Andrew Klavan condemns progressives as authoritarian allies of terrorists, citing Ilhan Omar's support for Hamas and criticizing fragmented rebel media following Tucker Carlson's anti-Semitic rhetoric. He links California's educational failures to left-wing control and attacks New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani for prioritizing World Hijab Day over Catholic traditions. Transitioning to culture, Klavan argues that while liberals dominate experimental arts, true greatness blends conservative moral truths with liberal empathy, warning that "wokeness" destroys artistic potential by silencing complex narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, I'm old enough to remember a kinder, gentler America, with safe suburban streets, well-kept houses, where a good kid could go out on his bike after school and not return until sunset around six years later, after which he would just sit silently in a corner of the house, staring into the middle distance and occasionally pulling the legs off a spider or a mouse or maybe his kid's sister while dreaming of the day he'd be free to hunt and kill at will.
Maybe that was just me.
But in any case, today's America is so hostile and so divided that I just wish we could find a way to build bridges of communication and even friendship between conservatives and the flaming dirtbags trying to destroy everything that good people hold dear.
It's not that all progressives are sinister communist authoritarian perverts looking to bring the nation to its knees by allying themselves with Islamist terrorists and illegal immigrant gangsters in order to reduce our civilization to ashes, then seize power in the ensuing chaos so they can enchain us in yet another of their drab utopias where everyone is equally miserable except for the small cadre of bitter lowlifes who derive some small pleasure from imposing their own unhappiness on everyone else.
Well, okay, it is that, but it's also the smug look on the faces of these schmucks that just makes you want to squeeze their noses between the knuckles of your first two fingers and twist them like Mo used to do to Curly on the three stooges.
Except not playing around this time.
But as Christians, we have to remember that Jesus told us to love our enemies.
And sure, a lot of good that did him.
But still, it's up to us to try to understand those of our fellow citizens whose deeply held principles lead them to oppose anything that even smells remotely like common decency.
For instance, take Ilhan Omar.
Here's a woman who escaped the violence of civil war in a primitive hellhole called Somalia, an African word that means, please get me out of this primitive hellhole.
By the grace of a loving God, who clearly just wasn't paying attention that day, Omar's family was granted asylum here in the United States, where she then rose to become a congresswoman in the corruption-riddled filth pit of Minnesota, an Indian word that means, please get me out of this corruption-riddled filth pit.
Surely, such a woman must feel deep gratitude to a country so welcoming and generous and self-destructive.
And yet the other day, Congresswoman Omar said she was, quote-unquote, incredibly proud of her daughter Isra for traveling with other assorted snot-faced idiots to the communist cesspool called Cuba, a Spanish word meaning, please get me out of this communist cesspool.
The luxurious Cuban junket was intended, Omar said, to show solidarity with Cuba against the United States because the U.S. is cruelly attempting to free the Cubans from communist cesspoolery.
Omar went on to call her daughter a quote-unquote brilliant young leader, presumably referring to Israel's arrest for demonstrating at Columbia University in support of the Iranian-funded rapist murderers called Hamas, and also to the T-shirt Israel Award to Cuba celebrating the George Floyd-inspired burning of Minneapolis, an Indian word that means, please get me out of Minneapolis.
So, in an attempt to build bridges of friendship with the Congresswoman, I wrote her a polite email saying, quote, Dear communist terrorist witch demon, shouldn't you show more gratitude to the country that rescued you from a hellhole and elected you to Congress in a filth pit?
To give credit where credit is due, Congresswoman Omar did reply promptly, writing, quote, your Islamophobia is not who we are as Americans.
Who we are as Americans are people who allow a Somalian grifter to play us for suckers while she's simultaneously plotting to crush us under the iron heel of Islamist communism.
That's who we are as Americans, if by we, I mean you.
Unquote.
So there it is, my friends.
We really can learn to communicate with those on the other side of the political aisle.
Andrew Klavan Returns00:03:13
Just remember to wear a steel-tipped boot and aim for the ass.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
All right, we are back with you laughing our way through the end of Western civilization.
If you have not done this yet, and you should have, but if you haven't, we won't blame you.
We'll forgive you.
Please go on Daily Wire or YouTube and try out my new show, Clavins on the Culture with Spencer Clavin, No Relation.
This was the one about Project Hail Mary.
We discussed it.
It's getting very, very nice reviews and good numbers, but I hope you will take a look at it.
People are really enjoying it.
And Spencer will come on today.
He'll be on the show today, and we'll talk about what we're trying to accomplish, talking about the culture, which is different than what I think most right-wingers are trying to do or can do.
Also, you might want to leave a comment wherever you are, you know, in the street, in prison where most of my listeners, I think, are, you know, at summer camp.
You might want to just leave a comment wherever you are, even just on, you know, the back of your wife's head.
We will read the comment wherever you put it.
And if it is just absolutely tasteless, it will fit right in with the rest of our content.
Today's content, today's comment is from Cheese Head Eric.
He says, I used to listen to Clavin at the gym.
Unfortunately for me, I laughed so hard during his opening that a barbell fell directly on my windpipe, leaving me unconscious and paralyzed below the neck.
Fortunately for me, I've been installed as the next Ayatollah, assuming I won't be assassinated before I finish typing this guy.
I guess the IDF got him.
I think that was sufficiently tasteless, right?
That is crude and cruel, and just like the rest of the show will be.
So let's get to it.
Let's get to today's episode, Smart Lies for Stupid People.
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Defeating The Empire Of Lies00:14:55
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Chapter one, The Courage to Continue.
So this is a little sad for me to talk about, but on the night Donald Trump was re-elected, I told you, I told you then, right then when it happened, that I was bathed in a warm sense of peace, that it lasted for months.
And the reason was not just because Trump had won.
I, of course, was delighted and relieved that Trump had won against Kamala Harris, but because he won, at least in part, I mean, part of it was just the fact that he can't be shot down, he won't give up or anything.
You know, he's just an absolute beast when it comes to defiance.
But part of why he won was because of the rebel media, which I've been a part of, the Daily Wire, other places that some of which were right-wing, some of which were just new.
You know, Joe Rogan isn't particularly right-wing, but there were places where they were speaking against, diverse voices that were speaking against this empire of lies that I had been battling for a long time.
And we were able, we had finally reached a point where there were enough of us that we were able to shoot down the lies of the empire of lies in real time.
So, you know, the assault on Donald Trump, of course, as I'm sure most of you remember, was unparalleled.
It was like nothing I'd ever seen before.
It was, you know, the Democrats and the media, but I repeat myself, there was that whole Russian collusion hoax, total hoax.
And yet after it was over, after it was exposed, they gave themselves Pulitzer Prizes for reporting on something that hadn't ever happened.
They had that widespread campaign of internet censorship where they would knock us off the air.
They tried to destroy the Daily Wire on Facebook.
Anytime we said anything on YouTube that defied the regime, it was cut out.
We were warned and told that they weren't going to let us monetize our content.
Even the president of the United States himself was forced off Twitter because he was saying that the election was rigged.
All of this violated, openly violated the First Amendment because the press was doing it, was part of it.
They weren't crying about their usual crocodile tears about the First Amendment.
Then there was the lawfare, which was, to me, that made my eyes go wide because I'd never seen it before, where they convicted Trump of entirely made-up felonies, felonies that didn't exist, and told the jury, don't worry about how it happened.
Just convict him.
That'll be fine.
They repealed the statute of limitations so that a woman could accuse him of rape without even knowing herself what year the rape supposedly took place.
So imagine trying to defend yourself against a charge of rape when you don't even know what year you're trying to find an alibi for.
There was then the massive cover-up of Joe Biden's dementia, followed by a massive cover-up of Kamala Harris's stupidity and corruption.
And there was a steady stream of hysterical accusations against half the electorate who was all supposed to be fascist.
All of that failed.
I mean, it's amazing that that failed.
That should have worked.
It would have worked in another day and age, but it didn't work because we were There, partly because Trump never gave in, never stepped down, couldn't be broken, all of that to his credit.
But it was also because the Daily Wire and all the rest of the rebel media, with a big assist from Elon Musk when he took over X, we were able to debunk the lies in real time.
Here's what they're saying now.
Here's what they said then.
Here's what this charge is.
Here's what it really means.
We could do it all the time and get it out to enough people so that it didn't stick.
And for me personally, it was extremely gratifying because it meant that the fight that I had joined maybe 20 years before, yeah, 20 years before, which against the leftist poisoning in the culture, when I came back from England, I saw that our culture had changed, it had changed for the worse, it had changed because the left had poisoned our culture through the movies and through the academy and through the news media.
And I started to speak out about it.
And it cost me, I am convinced that it cost me, I can't prove this, but I believe it ended my multi-million dollar career in Hollywood, right?
In Hollywood.
The phones turned off like that the minute I started talking about it.
And I have to say, I had no clue it would ever lead to this part of my career here at the Daily Wire.
I had no idea that it would ever lead to anything that would be profitable or interesting or exciting or indulge my capacity to make things.
And there's a line in Wordsworth that the best portion of a good man's life are his little nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.
And I have found, I won't say that I'm a good man, but I have found out that when I've done things without thinking about them that were the right thing to do, those are the things that I look back on most fondly, you know.
And so it was a really good moment when Trump won, not just because of the electoral victory, but because of the media victory, which I had been fighting for for a long time.
There is a quote, sometimes mistakenly attributed to Winston Churchill, sometimes to Abraham Lincoln personally.
I think it's from Rocky Balboa.
But the line is, success is not final.
Failure is not fatal.
It is the courage to continue that counts.
And whoever said that, he was talking about this moment, because our success has fragmented.
The rebel media has been deluded by people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens who have lied, deformed, distorted information, and basically ginned up Jew hatred.
Why, I cannot tell you.
I don't know why they do it.
I don't know if they're being paid off.
I don't know if they're corrupt.
I don't know if they're hateful themselves.
I have no idea.
But all I know is they're very powerful.
They have a lot of very big audiences.
And the things they say aren't true.
And because of them and the failure of some people on the right to be willing to sacrifice audience share in order to speak against them, that has become, it has now blown up into a big problem that has fragmented the rebel media so that no one knows who to believe.
People are indulging in some of the conspiracy theories that always go along with Jew hatred and the lies.
And it's typical that this occurred at our, it was the moment of greatest tragedy since Trump's reelection, but it was also a moment of triumph in the saddest possible way.
And I'm talking, of course, about the murder of Charlie Kirk.
This is when the left is a violent movement.
Leftism is a violent movement.
They rioted at our speeches.
They attacked our speakers.
Their defamation of us as Hitlerian encouraged people to attack us.
Their willingness to sanction race riots and black crime in the name of their precious message that didn't have to be, it all kind of blossomed in this god-awful murder of one of our best spokesmen, Charlie Kirk.
And the reason I say that that was a moment of strength for us, though, it was a moment of terrible sadness, was because it revealed them for who they are.
It revealed the fact that all this stuff about how violent, how oppressive, how authoritarian the right is was all projection, all a lie.
It was all about them.
They were the ones who censored.
They were the ones who hated.
They were the ones who attacked.
They were the violent ones.
It was clear.
It was right there on the table.
And into that truth stepped Candace Owens with these fantastical and wicked conspiracy theories that drew attention away from this because we had to fight them.
And then along, of course, came Tucker and JD Vance's inability to just stand up to find his man parts and stand up and say, I'm sorry, Tucker Carlson may be a friend.
I have no problem with people being friends with people who have bad ideas, but he is wrong about this stuff.
He's wrong about this anti-Semitism.
No, the Jews are not controlling the government.
They're not forcing us into war.
You know, just remember this.
I've said this from my, when I first started this program, the devil does not care who does the hating as long as the hating gets done.
And so when people say, well, we can't attack to the right, I say no.
We attack the evil where the evil is.
And this was evil.
It made us weaker than we were in our moment of triumph.
And it has really taken away a lot of our power to debunk the left because now nobody knows whether what we're saying is generated by hate or if we're part of this conspiracy nonsense or not.
Right this minute, we are coming to what I believe is going to be the end of one of the most successful military campaigns in human history.
And it's been against an enemy that is not only as malevolent as it's possible for an enemy to be, but it is also the prop and support and tool of nations like China and Russia, who are just as malevolent, but far more powerful and dangerous.
You know, Marco Rubio was talking about this even as I was getting ready to come on, so we don't have the clip, but he was just talking about what a success this thing has been.
Here is Brett Stevens, a Trump-hating New York Times columnist.
He said, if past generations could see how well this war has gone compared with the ones they were compelled to fight at a frightening cost, they would marvel at their posterity's comparative good fortune.
They would marvel, too, at our inability to appreciate the advantages we now possess.
And as a result of the fact that the mainstream media has regained its strength because of our weakness and is lying at incredible rates and incredible depth, never reporting the triumph of this campaign, never reporting its purpose, only telling you about things that might happen.
There might be a recession.
There might be a quagmire.
There might be a forever war.
Well, instead, what's happening is going very quickly and very fast.
Now, 61% of respondents in a Pew Research Center poll said they disapprove of the president's handling of the conflict, which is insane, which and a separate poll conducted by Quinnipiak showed that 42% of registered voters believe the war will make the world less safe, also insane.
Now, those numbers are heavily split on partisan lines.
So Republicans mostly support the war and Democrats mostly are against it.
But the independents are the ones who are being affected.
We all know they decide elections in this country.
And Trump's approval rating is cratering.
It's down around 36%, which looks bad for the midterms and might even be bad in the long term for the next presidential election.
So it is just amazing that the jokes on late night are all about us.
They're not about the Iranians.
They're all about how badly we're doing.
You know, the news, again, bad news after bad news, all powered by this hatred of Trump, not because Trump is that hateful.
Trump is a big character, as I've always said, with big merits and big flaws, but he just broke their machine.
He broke their machine by not being afraid, by not being intimidated, by not being silenced.
And that's why they hate him.
And the hatred is insane.
I mean, while we're here, the Democrats will not fund Homeland Security at a moment when clearly it's heightened danger because the Iranians can't wait to strike back at us.
But the Democrats are so busy hating Trump and trying to make him look bad and making sure he doesn't deport the illegals that they have allowed to flood the country.
That's how wicked they are.
And that's why it's so dangerous.
And that's why the prospect of them coming back into power is so bad that I think Trump is going to have to end this war sooner rather than later.
Here, just to read you an example, this is from Foreign Policy Magazine, which is kind of the magazine of the blob.
It's not necessarily right-wing or left-wing, but it's the State Department type ideas.
It says, an expert's point of view on a current event.
Why U.S. victory in Iran would be bad for Washington and the world.
U.S. victory in Iran, the U.S. fighting Iran, get this through your head.
Isn't foreign policy, a major journal of foreign policy, would be bad for the world.
Why?
Because the possibility of Trump imposing his personal whims on another nation is even more frightening than U.S. failure.
That's how much they hate him.
The other day, Trump came out and said that Iran was suing for peace and had sent him a gift.
He just now, a moment ago, revealed that the gift was 10 tankers of oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
They wouldn't even believe him.
They said, no, we won't believe this until we hear from the Iranians.
Here's John Brennan.
Now, admittedly, he's on MS now, but he's a lying scum who told us that the Hunter Biden laptop wasn't real, was part of that major CIA op to tell us that wasn't real.
Why is he on TV at all?
We know he's a liar, but here's what he said.
Cut one.
Well, I tend to believe Iran more than I do.
That's true because he could not acknowledge the truth, even when it is, he's slapped in the face with it repeatedly.
And it's clear that, you know, he is flailing right now.
He's trying to figure out how he's going to get out of this debacle that he has created.
And so he's going to make these claims about negotiations that the Iranians now are sending signals that they really want to make a deal and indicates that they're going to make a deal on our terms.
I don't think anything close to the truth in that statement.
So John Brennan, a known liar, is telling us that he believes Iran instead of more than he believes Donald Trump.
That's the level of hatred on the left.
So this is a bad moment.
You know, it's a bad moment that they have regained the kind of power to engineer this sort of opinion making.
And I think I'm hopeful that we are going to regroup.
I'm hopeful we're going to toss people like Tucker and Candace out of our, stop saying, oh, well, they're on the right.
We can't have division on the right.
They're not on the right.
There's nothing right-wing about them.
There's nothing conservative about them.
They don't like this country.
Tucker praises no country who is not our enemy.
He only praises countries that are our enemy and never praises the United States.
So I'm hoping we will recongeal.
But for the moment, we have to look at things the way they really are.
No Division On The Right00:06:51
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Chapter two, Goofy Nation.
So I want to, just to give us a sense of what the actual situation is, I want to play a couple of videos that came out that were popular.
Here's one.
I think this is from Fox News, Jesse Waters, maybe a guy interviewing girls and boys on Spring Break Cut 2.
What issue facing America is the most important to you?
What bikini I'm going to wear next?
Obesity is terrible.
Ice.
Not personally.
I'm legal.
Getting a tan on the beach.
That's the most important thing in my life right now.
I'm thinking about Starbucks, to be honest.
I'm thinking about Starbucks.
What am I going to get for today?
The elevators don't work.
You got 43 floors.
The elevators don't work.
You must be happy.
I'm very happy.
The Ayatollah's dead.
I'm so what?
Who?
What?
What is that?
Who the f is Ayatollah?
I have never heard that word in my life.
Lewis, what's Ayatollah?
I haven't heard.
I found out about Chuck Norris yesterday.
That was more devastating to me.
Yeah, no, that was more devastating to me as well.
Chuck Norris's death, but of course it's going to turn out badly for death.
You know, Jesus triumphed over death, but Chuck kicked him in the groin and knocked his teeth out.
Look, obviously, you go to spring break, you're going to get a bunch of dopey kids, and that is not, that doesn't, it wouldn't worry me if they were using those nice bodies to couple up and get pregnant and then get married, or possibly even do it in a different order.
But it doesn't end there.
Here's another video that I was looking at from a place called Liberty Hangout, where they went around and asked left wingers who they trusted more, Donald Trump supporters or radical Islamists.
Who do you have more in common with, a Trump supporter or a radical Islamist?
Radical Islamist.
You saw someone wearing one of those red hats chanting, Make America Great Again, or you saw someone shouting Allahu Akbar running down the breezeway here.
Who would you feel more safe with?
The one shouting Allah Akbar.
What is it about Trump supporters that you don't think you'd get along with them so well?
I'm gay.
But you would get along with a radical Islamist?
Yes.
And you're gay?
Yes.
In solidarity with radical Islamists.
Would you look at the camera and say in solidarity, Allahu Akbar?
Ahu Akbar.
And would you say make America great again in solidarity with the Trump supporters?
No.
Now, obviously, these are just selections and they're videos that are put together for your amusement.
But in fact, the stupid does not end there.
In blue states, ignorance is a pandemic.
It is spreading fast.
You know, in San Francisco, I don't know if you know this, they just restored teaching algebra in public school in eighth grade after 12 years of not teaching kids algebra.
Why?
You know, guess why?
Because black kids were doing worse in algebra than white kids.
So to make it fair, they just left them all ignorant.
They just said, we're not going to teach it.
That didn't turn out so well, so now they're bringing it back.
In California, this is really blues about blue states.
In California, 30% of public school fourth graders can read proficiently, which means if you figure it out, 70% can't.
41% can't even read at a basic level.
They are illiterate, and this is true of eighth graders as well.
You know, COVID obviously made schooling worse because of the teachers' unions that run the Democrat Party.
But the poorest kids, as I told you, was going to happen at the time, are not making it up.
They can't catch up.
And so they're really being devastated.
In California, 28%, 28% of black fourth graders read at or above basic level, which means that 72 are below the basic level.
By the way, this is not true.
For instance, Mississippi, this Mississippi miracle, they have turned all this around and are now something like they used to be last in the country in education or down low, and now they're up around, they're in the top 10, I believe.
So these stupid left-wingers that you're seeing in this video, in these videos, are a creation of leftism.
And it means that by their control of the school system, they've created people ignorant enough to be manipulated by the media.
And the media, so they're stupid, but the media is smart about lying.
And the reason they're smart about lying is because like yours truly, they are storytellers.
And storytelling is really interesting because basically, you know, stories are the way that we communicate the internal experience of being a human being.
So it's a snapshot of the soul in time.
So if you are a great storyteller like William Shakespeare or Tolstoy, you communicate great depths of the human soul that tell you what's eternal in the human soul and what is temporary in the human soul, you know, just affected by history.
But even if you're just good enough at it to write a TV commercial, you can make people cry and touch them with emotions.
And what that does, if you touch them with emotions only in a certain way and not in other ways, you are basically convincing them that this small story about an individual is true at scale.
And that is not true.
Stories That Destroy A Country00:09:12
There's a difference between individual, the morality of the way we treat individuals and the morality of scale.
There's a church around the corner from my house where they have a Bible quote saying, treat the immigrant with kindness.
Or, you know, I'm saying off the top of my head, but this is the idea.
And I keep saying, yes, the immigrant.
That doesn't mean that you let people invade your country, which God did not.
We took very seriously in the Bible and got very tough about it.
So, you know, obviously, if you tell a story that makes us feel bad about a mistreated illegal immigrant or a gay person or a Muslim person or any person, you know, it makes you feel like they're oppressed.
And there's truth to these stories.
No one should torment people for what they are.
You know, you treat people according to who they are and what they do.
So you don't torment a person for being gay or black or Muslim.
That's ridiculous.
But that doesn't mean that at scale, that behavior is a good thing.
So, you know, I know many wonderful Muslim people and to bully somebody for being Muslim is despicable.
But is Islam compatible with Western nationhood?
That's the question.
Some people don't think so.
Here's an imam in England where you can be arrested for saying Islam is not compatible with Western nationhood.
And here's what he says, cut four.
We don't say that Islam is here to live, you know, to coexist with lots of different religions and all of us can just hold hands and be friends.
This religion has been sent to dominate, to wipe out, to take out every other religion, to have the people leave every religion and to accept Islam.
And if that requires fighting to achieve it, then it requires fighting to achieve it.
Because the greatest purpose for which jihad was legislated is to make the word of Allah the highest and the word of those who disbelieve the lowest.
Even if the disbelievers hate it.
We're not shy to say it, and we don't find that to be something that we should be shy to say.
Yeah, they're not shy to say it.
We see this in the way that the evil mayor of New York, Zoran Ival Mamdani, I think that's his middle name.
The way he's treated by the press, that any criticism of him is Islamophobic.
You're accused of being Islamophobic, a condition that doesn't exist.
Nobody is phobic about Islam.
But he'll hold prayer meetings, and you'll say, well, wait a minute, what if we held a Christian meeting?
All we would hear about is how we're violating the Constitution.
But no, that's Islamophobic.
Ayan Hirsia Lee has pointed out that he is governing in an Islamic way.
She says, you know, that Mayor Giuliani, the greatest mayor New York ever had, wasn't a Catholic mayor.
Mayor Bloomberg wasn't a Jewish mayor, but Mamdani is a Muslim mayor in the way that he treats people.
In the first hours of his mayoralty, he reversed New York City's adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, which is not a complicated definition.
As other political leaders were condemning a crowd for chanting, we support Hamas, he remained silent.
When it was reported that his wife had liked Instagram posts celebrating the rapist murders of October 7th, he said, well, she's a private person.
He didn't condemn what she said.
He skipped.
He was the first mayor to ever skip the installation of a new archbishop of the Catholics.
And he has done all this, but while taking, as Ayam Hirsina Lee writes in the Wall Street and Washington Post, a different approach toward Islam.
He has shoed the Archbishop of New York, but was photographed with Siraj Wahaj, a Brooklyn Imam who, though never charged, was named on a list of potential co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
He has stressed the threat of Islamophobia.
He celebrated World Hijab Day, describing a hijab as a powerful symbol of devotion.
This is something that the women in Iran like to take off, but unfortunately, it's risking their lives.
So, you know, it's despicable to bully a person for worshiping God as Allah.
That's despicable.
But Christianity sets aside a sphere of political action.
Remember when Jesus said, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, that doesn't just mean tax money.
That also means the sphere of political action.
It doesn't say that you have to be a Christian or a Jew to be a governor, but it means that you leave that to Caesar, but give to God what is God, namely your soul.
Islam doesn't have that exemption, as you heard that Imam saying.
They have Sharia law.
They expect it to be a political religion.
So it might not be compatible with Western life.
And, you know, the same thing with it's despicable to bully a person for being gay.
I've seen it done.
I've been in fistfights over it, actually.
And, you know, but gay theorists claim that it is erotic injustice to keep them from having sex with children.
Now, that's not every gay person, obviously, but that is the movement, the gay movement.
This is why we saw Democrats supporting cartoon porn being piped into elementary schools, gay porn, into elementary schools, only being embarrassed when people read it out loud, which they tried to stop people from doing.
They don't want to make a distinction between those things that destroy a country, those ideas that destroy a country, and individual persons.
You know, kindness toward gay individuals in a heteronormative society works pretty well.
That's pretty much the way we've lived before it was decided, found in the Constitution, that gay people get married by right.
So to keep these conversations from being held, they basically only allow the kinds of stories that support them.
And that means they have to silence other kinds of stories, right?
And that is the important thing.
There's an 18-year-old Loyola University student, Sheridan Gorman.
She was shot and killed allegedly by an illegal alien.
She was out with some friends going on to a pier to see the northern lights.
This guy attacked them, shot her to death as she tried to run.
An 18-year-old girl, shot to death, once again, you know, by an illegal alien.
Here's how a leftist alderman in Chicago told the story.
This cut five.
The kids were out doing normal, normal things people do in the neighborhood.
And it sounds like this might have been a wrong place, wrong time, running into a person who had a gun.
They might have startled this person at the end of the pier unintentionally.
But that's all we know.
That's all we know.
And a major newspaper led, that was the headline, wrong place, wrong time.
She just happened to be where there was a bullet and she startled the poor guy who just happened to be out to kill people.
You know, I mean, it's just amazing.
There's been very little coverage of this in the mainstream media.
They've been playing it down as much as they can the same way they had a cover-up in Nashville where a trans girl shot up a Christian school.
And you remember Biden's spokeswoman, Corrine Jean Identity Hire, came out right after the killing of these Christian children, came out and said, our thoughts are with the trans community today.
That's what she said.
In Finland, the other day, a woman was convicted of the crime of 20 years ago putting out a pamphlet saying the Bible condemns homosexuality, which is true.
It largely does.
And of course, we know in Britain, you get put away for anything that they can deem is hateful.
Once your lies are supported by the stories you tell, you have to censor the stories in order to keep the lie going.
And that's why the left keeps such a clawhold on Hollywood, on television, on novels, on all of this stuff.
If people can't read, they can't discern the difference between a sad story and a philosophy.
So the people who tell the stories rule the world.
And that's one reason, but not the only reason, why stories and culture and the arts are so important.
And that's what I want to talk to Spencer Clavin, No Relation, about.
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Wokeness Killed The Arts00:14:54
That's D-O-S-E-D-A-I-L-Y dot C-O slash.
They don't even tell you how to spell this.
I don't know how you could ever guess.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
That's Klavan, no E's, for 35% off your first month subscription.
Chapter 3, Klavans on the culture.
So as I told you at the start of the show, we have just released a new show called Clavens on the Culture, where myself and Spencer Claven, no relation, talk about the arts, which we think is an important subject, but we want to talk about it in a different way.
The first episode is about Hail Mary Project Hail Mary, the new Ryan Gosling movie, which is a big hit in which we discuss at length and we discuss science fiction and all this stuff.
I ended, Spencer, welcome.
I'm just going to say hello.
Now there are officially two Clavins.
Exactly.
And it's good to see you.
I ended the last chapter by talking about the fact that the left has controlled storytelling and censored storytelling is doing that even as we speak.
And that affects the mood and the emotional state of the country.
But this show is in a way, it's not about that, but it is about that.
Because one thing that I believe is that culture is like God and that you need it in your life, but you can't get it because you need it.
You have to get it because you love it.
And that's what I think we're trying to get at.
Is that a fair way of describing this?
That's right.
You have to seek it and love it for its own sake.
And they say, you know, you should be the change you wish to see in the world.
And so you and I with this show, we're making the show we want to see in the world, the show that we think is missing, right?
It's not grumbling and complaining.
It's also not holding every work of art to the standard of our ideology.
It's using our principles and our ideas to inform our aesthetic sensibilities, which, as you say, kind of have to come first in order to understand any work of art.
You have to begin from the thing in itself.
This is an ancient idea, right?
The liberal arts are the things that you do for their own sake, because you love them.
It's still true.
And it's something that's missing from cultural commentary.
I would say on the left and the right.
You know, we know the right better, so we tend to sort of critique them more in a friendly way.
But actually, now that I think about it, the left is suffused with its own, choked on its own ideas, like can't say anything else other than this small, narrow, dogmatic set of things that they think, which are untrue and so make crap art.
But they also, separately from that, and this is what's made them successful in the culture, they also have flair and taste and style, right?
And this is the thing that like we, it drives conservatives crazy because they don't know why they can't, you know, break in and they can't have success.
And of course, there is blacklisting and there is like a stack deck and all of that, but there's also a real kind of lack of criticism and sensibility.
And we're trying to kind of provide that.
I think we want that to be in the space.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, this morning, as I was preparing the show, every morning I read the New York Times because it's cheaper than driving a nail into my ear.
But I'm reading the cheaper.
So I'm reading the New York Times.
And all of a sudden, there is an article by one of their top critics, A.O. Scott, who's an older guy, about a Wallace Stevens poem that I happen to know and really like very much, which begins something with a word about the palm at the end of the mind, which I just thought is a great line.
And all he does is talk about it.
It wasn't profound.
It wasn't a very deep reading.
It was the kind of thing that people say about poetry when they don't really know that much about poetry.
But at least it was a man interacting with a work of art from a place of like, oh, here's a beautiful thing, you know, and here's a beautiful thing.
And what does it mean?
And how can I get at the meaning of it?
And I think, you know, I think bad art can speak about, can tell you meanings.
I think left-wing art has something to say because, you know, the basic principles of leftism, that you should take care of the poor, what used to be the basic principles of leftism, that you should take care of the poor and not forget the underdog and all.
Those are very, you know, biblical principles that we agree in.
And you can tell like Charles Dickens great stories.
You know, Charles Dickens had a lot of opinions that I don't agree with, but he was one of the greatest novelists who ever lived.
And we want to capture any of that that we can because I am so tired of hearing one, conservatives complain and two, of hearing them only praise work that they agree with.
It's true.
And it's actually a conservative idea that the world is bigger than your theories.
This is something that the conservative tradition is filled with this wisdom.
We don't always practice it in this domain.
And partly it's because we're like, you know, we're like abused spouses, right?
We've been beaten down so much and told we suck in the media so much that we're hypersensitive to it.
And that makes us naturally resentful and unable to concede the virtues of left-wing art when it is so aggressively kind of hateful toward us.
But of course, you can't approach anything truly good or beautiful from a place of resentment.
You can't even mount an effective critique from a place of woundedness and resentment.
You have to even criticize things from a place of love, of wanting things to be good.
And that point that you make about just, you know, arts criticism, right?
Writing on the arts, which we both just love and love to do, and which is, it's so disheartening when you have to filter it through some like political angle or news hook, as you often, you know, you'll often be asked by an editor, like, can we find some contemporary moment to like hook this to?
Because that's what people are always obsessed with is the politics of the day.
And you want to say, and we often do say, like, no, we're trying to get people.
You know, everyone knows that that's unhealthy.
Everyone knows that we need an antidote to just up to the minute constant scrolling.
And what we're trying to say is this is the antidote, right?
The world reflected back in the mirror of art is the refreshing kind of escape that we all want from constant politics, but you have to allow that in.
And I think like everyone feels this to a certain extent naturally, because what's the first thing that happens when you see a movie you just really love or you close a book that you were totally like over the moon about?
You want to talk to somebody, right?
Like the first thing I do when I play a video game that I've just thought was incredible, like Expedition 33 kind of blew my mind last year.
And I, of course, saw somebody tweet about it and thought it looked good.
So I picked it up and I'm in the middle of this thing and I just think, man, this is the best game I've played in years.
I've not been this immersed in a video game in a long time.
So the first thing I did, of course, was went to Reddit, right?
Like looked up the game magazine reviews and of course discovered that this was like the game of the year in every poll and every rating.
But I wanted people to tell me like what they had liked best.
I wanted them to say things that didn't work for them.
And I didn't have any agenda about it.
And I think like we all have that reaction.
People have it with this movie that we covered in the first episode, Project Hail Mary, right?
I mean, in some ways, the lesson that we've learned from this week at the movies is all you have to do is put Ryan Gosling in your movie and you will have a blockbuster sensation.
We didn't actually mention this, but he was also the secret sauce to the last movie that was this explosive, which was Barbie.
Yeah.
I mentioned it at one point that he's because he's underrated.
But I think, look, you know, I started talking about this when we first moved back from England.
And I came back and especially after 9-11, I found the country so much changed that I started to say, you know, what happened?
Why are people reacting to the first bombing attack in America since Pearl Harbor?
Why are they reacting as if like, you know, what is wrong with us that these nice Islamists wanted to do this to us?
And I thought, like, that has a big change since when we left.
And we, and we left because I was sick of political correctness in the first place.
So things have gotten much, much worse.
I started talking to conservatives about this.
And I used to joke that they would look at me the way mom looks at me when I tell her that if you buy something on sale, it still costs money.
You know, and I thought like, you know, they would look at me with that look like, you know, you're really cute and we like you, but we have no idea what you're talking about.
And one of the questions that I got over and over again, there are two questions that I got.
One is, what can we do?
We're not artists, which I thought was a perfectly good question.
And my answer really is you can love the arts.
You know, you can not leave people, not leave artists alone by saying, I never go to the movies anymore.
I'm not going to the movies.
You know, I mean, you should be big one.
Yeah.
I hear that a lot now, especially around Oscar season.
So there's absolutely no incentive for them to bring you into the theater.
So that's one thing.
But the other thing I'm asked all the time is, is there something inherently, uh, anti-artistic about conservatism is, is our conservatives.
And I, and I keep saying, I keep saying, well, I don't know when they kept blacks out of baseball, uh, out of managing baseball, it took a while after they opened the door for the blacks to show up because they're not stupid enough to stand outside a closed door for years.
So it took a while for them to show up.
And there is blacklisting, as you say, but do you think that there is something inherent in conservatism that is anti-art?
Boy.
I mean, this keeps me up at night, I have to say, because, you know, I live in Nashville now, where a lot of the daily wire guys are out here too.
And I have this joke in Nashville that it's kind of like a bluish city in a red state.
And the same's true of Austin, where I do some teaching.
And they have these very distinct characters, these blue cities and red states.
And it's kind of like the old joke that, you know, in heaven, the French run the restaurants and the Germans run the trains and the British are the police, you know, the friendly bobbies.
And then in hell, the British run the restaurants and the French run the trains and the Germans are the police.
And so I kind of have this semi-serious theory that in heaven, the libs run like the museums and the coffee shops and the culture centers and the art houses, you know, the concert halls and the conservatives run the government.
So this is sort of what you get in blue cities and red states, although, you know, liberalism is kind of like a contagious virus and it does tend to escape containment.
So they don't really function the way because we can't have nice things.
But this is just to say, there is, I think, a kind of predisposition in the liberal mind for experimentation, right?
For adventuresome kind of thinking outside the box, just like a natural disposition to look at a system and poke around the edges of it.
And in an ideal world, right, that would be tempered by the natural conservative disposition to preserve what is good because it's hard won and keep the boundaries policed, right?
But the liberal disposition is more obviously artistic, right?
It kind of like leads you to exploring these weird, like quirky, you know, the Emily Dickinson line, tell the truth, but tell it slant, right?
And there's something artistic about that and something perhaps less naturally artistic about your average conservative person.
However, there's a big, big butt here, I think, which is, you know, the bell curve idea, right?
That you have this big kind of central distribution and then on either side of the extremes, the extreme worst and the extreme high, you have very, very few people.
I think that as you get to either side of the bell curve of art, you find conservatives.
So there's like really bad conservative art concentrated at the far left of the bell curve.
And in the middle, you probably have a fair amount of lefties making decent art.
But once you punch through to the other side, you find that the truly great artists are those who can recognize, acknowledge the complexity, even take it in with a kind of sorrowful, tragic vision.
and find that complexity within the framework of the moral universe.
And I'm thinking here of like Dostoevsky and Shakespeare and like at the very top tier.
And those are guys who, like, would they vote the straight Republican ticket?
No, but there is something definitively conservative that shapes their sensibility and keeps it from being purely destructive.
So I kind of have the bell curve theory of this, which is more hopeful than just like, oh, we're at a natural disadvantage.
I mean, I think the fact that the arts have been so bad for the last five years in keeping with wokeness, what it says to me is that the liberal arts are by nature liberal.
And the left is the most illiberal group of people in the country.
So they owned the arts because they were the liberals.
That's how they took the arts over because they were liberal.
But now that they're not liberal, the arts are dead.
And all the liberals, I think, are on the right.
And this makes perfect sense because liberalism has a place for the individual in the system.
So a lot of art is going to be culture critical.
It's going to say something about this culture is oppressive to this individual person.
That is a very liberal thing to say.
But conservatism is based on the truth of human nature.
So that really, the best artist, I think, is going to be a conservative with a liberal bent.
So you talk about Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is thought to be a monarchist.
But when he talks about the hero king, Henry V, Henry says, well, what is a king except for a ceremony?
They just give me a ceremony.
It didn't make me the king.
And so he questions his kingship and then goes out and proves that he is in fact the right man for the job.
And so that, I think that that combination of conservative verities with a liberal feeling towards humankind is going to be the sweet spot for the arts.
Completely.
And what your point about the way that wokeness has killed the arts is really important because we can't forget that this idea of the left as owning the culture is a little bit outdated now.
Like we have one of the things we talked about on the first episode of Clavis on the Culture was that the age of pessimism is kind of dead, right?
Non-Stupid Optimism For Culture00:02:46
Like the age of spiritual pessimism has played itself out.
And what we're looking for is kind of non-stupid optimism.
Like we're looking for like a really vigorous way to believe in kind of the good and the true again.
And even like Zoomers are kind of known for being more sincere than millennials, right?
And part of that is because, as you say, the left became increasingly illiberal.
And you can see how it kills their artistic sensibility.
I mean, everything gets uglier, it gets worse.
So definitely, I think like the conservatives have a shot now in the way that they did before.
I think that's right.
I have to stop you there because we're out of time, but we want to leave them wanting more.
So they will come and watch claims on the culture.
The first episode is the Hail Mary episode, and it's going to depend on how much you guys show up for it, how often we do it.
That's basically the way it works.
Spencer, it's good to see you, whoever you are.
And I've wandered in here.
I'm not going to wander out.
I hope that's all right.
I'll see myself.
I'll see you later.
Thanks a lot.
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I don't know.
You won't be able to trust me because you'll lie down.
The next thing you know, it'll be morning.
You'll feel great.
But you'll think, was he lying about that mattress?
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It's K-A-L-A-V-A-N.
Christian Heresy And Nazis00:06:33
Final chapter, same old story.
It's...
It's so interesting to me, fascinating and yet predictable, that whenever evil starts to rise, anti-Semitism is so visible.
I've always called it the devil's flagpole.
It's just amazing how central it is to the dissolution of the West.
And I've explained a million times, I'll just say it briefly, that I believe that the hatred of Jews is the hatred of the Jewish God, whom we know through his incarnation in the person of Jesus Christ.
And so it's the hatred of Christ in Christ's name.
It is the hatred of Christ in Christ's name.
And Christianity is the framework on which Western civilization was built.
It's like really removing it is like removing the skeleton from the body.
The body just becomes a puddle.
And so as I watch the people who have become part of this destructive toxin in the new media that so gloriously defeated the empire of lies, it doesn't really surprise me, and yet it appalls me that the things they are saying are exactly the same things that were being said in Weimar, Germany before it fell to the Nazis, which just remember,
and I especially remind all those people who send me pictures of Nazis as an anti-Semitic gesture, that the Nazis left Euro in rubble.
And that does seem to be what happens when you forget your God.
But let's just take a little look at this hateful ancient slur that it was one of the things that held me up in my conversion to Christianity because I had accepted Christ, but I was aware of the thousand plus year history of Christian anti-Semitism, which thankfully many people in America are only accepting or only experiencing for the first time because it has not been true of American Christians.
It was from an earlier time, but it was true in Europe.
And part of the slur was not just that the Jews had killed Christ, as if there were anyone else there who could have done it.
And if God selected, chose the Jews to be his people because he thought that they were the best people for the job.
What were the people who were less than the best people for the job?
What would they have done to Jesus Christ?
So that's one slur.
And the other is that now God has rescinded his promise and his chosenness to the Jews and has now replaced them with the Christians.
The Christians are a replacement core, which if you think about it, it doesn't even sound like God, but it sounds like angry little people.
But here is Carrie Prigon Bowler, a former beauty queen, a new Catholic, who has become just a voice of, to me, of bubbling hatred.
This is cut six.
I know what the Catholic Church teaches.
We are the new Israel.
That's what the church teaches.
We are the fulfillment of the old Israel.
I mean, look at Jesus fulfilled it all on the cross.
When he said it is finished, the old was completely done.
There is the new covenant now.
Those who are in Christ, that is the new people of God.
And then, of course, there's Tucker Carlson, who is constantly accusing people of being obsessed with Israel and cannot stop talking about it.
And, you know, these guys, see, they're not anti-Semitic, they're anti-Zionist.
But I would like them to provide a list of countries they feel should cease to exist because there's only one country on it.
There's only one country on it.
And it is the most democratic, the most tolerant, the most religiously diverse, where women are the most respected in the Middle East.
Although there are other countries in the Middle East that are becoming more civilized, which is wonderful.
And I'm happy, you know, I have no motivation to hate countries.
But here's Tucker Carlson saying essentially the same thing as cut seven.
And the last thing that I think we need to do to restore balance between the relationship between the United States and Israel and to restore some sanity to the public conversation on this topic is to get our theology right.
And this is not a message aimed at Israelis or Jews.
This is a message aimed at Christians who are the largest group of Israel supporters in the United States.
And their view of Israel is colored not just by a sentimental attachment, which is fine, or trips to Israel, great, no problem, but by a Christian heresy, the oldest of the Christian heresies, which is that God somehow prefers some people based on their DNA.
And of course, the whole point of Christianity is that that is no longer true, that there is no chosen people.
The chosen people are people who choose Jesus.
That is the Christian message right there.
So it is, of course, true that God used the Jews, the people of the Jews, to return after the fall, to return to human contact and human relationship after the fall, and meant for that to ultimately become universal.
But my question of Tucker then is, did God reject his people, the Jews?
And I would say no.
And I am an Israelite myself.
I am a descendant of Abraham.
And I say that God did not reject his people whom he knew of old.
Israel has experienced hardening in part until, only until the full number of Gentiles has come in.
And in this way, all of Israel will be saved.
All of Israel will be saved.
And as far as the gospel is concerned, the Jews may be enemies of the gospels for now, but it's for the sake of the Gentiles.
As far as their election, their chosenness is concerned.
They are loved by God on account of the patriarchs, for God's gifts and his call are irrevocable.
And this is a Jewish Christian talking to you, not me.
Those are the words and sentiments of Saint Paul.
That is his message to the Romans.
I, you probably have noticed, am not a saint.
And this is my message to the anti-Semites, which is much briefer, but I can't say it on the air.
So it's become obvious at this point that I'm never going to die, but that's not true for you.
And you better realize there are bigger things that you have been putting off, like taking care of your family, protecting the life you've built for the people you love.
My Message To Anti-Semites00:07:26
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With the Passion of the Christ now streaming on Daily Wire Plus and Easter just days away, Matt Walsh, Isabel Brown, and Michael Knowles are sitting down for a real conversation about the film, what it meant when it was released over two decades ago, and what it means now.
And a few of you are actually going to be in the room with them, not watching from a screen, but they're part of the conversation.
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Clavin Clapbacks.
I'm the hunky donkey here.
Iopistic.
Yeah!
I miss that guy.
I really do.
Clavinclapbacks at dailywire.com, Clavin with a K, Clapbacks with a K, Clavin Clapbacks at DailyWire.com.
We love to hear from you.
So please, we read, I read more of the letters than I can answer, but please send them in and ask about anything you want.
The first letter is from Ryan.
He says, I know you feel definitively that The Exorcist is an exploitative film about a young girl getting her period.
I would be very interested in how you arrived at that conclusion since William Peter Blatty, the author of the novel, and William Friedkin, the director of the film, have stated that the film is about the mystery of faith.
Originally, the film contained a scene in which the older priest explains that the girl is not the target.
The demon's real purpose is to make the priest despair.
Blatty was furious when the scene was cut, and after 40 years, Friedkin restored the scene and the author and the director were reconciled.
Would this scene sway you in any way to reassess at least what you feel the film is about, regardless of its effectiveness?
Love the show.
Thanks for everything you do from Ryan.
You know, Ryan, you're kind of, I mean, it's maybe my fault.
I may not be quite clear about this.
You're kind of confusing a few things that I said.
First, I don't like the film because I don't think it's a good movie.
I think it's just a little girl being torn to pieces for two hours, and it's not very interesting.
The priest is interesting, but I didn't find it interesting.
I didn't find it scary.
I just found it hard to look at.
I didn't like watching that girl torn apart.
So I know many people, especially Catholics, were absolutely terrified.
The guy I went and saw it with, who was a lapsed Catholic, actually had a fit.
I had to carry him physically out of the theater.
It's a long story and a good story, but I can't tell it now.
So it's like, I know it was frightening to some people, but I was laughing at the film.
So I just don't think it's a very good film.
I understand that it's about faith and evil and all that.
What I'm saying is there's a subtext there of this child becoming evil because through sexuality, almost every word out of her mouth that the demon speaks is this hideous version of sexuality.
And I think that that is a take on, you know, an under-theme or an undercurrent of a girl coming into her sexuality, which many feminists said at the time.
And I'm sorry to agree with feminists, but that's what I think.
But so I don't like the film, but I do understand what it's about, and I do understand the author's intention.
But sometimes beneath the intention is, you know, a psychological strain.
And I guess that's what I'm identifying.
And, you know, I could be wrong, but that's the way I read the film and the way it hits me every time I see it.
From Kenny, Mr. Mirth Merchant, I am in grad school so that I may become a licensed marriage and family therapist.
That's what my wife is.
In the last episode, you suggested pursuing Christian couples therapy as an answer to a listener's question.
I found this refreshing and hopeful, as many conservatives are only negative on the therapeutic process.
This often discourages me as I am a Christian conservative who sees the value of psychology and therapy as tools to help hurting people.
Why are conservatives so down on psychology and therapy broadly?
Kenny from SoCal, I can only guess at the answer you should really ask Matt Walsh because he is that way.
But it is true.
I mean, Joseph Campbell, who was a conservative writer who wrote about myth, said, oh, I'd prefer myth to someone sobbing out his heart.
And I think it's that.
It's the non-masculinity of it.
It is there almost no male therapists anymore.
It's very hard to find one.
So I praise you for becoming one.
And the kind of get in touch with your feelings aspect of it is kind of feminine.
And the, you know, let's talk it all out.
I think those are things that are feminized for conservatives who tend to be men.
And I think that that may have something to do with it.
But I think that they are mistaken.
I think it is a method of exploration if you have a good, tough therapist who's not all about touchy-feely, but is all about, you know, finding who you are and doing the right thing.
It saved my life, but I had a very, very hard moral therapist who was not all touchy-feely at all.
So I think that that may have had something to do with it.
But I think that's it, basically.
I think it is the softness of it, the emotionalism of it.
And there's also a strain.
There's also a, in the practice of therapy, you have to put aside moral judgment a lot of times.
I've done this as a person on hotlines.
When people tell you horrible things, you can't just say, that's horrible.
What a terrible person you are.
You have to talk them through to the point where they can see that maybe they're doing this for unhealthy reasons.
You know, kind of the way God deals with, that's when we pray.
He doesn't hit you with a bolt of lightning when you tell him the stupid thing you're doing.
He leads you to wisdom in yourself.
That doesn't mean some people have interpreted that to mean, including therapists, that therapists should be amoral, but that's not true.
They are using a non-judgmental approach to let the person see himself, which is, I think, kind of what Jesus intended.
But I think those are some of the reasons conservatives don't back it.
And I think that they have a point in that most therapists are not very good.
And I think that's, so that's why it sounds more true than it is.
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