in this really self-destructive way, is saved by the love of a good woman.
I mean, there's no other way to say it.
And he is baptized.
And here's this scene in the car after he and the little boy are baptized.
And Robert Duvall's character is called Mac.
Well, we got it, Mac.
We're baptized.
Here we are.
Everybody said I was going to feel like a changed person.
I guess I do feel a little different, but I don't feel a whole lot different.
Do you?
Not you.
You don't look any different.
You think I look any different?
That's it.
The thing is, he looks totally different.
His eyes are lit up.
When we first meet him, he's this washed up, broken character.
Now he's smiling, he's laughing.
It's another amazing scene of a woman using soft power, as it were, to transform a man's life and bring him into himself.
And this is the thing about this moment when we are tasked with restoring our Christian faith is it needs to be actual Christian faith.
And I'm sorry.
It needs to be actual Christian faith.
We saw last week, I think I played Kentucky governor Andy Bashir saying, oh, my Christian love means that I can't stop a child from being sexually mutilated in the name of transgenderism.
Well, no, that's not Christian faith.
I'm sorry.
That's fake.
That's fake love.
The same thing is true of these people who hate Jews or who say cruel things to gay people.
You know, it's like that.
No, that's not Christian faith.
The great symbol of Christian manhood is not a crusader with a sword, even though sometimes we need crusaders with swords, no question about it.
It's a contrite heart.
This is Psalm 51.
He says to God, you do not desire sacrifice.
This is David talking to God, or else I would give it.
I would give you sacrifice if that's what you wanted.
But you do not delight in burnt offering.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart.
These, oh God, you will not despise.
You wonder where freedom comes from.
You wonder where a race of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who are willing to give power to blacks, even though they outnumber them, who are willing to give power to women, even though they don't have to.
You wonder where that idea comes from.
Hillary Clinton thinks that where does she think that comes from?
She thinks it comes from Karl Marx in a pig's eye, in a pig's eye.
It comes from people who understand that God wants their heart.
Contrite, I believe the word contrite comes from a root that means crushed, you know, a crushed heart, to crush your pride.
And you see in this amazing acting work that Duvall does that these things are internal.
They are not about, you know, waving your hand in the air.
They are not about waving your cross in the air.
They're not about shouting insults at people who disagree with you or condemning people.
They are something that happens inside yourself in this relationship with Christ that transform a race of people into people who understand what freedom is and who let people talk even when it threatens their power and their money and their position in the world.
That is a Christian thing to do.
It has never existed anywhere else.
It has never spread anywhere where Christianity was not rampant or Judaism too.
And Robert Duvall portrayed it because he perspected it.
He was an actor who was twice great.
He was once great by his pure talent and the hard work he put into it and twice great by what his acting revealed.
You know, when you've lived as long as I have, you've seen kingdoms fall.
I saw Rome fall.
That was just a terrible, terrible time.
You know, and I saw England rise and then fall.
It's just been an amazing life.
But through it all, my family is the most important thing I have.
And with that, I want to make sure they are taken care of, that everything's in place in case something were to happen to me, although at this point, it doesn't seem like anything ever will.
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Babies and Reality00:08:23
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Final chapter, A Matter of Death and Life.
There is some good news, I think, on this front, on the religious front.
Joel Kotkin, who is a reporter I know and whom I respect quite a lot, and Beke Malobo, writing with Beke Malobo, who I don't know at all, but Joel Kotkin, I do respect it.
He was writing a real clear investigations.
And they say the decline of religion remains a fundamental reality in most Western countries, particularly in Europe, where over 50% of those under age 40 do not identify with any faith.
Even in more religious America, some estimate that as many as 100,000 churches will close in the near future.
Meanwhile, the ranks of nuns, those outside religious communities, have grown so large that their numbers rival those of Catholics and evangelical Protestants.
Yet, as we document in a new report for the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, there are signs that religion is enjoying more than a nascent revival, a newborn revival.
For the first time in decades, Pew Research notes in the U.S. at least, Christianity has stopped its nosedive as more people begin to see the efficacy and the rewards of religious faith and practice.
Contrary to past assertions today, the faithful are not poor and ignorant, but increasingly from the educated upper middle class.
It's almost what that nice Andrew Clavin has been saying for 10 years, that there was going to be a top-down renewal.
That guy's great, isn't he?
I love him.
Even the cognitive elites are experiencing a growing trend to embrace religious activity.
Indeed, in a rebuke of the aggressive new atheism of the early 2000s, embraced by thought leaders like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, a counter movement appears to be growing among scientists, philosophers, and public intellectuals who view religious tradition not as a delusion to be eradicated, but as a sustainable civilizational operating system.
As our politics splinter along gender with women increasingly forming the base for Democrats and men, it is men who are leading the return to the church.
And this is like hugely important because I'm always telling you the future is male.
And the future is not male because women don't count.
Women create the future.
Men shape the future because they are risk takers and because they notice faster, because they have the capacity for a reason.
They notice faster when things don't make sense.
And this is the thing about reality.
Reality makes sense.
You know, Einstein said God does not play dice with the world.
And people make fun of that because he was trying to erase the uncertainty of quantum physics.
But in fact, quantum physics actually does make sense if you live in a world made by God.
See, in a world of pure material, if AOC's world, Karl Marx's world, if you know everything about the material world right now, you know where it's going because it has no will.
There's no uncertainty.
It's going to go in a certain direction.
If you've never read the wonderful, wonderful anti-communist novel Darkness at Noon, that is the excuse for all their atrocities that we scientifically know what's going to happen next.
And if you get in the way of it, we can kill you.
It's because it is a scientific thing, just like people have murdered each other in the name of Darwinism to cull the herd.
God is capable of making a material world that is indelibly linked to our perception of it and is therefore uncertain, which gives us freedom.
It means there's free will in the world, choices that you can make.
That doesn't make sense to human logic, but it makes sense to God logic.
And once humans buy into God logic, the world starts to make sense.
And men notice when things don't make sense faster than women do.
Women, they're more emotional.
They're more keyed into emotion.
It is a way of seeing that is very helpful to the world.
You know, I think without it, we would be complete animals.
And that is why I think this is going to be a male-led revival.
And I think it's going to be an intelligence, intelligent person-led revival.
You know, a lot of people say that Christianity is bad because people just act good because they don't want to go to hell, as opposed to materialists who act well because they're just such wonderful people.
That's their idea.
But it's simply a system that makes sense.
It's like saying, don't go to the gym because you're only going because you want to be in good health.
That's what it's like saying.
Things have consequences.
And as we lose our religion, we lose our freedom.
We lose our nation.
We lose everything.
We lose our way.
No matter what Hillary Clinton says, God is not mocked.
You can only, listen, you can only, you have to choose between life and death.
I think God said that, right?
I put before you life and death.
Choose life and live.
And he said that because the opposite of God, the opposite, God is love.
The telos of love is creation.
The opposite of God is death.
And you see this in the love of abortion, the love of sexually mutilating people, the love of infertility through feminist priorities, infertility through selfishness.
I don't have time for kids.
I have a job.
The future belongs to people who exist.
So it belongs to the living.
God is God of the living.
And the future belongs to the living.
And that is whether you're talking about the future in history or the future in eternity.
So don't despair.
Don't despair.
The future belongs to the living.
What we hope is that our country will participate in that future.
So, you know, don't be too tired to make love.
Don't be too selfish to get pregnant.
You know, create the world of the future.
On earth, as in heaven, life is more powerful than death because life lasts.
Life lives.
Here I'll end with the lines from the great poet John Donne.
He wrote, death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful.
Thou art not so.
One short sleep past.
We wake eternally and death shall be no more.
Death, thou shalt die.
This is a moment of transition.
But let us hope it is a moment of transition from a philosophy of death back to the Christian philosophy of life and life everlasting.
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Pendragon episode six is here, and a lot of people are saying you can start with this one.
Everyone who's seen it says this is their favorite.
Even Tom Sharp, the guy who plays Merlin, said he would do whatever it takes to make sure people watch this particular episode.
The fight scenes are really good, just as good as anything Hollywood makes.
The love story, you'll like the love story, and the ending launches us straight into the finale in the most epic way possible.
Why We're Made to Serve00:05:47
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Clavin Clapbacks.
Hey, Mister.
Were you really Max Sledge?
Yes, ma'am.
I guess I was.
Yeah.
All right.
One of the greats, Robert Duvall.
Clavin Clapbacks at DailyWire.com.
Claven with a K, clapbacks with a K at dailywire.com.
We were a little short this week, so this is a good time to send them in.
You have a better chance of getting on.
And like I said, I read a lot more of them than I get to put on the air, which I'm sorry about.
This one is from an avid viewer.
He says, hello, wise Mr. Clavin.
You discussing 50 Shades of Gray got me to think of asking you about this.
My wife has always had trouble with sex ever since before we got together.
She has never withheld it from me, but she has never been able to get into it.
She's recently wanted to try BDSM-like stuff.
When I asked her why, she said it helps her not give into her self-harm problem.
I agreed to light BDSM stuff.
He describes it as very light BDSM stuff.
She seems to enjoy sex more and also doesn't feel the urge to self-harm as much either.
But I am worried if it is bad for a relationship.
You know, my feeling about this is you're one flesh.
Do what gives you pleasure as long as you don't hurt or humiliate each other.
You know, the bedroom is a good place for play.
It sounds from your description of what you're doing, like you are playing.
You're not actually hurting each other.
But, but having said that, you know, like, and I hope you should have as much sex as humanly possible, have a great time.
But also, I think your wife should probably get some help for self-harm.
If you're talking about real self-harm, like cutting or drug taking or something like that, you know, there's something behind that usually.
And you might want to find out what it is and see if you can get her past that.
And that might solve all the problems altogether.
From James, he says, as well read as you are, please do a little more research into this subject of Zionism.
It's completely compatible with the Catholic faith to love the Jews and reject Zionism.
By Zionism, I mean the unequivocal support of the modern state of Israel.
Carrie Prégine or Prison Bowler, I think, is being unfairly attacked for simply questioning Israel's behavior to the Samaritans.
Oh, I mean the Palestinians.
Best regards, James.
Well, first of all, a totally unfair version of what I said.
I said that, I said I did not believe that there was a religious requirement to be a Zionist, but I said I was a Zionist.
And it seemed to me when you read the Bible, it does say that God has given this land to the Jews and will bring the Jews back to it.
But, you know, I said it's not a requirement.
But no, about Carrie Prajan Bowler, the clip I played where she was talking to a rabbi, she was dishonest.
That was my objection.
If you have a good, if you have something to say, you should not have to be dishonest.
She said that she asked the rabbi if being anti-Zionist was the same as being anti-Semitic.
And he said it's anti-Semitic if you're not anti-the Muslim countries.
If you're saying the Jews can't have a country, but the Muslims can, the Jews can't have a country, but Christians can.
Yeah, that's obviously anti-Semitic.
And she said, let's not get Islamophobic.
That's dishonest.
That's not arguing with the point that he was making.
There was nothing Islamophobic about what he said.
And so I think she was attacked because she was doing something dishonest.
And I think her attack, you know, it is true that being, how did you put it?
Let me use your words.
The unequivocal support of the modern state of Israel is not required of anybody.
All states make mistakes.
But the decision that Israel should not exist because it's a Jewish state, now you're starting to deal with something else.
And I think she's being dishonest.
I think that was anti-Semitic.
Hi, Mr. Claven.
You mentioned something on your show last week that I'd like to challenge.
You said God wants us to be free.
I think they can give off a bad message unintentionally.
I think God made us to be free, being we're made in his image, but we're made to really submit and serve God for our main purpose, not ultimately to be free.
I only say this because when you say God wants us to be free, I think they can be open to interpretation in ways you can probably imagine.
Thank you.
Love your show and all that you do.
Well, see, now, this is a tough one.
And I understand, and I write about this a little bit in The Truth and Beauty.
You know, it says in the Bible, in the Gospels, I'm sorry, in the epistles, it is for freedom that Christ made us free.
It is for freedom that Christ made us free.
There are other things where it says, you know, love and do what you will, that all things are permissible, but all things are not helpful.
The idea is basically that, yes, you are forgiven, and therefore you can do anything you want.
But of course, if you have accepted Christ, you will be the kind of person who doesn't do certain things.
That's basically what it comes down to.
That's why there is a conflict between faith, not works, and faith without works is dead.
Both those statements are true.
You are saved through your faith, but faith without works is a dead faith.
It's not really faith.
Just like if you believe in gravity, you don't step off the roof.
If you believe in Christ, you don't commit murder and you don't do terrible things.
So it's complex.
It is very complex.
It's about changing your soul.
As I always say, Judgment Day is not a short answer quiz.
It's the state of your soul and the state of your soul that's telling about who you are and what your faith is like.
We have to stop there.
And for those of you who have faith, you're about to lose it if you're not a member because you're about to be plunged into a clavenless darkness through which even the light of faith cannot permeate.