Andrew Klavan and Dave Rubin dissect Klavan's new book, The Kingdom of Cain, arguing that archetypal murders from Charles Lussanier to Leopold and Loeb reveal a cultural crisis where Nietzschean nihilism justifies violence. They connect historical atrocities like Nazi Germany to modern figures such as Luigi Mangione, asserting that the loss of faith drives an elite belief in human perfectibility that ignores the permanent presence of evil. Ultimately, Klavan contends that media lies about political leadership while ignoring this spiritual decay, suggesting humanity cannot evolve away from these dark narratives because justice for the dead never arrives on earth. [Automatically generated summary]
I think you know who I am, and I think you know who my guest is because he's been on this show at least a dozen times in all of the years that we've been pumping these things out.
I mean, that's just, as someone that's only written two books, and I know how grueling that is, and even right now, I'm starting to sketch out the third, and I'm like whacking my head with a hammer.
It's like, it's really amazing.
You mostly write fiction, obviously.
This new book, and let me get the title right and everything, we'll show the image for you.
The Kingdom of Cain, Finding God in the Literature of Darkness.
This is your third work of nonfiction.
Before we get to the book, which I do want to focus on because it hits a lot of the sort of spiritual and Anything going on in the world that you want to get off your chest at the moment that you're not able to talk about at the Daily Wire?
Now, the big thing that's happening, of course, are all these revelations about Joe Biden and what's making me— What's making me laugh is this idea that the press is kind of examining how Joe Biden fooled them.
When, in fact, our media lies about everything.
Like, this is not an exception.
This is the rule.
You know, they lied about Trump and Russia.
They lied about COVID.
They lied about George Floyd.
They lied about everything.
Like, every word that comes over the mainstream media, the corporate media, is a lie.
And now this is the one they got caught.
So they have to sort of say, like, hmm, you know, let's do some self-examination because this one is irrefutable.
But do you think it's – So I'm amazed by that, too.
It's not the revelations, obviously, about Biden that I'm surprised by.
Of course not.
But there does seem to be, and maybe you're right, it's because they've been caught so red-handed this time.
Although I think you can probably argue that they were caught with a lot of the COVID stuff, too, and a bunch of other stuff.
But this one seems just so, like, starkly obvious.
Do you think there is, is there any honesty to whatever layer of mea culpa or whatever layer of introspection?
Is there any honesty or is this just, what I always say is, this is just them figuring out how to rejigger the game in real time so that they can do it again.
And the only thing about it is it's so blatant that I think it has, you know, it's not like they had a lot of credibility before, but it has really damaged them.
So they're looking for a cheap way to cover the damage, to heal the credibility gap without actually taking responsibility for the fact that every word that comes out of their mouth.
So let's talk about the kingdom of Cain, finding God in the literature of darkness.
You know, when I saw the title a week or two ago, I was like, wow, this very much sounds like Jordan Peterson would be writing this book.
So did you have to wrestle the idea away from Jordan Peterson because you're talking about Cain, you're talking about God, you're talking about truth and darkness, and he works for the same network as you?
One of the things I'm proud of about this book is literally no other human being walking the earth could have written it.
I mean, with all due respect to Jordan, who I love, you know, no one could have written because really what it's about is it's about certain murders that have captured the imaginations of artists again and again, and it continually made into movies, into novels, into poems.
At one point, one of the murderer's hands is mummified and put on exhibit in a museum.
These are murders that.
I think I can say this is a unique Klavan product.
So before we get into the specifics, do you like writing nonfiction?
I mean, you're a fiction guy, really, and you're a superb mystery writer.
That seems to me, from the outside, that seems like it would be fun as you're figuring out the arc and all the twists and turns and everything else, where writing nonfiction, it's just a different thing.
I, for some reason, have not been able to get This is my third nonfiction, as you said.
I haven't been able to get past this instinct to pour everything into the first draft and then have my wife go after it with a cleaver and just cut out all this extra stuff.
But I hope to kind of refine the process over time.
There's a murder in France in the 19th century where this guy becomes famous for killing somebody because he says, oh, you know, I just killed because life is so unjust, which always captures intellectuals.
And they're visiting, the intellectuals of Paris are visiting this guy in prison before he goes to the guillotine because they think he's so fascinating.
You know, it's just an absolute star.
So this inspires.
Listen to this, David.
This is amazing.
This inspires Dostoevsky to write the book Crime and Punishment, one of the greatest novels ever written, which essentially is about a guy who thinks that he is special and therefore he can commit a murder.
There's no moral restraints on him.
The philosopher in Germany is inspired by Dostoevsky and comes up with this philosophy that now that God is dead, we need superior people to rewrite morality.
So essentially, Dostoevsky has now invented Nietzsche, right?
And then in the 1920s, these two kids in Chicago, Leopold and Lowe, decide that they are the Nietzschean supermen and they're going to commit a murder to prove, the perfect murder to prove that they are superior to everyone else and aren't bound by reality.
By morality.
So you get this chain of murder and imagination from Dostoevsky to Nietzsche to Leopold and Loeb.
And the Leopold and Loeb murders, a lot of people have forgotten them now, but at the time they were called the murder of the century, the crime of the century.
And all of these now, the Leopold and Loeb murders have been made into movies maybe 10 times, maybe 11 times.
So, you know, you get Compulsion, you get Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, you get an episode of The Sinner just a couple of years ago.
There's just again and again these two people committing a murder to prove their superior.
So I started to ask myself, well, why are these murders?
Repeatedly picked up by artists and connected to other artists and then connected to other murders.
You know, how does that happen?
And it began to occur to me that when an artist writes something really good, He may not mean to do that, but he captures his time.
And when he captures his time, he captures the future because if you see your own time very clearly, it kind of projects into the future.
And what these guys were doing, even when they didn't know it, is they were picking up on ideas in the culture that were going to work themselves out.
So if you take another murder that happened in the 50s in Wisconsin, the Ed Gein murders, this was a guy who killed women and then used their bodies, dressed in their bodies, to make himself into a woman.
I know that's not what this is really about, but just for a moment, because Silence of the Lambs, to me, I put that as the number one...
probable horror or suspense movie that, that ending that last 15 minutes is just so absolutely unbelievable as you're seeing the split screen when you think she's, you know, when you think that, uh, Clarice Starling is showing up at the other house and she's actually at Buffalo Bill's house.
And it, and then of course everything with Hannibal Lecter and the whole thing.
But the idea of gender as it relates to that, it's like, could you, you think you could even make that movie now?
I mean, I know we're breaking out of the political correctness stuff, but the idea of a serial murderer, who in essence is trans or whatever you want to call it, so he wants to become the other gender and then is the bad guy in the movie.
Hollywood ain't making that movie these days, I don't think.
Thomas Harris in that book is obviously writing about this because all through the book, Clarice Starling is a kind of mistreated because she's so beautiful.
And Jamie Gumm, who is the His last words to her is, what does it feel like to be so beautiful?
Because he basically feels that if he can just change the shape of his body, he will have changed his gender.
And they go out of their way to say that he's not really transgender.
You know, he just wants to be.
But still, that is, in fact, the idea behind this kind of viral notion that we can cut people up.
I mean, cut children up, for God's sake, and turn them into another generation.
And my point about this, and the reason I call the book is subtitled Finding God in the Literature of Darkness, is all of these ideas are traced back to the loss of faith, which I think is the biggest news story of the last 500 years.
The idea of faith going out of the Western world, I think, is really beneath all of these stories and why they make sense.
So is that connected when you mentioned Nietzsche before, and obviously the famous quote of God is dead.
So is that connected to, okay, so if someone was to think that God was dead, that in essence, in some ways, the next logical step is, well, then I am God.
I am the replacement for that.
Thus, you will prescribe justice as you see fit.
Because right when you started speaking, I was thinking, well, man.
This sounds an awful lot like Luigi Mangione.
This guy could just murder a healthcare executive because he just damn well thought it was the right thing to do.
And then you see him become a hero to these people.
You know, that's exactly what Nietzsche said, by the way.
He said, God is dead and therefore we must become gods.
And that included rewriting all of morality.
And one of the things that runs through this strain, the French philosopher Albert Camus said, once you believe that There's no God, and therefore man is not sinful.
Once you believe that, you will commit murder.
This is what he said.
He said, you will commit murder to make the world, to perfect the world.
And so you have this guy, Lassenaire, in France, who inspired Dostoevsky, who said, I'm committing murder because the world is so unjust.
And the intellectuals loved it.
You know, they loved it.
You know, in France, where people don't believe in God, haven't believed in God for hundreds of years, they just thought that was, what a great idea.
Just like Luigi Mangione, they think, yes, you know, if we can just kill the right people, we will make the world right.
And all of this stuff has to do with losing the notion that you are a creation, not the creator.
You know, if you're talking about—yeah, well, that is really true.
But you're also now talking about the intellectual elite and the academic elite.
I mean, one of the most interesting parts in Kingdom of Cain, I think, is a study of how Nietzsche, he went crazy, obviously, the last 10 years of his life he spent as a raving madman.
And his sister, who was a villain out of a fairy tale, took over his books and took over his work.
And she tried to create an anti-Semitic phenomenon.
No, she actually brought in the Nazis to run Nietzsche's archives.
And the ideas of Nietzsche then became Nazified.
And during World War I, for instance, German soldiers were carrying Nietzsche's book into battle in World War I. And so, yeah, it all fed into this.
And when Leopold and Loeb committed this Nietzsche-inspired murder, and Hitchcock made a movie out of it called Rope, At one point, somebody says, how could they do this?
Because they were Nietzschean.
And somebody says, well, so was Hitler.
And so all these ideas go together.
And yes, that's exactly right.
If you believe that man is perfectible, you will begin committing murders.
And you can prove it.
Just go in a room by yourself and try to imagine a perfect world.
And the first thing you will do is say, well, I got to get rid of these people.
And I got to get rid of those people.
Like you said, you'd probably start with the Democrats.
You know, if you get an archetypical story correct, the way someone would say that, like, it's not exactly my thing, but Harry Potter, that it gets the archetypes right, so then the story is clean.
I mean, it does kind of tell you, maybe we only need, like, five or so grand stories about truth, and then we can figure out, okay, it's a sci-fi story, it's a medieval story, they got wizards or whatever.
Now, you know, I only half agree with that because I think that, you know, even Jung, who comes up with this idea of archetypes, and I know that Jordan loves the guy, but even he says, you know, there's this individual person and then there is this mass of unconscious knowledge in which the archetypes live.
So everybody's story is completely unique.
And yet also partakes of this mythic nature.
And so the great works of art, every time you read a great work of art, it's as if you'd never heard the story before.
And then sometimes when you think it through, you think, well, yes, there are elements of those archetypes in there.
And so, you know, Hamlet is a very different story than Othello.
And yet both stories are kind of part of that structure.
So that's what makes art so endlessly fascinating to me, is that it's always different and always the same in some way.
Well, there's a line in John Steinbeck's East of Eden, which is basically the Cain and Abel story updated into California, into 20th century California.
There's a line in there where somebody says these verses, and the Cain and Abel story is only like 16 verses long.
These verses tell the entire story of mankind.
It's not only true in real life, it's also true in the Bible.
It's the first thing that happens after the fall of man.
It's the first event after the Garden of Eden.
And it sets almost like a trauma in your childhood keeps repeating itself throughout your life.
It keeps repeating itself throughout the Old Testament.
Almost every story, major story in the Old Testament is a brother battle.
It's a battle between David and his brothers or Joseph and his brothers.
In each generation, the brother battle is repeated.
And interestingly, in the brother battles that come afterwards, Cain is the older brother killing the younger brother.
But in all the other battles, it's the younger brothers who rise to the top, like Joseph rising over his brothers.
And it's almost as if, just like with the trauma, it's almost as if they're...
I mean, psychiatrists say the reason we repeat our traumas obsessively in our mind is we're trying to get it right.
We're trying to make it stop, and we felt helpless, and now we want to make it stop.
And so it sets the pattern of history in the same way something terrible that happened to you in a child might set the pattern of your life.
I think then you start to ask yourself the questions, you know, as Jordan himself would say, you start to ask yourself the questions, what themes are being expressed here?
And I think among those themes, and that's the way I deal with it in the book, you know, I don't actually look for movies based on Cain because they all are.
Every movie is based on Cain and Abel at some level.
But you start to see things like, for instance, envy, the idea that you have something and therefore I want it.
You have to protect yourself, and that builds up into a battle over time.
The idea that your brother is kind of a version of yourself, and so that every murder is really a suicide, which I think is something that people who have committed murder will actually say, that I felt like I was killing myself.
All of those ideas build up until you get this kind of brother relationship between Adam and Christ, and that is a way of kind of ending the trauma.
It's a doorway out of history.
It's a doorway out of this absolute prison of sin that we're all caught in.
Well, actually, in Crime and Punishment, Crime and Punishment is the book that really changed my life when I was 19. And here's a guy who, foreseeing the advent of Nietzsche, it's written before Nietzsche's published anything, says, I'm a superior being, therefore I can commit murder, and then commits murder and finds out.
Oh my God, now I'm trapped in a hell of my own making.
And his conscience starts to tear him apart.
And the heartbreaking scene in it, one of the greatest scenes in all of literature, is when he confesses to his friend, who's a prostitute, that he has killed two women with an axe in this horrific murder.
She says to him, Oh my God, what have you done to yourself?
You know, which is just a heartbreaking line.
And from that period on, he begins to move toward redemption.
And Dostoevsky wisely doesn't show us the redemption.
He says that would be a whole other story.
But he begins to hint that he's moving in that direction.
And the direction is in the direction of Christ.
in the direction of believing in a redeemer God.
And Dostoevsky was so...
That there's a famous painting by Holbein of Christ lying dead, and it's just a dead body.
That's all it is.
It is just the grimmest, most dead picture you can imagine.
And thus, he used to stand in front of this painting for hours until his wife would come and take him away because he wanted to make sure that he was being honest about what redemption means and how horrifying a price you have to pay to redeem a soul is.
Do you think it's possible to commit the ultimate sin and actually somehow, in your own psychology, in your own spirit, actually get away with it?
The reason, I mean, I'm asking for a fairly obvious reason, but also, I happen to be re-watching Sopranos right now.
I mean, it's my third go-around with Sopranos.
And one of the things that always amazes me, each time that I watch it, it amazes me more, is that everybody, from Tony all the way down, everybody kills people.
Sometimes they have their reasons.
Sometimes it's accidental.
Sometimes, you know, some random person gets shot.
Sometimes it's a young person, a hooker, whatever.
And everybody kind of moves on with their life, but you're rooting for them the whole time because they seem to have a code that they live by.
And that, like, that's why you like Tony.
You don't want whatever happens at the end of Zafranos, which I love that ending where it just went black.
I know a lot of people didn't like it.
I loved it.
But, like, you're rooting for him the entire time, and yet he killed hookers.
He killed young guys.
He beat all sorts of people.
You know, all these horrific things.
Do you think you can get away with it in some way?
That there is a type of psychology that would allow someone to do all of these horrible things and still, at the end, when they meet their maker, be like, well, you know, it's pretty good.
You see, actually, it's interesting, I haven't thought about it so specifically, but you see moments where they start to change, and then they can't change.
I mean, there's one called From Where to Eternity or something where somebody actually prays to Jesus to save one of them, and the guy is saved, and briefly he starts to believe, and he starts to be haunted by the dead, people that he's killed, and then he's just like, forget it.
Match Point is one of the jokes in Match Point is the murderer uses crime and punishment as his blueprint for a murder.
And what I think Woody Allen doesn't quite understand is that is a kind of hell to not know, to not come to terms with your guilt because you can lose your soul without knowing it.
It's kind of like being colorblind except at a deeper level.
line to the death of your own soul.
And I think that, that that comes with the price that, He can never get out of it.
He knows something's wrong with his life, but he can't quite change it.
Do you think that that Do you think humans will evolve to a point that these stories will be like, oh, that was the archetypical story that had to exist for humans in their nascent era, and now we've evolved into something completely different?
I believe one day it'll all come right, but it's not going to be in this world.
But I will say that one of the things that this book is about is about the permanent existence of evil in our world and how we blind ourselves to it and how by looking at it, you can transform it into something beautiful in your own heart.
And that's kind of the idea that when you look at, for instance, slavery, we say, oh, those people who held slaves were bad.
But you don't look at abortion.
You know, you don't think like, well, wait a minute, maybe we're doing something just as bad all the time.
Evil is a permanent presence in a broken world.
And I think one of my problems here.
It's like, oh, we're only going to talk about good things.
Everything's going to be great.
Everything's going to be family-friendly.
Everything's going to end up, well, if you pray, you get what you pray for.
You know, there's always justice.
God is working everything out.
That's all nonsense.
That doesn't happen.
The whole thing about murder is no matter what happens on this planet, on this level plane, That dead person is never going to get justice.
That dead person has been wronged to the point of death, and that justice is never going to get there.
If we don't look at the world that way, we don't understand actually what Christianity is all about.
It's a tragic religion.
It's a religion that says, if God walks on earth, we will kill him.
It's so interesting because to connect it to where we started with some of the Biden stuff, you know, I didn't see that many people that were rejoicing over the cancer diagnosis.
But I think it was, but I saw a lot of people that just immediately were making it very political as opposed to just taking one breath and being like, he is a human being and although he's done some, he either knowingly, and that's the problem partly, is that we don't know that he knowingly did all these bad things like the border or whatever else.
Or he didn't know, and that's a separate issue.
But all week I just was trying to really make the distinction between empathy for a human being and then the bad things that that person either knowingly or unknowingly does.
Because it is to your earlier point.
Because that's really what you're doing to yourself then at that point.
If you can't see someone for a human, that's when bad things start happening.
I thought it was quite a good move when Donald Trump put that truth.
Truth Post Up, because it was like, let's separate the problems that this man was having versus the output of the administration, because that most of us can agree on was terrible.
We don't want to be attacking a dementia patient because you're right.
Death comes for all of us and the cognitive stuff or whatever else, prostate cancer and everything else can come for all of us.
And I think the interesting thing about it is that, you know, the question of who was running the country is now being swept away.
Like in this kind of, with Jake Tapper covering how Jake Tapper hid this dementia story is not covering how Jake Tapper also hid the fact that the government was being run by somebody.
And we don't know who.
And who let all those people into our, who let 20 million people come marching into our country?
who did this gender affirming care, one of the You know, so like that is the thing that I would like exposed and I would like to see.
And you asked if the media was going to do that.
No, they're going to continue to lie until basically we replace them.
You know, I think that that's what I hope is happening.
You are the only person who then, and this was not my tequila, but this was a high-level tequila that I gave you to sip on, and you said, no, I'll have my Scotch.
You tasted it and swirled it and spit it out.
I don't know what that really says about you, but here we are.