Andrew Klavan critiques performative Christianity and media narratives, celebrating Donald Trump's strategic Middle East victories and the miraculous rescue of "Dude 44." He argues that capitalism drives prosperity despite a shrinking core middle class, while condemning left-wing division and unfairness. Klavan contrasts the British Empire's humility with modern decline, asserting crime stems from sin rather than poverty, and praises Reagan-era policing. Finally, he offers spiritual comfort for grief, urging listeners to walk through suffering by talking daily to God who turns bad things good. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Pretending to Believe00:04:02
You know, many people ask me to explain how to be a Christian.
Not many people, maybe like three or four.
It's hard to count them because they're invisible.
But whenever some lost soul begs me to point the way toward the light of God's love, I always take time out of my busy schedule and say to them, Of course, that'll be $25.
A man's got to eat.
There are many misconceptions about the experience of Christian faith.
Even an honest seeker can lose his way and begin to believe that Christianity is just a matter of establishing a relationship with a loving God who sacrificed his own son to win forgiveness for his sinful creation, and wants nothing more from you but that you turn from your destructive desires and live into his image to find peace and joy and eternal light.
That's absurd.
It's difficult and you miss all the fun.
Instead, you must turn your eyes to the Lord's eternal dwelling place, social media.
There, you'll find to your delight that the moment you accept Christ into your heart, you instantly receive the power to tell other people that they're doing it wrong.
When Jesus said, Judge not, lest you be judged, he didn't mean, Judge not, lest you be judged.
He meant, Hey, tell that stupid schmuck over there I am sending him to hell if he doesn't shut his fat face right now.
Of course, those of you who are only just starting on your Christian journey might wonder, Why did our Savior say the exact opposite of what he meant?
But as you grow in social media faith, you'll understand it's because our blessed Lord was a Jew, and you just can't trust those people.
Also, when you become a Christian, you'll develop the ability.
To see things no one else can see, almost as if you were a prophet or a schizophrenic or a CNN anchor woman.
To explore this ability, social media Christian Tucker Carlson recently interviewed an exorcist, Father Brendan O'Peggy.
Here's a brief portion of the transcript Father O, in order to cast out demons, you must first be able to discern the presence of evil.
Tucker, your mother has sex with animals in hell.
Look, my head spins 360 degrees.
Fall down and worship me.
Father O, you must learn to look for small, subtle signs of demonic influence.
Tucker, behold, I levitate and spider walk across the ceiling.
I am legion, abandon the Holy One, and despair.
Father O, next, you must learn to speak Syriac.
Well, the full interview is available online, but you get the idea.
But religion isn't all fun and games.
Sometimes you have to make an effort.
For instance, to be a good Christian, it's essential that you marshal your willpower to overcome your sense of humor.
Knowing Christ can make your heart light with celestial joy and cause you to laugh even amidst the hapless corruption of a fallen world.
You don't want that.
Non Christians might see it and start to join in.
Then we'd have to live with them forever in heaven.
And I hate those people.
Fortunately, once you've stripped yourself of any propensity for laughter, all self awareness will also melt away, and you'll at last be prepared for the pious act of pretending to believe absolute nonsense in the name of God.
For example, when the Bible says, Do not mistreat the immigrant among you, you can pretend that means.
Allow 20 million illegal crapheads to exploit your tolerance, sack your coffers, and rape and murder your women.
Or you can pretend that when Jesus says, love your neighbor, he means sexually mutilate your children so they can delight in being the gender of their choice right up until the moment they commit suicide.
And okay, pretending to believe such things may not win sinners eternal life, but it could get professors tenure, which is almost the same thing.
Now, some of you may be asking yourself, gee, where in the Bible does it say Christ's titanic liberating sacrifice is supposed to turn us into humorless, pious scolds who pretend to believe complete nonsense?
But it's right there in John 11, verse 35, where it says, Jesus wept.
Defending the Impossible00:15:18
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is The Andrew Clavin Show.
All right, we are back once again laughing our way through the start of the American Empire.
I hope you all had a wonderful Easter.
I had a really lovely Easter.
Among other things, I saw my grandchildren who turned out to be just a collection of germs that are disguised as adorable children.
That's how they lure you in so that you hug them and then you immediately get ill.
So I'm counting down till my cold arrives.
Every time I see them, I get something.
We've got a lot of good things coming up next week a new edition of Claven's on the Culture with Spencer Claven, no relation.
Last time we discussed the Hail Mary project.
You can see that at Daily Wire or online or on YouTube.
And this time we're going to discuss a new tech savvy form of ghost story.
And we'll be reviewing a movie based on a spooky video game called The Exit 8.
This has been the film has been released around the world everywhere, but here, and it's now being released here.
It's got developed already, a major cult following, but it's kind of an example of the way ghost stories are being done nowadays.
So we're going to talk about that.
Also, the Daily Wire I don't know if you've seen this, but you really should.
The Daily Wire has a genuinely funny new show.
Hosted by my insane friend, Pavel Widowski.
It's called Be a Man with Me.
And it's every time, every episode, Pavel goes out and does some other crazy manly chore and, you know, some job that he does.
And eventually, you don't want to miss it because eventually he's clearly going to blow himself up.
And you'll want to see, you just watch a giant, gigantic pole catch fire, which should be entertaining.
Here's just a brief trailer from Be a Man with Me with Pavel.
I can't think of more manly professionals.
Than firefighters.
They are strong, they are courageous, they have chilly competition.
Everybody loves firefighters, but nobody's signing up.
We all lack of courage, and that's a problem.
We really need firefighters.
They are the ones that are running towards the fire when everybody else is running away from it.
So, in this episode, I'm gonna spend a day and train as a fireman to show how important it is what they do and to show you how fun it is to use that freaking hose.
You can get that on Daily Wire or on YouTube at youtube.comslash at beamanwithme.
You don't want to miss it when Pavel finally blows himself up.
I've been waiting for him to do it for years.
Also, wherever you get this show, whether it's on Daily Wire Plus or whether it's on YouTube or whether it's just in your imagination, leave a comment.
We can get your comments, even if they're in your imagination.
We have that power.
And it's a little disturbing to know that, but we thought we should tell you.
And if that Is as ugly as your imagination, it'll probably fit right in the show.
So today's comment comes from Terry Landes, 6072.
He says, Losing that many people by revoking citizenship on moron status would solve a lot of long term problems while only gaining a few short term ones.
Yes, this was my plan.
This is my brilliant plan.
I mean, nobody ever listens to me.
Nobody listens to Andrew.
I had this brilliant plan a long time ago that we should turn the Middle East into a one state solution instead of a two state solution.
The whole area should be run by the Jews.
They have a better country.
Everybody will be happier.
Everybody will be treated better.
Does it look like they've done?
No, they just let that great idea.
And then last week, I had this great idea off the top of my head that we revoke moron citizenship.
Instead of worrying about native citizenship, we revoke people for being morons.
The minute they open their mouths and whatever they say, it's all the fault of the Jews.
There's no moonshot or anything like that.
The ice just shows up, picks them up under the arms, and sends them.
To Botswana or some other made up country.
It's a great idea, but nobody listens.
So, since nobody listens, let's get directly to today's episode What Winning Looks Like.
If you are looking for a gift that guarantees a real reaction and possibly a small emotional breakdown, I have to tell you about our sponsor, Book by Anyone.
I should have brought this in.
They didn't tell me they were going to have an ad on this show, but bookbyanyone.com lets you create a fully personalized AI generated book.
where your friend, partner, family member is the main character in a wild sci-fi fantasy thriller, or even a nonfiction book about themselves.
I did this about myself because I'm the person I care about most.
And it's not some sad little novelty pamphlet.
It's a professionally printed hardcover or paperback with over 200 pages of completely original content built around the person that you're doing.
For me, it was me.
There's a title, the cover, the table of contents, the story, even the fake reviews on the back.
I did one about a cookbook.
Because I have no idea how to cook, and every time I've tried, I've set myself on fire.
So I thought that would be pretty funny, and it was pretty funny.
Just go to bookbyanyone.com, answer a few fun questions about the person you want to send this to, pick a book idea and cover, and bookbyanyone.com does the rest.
It takes about two minutes, then they ship you a real book with free shipping, which is why they've already printed hundreds of thousands of copies.
The reactions are the best part.
When you watch somebody open what looks like a serious book and they suddenly realize it's some deranged story about themselves, it is perfect for birthdays, for holidays.
Anyone who's impossible to shop for, like me, I'm impossible to shop for because I always think I don't need anything.
But no one expects to get a book about themselves that makes them look as silly as they are.
For a gift that's truly unforgettable, head to bookbyanyone.com, order your book today, and enjoy free shipping at bookbyanyone.com.
One last time, that's bookbyanyone.com.
Chapter one, war in an info crisis.
This is what we're experiencing.
I had a lot of visitors over the holiday, over Easter, and I was talking to a lot of people, most of them in somewhere in politics or the journalism business or something like that.
And three separate people, without my saying anything, brought up the death of Robert Mueller and the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife by their son and Trump's reaction to those.
If you remember when Mueller died, Mueller was the guy who hounded him.
Over the Russia hoax and knew that it was a hoax, but investigated him for two years anyway.
Trump said, I'm glad he's dead.
When Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered by their son, possibly one of the most tragic things that can happen to a person to have his own child turn on him and kill him, just an awful, awful story.
It's not something anybody deserves just because he's slightly annoying as Rob Reiner was.
Trump said horrible things about Rob Reiner, again, indicating that he didn't care.
The reason this came up is because Trump's, as I've often said, like all of us, Trump's best character traits and his worst character traits are the same character trait.
We love him because he's belligerent enough to break the bonds of restriction and cancellation and fear that the left had slowly wound around our country like cocoons, who nobody was brave enough to face them down for fear of being called racist or being canceled, which I think is still a problem in Congress.
But Trump just busted that because he had the Guts and the belligerence and the indifference to manners that made him, on the one hand, kind of a bully and a bore at times, but on the other hand, let him speak, say the things that needed to be said.
But when he says things like that, when he says things that can't be forgiven, that can't be excused, that are just rude and cruel and the kind of thing that a civilized person simply does not say, and even doesn't think I mean, I can't ever remember celebrating somebody's death.
I think death is like over the top, it's something that we should just be respectful about.
When he does it, it casts doubt on the other things that he says that are 3D chess or are facing down a power that needs to be shattered, like the blob or the left's media.
When he does that, they deserve it and they need to hear it, and we need to have it done so that other people can acquire some guts going down the road, which I'm not even sure has happened yet, but hopefully it has.
It certainly has to Marco Rubio, I think it has to JD Vance, and those are things that are really important.
So this week, I'm sure you all know.
Before this ceasefire started, there was an 8 o'clock deadline, and Trump said, A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back.
He was talking about the fact that he was going to bomb bridges and other infrastructure, electric plants.
He says, I don't want that to happen, but it probably will.
Most of us, I mean, the idea that he was going to drop some kind of nuke on Iran and kill all the people there, I don't think that occurred to anybody.
But you remember when Trump said that there was going to be a bloodbath in the auto industry.
Remember this?
There was going to be a bloodbath in the auto industry if he weren't elected.
We had to spend two days listening to how he was going to murder people, presumably in the auto industry, if he weren't elected.
I mean, it was just insane, the coverage on him.
And so, of course, we had to hear from this.
Now, before, when asked about this, the god of war, Pete Hegseth, Told us what Trump meant.
Here's that cut.
I see only what I have come to destroy.
Now, I'm sorry, the wrong God of War.
That's Kratos from the other God of War.
This is Pete Hegseth.
Cut through.
We had a target set locked and loaded of infrastructure, bridges, power plants.
Remember, this is a terror regime.
The military regime used all of these things for dual use to fund their military, to fund their terror campaigns.
We had a lot of legitimate targets.
They knew exactly the scope of what we were capable of.
We hit some military targets on Karg, which is a bit of a signal.
They can't defend it.
And so Iran ultimately understood their ability, their future to produce, to generate power, to fuel their terrorist regime was in our hands.
So in other words, when Trump said he was going to destroy their civilization, he was talking about the fact that he could hit anything he wanted.
They knew what he was going to hit.
They were telling them, we are going to hit this plant and that plant and parts of Carg Island.
You can't defend Carg Island.
You probably can't defend anything.
They have been destroyed.
But of course, the press had to go insane.
And so they pretended it was going to be a war crime and genocide and all this was absolute nonsense.
Here is Carolyn Levitt answering stupid questions from the press.
How can the president claim that America can ever have the moral high ground if he's threatening to destroy civilizations and not casting wars as fights against other governments?
Andrew, I think you should take a look at the actions of this president over the course of the past six weeks and the actions of our brave men and women in our United States military who have essentially taken out the military of a rogue Islamic regime that has chanted death to America for 47 years, that has killed And maimed thousands of American soldiers over the course of the last five decades.
The president absolutely has the moral high ground over the Iranian terrorist regime, and for you to even suggest otherwise is frankly insulting.
So, we're talking about the information crisis that we're in, where it's really, really hard to know who is telling the truth, because on the one hand, we have a press that is 100%, just approximately 100% corrupt.
They have been selling the fact that this war is a quagmire, that we're losing it, that it's terrible all the time, constantly.
Then we have a Rebel media, social media that is completely unpoliced and it has an incentive of clickbait.
So there's an incentive for people to tell you what you want to hear or what incites your anger or what incites other people's anger and gets them publicity.
That is the incentive that makes them say things.
So we don't always know that even they are telling the truth.
And of course, they use that the fact that the left is lying all the time, that the mainstream media is lying all the time.
They use that to suggest that therefore they know something, which oftentimes they don't.
The only person you can trust is me because I'm on a mission from God.
So I'm going to tell you what I think.
No matter what.
And also, I'm just, I have only one client, which is the United States of America.
That's the only thing I actually care about.
So at the same time, Trump, who very often says exactly what he's thinking, he's an amazingly transparent president, also has that mouth on him where he'll say something awful that makes you doubt whether he's actually in control of what he's saying.
Is he playing 3D chess or is he just blabbing?
The hyperbole sometimes makes it hard to trust him and things like that.
I think when this Ceasefire began.
This is a two week ceasefire during which they're going to negotiate theoretically in Islamabad, overseen by the Pakistanis.
They're going to have talks between Iran and the U.S.
And Trump said this is a total and complete victory.
Well, obviously, it may not even be a ceasefire.
I mean, we don't know what it's going to be.
Once again, though, I think when we step back, so what has happened?
Where are we and where are we going to go?
So let's talk about where are we first.
I think, once again, God of War, Pete Hegzett.
Gave a good description of what has been accomplished.
I see only what I have come to destroy.
Oh, that's Kratos.
I think they're doing this on purpose now.
I'm not sure.
Here is the real God of War.
Together with our Israeli partners, America's military achieved every single objective on plan, on schedule, exactly as laid out from day one.
Iran's Navy is at the bottom of the sea, whether it's the Soleimani class, their frigate class, their prized.
Iran no longer has an air defense, any sort of a comprehensive air defense system.
We own their skies.
So he goes on.
It's a long speech where he talks about 15 minutes about all the things that have been destroyed.
Their defenses have been destroyed.
Their plants have been destroyed.
Their nuclear stuff is buried underground.
It's going to take them years to get back going.
I'm not even sure there's a government left in Iran.
I mean, I don't even know who they're talking to.
And I think this is really kind of an interesting question because there also is a possibility that Trump is just playing the different factions off each other.
Some of them may want to make peace.
Some of them may not want to make peace.
And he's trying to get them to fight with each other.
That would be kind of an interesting scenario.
We just don't really have the whole story.
And of course, because it's the future, we don't know what is going to happen.
Regime Change Scenarios00:09:20
And I was talking, we did a friendly fire.
And I was saying this to Walsh, you know, you can make a living reacting to, The bad news sources that we have to the New York Times lies and the NBC News lies and all the lies coming from the left, the constant.
The Wall Street Journal, where the op ed page is quite good, but the rest of the paper is very left wing.
And so they said, well, Trump backed down.
I thought, what do you mean he backed down?
He wanted a ceasefire.
He got a ceasefire.
That's pretty obvious.
And even if it's not a ceasefire, it probably gives him a chance to see if we can now move into a place where he can get the things.
He's done what he needed to do.
We didn't really expect the regime change.
We didn't need it.
But just keep remembering this.
Keep thinking about this.
I don't want to react to commenters.
I don't want to just say, oh, this commenter is wrong.
Matt on the Friendly Fire was complaining about those people who attack you if you raise questions about the war.
That is definitely happening.
It is often one of the big Jewish commentators who will call Matt terrible names if Matt says, I would rather trump were paying attention to the border, to deporting people, which is a citizen's choice.
The guy's a voter.
He's a commenter.
That's what he would rather Trump were paying attention to.
I understand.
Trump is never paying attention to anything with a lot of focus.
So this is what he's doing at the moment.
But it's true.
There are people who attack you if you criticize the war or think we should end it or think we should end it before Israel thinks we should end it because Israel's still fighting with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
They're throwing missiles at them so they can't not fight back.
It's also true on the press that everything that Trump does is wrong.
Everything is a failure.
Nothing can happen.
And when it turns out that it's a success, as it does again and again and again, it simply disappears from the news.
So let's remember this, okay?
Let's remember in Gaza, Trump finally unleashed the Israelis to stop the genocidal SOBs funded by Iran who had broken into their country, raped, and killed 1,200 people.
I mean, just an absolute atrocity, one of the worst since the Holocaust against the Jews.
That Jews had, the Israelis had every right to go into Gaza and kick ass.
And Trump finally, after Biden held them back, Trump finally let them go.
And then, do you remember the ceasefire there?
Oh, it was going to fall apart.
Oh, it's terrible.
Oh, this is no good.
It's not going to happen.
And then suddenly, out of the news, you don't hear a word about it anymore.
He goes in and he bombs the Iranian nuclear plants, and that's going to be a disaster.
Remember Tucker Carlson clutching his heart because there were going to be thousands of American deaths, and it was nothing.
It was just, we came, we saw, we.
Killed, we were gone.
It was just, it was absolutely great.
Remember Venezuela?
He went in and took out Maduro, but you didn't get regime change.
Why didn't you?
They were trying to entice him into a quagmire in South America.
And he says, no, we don't need a regime change.
They can have any regime they want as long as they work with us and stop selling their oil to the Chinese, which is basically what, like I said before, there were a lot of suspiciously yellow people running out of Venezuela when we went in to do that.
And so Trump has been right again and again and again on foreign policy, especially.
What are the odds?
What are the odds?
That all of the naysayers, all the black pillars, all the, you know, the both on the left, the people who think everything Trump does is wrong, and on the right, the people who think anything that makes the Jews happy must be wrong, the Groypers, what is the chance that these people have their heads stuck firmly up their backsides and Trump has got it right again?
I think the odds are pretty good.
You know, I think the odds are pretty good.
We don't know what the ceasefire is going to look like.
We don't know if it will be a ceasefire.
We don't know what the reaction will be.
You know, the big question is can they open the Strait of Hormuz?
Because The Iranians have been destroyed.
They keep misusing the word decimated, which means killing every 10th person, but they keep using it.
But it's been absolutely devastated.
They've been wiped off the face of the map.
The only power they have is to take.
And put them in the Strait of Hormuz and hold up the oil shipments out of there.
And I don't know how long they can do that because where are they going to get their money?
They're saying now we'll let a few ships in.
They're hedging.
At some point, Trump is going to lose his temper.
Two weeks will be up.
He knows that the Iranians like to stall.
And I think, you know, I think it's he'll go back and do what he has to do or he'll arrange for other people to do it because we now, you know, things are better now.
Than they were before.
I've heard people say, well, oh, this is another thing I keep hearing.
The Iranians will be much stronger.
What are they talking about?
What are they going to do?
Beat our military to death with a crutch?
What the hell do they mean?
They're stronger.
They're absolutely in rubble.
All their defenses are in rubble.
Their leadership is dead.
The world is a better place now than it was six weeks ago.
I think we can say that.
The scene in the Middle East, I think we can say with absolute confidence, is better now.
An oppressive tyrant has been weakened.
You know, they can celebrate and put out pictures of Trump on his knees waving a white flag, do anything they want.
It's like Baghdad Bob.
They can put out all that propaganda, but it is going to take years before they're back on track.
And in that time, a lot can happen.
And yes, the Straits of Armoured is going to be an issue of contention, but it doesn't have to be a source of more war.
It's very possible that some of our allies in the Middle East, you know, the UAE, which is a quite civilized country, a very impressive country, they've been saying that their main ally now, their main ally is.
The United States of America.
That is pretty cool when somebody is saying that.
A lot of these things, because of what Trump has done and because he used the sinister error that Obama made of strengthening Iran to bring everybody else together with the Israelis, saying we'd rather be with the Israelis and the Americans than with Iran, who keep killing people.
Now there's this chance that new coalitions can be formed and the people in the Middle East, God love them, can move into the 21st century and basically start to trade with the world without being, you know.
Beset by these absolute extremists who make everything miserable.
This is a positive development.
Trump did a good thing well.
As at this moment, we can say Trump did a good thing well.
And yes, his mouth gets in the way because now his supporters have to pretend it's total victory.
And there is not going to be a total victory.
There's going to be a sit down, and hopefully we'll get the stuff we want.
It doesn't matter what Iran asks for because nobody's paying attention to them.
And as I say, there's a possibility that Trump is still just jerking them around, which would be great.
But here's the thing about Trump this is really important.
Trump may not have a plan, I don't know, but he does have a vision and he's been talking about it for a long time.
He sometimes calls it the Greater North America, which is to solidify the American hegemony in our region.
That's why he wants to include Greenland and he hasn't given up on that.
He still means it.
He wants to have energy dominance.
So when he sits down with the Chinese, as he's about to do, he can say, We love you.
You're great people.
We want to trade with you.
We want to have a world with you.
It'd be too nice oil you've got there.
Too bad if anything happened to it.
That's what he's kind of.
Moving toward.
You can have all kinds of bad dreams about bad things that happen, but I'm just saying right now, Trump has made the world a better place.
It annoys me when he goes off in his mouth.
I tell you, it annoys me when he's not civilized.
You can be a man and speak politely, you can be absolutely courageous and never raise your voice.
That's not Trump's style.
We have to take the man as he comes in his entirety.
And mostly, it's been for the best.
When I was growing up, There was a war in Vietnam, and I missed going by one year.
I missed the draft by one year.
And it was all bad.
I don't think there is a single book written that says the Vietnam War was a good thing.
It was dishonest.
They hid things from the American people.
There were moments of brutality and a lot of Americans died.
It was terrible, terrible, terrible.
All I can say is after Vietnam, we did not see China for 30 years.
They kept their mouths shut for 30 years because they were so scared of any country that was crazy enough to spend all that blood and treasure in a hellhole like Vietnam.
They just kept them to themselves.
It scared the hell out of them.
Everything has gotten better really since George W. Bush went into the Middle East, even though I think he screwed it up big time.
Things have gotten better in the Middle East, and I think they will continue to get better.
And I think this is a good step in the right direction.
Trump is thinking long term about China.
He wants to be ready for China because China is what's coming in the next five years, maybe earlier than that.
Everybody else is going moment by moment.
And Trump isn't playing 3D chess.
He doesn't have to play 3D chess.
When you play regular chess, You think five moves in advance.
And that's what he's doing.
And I think he has put America in a better place.
Bringing Back Bold America00:11:45
All right, let's talk about balance of nature.
This is for people who feel that nutrition is just getting too complicated.
We used to just eat food.
There's two words, eat food.
Now you need a PhD to read the back of a cereal box.
Here's the thing we've all been told since we were kids to eat our fruits and vegetables.
We know that.
But nobody really explained that what you're actually after in those foods.
Are the phytonutrients.
The reason for that is nobody knew that word or could pronounce it.
But those are the natural compounds your body uses to adjust, repair, and respond every single day.
And the more we've tried to improve food in factories and stuff like that, the more we've gotten away from what the body actually recognizes as food.
That's why I like Balance of Nature.
They take real produce, they run it through a tailored vacuum cold process that stabilizes its phytonutrition instead of nuking it with heat and chemicals.
Their whole health system bundle includes their fruits and veggies and fiber and spice supplements.
giving you 47 ingredients of whole food and their, sing it with me, their phytonutrients in a simple, consistent routine.
They've even rolled out brand new freeze-dried snacks that go through a similar process so you're not trading convenience for quality.
I take the Balance of Nature capsules because they're easy and you don't get juice in your beard, but you can save over 30% when you subscribe on balanceofnature.com, join hundreds of thousands of customers in one simple routine that can change your world.
Chapter 2, Jesus, Artemis, and Dude 44.
To remind you of one of the most important mysteries there on earth, and that's love.
Christ said in response to what was the greatest command that it was to love God with all that you are.
And he also, being a great teacher, said the second is equal to it, and that is to love your neighbor as yourself.
And so as we prepare to go out of radio communication, we're still able to feel your so that was Victor Glover, one of the four astronauts on Artemis 2, just before they went around the back of the moon farther into space than any humans ever have.
They will be coming back Friday night, God willing, and we pray for them.
We pray for their safety as they come back into our atmosphere.
And here is what Glover said as he was looking back at Earth from space.
Cut seven.
Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we're doing is special, but we're the same distance from you.
And I'm trying to tell you just trust me, you are special.
In all of this emptiness, this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe.
You have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together.
I have to tell you, this brought a lot of childhood memories or young boy memories back to me because I was, I don't know, 15 when we landed on the moon.
It had that feeling.
It had a feeling like somehow there had been a cut in the film and we had spent our time, you know, on nonsense.
But maybe that's unfair.
I'll think about that, get back to that in a minute.
But first, right now, under Trump, if you just eliminated all the terrible things that haven't happened but might happen that fill the newspapers, And the news media, if you get rid of all the Groyper bitterness about the fact that we are not the America of 50 years ago where everyone was white and black people had no place in the world,
when you get rid of that, Donald Trump has gone a long way to bringing back an America, the America I love, that is bold, that is dominant, that has a spirit of adventure instead of the whiny self hatred about what people did 200 years ago or the The kind of Groyper thing that if anything changes, that's a bad thing.
All of that is, it's not who Trump is and it's not what's happening in this country if we would only open our eyes and look at what is happening instead of listening to the media and social media about what might happen and what somebody's disgruntled about.
And what I love about this guy Glover.
Is he looks, when I was a kid, these guys were some of my heroes.
My heroes were baseball players and they were astronauts.
That was basically it.
And I also like Thomas Edison.
But this guy looks and sounds exactly what American heroes looked like and sounded like when I was a boy, guys like John Glenn and Mickey Mantle and people like that.
And yes, there's an exception.
His skin is brown.
But that's exactly what we wanted.
That's exactly what the left took away from us by taking civil rights and turning it into this horrible.
You know, DEI hate whitey bigotry, answered on the other hand by the Groypers with this kind of nihilistic white supremacy, because this is what America was supposed to be.
This is what we saw in our future when I was a little kid who was just, you know, people are always complaining that Christianity has adopted some pagan rituals.
And I always think, no, that's a good thing.
If it's a good ritual, make it a Christian ritual.
All good things should be connected to Christianity because Christianity is the truth.
And it covers pagan dreams, right?
The pagans had what, what, C.S. Lewis called good dreams of what was going to happen.
They had stories about gods who died and came back to life, and those were the good dreams of what, in fact, was really going to happen.
We should expect that.
I think people know in their hearts what God is doing and what He is about.
And for all the left with their hate whitey racism and all the gripers on the right, if they are on the right, I don't even see what's right wing about them anymore, but all that kind of nihilistic white supremacy that things are only going to be good again, can only be good again if white people are the only people here.
Basically, they can kiss America's ass because look what America has done.
Look at what it has done.
Just like Christianity turned the pagan rituals to Christianity, we are turning all kinds of people into Americans, which is the best thing to be.
It's about freedom, it is about exploration, it's about courage and family and faith.
And then hearing this guy from outer space, you know, I'm just thinking, wait a minute.
It took us 50 years while everybody else was trying to make us go another way, but somehow it actually happened.
That is America.
Meanwhile, on Earth, as he's sending Jesus messages from outer space, a miracle took place to mark the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
An F 15 was downed on Crucifixion Friday, on Good Friday.
The pilot was rescued, but the weapons systems officer, the guy they call a Weasel, who was known by his call sign, Dude 44, was not rescued until Easter Sunday, right?
His training taught it was to get away from your plane, get away from the crash plane, because that's where they're going to look first.
And here's Trump describing what Dude 44 did next.
Cut eight.
He scaled cliff faces, bleeding rather profusely, treated his own wounds, and contacted American forces to transmit his location.
They have a very sophisticated beeper type apparatus that is on them at all times.
And he used that to send the message, God is good, so they would know where he was and that he was still alive.
And so, God is good.
The Iranians are closing in on this.
Thousands of soldiers are closing in on him.
The CIA took time out from running leftist psyops on Americans and trying to convince them that the Hunter Biden laptop was unreal.
And instead, they deceived the Iranians.
It was a change of pace.
They deceived the Iranians about where Dude 44 was.
There were, I think, over 100 planes and other vehicles pretending to look for him in different places so the Iranians wouldn't know where he was.
And they got him out of there.
Unbelievable, unbelievable rescue.
I was going to bed at midnight Easter, and that's when I saw it.
And I thought, wow, at any other time in human history, at any other time in human history, this would have been seen.
As a sign from God.
If this were biblical times, it would be in the Bible as a sign from God.
I mean, it's the meaning of Easter lived out, right?
Despair on Friday turned to celebration on Sunday, and mankind rescued, rescued.
And the pessimism and grimness of the corrupt press, the black pilled hysteria of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and all the other haters, it is time, it is time to turn them off.
You know, if we're going to purify our information system, it's not that we shouldn't consider the bad things that can happen.
Of course, you want to look at risks and dangers.
You've got to look at the things that are happening now.
I mean, faith and hope are two of the central Christian virtues, right?
Remember that love, faith, and hope?
Not just hope for eternity, but hope for tomorrow.
You know, you have to be hopeful that God is going to be there and turn bad things, even bad things, to good.
And bad things are going to happen.
Really bad things can happen.
But there's no reason to think that we are not moving into a time of great glory.
I mean, it really is.
That's what I'm looking at.
And I'm not being a Pollyanna.
I know there's going to be sinfulness and wickedness, and we'll do bad things, and there'll be Failures and there'll be deaths.
We can only pray that Artemis II is going to come back through our atmosphere and not burn up.
I'm praying that's going to happen.
But even so, these things are the things that have to be to get to the next stage of human existence.
And look, again, not being a Pollyanna, I think the mind of our culture is sick right now.
I think it's sick because men have forgotten God, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said.
But Victor Glover hasn't forgotten God.
And when we look at the rescue of Dude 44 and remember what happened on Easter, I think it is safe to say there's every reason to believe that God has not forgotten us.
You ever get the feeling someone's watching you online?
That's not paranoia.
It's me.
No, it's not me.
It's your internet provider.
They track every site you visit.
And in the US, they can even sell your browsing history.
Incognito mode doesn't save you until Congress wakes up.
The smart move is simple.
I use ExpressVPN.
ExpressVPN locks down my internet so nobody, providers, data brokers, or the creepy guy buying my info, can see what I'm doing online.
It hides my IP address so I stay invisible to the digital vultures trying to sell me off to marketers.
I'm not a tech genius.
But I can press a button.
It's one click and you're protected.
It works on every device and it's top rated by CNET, The Verge, pretty much everyone who knows their stuff.
In a world where privacy is dying fast, ExpressVPN keeps me free.
And look, it doesn't have to be something you're guilty about.
I write wonderful thrillers like After That, The Dark, and I look up all kinds of things, what bad guys do and bombs and poison and all that stuff.
And I don't want people looking on and thinking that I'm doing something bad when I'm not.
They've also, ExpressVPN has also just launched Express Mail Guard.
It works with any email provider, shielding your real email address wherever you sign up online.
The result you get a cleaner inbox, tougher defense against spam and phishing without changing how you use your email.
Right now is the best time to start taking your online privacy seriously because you can get ExpressVPN at just $3.49 a month.
That's $3.49.
Plus, if you use my special link, you can get four extra months of service at expressvpn.com slash Claven.
That's E X P R E S S. VPN.com slash Clavin.
And you think, how do I spell VPN?
Shrinking Middle Class00:09:03
It's K L A V A N. Chapter three, also, we're rich.
This is another thing because the economy goes up and down, and we've had some bad economic times back in 2008.
That was bad.
The stock market is soaring, but also businesses are coming back and things are changing.
And here is this amazing you know, remember the tariffs when Trump was going on with the tariffs?
The Wall Street Journal still hasn't gotten over their fits and spasms about this.
terror that went on.
Every columnist was enlisted to say something bad about the tariffs.
And I was sitting there going like, look, I'm not an economist, but I can see that Trump is using this as a way of rejiggering our trade deals so that we're not always on the giving end.
I think that that's part of the whole system.
Some people have said that he's trying to close America off from the world.
I don't believe that.
I simply believe he's trying to solidify the American empire, which is what it's becoming.
So Jason Riley, a columnist in the Wall Street Journal, he writes this.
He starts his column this week saying this.
Capitalism is rigged.
China is eating our lunch.
The middle class is shrinking.
This is the constant refrain from doom and gloom populists on the left and right.
But is it true?
And he then goes on to talk about a study from the American Enterprise Institute, AEI.
This is a study done by Stephen Rose and Scott Winship at AEI.
Here's what Jason Riley writes.
He says Messrs. Rose and Winship divided households into five categories poor or near poor, lower middle class, core middle class, upper middle class, and rich.
Technically, the middle class has in fact been getting smaller, but that's only because more families have ascended the income ladder.
And here is a quote from the report.
We find that the core middle class has shrunk, but so too has the share of Americans with income too low to reach the middle class.
So that means people, there are more people coming out of poverty into the middle class.
The shrinking core middle class is due to a booming upper middle class.
So there are more people moving into the upper ranks of the middle class just under the rich.
Only the relatively worse off parts of the middle class have shrunk and by less than the upper middle class has grown.
In 1979, now listen to this stat carefully, in 1979, the upper middle class was 10% of all families.
I think that's probably around normal for most of modern times.
It's probably more than normal, but still it's pretty good.
By 2024, it was 31%. in the upper middle class, one third of the country.
Over the same period, the share of families with income below the core middle class declined from 54%.
So 54% used to be under middle class, moving toward poverty.
Half the country in 1979, not that long ago, half the country, now it's 35%.
One third of the country is now not doing so well.
So obviously we want to move them up, but still those are amazing statistics.
Just remember, every day that that was going on, every day that half of the country was moving into the upper middle class, someone was complaining.
Someone was saying things are bad.
Someone was saying the crash is about to come.
Someone was saying the recession is around the corner.
Look, all those things can happen.
We've had some recessions in my lifetime, but they were nothing like the Great Depression.
Even during the Great Recession, it was nothing like the Great Depression.
And so, what do we have here?
We have this kind of actual prosperity over time.
Life is bumpy, right?
Life is a bumpy road.
All kinds of things happen.
Sometimes terrible things happen.
Again, I'm not being a Pollyanna, and I understand there's a sickness in our society that really is bad and has moved into places like our media instead of just on the outskirts, which is where it was in the 60s and 70s.
But what do we have?
We have the left is always talking about how to divvy up the spoils, which, first of all, Points out to the fact there are spoils, that there's wealth there to have.
They never, ever talk about where the spoils come from.
This is something David Horowitz taught me.
David Horowitz was a communist, then he became a right winger, leader of his own think tank, right wing think tank.
He said they never they're like pirates.
They never talk about who made the money.
Where does it come from?
It comes from capitalism.
I mean, before capitalism, everybody was poor.
Even a king, even the Pharaoh was not as rich as you are today if you're eating food at McDonald's or 7-Eleven.
If you're doing that, you're eating better than Pharaoh because capitalism made us so much richer.
It has made the bottom level of poverty all around the world almost vanish.
It's almost vanished from the earth.
Individuals operating in freedom, trade, and military security by the good guys.
When people like America, when a country like America or Britain provides military security, everybody thrives.
The right reacts to change, and I've been talking about this ever since I had this podcast.
They react to change as if it were a deadly disease.
They can always see how this string you pull is going to destroy the suit, right?
And of course, we live in a web of things, and there's things that we don't want to get rid of.
You get rid of the family, you're taking away the building block of the country and the building block of freedom.
All true.
But not every change, there's a good deal of ruin in a nation.
Not every change can't be compensated for by change elsewhere, and that is often what happens in a country.
Even the government, I have to say, helps by making sure that the rules are fair, that they're unobtrusive, that we don't get over-regulated, and by policing everybody so everyone plays by the same rules, which is one of the reasons I think everybody who's here illegally should be deported.
I think the law is for everybody.
All of this depends.
It grows out of what economists call animal spirits, which is what I was talking about before.
Hope, confidence, optimism, the sense that, yes, I am going to take this risk because, even if I lose, I'm going to come back.
And take a risk again because the country is worth betting on, because over time, if you invest in stocks over time, you will make money.
If it's, you know they're ups and downs, you have to have some steely nerves, but over time you're going to make money.
You invest and build businesses because you think the country's going to be here, that people are going to have money to spend, that that's why things are going as well as they are going in the in the investment markets.
People are investing in America because they see what Trump is doing overall and you know every word of panic is is not just usually false, but it also dampens those animal spirits.
Again, things can fall apart, and they do fall apart very quickly, and often they fall apart at the very peak of success.
And so maybe what we should think about for just a moment is why, why that happens, why success leads so quickly to destruction.
So, you can remember a lot of things.
You might have 72 passwords.
You probably know what one or two of them are.
Your kids' school and sports schedules are in your head.
Your grocery list never stops growing, but you know it.
For all the stuff we manage to remember, we often forget something much bigger.
What happens to your family financially if something happens to you?
The responsibility of protecting your loved ones and planning for the future is a heavy one, and trying to navigate life insurance on your own can be a mess.
Take a look at Policy Genius.
Dramatically easier by acting as an online insurance marketplace, not an insurance company, so you can compare quotes from some of America's top insurers side by side for free and actually understand what it is you're buying.
Their licensed team works for you, not for the insurance carriers, so they care about your needs, your budget, your family.
They help you figure out coverage amounts, prices, terms, all of it, so there's no guesswork, just clarity and peace of mind.
I remember what it was like to get insurance.
You don't even want to think about it, you don't want to think about bad things happening, but it's that kind of preparation.
That saves you in the event.
Policy Genius will answer your questions, handle the paperwork, and advocate for you throughout the process, which is why they've racked up thousands of five star reviews on Google and Trustpilot from people just like you and me.
Protect your family with a policy that grows with your life.
With Policy Genius, you can see if you can find 20 year life insurance policies starting at just $276 a year for $1 million in coverage.
Head to policygenius.comslash Claven to compare life insurance quotes from top companies.
And see how much you could save.
Remembering Kipling's Warning00:15:19
That's policygenius.com slash Claven.
How do you spell it, you ask?
I know you're asking.
It's K L A V A N.
No ease in Claven.
I just make it look this easy.
Final chapter, lest we forget.
So let us go back to 1897, right?
Just before the turn of the last century.
The British Empire is celebrating Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee.
It has been one of the greatest periods in human history.
We always talk about the Victorians and about their reluctance to discuss sex and their kind of prudery.
At the same time that was going on, Britain was taking over the world.
The sun never set on the British Empire.
And there were also lots and lots of political reforms.
More people could vote.
There were all kinds of rights granted to people.
More freedom was happening.
It was a time of tremendous human thriving brought to you by the British Empire, by a bunch of people who now hate themselves for having had the empire.
So Queen Victoria was on the throne 50 years, and there were celebrations and exhibits of all the science, the incredible advances in science that were taking place in Britain.
And Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem for the celebration, but he called it Recessional.
Rudyard Kipling was never a poet laureate, I don't think, but he was basically thought of as the poet of the empire.
He was the poet who wrote about the empire.
And he's been damned for it ever since, but he was a great poet and a great story writer as well.
And he wrote a poem called Recessional.
That's the music that you play as you're leaving church, as you're leaving a religious ceremony.
And it was so, in other words, it was supposed to be something you thought about at the end of the celebration as the empire is celebrating its highest moment.
He had a kind of melancholy reminder, a kind of somber warning.
I will read you the first two stanzas.
It's not that long.
I'm just reading the first two.
There's more to it.
You can look it up.
It's called Recessional by Rudyard Kipling.
He says, God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far flung battle line, beneath whose awful hand we hold dominion over palm and pine, Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, lest we forget, lest we forget.
The tumult and the shouting dies, the captains and the kings depart.
Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, an humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, lest we forget, lest we forget.
So things change, captains come and go, empires come and go, but the one thing God always appreciates is a humble and contrite heart, remorseful, understanding that you're sinful, repentant of being sinful.
That is the sacrifice God wants from us.
He doesn't want dead animals, He doesn't want people.
Killing their firstborn.
He doesn't want any of that.
He wants your heart to be given to him.
So he was telling people, don't forget God.
That's what Kipling was telling people.
In the midst of your glory, don't forget God.
Less than 20 years later, 1914, World War I begins for absolutely no reason, and Europe comes to an end.
World War I and World War II are the death of Europe, the death of the greatest civilization that has existed in human history, certainly in the West, lasts from about 1500 to 1914, and then it's over, and that was for no discernible reason.
It just happens.
Again, watching this moonshot, I remember when I was 15 years old, 1969, we landed on the moon, an unthinkable achievement.
And it's what many people consider the peak of the American Republic and say that everything since is in decline.
So why is that?
Why is that the minute you hit that peak, you go down like a bobsled?
So I've talked before many times about the imagination and how people think the imagination is for seeing things that aren't there, but I believe the imagination is our sense, our sixth sense for seeing the invisible world, the world of values, the world in which actions are connected, signify things about God and about the spiritual world.
So in other words, if I torture a child, that is evil.
That is a connection between my actions and the mind of God in which that is an evil thing.
We don't have to think it's evil.
We cannot think it's evil, but a healthy imagination sees that as evil, just like a healthy imagination sees charity is a good.
And it's hard to train the imagination to see realistically because what it sees is invisible, and we want to see, we're always tempted to see what we want to see.
And at the peak of a civilization, the consequences are removed, right?
Suddenly you don't have to worry about being invaded, you don't have to worry about going broke, you don't have to worry about safety.
You are the king.
Britain was the king empire.
Nobody was going to bring down Britain except themselves, which is what happened essentially by going into World War, this idiot war, World War I that had no purpose except to wipe out a generation.
They basically put their own heads on the chopping block.
When you are that safe, people start to dream absurd dreams and they start to imagine a world that is not.
They start to imagine that we can end war, that we don't need a military, that's spending on the – why are we spending on the military when we should be spending on butter for the Poor.
We can defund the police, maybe the stupidest idea anybody's ever had.
Things are going to be fine if we just treat people nicely.
People won't be corrupt anymore.
They won't be criminals anymore.
We say things like, crime is caused by poverty.
It's not, or else there wouldn't be so many criminals on Wall Street.
Crime is caused by the sinful human heart.
It is eternal.
What poverty does is it limits the kind of crimes you can commit to the more violent ones because you can't just write a check and destroy people's lives.
We're going to make everybody equal.
Everybody's going to be equal.
They just need a chance.
We're going to replace marriage with free love and have endless sex and it'll be with impunity.
We can abort the children if we have them.
It's not going to make a difference.
We forget what Kipling called – in another poem, he called the gods of the copybook heading.
The gods of the copybook headings, those are the gods who tell us the old truths we don't want to hear.
I frequently think that That dumb people come up with new ideas.
Wise people simply remind us of the true ideas that we don't want to think about.
I'm going to read you one more stanza from his Gods of the Copybook heading.
He says On the first feminine sandstones, we were promised the fuller life, which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife.
Till our women had no more children, and the men lost reason and faith, and the Gods of the Copybook headings said, The wages of sin is death.
The gods of the copy book headings bring the bad news of the truth.
Now, today in the New York Times, they announced the U.S. with glee, I'm sure, they announced the U.S. fertility rate had fallen to another record low in 2025, extending two decades of declines according to federal data released on Thursday.
So, why does Kipling say the feminine sandstones?
It is a made up geological term meaning in the time of feminine reasoning.
Things that feel nice instead of things that are true.
And this is obviously a generality, but it is true that women tend to experience things as how they feel, and men have a way of thinking about things and saying, yes, but what is the truth?
And it is just a difference between the way men think and the way women think.
And that is why the Bible recommends in a marriage that maybe the man should take the lead and the woman should be the heart of the house.
And in the Bible, when Israel is successful, People forget the harsh disciplines of Yahweh and they marry girls from outside.
This is what happens to Solomon.
And pretty soon they start to worship the gods of their wives, and pretty soon the empire collapses.
This is not blaming women, by the way.
It's actually blaming men.
It's blaming men because of desire, following their desires into accepting what is not reality, but is just the things that feel good.
The imagination of the West, we know, is shaped by Christianity, which comes to us through scripture, but is modified by experience, right?
Early Christians thought, oh, it's in the Gospels, it says some early Christians thought the end of the world was coming right this minute as we go into Jerusalem, but then they learned, no, life is going to go on, and it's going to go on and on.
We don't know when the end of days happens, so we have to have a Christianity for a long time, for a lifetime.
Sometimes people have thought that turning the other cheek means pacifism, but pacifism just leaves you dead, or it puts the moral responsibility for fighting on other people who are not pacifists.
Pacifism is a wicked philosophy.
Some people thought that Christian belief could dictate science, that we could tell Galileo, no, we think that the earth is at the center of the universe, therefore it must be.
But no, as St. Augustine knew, the book of nature is also one of the books of scripture.
It is God's creation and it speaks to us.
We have to know the truth of how things work if it's going to be free.
For the last 50 years of, 60 years of success, we have increasingly listened to womanish, as opposed to womanly, womanish dreams of fairness and world peace.
and an end to nationhood and equality and end to inequality.
And while I, again, I don't think men have to be impolite to tell the truth.
I don't think they have to talk like Trump to tell the truth.
I don't think they have to be unkind or unloving.
But I do think you have to be steadfast in telling the truth, which sets us free.
I think that's just the way.
People are corrupt.
Women depend on men for protection.
Life is unfair.
Life is so unfair that if you try to make it fair, you actually make it worse.
You can be just, which means treating everybody By the same rules.
It doesn't mean treating poor people better than this is in the Bible, too.
It doesn't mean you should treat poor people better than the rich.
You treat everybody the same.
That's what you can be.
You can be just.
When you try to make things fair, everything becomes stagnant and dies.
And you have to oppress people because life is unfair.
You can't make a great baseball player, Aaron Judge, play equal to me, right?
He's got to play less.
So you've got to crush his game.
Borders have to be protected.
Enemies have to be killed.
Police have to patrol the streets and treat criminals badly.
And again, in my life, I have seen the gods of the copy book heading ignored and returned.
After the moon landing, I saw all these notions about treating criminals nicely and they'll be reformed by our niceness.
And as a result, in the 70s and 80s, our cities were nearly unlivable.
I lived in New York in the 80s, it was unlivable.
You could not go outside at night.
And finally, they brought in hard guys like Rudy Giuliani as mayor and William Bratton as the police chief.
Put those suckers in jail as the New York Times every single day called them racist.
Every day they were racist, they were fascist, and they brought that city back.
It was one of the great cities in the world for many years, and now they're working very hard to turn it back into what it was before.
I saw the Soviet Union in the 80s nearly take over the world.
We forget how much of the world it took over in the 80s in parts of Africa and all these places where we weren't paying attention, and America was plunged into stagflation under Jimmy Carter.
There were gas shortages.
You had to wait online to get gas, and you could only go on certain days.
Then Ronald Reagan, very politely, very gracefully, spoke the truth softly, carried a big military stick, brought the US back, and brought the USSR down.
The truth is hard, and people only turn to the truth as a last chance, basically, when everything else has failed.
People want to forget the truth.
They want to forget that you need marriage.
They want to forget that sex, unbridled sex, is going to destroy your community, not bring it together.
But the message of Easter is always this it is always this.
Even when men crucify the truth, when they do because they hate to stand in the light of it, they will crucify the truth.
It will rise again.
The truth never dies.
So as we're moving through this information crisis, when it's hard to tell what is true and what's not true and whether things are good or bad, find the people, find the people who look for the real, not for the happy, not for the sad, who look for the real and not for what might happen, not for their fears, but for what is actually happening and all the different ways it could go.
Find the people who look for the truth instead of the people who confirm you in your prejudices and your hatred and your anger and your fear.
Look for the people who tell the truth so the gods of the copybook headings will be with us yet, lest we forget.
If you're watching on the Daily Wire Plus app, thank you.
If you're not, that's where you should be.
That's how you get push alerts when we go live, breaking news as it happens, and access to our investigative reporting.
The Daily Wire Plus app is free.
It's available now on the App Store, Google Play, Apple TV, Roku, Samsung, LG, and more.
Clavin Klapbacks.
Woo!
Don't talk good.
Thank you, honey.
I agree.
That was nice.
I like that.
All right, from Amelia.
Almost eight months ago, my brother died from a rattlesnake bite.
I was with him as well as my four children and his three children, and it was traumatic to say the least.
For the most part, I feel like I've been working through the grief.
However, I am often feeling like I am drawing away from God.
Cognitively, I know he loves me.
Even in my brother's death, I have seen his hand moving, but my heart feels far from him.
I don't know what to do.
Your wisdom would be much appreciated.
Yeah, listen.
Many such cases.
Part of this is due to some of the stuff I was talking about on the show.
Part of it has to do with imagining a God of all good things, a God who sits over a world in which only good things happen, a kind of Joel Osteen God, to be perfectly frank about it, where you always win, you're always prosperous.
If you do the right things, good things happen, and if you do bad things, you're punished.
But be good to God and God will be good to you.
That's not true.
Bad things happen to good people.
Bad things happen for no reason, or at least reasons that we can't see.
God is always there.
And here is the thing.
It is absolutely no sin for you to feel distant from God, but it has no effect on whether God is there or not and whether he's there for you or not.
And the best way to get in touch with God is to talk to him.
His lines are open 24-7.
His lines are open.
And if you talk to him, you will find what you-here's what you find.
I always say about grief because I've experienced it as most people have.
Grief is a desert that must be crossed on foot.
There is no way.
To get through grief faster, there's no way to speed through it.
Crossing the Desert of Grief00:02:19
You've got to walk across that desert.
And if you walk in the right direction toward God, when you come out, your life will be deeper and richer.
It doesn't mean the sadness will go away all the time.
It simply means that your life will be deeper, richer, and you will see both the world and the invisible world more clearly.
Talk to God, talk to Him every day.
Take some time by yourself where you can talk out loud so that your thoughts don't ramble and you understand, you finish the sentences that you're saying and you finish the ideas.
You're still walking across the desert of grief, but follow the North Star across the desert and you will find you come out in the place where you're supposed to be.
Because the question is always not, why did God do this?
We can't know the mind of God.
Why did God make the world exactly this way?
We cannot know this.
The question is always, what is it that God means for you to make of this?
What does He want you to do with this thing?
God has this amazing party trick of turning bad things.
To the good.
But the bad things don't go away.
You know, evil, he can turn evil to good, but the evil remains and the suffering remains and all of that.
This is the world that we're in.
The world is broken.
That's what it's like.
But if you talk to God as you go, as you cross the desert of grief, you will follow that star and you will come out in a place of incredible richness and fertility and deeper knowledge.
And that's all I can tell you.
I can't make it better for you because it's just that hard, but I can tell you that is the way to go.
And you will find, as I say, Whether you feel God there or not, whether you believe in him or not, has absolutely zero effect on whether he's there and whether he's there for you.
He is.
He is.
I give you my word.
You can take it to the bank.
All right.
We're going to stop there and go to member block if you're a member.
If you're not a member, how screwed are you?
It's incredible.
I can't even describe it with the clavenlessness that is about to begin, about to drop on you like a black shroud made lined with lead.
That's what's going to happen to you if you are not a member.
So, save yourself.
Go to dailywire.comslash subscribe and use code CLAVEN at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.
If you have already done that, as you should, come to Member Block.