The Charlie Kirk Show - Poetry, Christ…and Frankenstein? Finding ‘The Truth and Beauty’ with Andrew Klavan

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, it's And the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:00:01.000 Andrew Clavin, who talks about the truth and beauty, how English poets can help you better understand Jesus.

00:00:08.000 A very interesting conversation, and I think you're going to really enjoy it.

00:00:11.000 Email me directly, freedom at charliekirk.com, and get involved with TurningpointUSA Today, tpusa.com.

00:00:17.000 At Turning Point USA, we're playing offense with a sense of urgency to help win America back and educate the next generation around what matters.

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00:00:39.000 Buckle up everybody here.

00:00:40.000 We go.

00:00:41.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:43.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:00:45.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:48.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:52.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:53.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:54.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:01:02.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:11.000 That's why we are here.

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00:01:26.000 With us right now is someone I have a lot of respect for, and he has a podcast for the Daily Wire and also a new book that is really interesting, The Truth and Beauty, how the lives and works of England's greatest poets point the way to a deeper understanding of the words of Jesus.

00:01:43.000 Andrew Clavin is with us right now.

00:01:45.000 Andrew, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:47.000 It's good to see you, Charlie.

00:01:48.000 How you doing?

00:01:48.000 I'm doing great.

00:01:49.000 So I must admit, I don't know a lot about English poetry, but I do have a desire to have a deeper understanding of Jesus.

00:01:49.000 Thank you.

00:01:57.000 I agree with one of your statements here that you find sometimes what he said to be a little bit confusing, and you can't always get to the deepest level what Jesus was trying to say.

00:02:07.000 Walk us through why you wrote the book and we'll go from there.

00:02:11.000 Right.

00:02:12.000 You know, it's not a book written for people who read poetry, actually.

00:02:14.000 It's a book for people who want to know Jesus better.

00:02:17.000 And it started with my noticing that a lot of the things that Jesus says, especially in the Sermon on the Mount, but throughout the Gospels, are not as clear as we think they are.

00:02:26.000 We say them because we're taught to say them and we have faith that they're true and we trust that they're true, but we don't always know what they mean.

00:02:32.000 And I myself was just looking at that and I was talking to my son about it.

00:02:37.000 And he said to me, you know, I think the problem may be that you're trying to understand a philosophy instead of trying to get to know a man.

00:02:45.000 And the minute he said that to me, I thought, wait, that's the smartest thing anyone ever said to me.

00:02:49.000 Because when you know somebody, when you actually know someone like, you know, your parents or your wife or someone who's really close to you, you don't really think, oh, you know, my wife has this philosophy of life.

00:03:00.000 What you think is, if my wife were here, she would like that or she would not like it or she would think about it this way or she'd feel it this way.

00:03:08.000 You know what's going on inside them.

00:03:09.000 And when I looked at Jesus again, I realized that was what he was trying to communicate to us.

00:03:14.000 He says, I want the joy that's in me to be in you.

00:03:18.000 And so I set out to read the Gospels again just to get to know him.

00:03:23.000 I didn't think about Paul.

00:03:24.000 I didn't think about the church.

00:03:26.000 I didn't think about theology, the Trinity, anything.

00:03:29.000 Because all I really want to know, to be honest with you, Charlie, is what God wants from me.

00:03:33.000 You know, the end of days is in his hands.

00:03:35.000 The judgment of sinners in his hands.

00:03:37.000 You know, the one thing that is in my hands is what I do with my life.

00:03:41.000 And so that's how I set out to read it, just to get to know him, like you would if you were reading a novel and you get to know the main character.

00:03:48.000 You're reading a biography and you get to know Ulysses S. Grant or whoever it is.

00:03:52.000 I just wanted to get to know him.

00:03:53.000 And as I did that, this weird thing happened.

00:03:56.000 Poets, these lines of poetry kept coming back into my head.

00:04:00.000 And I started to think about that.

00:04:02.000 And I thought, why should that be true?

00:04:03.000 And I realized it's because these guys, these particular poets, they're called the Romantic poets, and they wrote at the end of the 18th century.

00:04:11.000 So they wrote right around the French Revolution and afterwards.

00:04:14.000 They were dealing with a lot of the same problems that we have.

00:04:17.000 Almost the times are uncannily alike.

00:04:20.000 The French Revolution started with a bunch of people saying it's not fair.

00:04:24.000 We're not being treated fairly.

00:04:25.000 We're poor.

00:04:26.000 The rich are too rich and we're too poor.

00:04:28.000 But it ended with people saying, We are going to rewrite reality.

00:04:32.000 We are going to change the entire world.

00:04:33.000 We're going to tear down the statues of famous men.

00:04:35.000 That's what they did. 1.00

00:04:36.000 Yeah, we're going to kill all the priests. 1.00

00:04:40.000 We're going to kill the king and queen. 1.00

00:04:42.000 And we are just going to rewrite everything. 0.99

00:04:44.000 And all of Europe stood still and thought, here comes paradise.

00:04:48.000 This is going to be a great thing.

00:04:50.000 Well, when it failed, like the Soviet Union failed, the same attempt to do the same thing in the Soviet Union failed, the intellectuals didn't let it go, just like now.

00:04:57.000 You know, they thought, well, if we just tweak it here and do this, it's going to work eventually.

00:05:02.000 But some of them, one or two of them, risked being canceled.

00:05:05.000 And boy, oh boy, were they ever canceled?

00:05:07.000 And they decided, no, this was a mistake.

00:05:09.000 One of them was the great poet William Wordsworth.

00:05:12.000 There are poems written about him saying what a terrible person he is because he went from being a radical to being a conservative.

00:05:18.000 So these guys were facing a lot of the same things.

00:05:21.000 They were facing gender roles, were up for grabs.

00:05:23.000 People were saying, you know, should we get married? 0.97

00:05:25.000 Shouldn't women be allowed to sleep with everybody they want to? 1.00

00:05:28.000 The same kinds of things that we're talking about now. 0.99

00:05:30.000 Politics, the same kind of radical politics.

00:05:32.000 Everything should be swept away and we should rewrite the entire world.

00:05:36.000 And God, you know, science, this was the first time that science really started to have some successes in the world.

00:05:43.000 And people started to lose their faith, not because science disproved the Bible, but because it gave you the feeling that it had disproved the Bible.

00:05:49.000 You know, it sort of gave you the sense that things are different than they are in the Bible.

00:05:54.000 And so these poets had to reconstruct the world, just like we have to right now, just the same way.

00:05:59.000 I mean, the same way we have to start to ask basic questions.

00:06:02.000 Can a man become a woman? 0.99

00:06:05.000 Can we trust the Bible? 1.00

00:06:06.000 Is the Bible true?

00:06:07.000 And they were geniuses.

00:06:09.000 And so they wrote this beautiful poetry without even, they didn't mean to.

00:06:13.000 They didn't mean to go back to Jesus, but this beautiful poetry that when you read it in a certain way, explains what Jesus was saying.

00:06:20.000 And so, again, I didn't write this for people who like poetry or know anything about poetry.

00:06:25.000 I just talked about the journey these people took to rebuild the world from a state of absolute ruin, absolute destruction.

00:06:33.000 The same state that I think we're in right now, where even the most basic truths are up for grabs.

00:06:38.000 And for me, it changed everything.

00:06:41.000 I saw the words of Jesus in an entirely new way, not throwing out anything that he said, not changing or twisting anything that he said, but simply seeing getting into it from a different direction that gave me a fresh perspective and deeply increased my joy.

00:06:55.000 So I wanted to spread that around a little bit.

00:06:57.000 Give us some examples, maybe one or two that our audience might be able to resonate with.

00:07:02.000 Well, the classic thing was, you know, love your enemies.

00:07:06.000 I saw that and I thought, I don't even like my enemies.

00:07:08.000 You know, I don't even like some of my friends.

00:07:10.000 I'm like, I love my enemies.

00:07:11.000 And why should I love my enemies when some of them are really awful people?

00:07:16.000 Well, when I looked again, I realized that Jesus said, love your enemies because it will make you a son of your father, because that's the way he sees your enemies.

00:07:24.000 So I thought, ah, Jesus is trying to get us to see the world the way God sees the world.

00:07:30.000 He is trying to make us part of his creation.

00:07:36.000 So he's trying to make us a branch of his vine.

00:07:38.000 That's the way he puts it.

00:07:40.000 And when he says, I want the joy that's in me to be in you, he wants us to see the world as he sees it.

00:07:44.000 So we will be as joyful as he is.

00:07:46.000 And joy isn't happiness.

00:07:48.000 You know, it's not like, oh, it's, you know, you hear Christians say, oh, I'm blessed and truly favored.

00:07:53.000 My wife left me and I lost my job, but I'm so happy, you know, because I'm a Christian.

00:07:58.000 I don't believe in any of that.

00:07:59.000 I believe that when sad things happen, you're sad.

00:08:01.000 When happy things happen, you're happy.

00:08:03.000 But you always want to be deeply involved in life.

00:08:05.000 And that's what I think what joy means.

00:08:07.000 The poets called it gusto.

00:08:09.000 So when you start to love your enemies, it's not to be a nice guy.

00:08:13.000 It's not to transform your enemies into nice people.

00:08:16.000 It's not to change the world.

00:08:17.000 The world is going to stay exactly the same, but you are going to see it in a new way.

00:08:22.000 And that's what so many of these poets were writing about.

00:08:24.000 They were writing about the fact, you know, let me give you a good example from just from the modern day, all right?

00:08:30.000 Right now, when you lose touch with God, you lose touch with yourself.

00:08:34.000 When you're not a branch of the vine, you're just a branch lying on the ground.

00:08:38.000 You're not going to bear fruit.

00:08:39.000 You're just empty.

00:08:41.000 So you don't know what your inner world is all about.

00:08:44.000 Does it mean anything when I think something's good?

00:08:46.000 What if I think something's good and you think something different is good? 0.99

00:08:49.000 What if I think it's nice to live in a country where women are free, but you live in a country where women have to wear a dark hood and they can't go out without an escort? 1.00

00:08:57.000 Which one of us is right? 0.98

00:08:58.000 Are we both right?

00:08:59.000 So what we have is a world where people's inner lives don't mean anything.

00:09:03.000 They think they're not real.

00:09:05.000 And you have a world in which the inner life seems to be completely sovereign over everything.

00:09:09.000 So if in the middle of this conversation, I turn to you and say, oh, and by the way, Charlie, I'm a woman.

00:09:14.000 You suddenly have to call me a woman or else you're a terrible person because you're not respecting my inner life.

00:09:20.000 These poets reconstructed the inner life and how it works.

00:09:24.000 And what they came to is they came to say, we are in collaboration with creation.

00:09:30.000 We are not separate from reality, but we are in ourselves a new part of reality.

00:09:35.000 We are the part of creation that creates.

00:09:39.000 And that's a very beautiful thought.

00:09:40.000 And when you start to think about it, you realize that just walking down the street, just Charlie Kirk walking down the street has never happened before.

00:09:47.000 That experience that you're having, just looking around at the trees, the people, the cars, that's never happened before and it will never happen again.

00:09:53.000 It's a unique thing that God has made and that you are making as part of God's creation.

00:09:58.000 When you start to deal with life that way, and it's not easy, you have to do it a little bit at a time, you have to work at it, everything becomes incredibly beautiful.

00:10:06.000 Everything becomes incredibly joyful.

00:10:08.000 And as I say, that doesn't mean you're happy all the time.

00:10:10.000 It simply means you have gusto, you have meaning in your life because it is the purpose of your life to become yourself.

00:10:17.000 I wrote down here in collaboration with creation.

00:10:20.000 Andrew, I have to ask you, though.

00:10:20.000 I love that.

00:10:22.000 So you said that these poets were romanticists.

00:10:25.000 Is that correct?

00:10:27.000 They were called the romantic poets.

00:10:29.000 It didn't mean that they were, you know, good at lovemaking or anything like that.

00:10:33.000 It meant a certain approach to life.

00:10:35.000 And so I'm asking for a reason is that sometimes romanticism can be categorized or characterized, I should say, as a rejection of order or harmony or calm.

00:10:35.000 Yeah.

00:10:47.000 How do English Romanticists, how would that fit into Jesus or the Bible?

00:10:54.000 I would love some clarity on that.

00:10:55.000 Right.

00:10:56.000 Well, first of all, it's just not true.

00:10:58.000 I mean, this is what so many people say this.

00:11:00.000 So many people who ought to know better say it, real readers and people who pay attention to poetry.

00:11:05.000 They'll say, well, there was an age of reason, but then the Romantics came along and they didn't like reason.

00:11:10.000 So they just wanted to deal with emotion and disorder.

00:11:13.000 That's simply not the case.

00:11:15.000 If it was an age of reason, we have to remember that the age of reason ended with a reign of terror, that the age of reason led to the revolution, the French Revolution, which ended with people being guillotined, with priests being killed, with kings being killed, and with a 12-year world war, the Napoleonic Wars.

00:11:32.000 So the Age of Reason wasn't all it cracked up to be.

00:11:35.000 And it gave to a new generation an assignment.

00:11:38.000 How are we going to rebuild the consciousness of man for a new age, a scientific age, a free age, an age when people start to feel that maybe there shouldn't be kings and maybe people should be equal?

00:11:49.000 And each one of them dealt with it differently.

00:11:51.000 Is no romantic philosophy.

00:11:53.000 There's no one person who represents the romantics because each, it's really the task they were trying to create that brings them all together.

00:12:00.000 So, for instance, Wordsworth became a deeply conservative person.

00:12:04.000 The poet Shelley was a great radical.

00:12:06.000 He was an atheist and he believed in free love and all these things.

00:12:11.000 Whereas Wordsworth had this wonderful marriage and ultimately became a Christian.

00:12:14.000 He didn't start out as a Christian, but he became one over time.

00:12:17.000 So each one of them approached it differently.

00:12:19.000 What brought them together was their understanding that the inner life of human beings matters.

00:12:26.000 You cannot have reason as some kind of like machine.

00:12:30.000 You know, you can't, reason is not some kind of perfect thing that's going to explain the world because we're not entirely reasonable creatures.

00:12:36.000 We're creatures who love.

00:12:38.000 We're creatures who appreciate beauty.

00:12:40.000 We're creatures who are broken and sinful and do what we don't want to do, what we think we shouldn't do.

00:12:44.000 We do, and what we think we should do, we don't do.

00:12:47.000 All of those things, we're living in a complete creature, and each part of us is important.

00:12:53.000 It's not just our reason that is important.

00:12:56.000 We all know that is important, but it's not the only thing that's important.

00:12:59.000 And that is really what it's what the book is about, and it's what the title of the book is about.

00:13:04.000 You know, you asked me to discuss some of the poetry specifically.

00:13:09.000 And the title of the book comes from a very great, very famous poem called Odona Grecian Urn by John Keats, who was, he died extraordinarily young.

00:13:17.000 I think he was 25 when he died.

00:13:20.000 But he was probably the most talented English poet since Shakespeare.

00:13:23.000 He was probably the one with the most pure poetic talent.

00:13:27.000 And he wrote this beautiful poem about art and how art can take us into eternity, that art is an eternal thing.

00:13:35.000 It lasts in a way that human beings don't last.

00:13:38.000 And the last line of this poem is: well, you know, I'll read it.

00:13:42.000 I'll read you just a brief bit of it.

00:13:45.000 The one line is: Beauty is truth, truth, beauty.

00:13:48.000 That is all you know on earth and all you need to know.

00:13:51.000 And when you read that, you think, how is beauty truth?

00:13:54.000 But what he's really telling you is that you are the full human being is a machine for understanding truth.

00:14:00.000 Your inner life is not meaningless and it's not sovereign.

00:14:04.000 It is there to understand the truth in yourself through yourself in an original and new way.

00:14:11.000 And that's what Christ basically helps us do.

00:14:13.000 He is the model for the human connected to God.

00:14:16.000 He is the model for the human as God.

00:14:19.000 And when we become part of his vine, when we become a branch of his vine, we become our version of that.

00:14:25.000 Well, that's that's beautiful.

00:14:27.000 Andrew, tell us about Frankenstein.

00:14:28.000 What does he have to do with all this?

00:14:30.000 Yeah.

00:14:31.000 Well, one of the writers I deal with is not a poet, is Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.

00:14:36.000 And she was just a teenager when she wrote it.

00:14:38.000 But they were living in a time when marriage and sex roles were under question. 0.95

00:14:43.000 Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was one of the first feminists.

00:14:46.000 She wrote a very famous book called The Vindication of the Rights of Women.

00:14:49.000 Her father was a famous philosopher who despised marriage.

00:14:53.000 She ran away with the poet Percy Shelley, who also despised marriage, thought it was a prison.

00:14:58.000 He abandoned his wife to run off with her.

00:15:01.000 And she was spending the summer with Shelley, who was now her lover, and with Byron, who was everybody's lover.

00:15:10.000 The guy slept with everybody.

00:15:12.000 I mean, he slept with men, he slept with women, he didn't care.

00:15:14.000 And she was basically dealing with the philosophy of free love.

00:15:18.000 And she was a teenage girl.

00:15:19.000 She was 18, 19 years old.

00:15:21.000 And they were sitting around one day, and Byron sort of said, let's all write a ghost story.

00:15:26.000 And they all set out to write a ghost story.

00:15:27.000 None of them finished it except for Mary.

00:15:29.000 And what was her story about?

00:15:30.000 It was about a man who builds a monster, builds a creature out of human body parts and brings it to life.

00:15:36.000 And even Mary said, this is a story about a man who usurps the power of God to create life.

00:15:44.000 Now I've read Frankenstein many times and I don't think that's what it's about because Frankenstein doesn't usurp the power of God because we all can create life.

00:15:51.000 All men and women can come together to create life.

00:15:54.000 What he usurps is the power of women. 1.00

00:15:57.000 He creates a person without a mother. 0.81

00:16:00.000 And that is in opposition to God who, when he wanted to become a person, remember he's God.

00:16:05.000 He can become a person any way he wants.

00:16:07.000 But when he wants to become a person, the first thing he does is choose a mother.

00:16:12.000 So what happens to this creature?

00:16:14.000 You know, this creature becomes a murderer.

00:16:17.000 He becomes an outcast.

00:16:18.000 At one point, the creature, Frankenstein, hides out with some peasants, basically, out in the countryside, and he learns about life and he learns about what a mother is.

00:16:29.000 He learns about what a father is, what children are, and how much the mother and father love the children, how much they guide them in life.

00:16:35.000 And he comes back to his creator, to Dr. Frankenstein, and he says, I want to be fully human.

00:16:41.000 Build me a woman. 0.99

00:16:43.000 Build me an Eve. 0.97

00:16:44.000 Now build me an Eve.

00:16:44.000 You built me.

00:16:46.000 And this is the story of what happens to people when they lose the humanizing influence of motherhood.

00:16:55.000 And this was something all these poets wrote about because almost all of them lost their mothers young.

00:16:59.000 Wordsworth writes this beautiful passage in his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, where he talks about how a mother, by looking in her baby's eyes, creates its humanity, connects it to the world through her love.

00:17:15.000 This, it turns out, to be literally true.

00:17:18.000 It turns out that we have these things called mirror neurons, and they are set on fire by our interactions with our mother when we're a baby.

00:17:24.000 And so mothers don't just turn matter into life. 1.00

00:17:27.000 They also turn life into individuality, into individual humanity.

00:17:32.000 Now, this is something that Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley, as this teenage girl, created the science fiction novel.

00:17:37.000 This is the first real modern science fiction novel.

00:17:39.000 And if you look at science fiction over time, it tells a story about science's antagonistic relationship to motherhood.

00:17:46.000 If you look at dystopian novels like Brave New World or The Giver, almost always the first thing that happens is the mother has to go.

00:17:54.000 In Brave New World, they have children in machines. 0.63

00:17:56.000 In The Giver, they relegate motherhood to the lowest woman in the society. 1.00

00:18:02.000 If you look at a great science fiction movie like Terminator, The Terminator, remember, the machines are running the world.

00:18:09.000 The human beings are rebelling against the machines.

00:18:11.000 So what do they do? 0.83

00:18:12.000 They send a machine back in time, Arnold Schwarzenegger, back in time to kill the rebel leader's mother.

00:18:18.000 They understand that that's where his power comes from.

00:18:20.000 That's where his training, his abilities come from.

00:18:24.000 And the point that I think Mary Shelley was making, she may have been making it unconsciously, was that women have a special role to play in the creation of humanity, not just the obvious physical creation of humanity, but in the creation of true humanity, of deep humanity. 0.57

00:18:41.000 We have lost that sense right now.

00:18:43.000 And one of the reasons I think we've lost it is because machinery has taken from women many of the tasks they used to perform. 1.00

00:18:50.000 When you go back and you look at Proverbs 31, Christian's always saying, I want a Proverbs 31 woman.

00:18:54.000 Proverbs 31 woman is not the housewife from Leva to Beaver who vacuums with her, wearing heels and pearls. 0.56

00:19:02.000 Proverbs 31 woman is a businesswoman. 1.00

00:19:03.000 She sells property. 0.99

00:19:04.000 She creates food.

00:19:06.000 She grows an orchard.

00:19:07.000 She sells the food.

00:19:08.000 She uses the money to buy more land. 0.97

00:19:11.000 And she feeds and raises her children and she takes care of her husband and she gives her husband a good reputation.

00:19:17.000 That's a lot to do. 0.93

00:19:18.000 At this period that the Romantics were writing in, the Industrial Revolution had destroyed and was in the process of destroying much of that economic power that women had. 0.90

00:19:30.000 Suddenly clothes, which women created, women were called the distaff because they used this distaff to make clothes with. 1.00

00:19:37.000 Suddenly that was done in a factory. 0.92

00:19:39.000 Suddenly food could be created in a factory.

00:19:41.000 Suddenly children were leaving the farm to go and work in the city in a factory and not coming back. 0.96

00:19:46.000 So the value of children, which was something women supplied, went down because they no longer helped in your old age and they no longer helped took over your farm. 1.00

00:19:54.000 All of these things serves to strip women of their place in society. 1.00

00:19:58.000 So that's why feminism got started right there. 1.00

00:20:01.000 That's why the feminists start to say, you know, we need more rights. 1.00

00:20:04.000 We need to be more involved in the world.

00:20:05.000 We need to get out of the house.

00:20:06.000 And ultimately say, get out of the house. 0.59

00:20:08.000 And what Mary Shelley came over time, she was one of the few of these writers who actually lived into the Victorian age and became a Victorian and started to write books about the urgency of women's domestic role, of the homemaking role, of the motherly role.

00:20:22.000 She started to become more religious in her writing because she understood that this free love and this attack on the feminine nature, the nature of femininity, was destructive, not just to women, but to the humanity that women produce.

00:20:37.000 And when you read Frankenstein that way, you get a very strong answer, a very strong response to these guys who are telling us now that a guy can become a woman, that there's absolutely no, absolutely no difference between a man and a woman.

00:20:50.000 And if you want to just switch over, all you got to do is snap your fingers.

00:20:53.000 And all of a sudden, you're a woman.

00:20:55.000 You can compete in their sports.

00:20:57.000 You can have your period.

00:20:58.000 You can have, you know, all of this nonsense that they're talking is deeply destructive, but it's not new.

00:21:03.000 It is not new.

00:21:04.000 It has been going on at least since the Romantic period.

00:21:07.000 And they were dealing with it in that moment.

00:21:09.000 Some of the people who experienced the free love movement were some of the women were absolutely destroyed by it.

00:21:16.000 Shelley's wife, the woman he left, drowned herself and the child she was carrying in her belly by another man.

00:21:22.000 She drowned herself in the serpentine or a body of water in the park.

00:21:29.000 The woman who had an affair with Byron had a child.

00:21:33.000 That child was taken away from her and was separated from her and died young.

00:21:37.000 At the end, a lot of these women looked back on this era of free love and said these men became monsters, controlled by lust, basically saying that women were no different than men, that they needed nothing from men.

00:21:49.000 They became monsters.

00:21:50.000 And so we've been through a lot of this before.

00:21:52.000 You know, it's not like this is a new thing that suddenly these guys discovered, oh, we can mess around with gender roles.

00:21:58.000 This is something that's happened before and these people had to deal with it.

00:22:01.000 And I think Mary Shelley dealt with it as a nightmare.

00:22:04.000 And she dealt with it in one of the most powerful, I mean, Frankenstein's one of the great novels, and it's certainly one of the greatest horror novels ever written.

00:22:10.000 But it's a beautiful, thoughtful book.

00:22:12.000 It's not like the movie at all.

00:22:13.000 It's a very beautiful, thoughtful book.

00:22:14.000 And this, I think, is its real subject.

00:22:16.000 So what is the takeaway from that era of how they defeated that sort of gender confusion or the role reversal?

00:22:23.000 You've kind of touched on this a little bit, but how does it apply directly to our times today as we live through almost identical the same issues?

00:22:30.000 It's really a hopeful thing because one of the things that this gave way to, a time of radicalism, a time of gender role confusion, a time of disbelief, became the Victorian era.

00:22:41.000 And whatever you think of the Victorian era, some people think it's the great.

00:22:44.000 I happen to think it's one of the pinnacles of mankind, but some people think it's terrible.

00:22:48.000 But whatever you think of it, it was a deeply conservative, deeply family-oriented, deeply patriotic, and deeply God-fearing time in England, in the England these poets lived in and created in and came from.

00:23:01.000 And so it actually is quite a hopeful thing that while the Romantics are frequently disdained and disrespected and dismissed, really the world changed in ways that certain of the Romantics, like Wordsworth, the more conservative ones, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, that they foresaw and they wanted.

00:23:15.000 And they actually fought for.

00:23:16.000 I mean, Wordsworth became a highly political guy.

00:23:19.000 He used to say that he spent a dozen hours thinking about politics for every one hour he thought about poetry.

00:23:25.000 And it was very, very conservative politics.

00:23:28.000 And so it actually is a hopeful thing that you can rebuild things.

00:23:33.000 That yes, the radicals do destroy.

00:23:36.000 Time destroys.

00:23:38.000 New innovations in science and consciousness destroy, but you can rebuild those truths that are the same yesterday, today, and forever.

00:23:46.000 It takes mental effort and it takes soul effort, and it takes each person kind of contributing to that culture, but it can be done.

00:23:52.000 And is that also a call for new art as well?

00:23:55.000 I mean, this was all done in a form of art.

00:23:58.000 And so I would imagine that that's a massive vacuum right now in our society, which is who's actually creating the art to, you know, communicate this to the population.

00:24:09.000 Well, now, Charlie, you hit on one of my favorite topics, one of my rocking horses, because I left this country for seven years.

00:24:18.000 I went to England for seven years in the 90s.

00:24:20.000 And when I came back, I just saw absolute ruin. 0.89

00:24:24.000 I saw a country that could be bombed by Islamist fanatics on 9-11.

00:24:28.000 And the elites would say, well, why do they hate us?

00:24:31.000 Maybe we should change.

00:24:33.000 No, they're supposed to hate us.

00:24:34.000 They're the bad guys.

00:24:35.000 We're the good guys.

00:24:36.000 They're supposed to hate us.

00:24:37.000 And that's when I started talking about the culture.

00:24:39.000 I left for England a liberal.

00:24:41.000 I came back and discovered to my surprise that I had become an American conservative.

00:24:46.000 And that's when I started talking to conservatives that you've let the culture go.

00:24:50.000 And that's how I met Andrew Breitbart, who said, you know, you're the only other person talking about this.

00:24:54.000 You know, in the 20 years that I've been talking about this and beating this drum, at first they looked at me like I was nuts.

00:25:00.000 I used to complain to Breitbart and say, you know, nobody's listening.

00:25:03.000 And he would laugh, say, you know, welcome to my world.

00:25:06.000 Now everybody's listening.

00:25:07.000 Now we get it.

00:25:08.000 We are in a time when our arts are degraded. 0.83

00:25:11.000 And I don't mean that they have to become every movie has to become a Christian feel-good film. 0.96

00:25:15.000 That's that's ridiculous. 0.70

00:25:16.000 You know, I think we, what we need is reality. 0.92

00:25:19.000 We need truth.

00:25:20.000 It's the truth that sets us free.

00:25:22.000 The founders of this country didn't watch Dara's Day movies.

00:25:24.000 The founders of this country read Shakespeare.

00:25:26.000 They read the Greek tragedies.

00:25:27.000 They read stories of real life and real human beings and how twisted and broken we are.

00:25:33.000 We got to tell those stories honestly.

00:25:35.000 We've got to tell them from a point of view that understands there is a purpose to being a human being, there's a purpose to creation, and yet is honest about life.

00:25:43.000 It's happening.

00:25:44.000 It's happening.

00:25:45.000 At the Daily Wire, we're starting to make films.

00:25:47.000 They're starting a publishing house.

00:25:48.000 I've been creating art all this time.

00:25:50.000 I've been working in the arts this whole time.

00:25:53.000 It is absolutely changing.

00:25:54.000 The difference between the reaction I get from conservatives today and the reaction I got 20 years ago is absolutely black and white.

00:26:01.000 It's absolutely amazing.

00:26:02.000 And you can thank Disney and all these other cultural institutions for waking people up for that in more.

00:26:08.000 Absolutely.

00:26:08.000 Yes.

00:26:08.000 Thanks a lot, you guys.

00:26:10.000 I just want to read one of the testimonials for this.

00:26:14.000 Amazing.

00:26:14.000 Stephen Meyer, who I have a ton of respect for, says, quote, not since reading C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce in College, has a single book induced such deep and constructive theological reflection in me as I suspect it will for many other readers.

00:26:29.000 That's a big deal.

00:26:29.000 That's a big endorsement there from Dr. Stephen Meyer, who I have a lot of respect for from the Discovery Institute.

00:26:36.000 So congratulations.

00:26:37.000 And then Jordan Peterson says, quote, poetry and literature point to the sacred.

00:26:41.000 Andrew Clavin reminds us how.

00:26:44.000 Andrew, we have a couple minutes remaining.

00:26:47.000 I'll just kind of leave the floor to you right now.

00:26:49.000 What about the book or about what's happening in the world?

00:26:51.000 Do you want to make comments on that we didn't have a chance yet to touch on?

00:26:54.000 Well, I guess the only thing that I want to talk about is when I talk to people your age and younger, I find that they have a really difficult time, a lot of times, embracing faith.

00:27:06.000 We live in an atmosphere, a default atmosphere of non-belief.

00:27:11.000 And that's kind of what I wanted to address.

00:27:14.000 I know a lot of people, a lot of people who know they need God and they know the world needs God and they know society needs God, but they can't believe.

00:27:22.000 I see it again and again.

00:27:23.000 I noticed it actually over a decade ago.

00:27:26.000 A lot of intelligent writers, a lot of intelligent young people saying, you know, yeah, we cannot sustain this society without God, but I don't believe.

00:27:35.000 I can't believe.

00:27:37.000 And they wrestle with it.

00:27:38.000 And I guess I was hoping to find a way to speak to believers about a fresh take so you'd see something new that you hadn't seen before.

00:27:47.000 And to talk to people who have that problem, have that problem that, yes, they see it, they want it, they desire it, but they can't have it.

00:27:54.000 Because, you know, when we talk about the fact that our rights come from God, you lose God, you lose your rights.

00:27:59.000 When we talk about the fact that we are connected, that our spirit is connected to the spirit, that we're a branch of his vine, you fall off that vine, that branch dies.

00:28:09.000 You know, you will not have a creative, beautiful life without that.

00:28:14.000 We all know it.

00:28:15.000 I think a lot of people sense it, and a lot of young people know it, but they are surrounded by this fog of unbelief.

00:28:21.000 And so I hope this cut through the fog.

00:28:23.000 You know, the fog existed then as it exists now.

00:28:26.000 These guys, these poets, were geniuses, and the things they said are illuminating.

00:28:30.000 C.S. Lewis said that if you read Wordsworth and you follow him, you will eventually come to believe.

00:28:36.000 You will eventually be converted.

00:28:38.000 Wordsworth himself did that.

00:28:39.000 He started as an atheist and followed his own thinking and actually made it back.

00:28:45.000 And so I guess I just wanted to show you sometimes when you take a machine apart and you put it back together again, you sometimes understand it better.

00:28:52.000 And that's what these guys had to do.

00:28:53.000 And so I guess I just feel the need for it in this moment.

00:28:57.000 I hope I've met that need.

00:28:58.000 I certainly strove to meet that need, but I see it everywhere.

00:29:02.000 And I know, I know that everything depends on it.

00:29:05.000 I know you know that too, Charlie.

00:29:06.000 I mean, it all depends on God.

00:29:07.000 It's all about that.

00:29:09.000 It really truly is.

00:29:10.000 Well, Andrew, I want to thank you for joining our program and for writing this book.

00:29:14.000 Everyone, check it out: The Truth and the Beauty, The Truth and Beauty.

00:29:17.000 Final thing: it's the truth, not just truth and beauty.

00:29:20.000 Tell us why.

00:29:21.000 Well, you know, it's funny.

00:29:22.000 Ben Shapiro made fun of the title when I said, Ben, it is about Jesus and poetry.

00:29:26.000 It is about the truth and beauty.

00:29:29.000 So that's why it's called not just truth and beauty, but the truth.

00:29:34.000 And the truth will set you free.

00:29:37.000 So exactly.

00:29:38.000 Andrew, thank you so much for joining us.

00:29:39.000 I really enjoyed this.

00:29:40.000 Thank you.

00:29:41.000 Thanks a lot, Charlie.

00:29:42.000 It's great to see you.

00:29:42.000 Appreciate it.

00:29:43.000 Thanks.

00:29:46.000 Hey, everybody.

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00:29:49.000 They feel soft and lotiony in stores, but you get them home and they don't absorb.

00:29:52.000 Well, Mike Lundell at MyPillow found out that around 2006, towels changed forever.

00:29:57.000 They started importing them and adding softeners and other things to the cotton that made them feel good, but they didn't work.

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00:30:05.000 They have proprietary technology to create towels that feel soft but actually work.

00:30:09.000 They are all made with USA cotton and they come with a MyPillow 60-day money-back guarantee.

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00:30:41.000 I want to end on a note of optimism here about something that involves us and involves your country.

00:30:47.000 So you could tell a lot about where a country is and where the country is headed based on what people are consuming.

00:30:54.000 And so I check something fairly regularly, which is the top podcasts in the country.

00:31:02.000 And, you know, you feel as if that the country is taking a left-wing liberal turn, especially with young people.

00:31:09.000 And but then you look at the top podcast charts of who's actually doing well, who's succeeding, what podcasts are popular in Apple podcasts.

00:31:18.000 Are conservative ones getting blown out of the water?

00:31:20.000 Who's doing well?

00:31:21.000 So the number one podcast, the New York Times, Daily, and they do, they put a ton of money in it.

00:31:27.000 Then National Public Radio, then Ben Shapiro.

00:31:30.000 So it's a conservative podcast.

00:31:32.000 Then the Daily Wire, another conservative podcast, then Dan Bongino, then Matt Walsh, then our program.

00:31:38.000 If you look at the top 10 podcasts, one, two, three, four, five out of ten are conservative.

00:31:45.000 Out of the top 15, you have nine out of 15 are conservative podcasts.

00:31:51.000 Now, what's the significance of this?

00:31:53.000 And we're honored to be in the top 10 amongst so many phenomenal other patriots.

00:31:57.000 Is that people are consuming conservative information at record rates right now?

00:32:03.000 And this is a great sign.

00:32:04.000 If you look at it, you're like, wow, even with all the nonsense, CNN, all that sort of stuff, you have something that's really exciting that's happening here that I think isn't getting covered at all.

00:32:18.000 And if young people are gravitating towards center-right pro-American podcasts at this clip, there's a lot more hope out there than I think that will be ever communicated in the mainstream media.

00:32:30.000 So give us a subscription, Charlie Kirk Show Podcast, and hit subscribe.

00:32:34.000 We'll deeply appreciate that.

00:32:36.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:32:37.000 Email me directly, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:32:39.000 Thank you so much for listening.

00:32:40.000 God bless.

00:32:44.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - April 09, 2022

Poetry, Christ…and Frankenstein? Finding ‘The Truth and Beauty’ with Andrew Klavan

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