Speaking Your Mind, Markle's ＂Diva＂ Moment, and the Importance of Dads, with Spencer Klavan ｜ Ep. 382
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 34 minutes
Words per Minute
194.8319
Summary
Spencer Clavin is a conservative, a Christian, and an incredibly deep thinker who not only graduated from the University of Oxford but also taught there. In 2020, he launched a podcast called The Young Heretics, where he talks about classical literature in the hopes of igniting a fire in those of us who want to understand it but don t know where to begin.
Transcript
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
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Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
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Today's full show is with a young man on a mission to defend and save the West
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by teaching all of us about its rich and complicated, fascinating history.
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Spencer Clavin is a conservative, a Christian, and an incredibly deep thinker
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who not only graduated from the University of Oxford, but also taught there.
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In 2020, he launched a podcast called The Young Heretics.
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That is where he talks about classical literature in the hopes of igniting a fire
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in those of us who want to understand it but don't know where to begin.
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He can also dish out some brutal and hilarious and far too intellectual takedowns of far-left progressives.
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Sometimes you're holding on by your fingernails, but you're like,
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Not everyone can go from talking about the classics to writing about how the left now
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sees anyone who tries to stay physically fit as a potential Unabomber,
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So let's just say this is going to be a fascinating, fascinating two hours.
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Spencer is also associate editor at the Claremont Institute.
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And of course, we haven't listed the thing that most of our audience will know about you
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which is you are the son of the great Andrew Clavin,
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which already explains a lot about you, wouldn't you say?
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In fact, I always, I mean, we like to joke that there's no relation between us
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because he doesn't want to be associated with me,
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but I certainly want to be associated with him.
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I'm very proud to have him as my father, and I'm really glad to be here.
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I started listening to The Young Heretics pretty much, I think,
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And I'm somebody who knows very little to nothing about the classics,
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I find the way you talk about them very entertaining.
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And it is something I'm not going to say you dumb them down because you don't.
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But but it is sort of classics for regular people.
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So you tell the story, not assuming we know anything about the stories.
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So first of all, I want to start with this because you are brilliant and your father is
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So what was it like growing up in your household when it comes to books, when it comes to lessons
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Were those the kind of conversations you were having with your dad and maybe mom, too, your
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And I think it speaks to something you mentioned about the show, about young heretics.
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And that is that, you know, I was very, very lucky to grow up in houses, you know, filled
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Anytime I walk into somebody's home, even if they've just got one little bookshelf, that's
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what I gravitate toward immediately, because I started to learn that this is not just like
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a collector's item or something that looks pretty on the wall.
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But this is a little window into somebody's soul.
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What kind of furniture do they have in their mind, as Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying?
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And, you know, the part of that gift, I think, was the unpretentious way in which my folks
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I mean, my dad, you know, my dad, he loves his, you know, pulpy adventure novels just as
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much as he loves his Shakespeare and his romantic poets.
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And, you know, I had a kind of innate desire to know what these big, fancy books were on the
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But another thing that really stunned me when I kind of, you know, got educated enough to
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read some of this stuff, and especially when I started learning the ancient languages and
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kind of digging into classics, is that, you know, you think of these things as kind of
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talismans, Plato, Aristotle, the greats, you know, Shakespeare, you name these names.
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And a lot of times, I think we name them in order to scare people in order to, you know,
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build ourselves up and to suggest that this is something that, you know, regular people don't
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So you need me, the expert, to come in, you know, and kind of gatekeep and tell you that
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either this is something you should or shouldn't read.
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And that's part of how the left gets away with scaring people off of these books, is
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they say, well, they're very complicated, and you probably wouldn't understand them.
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But just trust us that they're racist and evil, and they kind of have such prejudices.
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And in fact, what you discover as you kind of, you know, climb your way into these books,
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is that the reason they're great, the reason they have endured is because underneath all
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of the detritus of time, and all of the, you know, language difficulties and whatever you
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have to struggle with, what you're really dealing with is a face-to-face encounter with
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a human being, one of the greatest minds of the past.
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I mean, books are one of the greatest technologies we've ever invented to capture in amber the real
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life communication between people, you know, actual humans like Aristotle, who's sitting
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around and thinking, what does it mean to be good at being human, right?
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And you and I wake up every day, and we have thoughts that amount to that, even if we don't
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think that way, we say, you know, what am I going to do today?
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And from those little decisions all the way on up to who am I going to marry?
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And one of the things that's so tragic to me about this kind of gatekeeping that goes
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on is that people think that there are these great answers.
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They kind of know that very smart people have thought about these questions, but they don't
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think that they have thought about them in a way that they could grab onto.
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And so part of, you know, my mission in life is just for, you know, I hear from people who
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listen to the show, they're on their tractor, they're farming or they're, you know, the police
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officer at the gym comes up to me and says, I listened to your show.
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And that's when I feel like I'm really firing on all cylinders because, you know, these guys
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This is your dad was on last week and we were talking about his piece, his speech, saying
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that you've been failed by the establishment, capital T, capital E.
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And he didn't mean that in terms of the Republican establishment, which is a term we've been banning
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He means your elders, your teachers, your philosophers, your parents, in some cases,
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who aren't teaching you a moral code anymore, you know, who are sort of letting you think
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in the way that the progressives do that maybe there's no truth.
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Maybe there's not parameters within which we're supposed to live.
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Um, and that the good news is you still have these teachers out there in the form of these
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books and poetry and, uh, you know, great literature.
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All of these teachers are still out there for the taking.
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And I asked him, you know, how should we start and all that stuff.
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But like, it's so clear that you guys are both so committed to that.
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So before we get into it in depth and your beliefs and what you've learned and that would
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take years, but I just want to spend some time on little Spencer because I'm curious,
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you know, like I look at my kids now, they play flag football, they play basketball,
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they play tennis, they run around, they wrestle with each other.
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And was it, I know you and your dad played video games and so on, but like, was it like
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every night you'd sit down and you'd read together and he'd like slip in a little C.S.
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Lewis in, in, in addition to like, I don't Grimm's fairy tales.
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Like how did it, how did your love of reading, uh, come about?
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Well, I, you know, I, I think of my relationship with my father and I think we both kind of
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talked about it this way to each other and to others.
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Um, you know, every son has, uh, an important relationship with his father, even if his father
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is absent, there's no escaping that it's built into your soul.
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And, and many sons have wonderful relationships with their fathers.
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Their fathers are mentors, their fathers are guides, but I think my dad and I are very,
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very lucky and I don't think it's a guarantee that my father and I are also friends.
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And, and I think of friendship, you know, in terms that Lewis and Aristotle both talk about
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that you, you find, uh, your union in love of some common good, some third thing.
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And, you know, obviously when I was a little Spencer, uh, that meant that, you know, I was
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kind of taking these, I was always, you know, interested in, in books and, and, and dad and
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I would go on hikes, you know, or he would read to me at bedtime and he would quiz me about
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You know, like who said this or what do you, who, who do you think said, you know, this,
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uh, line from say Rudyard Kipling's if, you know, and we'd have to talk about it.
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And, you know, the older you get, the more of your own, uh, sense of the world you acquire
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that those hikes started to become arguments and conversations and, you know, profound,
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uh, you know, approaches to, you know, the, the political questions of the day.
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Um, but always, I think, you know, we, we had that gift, which is a really underrated gift
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People think of the intellectual life as so solitary.
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Um, but Plato in his symposium talks about the intellectual life as a life of, of love
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and of shared friendship, love between people who, you know, can produce things in between
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one another, that between these two people, there comes into being some love of, of the
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Um, and, you know, I, I really, I had that in, in my father and I think that, you know,
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a lot of what I say and do now, we, we have a hard time really remembering where one person's
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thought ends and another's begins, you know, that's, it's, it's been that close.
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So I know that you recently got married, uh, you married Josh, who I love that he's the
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I assume you met him cause your dad, you know, works for a time, uh, at the daily wire.
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Oh, no, actually, no, no, no, we, we met through the log cabin Republicans, which is a,
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uh, you know, uh, you know, yeah, yeah, of course I know group.
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Um, and actually he was not that daily, the daily wires general counsel.
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So the connection kind of goes the other way around.
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So as a lawyer myself recovering, um, most lawyers I know are very, are linear thinkers are
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very good at logical reasoning at sort of thought organization at arguing.
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They don't tend to have a ton of extra time on their hands for deep reading of the kind
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So I, this is genuinely something I'm curious about.
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Do you guys sit there at night and talk the way you and your dad do, or is it more, is
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Because I, I mean, maybe if it, if you have two huge brains, like double Spencer's, you
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Maybe you need somebody who's more of like a beer guzzler who just wants to talk about
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Well, you know, Ben Shapiro tweeted out a, uh, cease and desist letter that Josh wrote
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And it ended with, I'm sure you'll be familiar with this.
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The last line of it was be governed accordingly.
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And so everybody was tweeting at me, like, does Josh tell you, take out the trash, be governed
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And, you know, it's, I think there's a real complimentarity here between me and Josh.
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He was also lucky with, to have a kind of, uh, I would say a humanist education.
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He went to Calvin college, uh, which is, you know, one of the places that I think you can
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still go to get that breadth of learning that, you know, I, I'm a big believer, as you know,
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in like, even if you're going to go off and be writing cease and desist letters, you ought
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And, and I think he kind of had that background.
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So he doesn't, you know, look at what I'm doing and say, huh, like, what the hell is that about?
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Um, but, but I do think that, uh, he's, you know, he brings me down to earth in a lot of
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Um, and, you know, many of the things that we share are kind of like in the middle of the
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Like we love, you know, movies, we love watching movies together and we'll go to a
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Marvel movie and he'll come away being like, wow, the studio did this and that.
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And I'll come away saying like, gosh, this idea of the multiverse, it's, you know, it's
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And it's, and, but I think that, you know, we have, we have a lot to learn from each
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other in that way, including the fact that like, you know, I, I live in a house and not
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a hovel or a box, like somewhere on the side of the road, because I haven't paid attention
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Because you don't, you don't want a carbon copy of yourself.
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You want somebody who, like you say, can be complimentary, who can further enhance your
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world and give you new perspectives that you're not immersed in all day.
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I always laugh with my husband, Doug, because, um, he's very well educated and he's a deep
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And on his birthday, you know, year after year, he would probably rather sit reading an
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And I put on every year on my birthday, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
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And like, and I think that there is something where, where people get so invested in their
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identity as like, you know, lovers of, of great ideas that they fail to pay attention
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And conservatives, uh, can, can be guilty of this, I think in a big way, you know, you
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start to talk about, well, what exactly is going on in like, you know, why is, why is
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You know, why is this kind of unappealing, unattractive woman rocketing to the top of
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the charts and maybe you don't like it, but what's the, you know, what's to be gleaned
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And I think, you know, a lot of people kind of miss that because they have a certain disdain
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for, for pop art, especially in times like ours when so much of it is so bad.
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So she's in the news just today, um, because Lizzo, for those of you who don't know, is
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a very successful singer and she's somebody who's extremely, she's morbidly obese and
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the, instead of, you know, it's one thing not to make fun of obese people.
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I don't think anybody's advocating for that, you know, constant cheat teasing, but it's
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quite another to be celebrating it as quote healthy, which is what's done by today's
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They really want us to believe that a 300 pound woman on a five foot six frame is quote
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So she was mocked by, I think it was another singer, uh, who came out.
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My team's giving, Aries, Aries Spears, Aries Spears.
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I have it here and had some things to say on Lizzo.
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Oh, we've got, you know, I don't have to tell you, listen, here he is.
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She's got a very pretty face, but she keeps showing her body off.
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But a woman that's built like a plate of mashed potatoes is in trouble.
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You know, it kills me about women is, is the hypocrisy and the contradiction.
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Y'all claim womanhood and about sisterhood and support for your sister.
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You know, when it comes to that ridiculous shit.
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But if you really gave a fuck, why wouldn't you go, black girl, we love you.
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But y'all won't fucking be real and go, sister, put the eclair down.
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Lizzo appearing at the VMAs appeared to be responding to him when she said the following.
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And now, to the bitches that got something to say about me in the press.
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They'd be like, Lizzo, why don't you clap back?
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This is somebody that's making untold millions, I assume, of dollars for, in her own words, right,
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And, uh, and, and, and this is not somebody that is in any way oppressed or suffering.
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In the grand scheme of human life, this is somebody that's on the top of the totem pole.
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And, but yet, her whole brand is based on this idea of her being beaten down somehow by people
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And it speaks, I think, to some, I mean, here's, you've got, you've got Lizzo, you've got,
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I think we may talk at another point about Meghan Markle, you know, the, the, the princess
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and the pop star, both of them building their brands out of suffering, out of the idea that
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being miserable is what makes them virtuous, this constructed misery.
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And I, I, I wonder about that because I think, you know, the, the thing about leftism and
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the thing about, you know, feminism of the second wave, which is really what a lot of
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this is based on is that it does make people miserable.
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I mean, nobody's saying that women shouldn't have careers.
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Nobody's saying that women shouldn't, you know, go out and do whatever they want to do.
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But this Gloria Steinem thing, a woman needs a man, like a fish needs a bicycle or, you know,
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just, you know, eat a pile of mashed potatoes and, and be happy.
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It's not like somebody wrote a rule or is oppressing Lizzo by making her, you know, so scream into
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She's acting that way because she's pursuing courses of action that, that make you miserable.
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And so we now have this kind of widespread trend in our pop culture, which again, you know,
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this is what looking at these sorts of things can reveal to us.
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We have this hugely widespread trend of glamorizing suffering because that's the only way they
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More and more young people are waking up every day and saying, you know what, this doesn't
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Uh, and, and everything that I'm being told to do in the media or even by my college professors,
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let's say is making me more and more unhappy, just keep doing more and more of it.
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And that's supposed to be the solution makes me more and more unhappy.
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You have to buy into this idea that your misery is somehow virtue, that, that suffering is
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And this is a weird little perversion of an actual true idea, which is that suffering can
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Um, and, but you look at these people and you realize they're actually having to invent
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In order to, you know, stay on top of the, of the misery hierarchy.
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It's incredibly perverse, um, but it's, it's deeply rooted in our culture at the
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But it's one thing that was, it reminds me again of something that your dad said, uh,
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which was, it's one thing to have these whiners who want to glom onto victimhood and put themselves
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at the top of, you know, the oppression Olympics, but it's another to have all of society sit
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And as Aries Spears said, say, yes, queen, you know, that that's where we're really
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You know, it's not that all of us should look at Lizzo and say, tsk, tsk, get on the scale
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That wouldn't be a bad idea if she wants to have a nice, long, healthy lifestyle, uh, life in general,
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Um, it's, it's just that society would never before have snapped for somebody who's celebrating
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her 300 pound status, nor for that matter, the fact that she's a girl who now on Tuesday
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And now we have to snap that as though this is a positive development that we all, you know,
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so his point in to, you know, paraphrase was basically where, where is the established?
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Where, where are the grownups, where's the culture to not tip or gore, ban stuff, but
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at least set moral standards within the bounds of reason within we, within which we all understand
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Well, you know, I, I think that the, uh, sort of inherent disgust for authority for age, right?
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We have this really deep seated cultural reaction against anybody who comes out and says,
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as, as, as my father was suggesting, like, you know, I actually am older and wiser.
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I know a little bit, maybe I have some wisdom that I've gleaned from the study of the classics.
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Um, and, and it was very purposefully put out into the culture that this was, and this was
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the root of all evil, that these kinds of voices of moral authority were the root of
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And especially I think in the sixties and seventies, people really went along with this.
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They really said, Oh no, I, you know, I'm just the cool guy.
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I'll let you drink alcohol in the house or whatever.
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And the closest comparison that I can come up with is with, um, Aristophanes clouds, which
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is a comedy, uh, uh, you know, famous play from ancient Athens, which is about the university
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It's about sending your kid to a school system where he will be taught to hate you and to
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hate your values and to hate where it comes from.
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And we actually have exactly that system currently, uh, alive and well in our country.
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It's being subsidized by, you know, debt forgiveness and student loans and propped up with all of
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these incredibly, uh, morally questionable as well as legally questionable measures.
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And so you have to ask yourself, why, why is it that we are throwing money at a system
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that takes kids out of the home and teaches them that inherently because their parents
00:22:28.760
are their parents, because their elders are their elders, because something comes from
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the past, it's therefore outdated and bad and wrong.
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It's just very kind of Woodrow Wilson progressive idea.
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Well, one thing you have to, I think, acknowledge is, you know, publicly funded education is a means
00:22:45.940
It was a means of state control back in the days of Plato and Aristotle, when they were
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talking about, you know, the, the perfect state and what were they would teach the kids.
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It was a means of state control in, in Prussia in the 18th and 19th century, when we in America
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were kind of cribbing from it to build our own public education system.
00:23:00.780
And, you know, it's, it's not inherently bad for the government to have an interest in
00:23:04.920
what kids learn and to be shaping that toward the good, but you always have to look at it and
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say, well, what are the state priorities that this reflects?
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What are the government priorities that this education system reflects?
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And it reflects an infantilizing and, and kind of, you know, a system that makes people
00:23:21.980
helpless, that creates kind of helplessness, victimhood, dependence upon the state.
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So it's like, you know, Biden writes off $10,000 of, of student loan debt.
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And we're all very upset about that, of course, but we also have to pull back the camera and
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It's fuzzing funding Lizzo culture because Lizzo culture is good for the state.
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It creates people that are helpless and, and, and need the state to come in and fix their
00:23:49.000
I mean, it's a very good point, but while you're talking about it, I'm thinking to myself,
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you went to Yale and double Oxford for your master's and PhD and you went off and Spencer
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and I talked about how he was not always a Republican.
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Um, I'm sorry, I do, Andrew and I did, and I wonder how did you, like, were you always
00:24:06.320
conservative and how did you fight back on the obvious leftward tilt of those organizations?
00:24:12.000
Or were you somehow not as exposed to it because you were in the classics departments, which
00:24:21.680
I mean, I'm always railing about these university systems and I'm absolutely a product of them,
00:24:28.780
And I usually feel like I have to stipulate that I had a wonderful education.
00:24:33.840
I really had excellent mentors and, and teachers.
00:24:40.860
And one of the things that we miss sometimes in the culture wars, when we're talking about
00:24:45.320
this stuff, as we talk about institutions writ large as kind of big monoliths.
00:24:49.780
Um, and that's because in fact, they are being captured at an administrative level.
00:24:53.780
Um, but there are still lots of people who stay and fight the good fight or who just
00:24:58.380
teach the great works, even, you know, under the assault that they've been under since,
00:25:02.800
you know, the eighties and, and even before, you know, and so I was able, there's a, you
00:25:07.640
know, a scene in the Iliad where one of the heroes kind of, uh, walks from ship to ship because
00:25:12.020
he's so huge and he is able to, you know, uh, transmit himself from the prow to the next
00:25:17.860
And that's kind of what I, I, it was sort of like that, except the ships were sinking
00:25:22.700
And, uh, you know, as each, each ship that I got off sort of proceeded to sink.
00:25:26.940
And I, I wonder, you know, whether I should have stayed and fought more, basically the,
00:25:32.340
the policy that I adopted, and this is something I tell people when, you know, they're now in
00:25:36.620
the, uh, higher education system, but they're more conservative leaning is, you know, there's
00:25:41.360
a Solzhenitsyn speech, uh, you know, the great Soviet dissident, uh, who, who, he said,
00:25:47.880
And if you can't, you know, stand up right now in your class and argue with your professor,
00:25:53.360
um, at least never be forced to consent to a lie.
00:25:56.960
And I flatter myself that I did a little bit more than that.
00:26:00.240
You know, I was, uh, sort of, I became more and more conservative as I went through, uh,
00:26:06.420
And there's still reasons to, uh, to do that, but, uh, you know,
00:26:13.280
No, well, I mean, I, I actually, this is a really good point, Megan is I don't think
00:26:19.080
I am the one, the lone person that's having this experience.
00:26:22.300
I think that I'm, I'm probably because I come from such a supportive family and because I
00:26:27.200
had experienced conservatives around me before I was maybe a little bit more outspoken or
00:26:32.460
ready to say what I thought, but I was just talking to a professor at Harvard, actually one
00:26:38.320
of the lone conservative professors at, at Harvard, Harvey Mansfield.
00:26:41.500
And he was saying he has a student who, uh, came up through the, you know, uh, the secondary
00:26:47.180
education system and was so resentful of the way that these leftist views had been drilled
00:26:57.900
I know, I know nothing except which pieties I need to mouth.
00:27:00.740
Um, and I think that there is a fair amount of resentment, uh, among kind of the undecideds
00:27:06.880
who just feel like they have to go along to get along.
00:27:08.760
It's a very demoralizing situation to be in, to feel like you have to say something you
00:27:12.080
don't believe in order just to get your grade or to get your degree.
00:27:16.860
And, you know, that in itself has a certain degree of promise for conservatives, but it's
00:27:22.080
I mean, we've relied on that resentment, the silent majority for so long.
00:27:25.260
I really think that we need to be telling people that, you know, there's no substitute
00:27:30.780
It doesn't matter if you're, you know, an undergraduate in a leftist, uh, university
00:27:34.120
course, or you're at a job that's telling you, you need to do something, say something
00:27:39.120
you don't believe the actual antidote to that situation where let's say 10% of the radicals
00:27:47.600
And then there's a good chunk, maybe 80% that just feel like they have to go along.
00:27:51.620
The only antidote to that is for that other 10% that disagrees to stand up and have the
00:28:02.120
And I, I forgive me for just repeating my interview with your dad with you, but I love
00:28:06.980
And one of the things I mentioned to him, I'd love to get your take on it.
00:28:09.900
And I think I know what it's going to be is, uh, I had just come from this event where
00:28:13.160
there were a bunch of Republican, um, muckety mucks, you know, politicians and donors and
00:28:19.280
And, um, one of the couples pulled me aside and said, what should we do?
00:28:23.980
We have a son and a daughter going off to one who's going to, um, some junior Ivy league,
00:28:29.420
you know, sort of the next step behind Harvard, Yale.
00:28:32.060
And then one was going into the military, one of the military institutions.
00:28:35.080
And they said, they're very worried about espousing their conservative values.
00:28:42.380
And we don't really know what to tell them, you know, like, do we keep your head down,
00:28:47.440
you know, say what they want you to say just to get ahead and get out.
00:28:50.840
And then you can be who you are or do you fight?
00:28:52.860
And of course, I mean, I actually believe that you go to the people you go to for advice
00:28:57.540
because you kind of know what you want to hear.
00:28:59.960
You know, you choose the people who are going to advise you, um, consciously or not consciously
00:29:05.520
And of course I said, I believe you have to fight.
00:29:07.660
I believe the answer is to fight even at that age.
00:29:10.480
And if they downgrade your child because he doesn't go along with their dogma, then ideally
00:29:19.100
But, but even without that, he should wear his seat like a badge of honor when he's out
00:29:23.780
there applying for jobs and that will help him align with a place that he's actually
00:29:30.640
You know, I think what I would say to a kid going into that situation or to parents is
00:29:38.860
You're not going to reach some point where you have enough credentials or enough, you
00:29:44.480
know, or you have tenure or you have whatever that milestone is where in your head, you're
00:29:55.420
Um, so it's not that you, you can't sometimes, you know, sometimes you have to go and get a
00:30:00.800
credential in order to work in the field that you want to work in.
00:30:04.160
And I completely understand that that might mean, you know, not just pounding your fist
00:30:09.960
Like I've been known to do, you know, this is why the soldier needs in principle is so
00:30:16.040
It's not that you need to always go out and, you know, make it your personal crusade to
00:30:20.240
refute every dishonest thing in every situation.
00:30:23.200
Um, but, but you, you know, all a man has, all a human being has is his word.
00:30:30.080
And, and the minute you say something, affirm something that you don't believe, you've given
00:30:38.800
And you're not going to just get it back when you get the credential.
00:30:42.600
There's not going to be some point where it's all easy.
00:30:44.640
So practice now when it's at the easiest it will ever be.
00:30:48.300
It's the easiest it will ever be for you to speak your mind.
00:30:53.080
This is part of why, you know, we worship a God who dies on the cross, who is truth,
00:31:00.880
You will lose some things, but you will gain life, life in abundance.
00:31:04.540
That's what you get out of speaking the truth, right?
00:31:07.440
And, and so, you know, the Bible also says be, be, uh, wise as, as serpents and gentle
00:31:16.700
You know, we're not all called every moment to be culture warriors.
00:31:19.300
Sometimes we might contribute to the salvation of the West by getting a degree of, you know,
00:31:27.020
Um, but it's never going to get easier to speak the truth than it is for you right now
00:31:34.200
I can't imagine what it was like for you, such a big thinker, so well-read, so immersed
00:31:38.860
in the classics and the writings of people like Aristotle and Socrates engaged in the business
00:31:44.940
of ideas, big ideas, you know, philosophical ideas and thoughts about religion, about God,
00:31:49.960
about the universe, about our souls, about moral principles to be bogged down day after
00:31:55.000
day with this nonstop messaging about identity, about skin color, about gender.
00:32:01.760
I mean, I've heard you say on your show, just please just forget all this, not forget this
00:32:07.720
nonsense about how the classics are racist and just enjoy, immerse yourself and enjoy and
00:32:12.520
take what they have to, but it must've been such an irritation to you.
00:32:16.500
Like a, like a, the mosquitoes at the delightful picnic, like the gnat ruining your beautiful
00:32:28.320
I mean, there, there's a way in which I suppose that that could be true, but just constitutionally,
00:32:36.600
And I kind of take it for granted that in, you know, in this life, you will have troubles
00:32:40.860
and this happens to be the fight onto which we were born.
00:32:44.020
Like who knows, but this was the moment unto which we were born.
00:32:48.720
And this is one great antidote that I always recommend to people is do, do find things funny,
00:32:53.800
you know, just because they're threatening to haul you off to the gulags doesn't mean they're
00:32:58.300
And when you hear people talk about these, like a whiteness in Herodotus, which as you
00:33:03.920
say, that's like a real thing that people will, will talk about.
00:33:07.480
And you say, you know, whiteness is a uniquely American modern obsession that Herodotus would
00:33:15.100
Or you say like, oh, I've, I've scoured these Viking texts and I found that there were black
00:33:19.660
people in, in Viking culture because they talk about Eric the black, you know, and it's
00:33:25.460
like, well, right, cause he had, he had black hair and, and some of these things are just
00:33:29.120
so absurd that the only thing you can do is laugh at them.
00:33:33.120
And then, and this is the crucial thing, right?
00:33:36.120
Don't let them into your thought world for a second.
00:33:39.980
Why would it, you know, what does it profit you to even hesitate before you then immediately
00:33:45.140
shrug off this nonsensical critique of, oh, the racism of, you know, ancient times or
00:33:56.520
We fight and fight over whether it's okay to read Homer and the left says it's wrong
00:34:01.120
and evil and the right says it's, it's good and we should do it.
00:34:03.780
But while we're fighting, and this is one of the left's best tactics, we're so wrapped
00:34:08.660
up in that argument that we're not actually reading Homer, right?
00:34:11.980
We've suddenly been distracted away from this storehouse, this treasure house of, of great
00:34:17.840
literature and art that comes down to us that is still available.
00:34:20.840
You know, even with all the problems of digital technology, it's also newly available online.
00:34:26.860
And, you know, one of the tricks, if you're, you know, if you're working out, if you're
00:34:30.420
starting a new diet, if you're trying to make a life change is to focus on the positive,
00:34:36.460
Say, look how much clearer my head is when I, when I wake up in the morning.
00:34:40.820
And, you know, for all that there, we get wrapped up in these absolutely idiotic political
00:34:49.620
They are like gnats, as you said, compared to this just mountain of excellence that comes
00:34:56.980
How lucky are we that we get to be inheritors of this civilization?
00:35:00.320
And I think, you know, we, we are always losing out.
00:35:04.680
We're always making ourselves smaller than we could be when we engage with identity politics
00:35:16.320
And, you know, the, the political, you know, the, the sort of non-binary, gender fluid,
00:35:21.440
fat shaming, whatever people online can't hold a candle to him.
00:35:28.520
I beg you, uh, your, your life will be improved.
00:35:33.800
Lewis who said something to the effect of, um, defend truth, but also enjoy it.
00:35:42.460
And, you know, Lewis was such a companion to me at Oxford.
00:35:46.020
I remember walking along the river with his books and having that feeling similar to what
00:35:53.540
And he, Lewis actually writes about this in the four loves that experience of, Oh, you
00:36:00.620
That's when you have made this kind of communion with another mind.
00:36:05.200
And I do, you know, another part of my experience in the media and, you know, in, in our current
00:36:13.140
political moment is a lot of sorrow when I see people, you know, whatever twerking on
00:36:18.300
the Capitol steps or screaming into a microphone about how it's great that they're fat.
00:36:22.920
You know, it's, it's not that those people are on the opposite side from me politically,
00:36:28.000
although they are, it's just a deep sense of loss that these are human souls endowed
00:36:34.060
with the capacity for reason and able to make that kind of connection.
00:36:37.940
Maybe it wouldn't be with CS Lewis, maybe it would be with Du Bois, or maybe it would
00:36:42.040
be with Machiavelli or who knows, but the, to never, to live your whole life, never even
00:36:48.140
engaging at that level because you've been taught by people that you trusted that this
00:36:57.940
You know, young people have been done a terrible, terrible disservice.
00:37:01.260
And the more of them come to understand that, the more of them start to say, well, I don't
00:37:06.200
know what I can do to move forward in, you know, 2022, but this ain't it.
00:37:17.020
That's what we're doing hopefully right now between our audience and Spencer Clavin.
00:37:20.540
Much, much more with Spencer right after this quick break.
00:37:30.580
I want to do a little bit more news of the day because there's a couple of interesting
00:37:34.540
First of all, we've got Joe Biden, who about, I don't know, two hours from now is expected
00:37:42.140
He is going to focus on crime and gun violence.
00:37:47.140
He now thinks crime is a winning issue for the Democrats in advance of the midterm elections.
00:37:53.680
And I believe that Karine Jean-Pierre, his press secretary, gave us a little preview of how
00:38:02.220
We are going to hear from the president about about the importance of making sure that we
00:38:09.880
You know, the president has been really clear that congressional Republicans, that extreme
00:38:13.580
MAGA agenda that you heard him talk about last week is a threat to the rule of law.
00:38:19.000
We will say that he will say that he will say that you can't propose defunding the FBI or defund
00:38:25.460
the mob that stormed the Capitol and attacked and assaulted police officers on January 6th and
00:38:33.040
And that's what you're going to hear from the president.
00:38:46.420
So how do you like his chances of persuading folks of that?
00:38:51.120
Well, first of all, Megan, thank you so much for bringing a little more Karine Jean-Pierre
00:38:55.120
into my life. I thought that Jen Psaki had maxed me out on comedy in the news, but then
00:39:00.700
I was given the gift of Karine and she never fails to deliver.
00:39:09.340
It's just like it's almost as if when you promote people on the basis of race and sexual
00:39:14.700
orientation, you don't get the best candidates.
00:39:18.120
Yeah. I'm sorry. That's she's not up to the job.
00:39:23.020
It's very clear. And even the Democrats know it and they don't seem to care.
00:39:27.240
They're just going to, I guess. And then they brought out the white guy from the Pentagon,
00:39:30.960
Kirby. And she's like, what are you doing here?
00:39:33.840
It's like, well, you know, it's not the fact that he's white and he's a guy, but he actually
00:39:37.600
does know what he's talking about. And they even they see that she needs a lifeline.
00:39:42.200
I know. Imagine if you were just qualified on the basis of nothing to do with his race.
00:39:46.340
Anyway, you know, you're also giving me a little bit of L.A. trauma.
00:39:51.060
I, you know, you're resurrecting old wounds because I'm living in Nashville now.
00:39:55.540
We moved out and Josh got the job of Daily Wire.
00:39:57.700
But, you know, we saw where things were headed with the George Floyd riots and the encouragement
00:40:03.520
of flawlessness, not just the permission of it, but the act of kind of cheering on of
00:40:08.520
this stuff. And you're looking now at Los Angeles that has, you know, kind of roving
00:40:13.780
gangs, shutting down streets for, you know, to do donuts with their cars and to grab stuff
00:40:19.940
out of 7-Elevens. And who's the victim of this? Well, of course, the victim is the actual
00:40:25.080
upstanding minority business owner. You know, it's always presented in terms of BLM and oh,
00:40:30.680
we're so compassionate toward these impoverished communities. But those impoverished communities
00:40:35.960
are where you now can't walk outside as you're trying to open your store because for fear of
00:40:42.280
roving bands of criminals. So, you know, this is it's almost impossible for me to imagine that
00:40:51.260
this is a winning issue. If Republicans can be smart enough to stick to the message, the
00:40:58.000
message is you're hurting exactly the people that you claim to be helping while lowering quality of
00:41:03.320
life for everybody else. I mean, if they get wrapped up and entangled in this, you know,
00:41:08.360
January 6th show trial, if they let the Democrats run circles around them with that, then, you
00:41:13.720
know, who knows? But if Republicans have a mnemonic move sense, this should be a slam dunk for
00:41:18.740
them. They should be able to knock out of the park. You know, Ben Shapiro, a mutual friend,
00:41:22.800
and he, of course, owns and runs the Daily Wire. He was making the point the other day that the
00:41:27.340
Republicans, I mean, honestly, they're so dumb. They just they walk into these traps that the
00:41:32.360
Democrats set so blindly as like they're so stupid. Why are they so stupid in terms of strategy?
00:41:38.120
Most of these guys like the Democrats are like Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump,
00:41:43.880
Trump. And the Republicans, as Ben pointed out, instead of being like no crime in Afghanistan
00:41:48.760
and covid and inflation and the economy and overreach, they're like, yes, Trump, let's do this
00:41:56.220
thing. And now now they're behind. I know. Well, this is I mean, it's our job. It's our job to be
00:42:03.400
the stupid party. So at least we're, you know, serving our role in the republic. No, I mean, I
00:42:08.420
think that the Trump thing is so frustrating to me, not because of, you know, my personal feelings
00:42:17.400
about Trump. You know, he's not my preferred 2024 candidate, but that's not really why it's
00:42:23.620
frustrating. It's because it's actually out of touch to be fixating on this particular man. Now,
00:42:30.520
it is absolutely appalling that the Justice Department, the FBI is raiding this guy's
00:42:34.920
private residence. This is somebody that may well run for president in future. He called it
00:42:39.500
unprecedented. It is completely unprecedented. I grant all of that. But when you have this incredibly
00:42:45.860
polarizing figure and an election that does not in any way need to be a referendum on him,
00:42:51.740
it's a complete own goal, a complete self-own to turn this into a referendum on Trump. As you say,
00:42:57.840
it's what the Democrats want, when even the things that are happening to Trump are signs of a much
00:43:03.420
larger problem that we have, which is the capture of our security state and our, you know, constitution
00:43:09.620
more generally by hostile actors, by political actors, the politicization of the DOJ. You know,
00:43:15.460
that's the kind of thing that you could talk to people about, as well as the kitchen table issues,
00:43:19.180
which are all in Republicans' favor. Inflation, right? And gas prices, energy, this war, even,
00:43:25.700
you know, foreign affairs. All of this is, you know, has been a disaster in the Biden administration.
00:43:31.260
And it's actually not a question of, you know, how loyal you are to Trump or whatever. It's just
00:43:36.160
about who are you trying to win over? You're trying to win over undecided voters whose lives are being
00:43:40.180
made progressively worse by every move that this administration makes. Why wouldn't you focus
00:43:44.380
on that? I just don't get it. Mm hmm. Today, the last night, I should say, on his social media
00:43:50.700
platform, Donald Trump was tweeting out this news about how the FBI went to Facebook, among others,
00:43:58.440
I assume, and warned them that disinformation would be coming from the Russians shortly before
00:44:03.020
the Hunter Biden laptop story dropped. And Mark Zuckerberg admitted to Joe Rogan. But as we pointed
00:44:08.900
out on our show yesterday, he had admitted it two years earlier in congressional testimony
00:44:12.140
that, in fact, Facebook did suppress the circulation of the Hunter Biden story, you know,
00:44:17.860
right before the election because of that FBI warning. They weren't ordered to do it. They
00:44:21.800
were just given the warning and then behaved accordingly. Now, Trump tweets out last night
00:44:26.940
in part about the FBI. He's mad that they did this. And he says, OK, we've never seen this
00:44:33.960
kind of massive fraud and election interference remedy. Declare the rightful winner. Like who?
00:44:40.360
Who would declare declare the rightful winner or and this would be the minimal solution? Declare the
00:44:46.760
2020 election irreparably compromised and have a new election immediately. So that's not a thing.
00:44:55.160
That's not a thing, Mr. Former President. There is no doing that. And look, this will this is grist
00:45:01.180
for the mill. The left wing media will dine on this for the next four days. It's another news cycle
00:45:05.900
sucked up by the Trump energy that where they're not talking about the economy and so on. And so now
00:45:10.740
I don't know about you, but I'm really getting to the point where I'm starting to think I don't
00:45:14.180
think the Republicans will lose the House. I think I think they will win the House still. But it's far
00:45:18.680
less certain than it's been in a year. And as we saw with Georgia, President Trump is not helping.
00:45:25.780
No, I mean, I've had since 2016, I've kind of had like a no predictions rule. I've just done.
00:45:30.720
It's not my it's not my game. I'm not good at it. So I can't I can't call this election. I think a
00:45:36.520
lot of what you say is, you know, I think it's Bill Barr in his memoir says recounts a story that
00:45:42.080
Trump says something to the effect of like the key to a good tweet is just crazy enough, right? It's
00:45:46.860
just crazy enough. And to me, the like, let's let's declare the 2020 election void. That's like over
00:45:53.720
the crazy line. That's more crazy than I want in the stamp. Yeah. Well, I want to ask you because
00:46:01.540
I know you've written a lot about this. You've talked a lot about this. You know, why? Why did
00:46:06.900
we choose Trump? And I I've defended a lot of Trump's policies. I've been very, I think, objective
00:46:13.720
on President Trump. But there's a reason that we got a figure like Trump in the presidency. And
00:46:19.400
there's a reason why tweets like that and some of Trump's crazy talk about the election
00:46:23.020
isn't an immediate deal breaker for half the country. And these are very good reasons. And
00:46:28.760
there are historical precedents if you look back at these well-known figures throughout time that
00:46:34.100
might help us understand. And more importantly, might help us understand how this ends. Spencer is
00:46:41.040
actually an expert on people like Julius Caesar, on people like Machiavelli, not to say Trump's a
00:46:45.920
Machiavelli. I'm just saying. But like he he can walk us through what happens, what gives rise to a
00:46:50.940
Trump and what gives rise to a populace that believes maybe will declare the election void.
00:46:57.240
Maybe there's a some pizzeria in Washington, D.C. where the Democrats are running a pedophile ring.
00:47:03.620
That's we're going to pick it up after this break. Spencer Clavin is with us for the whole show today.
00:47:08.180
Thrilled to have him. And don't forget, folks, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM
00:47:12.800
Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. And you can find the full video show and clips by
00:47:18.220
subscribing to our YouTube channel, YouTube dot com slash Megan Kelly. We're trying to get to 100
00:47:23.360
500,000 subscribers, followers, and we're almost there. Let's get there. A couple thousand would
00:47:30.840
love that if you would do it. How many languages do you speak, Spencer? And what are they?
00:47:38.340
Well, it's always kind of a running tab because I forget some and then I learn others. But it's
00:47:44.020
I can I can read, I think, maybe six languages. Let's see. Greek, Latin, French, Hebrew, English,
00:47:53.400
kind of Italian. And that's six. Right. I dabbled in classical Arabic. I'm currently learning
00:48:00.280
Japanese, which I love. I think I think that's I think that's it for now. Did you always have
00:48:05.680
like when you when you had to take French or Spanish in seventh grade? Did you immediately
00:48:09.880
have a knack for it? You know, I have one. I actually only have one superpower. Everything
00:48:14.900
else is just, you know, sort of charm and BS. But no, I my one superpower is that I have a really
00:48:20.480
good memory. I've always been able to remember things, memorize poetry and stuff like that. So
00:48:24.540
so that helps with languages a lot. Yeah, that is something. Yeah. Oh, I'm envious. I have the
00:48:30.840
opposite. I'm nowhere close to you when it comes to that. I don't know.
00:48:33.740
You and my dad are on the same page there. He's always quite very hard. Tanya, the great
00:48:37.360
French essayist, was had a terrible memory. And my dad is always consoling himself with
00:48:40.960
with that. I said to my husband about you, I said, it's almost as if you're speaking.
00:48:45.580
And I don't mean this in a critical way to a computer because you have so much knowledge
00:48:51.440
in you. Like when I listen to your podcast, your references, you're so well read, but you
00:48:56.060
remember it all. And my husband was lamenting, saying, you know, he's he's read a lot, too.
00:49:00.720
He's very well read, but he can't remember it all. He said, I feel like I remember 10 percent
00:49:04.200
of it. And I said, no, he remembers all of it. And he's not trying to impress you. He
00:49:08.480
just does these casual references to this guy or that guy or this book or that book. And
00:49:13.160
you know, he's got it at the ready. It's probably something he read 10 years ago. But he's got
00:49:19.380
I have to I have to correct you there, Megan. I actually am trying to impress you, but only
00:49:23.620
Consider it done. Well done. OK, so one of the gifts that the rest of us have in having
00:49:29.380
someone like you who's done all this amazing reading and studying and so on, and then also
00:49:33.720
is interested in current events and follows the news is you can relate the two. You can
00:49:38.180
be the bridge that takes us back in time and explains nothing is new. Old patterns get
00:49:44.980
repeated over and over, especially when it comes to governments and leaders and outcomes.
00:49:48.520
And I heard you. I don't remember which podcast it was, but you were talking about Machiavelli
00:49:55.420
and class warfare, like how he came up and the importance of class warfare. And I can't
00:50:01.780
remember whether you drew the line to Trump, but I was like, well, there it is. I mean,
00:50:07.540
Oh, sure. Yeah, this is so important. And it's a good example of why, you know, my my book
00:50:13.900
that's coming out in February is called How to Save the West. I want to write another one
00:50:17.320
called We've Been Through This or We've Been Over This, because there is, I think, a real
00:50:21.300
sense that, you know, part of the miseducation of American kids and elites is that we we think
00:50:27.740
that we are the first people ever to come up with like, oh, I have a good idea. Like, let's
00:50:32.500
share all property in common. Nobody's ever thought of that before. Well, that's, you know,
00:50:36.560
the Ecclesiastes I by Aristophanes. And so these sorts of things, right, are can be helpful
00:50:42.080
both to sort of orient ourselves and to maybe think about what our options might be.
00:50:45.700
And yeah, class warfare is in classical political philosophy is is the death of a republic. This is
00:50:52.880
something that, you know, people don't necessarily understand why we have the kind of constitution
00:50:58.660
that we have. But it's the labor, the long labor of many centuries dealing with this thing that the
00:51:05.020
Greeks called anicyclosis, which just translates to the cycle of regimes. And it's it's natural decay.
00:51:11.320
The idea is that we live in this world where things are always changing and passing away.
00:51:15.920
And even if you have the best king ever, let's say you start out with a great monarchy. Well,
00:51:20.560
his sons and his son's sons are eventually going to deteriorate into tyranny and self regard and
00:51:26.900
self dealing. And then you get an oppressive king. And so the nobles rise up. And for a while,
00:51:30.820
you have an aristocracy, right? And the aristocracy decays and you get an oligarchy. And then the people
00:51:35.220
rise up and you have a democracy. But democracy is inherently unstable. So you get mob rule.
00:51:39.060
And then, of course, mob rule, as we saw at Chaz Chop, right, is the perfect opportunity
00:51:43.160
for a strongman to stride in and exert his power that you've got you've got monarchy again. And so
00:51:48.400
our republic, the republic is a perpetual motion machine. It's designed to play these different
00:51:54.980
kinds of rule off of one another. We call this the checks and balances, right? Separation of powers,
00:51:59.420
but it goes much, much deeper than that. It was supposed to be the kind of grand solution. The
00:52:04.300
Spartans kind of played around with it. The Romans were the ones that really made it famous.
00:52:08.240
And one of the things that Machiavelli is doing in his commentaries on Livy, this is this,
00:52:13.940
you know, famous for his sort of ruthless politics, this guy, but actually a really great
00:52:19.180
reader of ancient texts. He looks back and says, well, okay, so this was supposed to be the
00:52:22.640
perpetual motion machine. What the hell happened, right? It falls apart. It becomes an empire.
00:52:26.960
And one of the things he concludes kind of drawing on Plato, who says, you know, when you have
00:52:30.980
extreme inequality, extreme disparities of wealth and power and kind of hardened class hierarchy,
00:52:38.240
then you get two cities in one. You have the kind of powerful, the elites, and then you have the
00:52:44.880
people. And Machiavelli is kind of going back and forth. Well, which of these are more dangerous to
00:52:49.260
a republic? And finally, finally, what he says is it's the elites who really do the damage because
00:52:54.800
once they have that power, their whole life becomes about keeping it. And they destroy the systems that
00:53:01.880
got them there by misusing them and abusing them. And so when you see somebody like Dr. Fauci,
00:53:07.500
when you see the CDC, which is supposed to be this apolitical body or the DOJ, Merrick Garland,
00:53:11.960
whatever, you know, supposedly these kind of just machinery of our system, it's not supposed to be
00:53:17.580
in the control of any one faction. When you see them weaponized in this way, the people start to
00:53:23.180
lose faith. One of the saddest things about, you know, the Trump era has been the sense among
00:53:29.060
conservatives who are the law and order folks who love America, who love this country as founded,
00:53:33.540
to see them, the kind of regular folks lose faith in the system and see that it's being
00:53:40.480
manipulated by people who consider them beneath representation, who don't think that they're,
00:53:45.700
you know, they're deplorables. They're not part of the system. And so this brings us all back to the
00:53:50.420
FBI, right? Where, you know, again, it's very upsetting to see Trump's home raided. But to me,
00:53:57.540
it's infinitely more upsetting to hear the FBI say about the Zuckerberg interview, right? You know,
00:54:03.840
oh, we told Zuckerberg to watch out for misinformation. And, you know, this was during
00:54:08.400
the time that the Hunter Biden laptop story. And as you pointed out,
00:54:11.500
FBI had a grand jury subpoena open, had a grand jury open on that very inquiry. They knew they
00:54:17.260
knew very well that it was legit. And they did. But they had a laptop in hand while they went to
00:54:21.320
Mark Zuckerberg. Exactly. And the brazenness of it, as you pointed out, that this has been kind of in
00:54:26.180
the public knowledge, even if it's been kind of under wraps or really slipped under the radar.
00:54:32.500
The next thing the FBI said was, oh, don't worry, we routinely do this. It's OK. We do it all the time,
00:54:38.860
right? This is their statement on the summit. It's like they actually literally don't understand
00:54:43.380
that that's the problem. I mean, they think that they're reassuring us because they're the
00:54:47.140
neutral guys in charge. And they don't understand that they are so abstracted away from the actual
00:54:53.620
divisions in the country that they're they're destroying the legitimacy of the institutions.
00:54:58.560
So I definitely want to get into all this class warfare and everything that's happening right now.
00:55:01.780
But this reminds me of something else I heard you say. And I was like, oh, my God, I just got it.
00:55:05.800
Thanks to you. It finally dawned on me why this moment in the news cycle was so upsetting and so
00:55:13.380
damaging. And it has to do. You mentioned Fauci. You mentioned the FBI. And I've heard you on your
00:55:19.020
show mention General Milley. Yeah. And what he did and why it was such a breach, why it was so bad.
00:55:28.160
Even if you hate Trump, you have to see what he has been doing as genuinely dangerous.
00:55:35.800
Yeah. I mean, you mentioned Caesar, right? And that's, of course, the famous Rubicon moment,
00:55:42.280
right, where the Roman Republic, even if, you know, still nominally a republic, even if Augustus
00:55:47.440
was the first official emperor, that moment was the moment when it all broke down. Why? Because
00:55:52.440
it had to do with politicization of the military, right? The military is just the force of the state.
00:55:58.480
And to be honest, you know, the left and progressives have been making this kind of noise for
00:56:04.000
a while. And you hear it. We don't we take this for granted. But when they say things like,
00:56:08.860
oh, you think you need guns, the right to guns to fight against the state, the state has nukes,
00:56:14.400
right? And so it's like, what's the implication of that? It's like, we'll nuke you.
00:56:17.560
We will use the power of our nuclear arsenal to prevent you from exercising the liberties that
00:56:25.840
were given you by God and guaranteed to you in the Constitution, right? That's essentially what's
00:56:31.380
being said there. And so, yeah, to to politicize the military, to get up there and start talking
00:56:36.560
about white rage, right, which is an inherently divisive concept deeper than, you know, Democrat,
00:56:43.820
Republican, that's actually at a core level of, you know, race and identity, that you are, you know,
00:56:49.780
part of the stain on this country simply by being white, by inheriting the DNA level stain of our
00:56:56.740
history, right? Now you are an object of the military's concern, right? If you can't trust in
00:57:03.040
the depoliticization of the military, that is that it is the weapon of of the state rather than of any one
00:57:09.460
political party or faction. And if you're a citizen, right, then the state ought to be working
00:57:14.160
for you, not trying to rub you out, not trying to eradicate you like some kind of blot upon the
00:57:20.640
nation's moral purity. I mean, that was the Caesar concern was that he kind of allied the soldiers
00:57:27.360
to himself and was kind of making them weapons of his own grievances and his own personal vengeance.
00:57:34.120
And that was, you know, where the beginning of the end came. And so people compare Trump
00:57:38.740
to Caesar, you know, they talk about, oh, so Trump is this, is he our, you know, strong man? Is he
00:57:43.780
our Mussolini or, or of course, our Hitler or what have you? But it's, he's really much closer to a
00:57:49.880
kind of a Gracchus, a Tiberius Gracchus figure, also an ambiguous figure in Roman history.
00:57:56.000
But now wait, don't test me, but I feel like Gracchus, we're talking like 100 BC. Am I, am I generally
00:58:02.240
right? Bill, you get a gold star. Yes, that's a 133 BC, the Gracchi, the first Gracchus brother
00:58:09.200
is killed. And that is another kind of beginning of the end moment. This is pre Caesar. But when
00:58:17.100
you're talking about, you're asking this question, like, why Trump? Why now? Why this person that is
00:58:21.380
so unhinged and, you know, put so many people off? It's because we're living in this sort of the state
00:58:29.740
of our Republic is such that a large portion of the electorate doesn't feel that they can be heard
00:58:36.400
in any other way than to elect this human wrecking ball. And the people that they're trying to
00:58:41.480
communicate to literally don't hear themselves. They don't understand that everything they say
00:58:46.000
to reassure you is actually part of the problem. So yeah, I mean, we, I think are still hanging on by
00:58:51.960
a thread to our constitutional order. I'm not sounding that alarm yet, but once you understand the
00:58:57.880
classical theory of regimes and how, uh, you know, a Republic is supposed to work, then you can
00:59:03.180
absolutely see why Trump is the man of the moment. It's because we're in a class warfare.
00:59:08.560
You look around the big picture, zooming out and you've got, uh, you know, basket of deplorables by
00:59:13.700
Hillary Clinton. You got bitter clingers from Barack Obama. You've got John Kerry on his private jet
00:59:18.340
telling us to wear sweaters and not eat red meat, not to mention what AOC's messaging is.
00:59:23.100
Let's not forget Rick Wilson and masturbating to anime. That was one of my personal favorites.
00:59:26.800
Oh my God. That, that's that one CNN clip with Rick Wilson and Wajahad Ali, what do you know,
00:59:31.320
turning up their noses with Don Lemon on all of America. They would get the messages about how,
00:59:35.980
if you voted for Trump, you're, you're a racist. And then on top of all that, you've got elite
00:59:40.180
capture, leftist capture of media, of Hollywood, of sports now of corporate America. And at the same
00:59:45.900
time, you've got messaging coming from the state governments. I talked about it yesterday,
00:59:50.220
Kathy Hochul in New York, basically saying, get out of New York. If, if you're a Trump lover,
00:59:54.640
Charlie Crist running against DeSantis in Florida saying, I don't want your vote. If you supported
01:00:00.180
DeSantis, you've got hate in your heart. Right. So all, all of these folks are feeling like
01:00:06.680
everyone from their local politicians to the media, they tune in on the small screen too,
01:00:12.040
to the big screen Hollywood folks who they see at the movie theaters, to the corporations who
01:00:16.860
employ them. And now, now the FBI, the DOJ and the U S military all hate them. That's what's
01:00:26.880
happening. That's how people are feeling. And it's not made up. There are really good pieces
01:00:31.560
of evidence here. It's not like general military general Milley is a nobody, right? It's not like
01:00:36.300
Merrick Garland is a nobody know, some no name lawyer within the DOJ. So that, so this is how people
01:00:42.840
are feeling. And this is how they were feeling even before Trump. It's only gotten worse,
01:00:45.860
but it explains why they hired the wrecking ball. They hired the wrecking ball because they want it
01:00:51.640
wrecked. Of course. And it, you know what else it explains? I'm sorry to say is all this QAnon stuff.
01:00:57.280
I mean, again, factually false in every possible way. So why are people continually glomming onto this
01:01:05.640
or onto the microchips in the, in the vaccine or whatever? It's because they have, they sense two
01:01:10.700
things. They feel that the, their lives are being run by people who disdain them and hate them.
01:01:16.320
And that all the relevant decisions are being made outside their sphere of knowledge and control,
01:01:21.980
that the press is against them, that the FBI is against. And so of course there are people that
01:01:26.960
are falling into this trap of, of conspiracy theory because the actual conspiracy is sort of out in the
01:01:33.020
open and they don't know how to express that or, or explain it. And again, you know, it's like,
01:01:38.360
I'm no, I'm no fan of, of Q, but it's like, how do you get there? How do you get Trump? How do you
01:01:43.480
get these, uh, you know, incredible, uh, you know, these, these tense moments in our, in our
01:01:48.840
politics, you, you get them when there is a class of people who, uh, not only believe, but also say
01:01:55.780
pretty openly that they consider themselves not only to be above the law, but to embody the law.
01:02:01.040
We are law. We get to say what isn't, isn't true. This is why after January 6th, I said publicly on
01:02:06.820
my show and elsewhere that all the media so quick to condemn the January 6th protesters. And I get
01:02:11.500
that a hundred percent, but need to take a moment to do a little navel gazing and figure out what role
01:02:15.840
they had in driving people to these sites, to Reddit, to, you know, these deep internet rabbit
01:02:21.980
holes where they started to believe that Trump magically would become president, even though he
01:02:25.720
had lost and so on. Right? Like what role, why did they not take two minutes to stop and say to
01:02:30.820
themselves, what role might I have played in this belief by all of these people? It wasn't three
01:02:37.120
people, right? It was hundreds, thousands of people who believed it or showed up there. Of course,
01:02:41.860
there's been zero self-reflection. Let me ask you this because I've also heard you talk about the
01:02:47.120
dangers historically and present day when good, strong men don't have something they can believe
01:02:56.640
in. They don't have a government they can believe in. They don't have a military they can believe in,
01:03:02.000
you know, or having, seeing trouble in the recruiting ranks of the military now,
01:03:05.540
um, disaffectation where I just, I worry what all these people who otherwise would have joined the
01:03:12.080
marines who, I don't know, might've run for office, um, might've tried to become a captain of industry,
01:03:18.420
but now see no path forward because they happen to have white skin or be a guy, God forbid, both.
01:03:23.500
Like what, what happens to those guys? Yeah. Well, I mean, we've been talking a little about
01:03:30.200
Gracchus and Caesar and some of these guys that, uh, you know, are, are main players in the end of
01:03:35.940
the Roman Republic. And there's an episode in Plutarch's life of Caesar, uh, before he really
01:03:42.520
rose to prominence of Caesar weeping at the grave of Alexander, Alexander, the great, right up to
01:03:50.300
three, 23 BC, when he dies, he's conquering the whole known world. Nobody's ever seen anything like
01:03:55.020
him. And he's weeping because of all that Alexander accomplished, uh, before, and you know, before he was
01:04:01.420
even Caesar's age and, and now Caesar is, feels inadequate, right? He's, he's got a kind of like
01:04:07.060
FOMO or, or whatever. He's looking at Alexander, he's looking at Alexander's Instagram page and
01:04:11.160
thinking this guy's really got the life I want. And, um, and, and that's, you know, that's Plutarch's
01:04:17.400
way of, of saying this is a man of surpassing ambition. And, uh, you know, the, the kind of
01:04:23.800
Italian word that Machiavelli uses for some of this energy, um, is virtu, uh, which literally means
01:04:29.620
manliness, right? Veer man. Um, and Plato would have called it thumos, the heart, the courage,
01:04:34.400
the spirit. Um, and, and this is a, a kind of a morally neutral energy can be used for good and
01:04:40.560
evil, but it exists, right? It's no matter how many, uh, gender studies seminars you take,
01:04:46.500
no matter how many gender snow people you teach in your, uh, public schools, no matter what you drill
01:04:52.500
into people, you know, boys and young men are born with this kind of drive. Um, and society's stand
01:04:59.180
or fall on their ability to channel that drive and have a direction they can point it in. And as you
01:05:05.300
say, when all those directions are foreclosed, when, you know, military endeavor, uh, becomes kind of a
01:05:11.700
snafu or, or worse, um, when industry is captured by kind of anti-human ideologies, when all of these
01:05:18.740
avenues of innovation and adventure and exploration are, are cut off. And on top of that, you're telling
01:05:24.560
people that thumos and vertu and manly energy are inherently evil, right? Are themselves signs
01:05:30.760
of failure and moral stain that people need to look in at themselves and, and stamp it out in
01:05:36.380
themselves. You're going to create an entire, uh, generation of young men who are at war with
01:05:42.820
themselves and have nowhere to turn those destructive energies except inward upon themselves
01:05:48.380
and upon their countrymen. And this is why the crusade against masculinity is so sick. It's not
01:05:53.500
because, you know, we're wagging our fingers and everybody needs to be, you know, exactly the kind
01:05:59.240
of man or woman that you would see in a 1950s ad catalog. Like that's not it at all. It's an
01:06:04.440
inherently anti-natural, anti-human way of looking at the world and teaching people to regard themselves.
01:06:11.180
And why do you think when Elon Musk comes along for all of his many, many, uh, questionable traits
01:06:17.380
and aspirations and characteristics, everybody is so eager to see this guy go to Mars because of
01:06:23.400
course it's something to do. It's a frontier and it's a positive vision of who we could be,
01:06:28.260
what we could do with ourselves, where we could take our regime and our future. We need a lot more
01:06:33.820
of that, uh, on the right. We need to be offering that I think with a lot less apology and a lot less
01:06:39.260
pessimism about, you know, of course technology has its dangers, the future has its dangers, but
01:06:43.740
you know, that if you don't have some kind of outlet for people to charge riskily and boldly
01:06:49.400
into the future, um, then you're really in trouble. Let's talk about what's happening in
01:06:55.060
the other lane, right? We spend a minute on men. Let's talk about women and in 2022. And I know you
01:07:01.240
and your dad have both said what I believe too, which is like, well, we've gotten to this weird
01:07:05.120
place, this dangerous place where we demonize homemakers, where they're, you know, maybe a
01:07:10.160
little less. So now the right is starting to push, push back on that or has been for some time,
01:07:13.580
but still, I mean, in democratic circles, a lot of them that I know women who stay at home,
01:07:18.600
don't feel embarrassed about it. It's ridiculous. Um, I remember being at a, I've told this story
01:07:23.780
before, but I was at my daughter's school and we were having a, a mom's meeting and it was an
01:07:28.360
all girl school. And one of the moms was saying that whenever she leaves the house, she's a stay
01:07:33.080
at home mom. She says to her daughter, mommy's going to a meeting. I have a meeting. And she wants
01:07:37.640
the daughter to think that because she thinks it makes her sound more important. And I was like,
01:07:41.680
what are you doing that for? Like, who cares? You tell her like mom's a stay at home mom. Cause I love
01:07:46.320
you. And I want to be there for you. And it doesn't mean if you're working mom, like I am
01:07:49.000
doesn't that you don't love your kid, but there's absolutely no reason to make excuses
01:07:51.860
for your choice. And by the way, even if you don't have a kid, even if you decide to be an
01:07:57.220
upper East side, stay at home housewife, good on you. If that's what you want, go for it, sister,
01:08:02.620
do it and do it without embarrassment. Like be a great wife, lean into your friendships. What a lovely
01:08:07.160
way to go through your existence. If that's, if that works for you, but you have to do it
01:08:11.160
unapologetically. Now we're at this place where every girl's school and I have a, I have two boys
01:08:15.740
and a girl, my daughter's 11, every single girl's school. And we've, you know, we've, we've only
01:08:19.820
done girl's schools during her 11 years. It's like STEM, STEM, you will be with no, no pausing,
01:08:30.200
no thought for like, what if she winds up really loving literature? Like, is that too girly? Does
01:08:35.180
that too female for you? So she's got like hardcore science being shoved down her throat on the
01:08:41.040
one hand, which I don't know that she's going to want at all. And then on the other hand,
01:08:45.360
you've got every other input she gets, which is pretty much the opposite of STEM. It's the Lizzo's,
01:08:50.780
it's the Kim Kardashian's, it's the Meghan Markle's. And the message is basically narcissism. Yes.
01:09:01.400
Well, it's both of those things are things you would say to women if you hated them. I mean,
01:09:07.420
that is really the point of that comedy routine you played earlier, I think is like, these are
01:09:13.160
ways that you would relate to little girls if you couldn't stand the nature of womanhood. And I,
01:09:20.340
I genuinely think that that has been the driving force in a lot of feminism, basically since the
01:09:27.620
feminine mystique, this is Betty Friedan's kind of, you know, inaugural text of second wave feminism.
01:09:33.400
We were talking about Gloria Steinem earlier, these new left folks who come along and look with eyes
01:09:39.960
of disgust upon homemakers in the suburbs. And, you know, they're drawing upon a lot of discontents
01:09:46.400
that were certainly there. I think everybody was feeling a certain spiritual malaise at that point
01:09:51.500
in time. But the caricature of womanhood that you get when you go back to that, to, to that book,
01:09:57.800
you know, you find her saying things like, it's really, it's like being in a concentration camp.
01:10:01.760
Seriously. I mean, I'm not making this up. This is like, you know, it's, it's the comfortable
01:10:05.280
concentration camp where you lose your identity and your soul. And you see this now when you get
01:10:11.800
articles in the New York times, right? About if you calculated the amount of money that you would
01:10:17.820
have to pay a homemaker for her labor, you would pay her a billion dollars or whatever number they've
01:10:24.740
come up with. But of course it's preposterous precisely because the, the work of a homemaker exists
01:10:30.540
outside of dollars and cents. That's the whole point. It's inestimable. A billion dollars would
01:10:36.560
be an insult to a mother that stays home to raise her child because she gets paid back in love. And
01:10:42.360
this is something that you, again, I come back to this thing about caricaturing the great works,
01:10:49.320
telling people not to read the great works by just pretending that they are something entirely
01:10:54.240
other than they are. They depend upon you're never having actually cracked the books that
01:10:59.520
would tell you otherwise. So you go all the way back to, you know, Proverbs 31, right? And people
01:11:04.580
go out and they say, I want a Proverbs 31 wife. And this is the description of a good woman who can
01:11:08.780
find. And when people say that, you sometimes think they mean like, oh, I want a nice little angel in
01:11:14.020
the house. But it's like, you go back, the Proverbs 31 woman, she has strong forearms because she's
01:11:18.720
constantly like kneading her own bread. She goes out in the early in the morning and she buys a field. I
01:11:23.760
mean, she's this woman that her children rise up and call her blessed. And this has been, you know,
01:11:29.900
the feminist line on homemaking has been that it's deemed valued, that it's, you know, that it's
01:11:36.000
infantilizing, that it turns women into these sort of meaningless appendages in society. But of course,
01:11:41.920
they are society. Women homemakers are society. And more and more girls, women that I talk to
01:11:49.060
will tell me like, you know, I hate the girl boss life. I hate this thing. I hate being on a
01:11:54.600
treadmill. You know, I have to like, you know, go out and work for some drudge boss when I could be
01:12:01.300
home making banana bread for my children, you know, and these sorts of things, again, nobody ever said
01:12:07.640
or needs to say that women should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen all the time. You just have
01:12:13.660
to acknowledge that this, this is a different kind of person than a man with a 50% of the world to make
01:12:20.640
with a real role that is distinct from the man's world. And this is, you know, if you, if you listen
01:12:26.340
to the way feminists talk about womanhood as weak, as, as, you know, as ignorant, as infantilized,
01:12:33.080
then it's absolutely no surprise that the skyrocketing gender dysphoria, which we're coming up against in
01:12:38.500
this gruesome, disgusting attempt to mutilate children is almost all among teenage girls who
01:12:44.400
are going through puberty and coming into womanhood and have no positive model for it. It's, it's
01:12:49.620
something, again, that the right could be much better about, you know, loving homemakers. They
01:12:54.400
are really the center of the world. And I think we're starting to get better about this, which is
01:12:58.480
overdue. I think about, you know, when, when I grew up back in the dark ages of the 1970s and
01:13:03.460
no women weren't as present in the workforce, uh, they were more present at home and they were
01:13:08.760
being told back then you have to do it all. Like you do it all simultaneously. You can good luck.
01:13:13.740
I mean, that was the worst era I think for mothers, because there was pressure to work full-time and
01:13:17.360
be full-time moms. And this was before, you know, society was set up for that, where they even had,
01:13:22.020
you know, support systems in place for moms who needed childcare and so on and so forth,
01:13:25.820
putting aside whether that's the right choice. Um, but I will say, what do we have in terms of
01:13:30.320
images? Well, we had models on the cover of glamor and Vogue and 17. Yes, they were too skinny.
01:13:37.340
Like that was about as much of damage as they were doing to the young girls. Like you have to
01:13:41.280
be skinny to be attractive. Okay. That's America. Okay. Now it's like, you have got to be a disgusting
01:13:48.140
classless whore. That's really, that's the future for you. You've got a, I mean, forgive me. I hate to
01:13:53.600
pick on Kim Kardashian because she actually seems like a nice gal, but I'm saying like break the
01:13:57.520
internet with her enormous bottom and her breasts exposed. And we're supposed to celebrate her and
01:14:01.960
Kanye talking about how they do it all night long. And then the, the Superbowl where I I've seen
01:14:08.120
Shakira's vag and JLo's. Why did I need to, I was trying to show my six-year-old the Superbowl and
01:14:13.340
football, nobody's vagina. Like what the hell? And it doesn't make me a prude to, to object to that.
01:14:19.600
Right. I don't need to see any pubic hair at the Superbowl. Um, and then you've got right now,
01:14:25.280
Megan Markle. We talked about her yesterday and I mentioned her, um, we mentioned her earlier. She
01:14:29.720
has got this podcast, $25 million. She got paid from Spotify to do this podcast. And so her second
01:14:35.780
part, first podcast was Serena Williams, where Megan talked about what a victim she's been her
01:14:39.180
whole life. She's a princess, but she's a victim. Second episode is with Mariah Carey and Mariah Carey
01:14:46.940
actually in a great moment, Spencer kind of turned the tables on Megan and called her a diva,
01:14:52.680
which she is. And let me bring it to you. What happened? But I just feel like this is all
01:14:58.460
hashtag part of the problem. Megan Markle, hashtag part of the problem. Here's soundbite one in which
01:15:06.640
And I think that's really important for people to remember that there might be this persona
01:15:11.900
and yes, the diva thing we can play into. I mean, it's not something that I connect to,
01:15:17.400
but it's for you. It's been a huge part of your diva moments sometimes, Megan. Don't even act
01:15:23.100
like you. It's also the visual. It's the visual. A lot of it's the visual because I associate it
01:15:31.820
differently. Well, I know, but let's pretend that you didn't, weren't so beautiful and didn't have
01:15:37.440
the whole thing and didn't often have gorgeous ensembles. You wouldn't get, maybe get as much
01:15:43.580
diva stuff. I don't care. I'm like, when I can, I'm going to give you diva.
01:15:48.800
Okay. That was during the exchange because Megan's whole thing on this podcast to make it about
01:15:53.620
herself. And then she, she comes back in her own closing remarks on her own podcast, Megan Markle,
01:15:59.800
having mused about the diva assertion and says the following.
01:16:03.860
It was all going swimmingly. I mean, really well until that moment happened, which I don't know
01:16:12.600
about you, but it stopped me in my tracks when she called me a diva. You couldn't see me obviously,
01:16:23.620
but I, I started to sweat a little bit. I started squirming in my chair in this quiet revolt. Like,
01:16:28.600
wait, what? No, what? Huh? But that, how could you, that's not true. That's not,
01:16:32.160
why would you say that my mind genuinely was just spinning with what nonsense she must have read or
01:16:37.740
clicked on to make her say that. I just kept thinking in that moment, was my girl crush coming
01:16:44.660
to a quick demise? Does she actually not see me? So she must've felt my nervous laughter and you all
01:16:53.940
would have heard it too. And she jumped right in to make sure I was crystal clear. When she said diva,
01:16:59.840
she was talking about the way that I dress, the posture of the clothing, the quote unquote
01:17:06.260
fabulousness as she sees it. Oh my God, Spencer. I'm, I'm gagging on the narcissism. Yesterday,
01:17:14.680
she compared herself to Nelson Mandela. And now today we have to deal with this. She can't
01:17:19.720
understand why anybody would think she's a diva. I mean, let me count the ways as you know,
01:17:24.120
during the queen's Jubilee, she's making sure to put the window down so everyone can get her
01:17:29.100
photograph, right? As she's always got to be wearing princess Diana's jewelry, as she's got
01:17:33.860
to have just the right angle and photographer. And she'll only deal with this certain stenographer,
01:17:38.960
press guy, Scobie, whatever his name is. She won't do. She sues every magazine or write something
01:17:44.380
negative about her. She pulls the meanest comment about herself, tries to blow it up into what a victim
01:17:48.980
she's been because she's only used to the good things being said about her. I mean, the fact that
01:17:53.300
she didn't want to live in the, in the Royal cottage and the frog more, it wasn't good enough
01:17:58.000
for her. They had to redo it on the taxpayer dime. She didn't pay all of it. I could keep going. And
01:18:02.700
now to be like, ah, the indignation. Thank God it was just about my appearance. Yeah. Thank God that
01:18:12.520
I understand. Look at me. This is the act of a person who would sit in Windsor Castle with
01:18:19.180
Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth, a woman who once broke bread with Winston Churchill and complain about her
01:18:25.700
mental health. I mean, it's like, it's, it's not a day spa. It's one of the most ancient monarchies in
01:18:31.180
Europe. Like it's, I mean, look, you know, I, I will say this when, uh, John Adams, when, when Abigail
01:18:39.620
Adams died and, uh, John Adams was left, uh, survived her. And when people would compliment
01:18:46.100
him on the success of his son, John Quincy, uh, he reportedly had something that he would always say
01:18:52.460
in response. He was a, Oh, your son is so great. You must be so proud. And he would say, my son had
01:18:57.000
a mother. And when I first read that, I, I actually teared up a little bit. I mean, we've, we've talked
01:19:02.080
on this show about my dad and the close relationship that I have with him. And, you know,
01:19:08.940
I, I like to joke, but it's, it's not really a joke. Like my mom is the best Klavan. She's like
01:19:14.660
Klavan deluxe and she's the only one of us who never does any media. So you all just have to
01:19:19.500
take my word for it. But I, you know, when I hear people talking about, uh, womanhood in these ways
01:19:25.880
or offering these, you know, role models to young girls telling them they have to be like Megan
01:19:30.840
Markle or like Lizzo, you know, I always think, you know, I, I too had a mother and it, that it
01:19:35.620
incenses me on those terms, you know, just to, you know, my, my mom stayed home with us.
01:19:41.200
Uh, she had a thriving career on either side of that. She was a successful writer before we were
01:19:46.880
born. She continued to write a little bit, but basically stayed home. And then, you know,
01:19:50.400
when we were grown, she took up her career and you talked, uh, very eloquently about the kind of,
01:19:57.080
you know, you can have it all, uh, mentality, this narrative that you can do it all at once.
01:20:01.900
And, and I, I've seen that too. I think, I think there's still a little bit of it going around,
01:20:07.020
but the irony is of course, that if you'll just let go of these, you know, confected narratives,
01:20:14.980
these absolutely artificial narratives that were not designed by people who have your best interests
01:20:20.340
at heart, that were not cooked up so that you could thrive and flourish, but so that somebody
01:20:24.980
else could make money off of you to just let go of that. You know, you actually can have an entire
01:20:30.600
rich, full life as a woman who, you know, raises children and has a career. That's a very real
01:20:36.380
thing. It's just not in any way, it doesn't look anything like this confection that they're
01:20:42.100
serving you. And that's why it, you know, gets me is to think about my own mother whom I do rise up
01:20:47.500
and call blessed as, as in, as in Proverbs, you know, and, and to kind of, uh, I, again,
01:20:53.300
I feel sorrowful for, for the girls who are being offered this just really, uh, unhelpful image.
01:21:00.000
No, I think, I think back to myself when I was deciding whether to stay at Fox or leave. And
01:21:06.060
it's, it's funny because some people online seem to believe that I was fired from Fox to the contrary.
01:21:13.120
Uh, I was offered a mega deal by Fox. I was thinking that Fox should be so lucky. Go on.
01:21:18.000
And, uh, and I decided to reject it because I was miserable. Um, not putting aside the toxic
01:21:25.620
lifestyle that comes with being in the primetime of cable news, which I think is readily apparent
01:21:29.960
to most people. I was not seeing my children. I wasn't raising my own children and they were
01:21:35.660
still very young. I hadn't missed it all. They were seven, five, and three. So I could still be
01:21:41.300
very present for most of their childhood. And that's why I went to NBC because they offered me
01:21:47.280
a show at nine in the morning where I thought, okay, I'll be able to be at home for the rest of the
01:21:51.820
day. And that is the one upside of that position that I took. But I will tell you two very powerful
01:21:58.260
women whose names you would know who I talked to and who were friends of mine and fans of mine
01:22:03.660
urged me not to go, urge me not to go. And it didn't have to do with politics. It had to do with
01:22:08.820
leaving what they perceived as a very powerful post for one that was less powerful, which was clear.
01:22:16.080
Um, even though it would allow me to raise my kids, that was not, and they had made different
01:22:20.700
choices and they are both moms. And I couldn't, I couldn't explain to them. You know, it's like,
01:22:27.020
if you don't understand why this is a priority for me and I, and I, it's, it's fine if it's not for
01:22:32.200
you. You know, I mean, there, there are plenty of kids who are raised by working moms who turn out
01:22:36.080
great, but I knew in my family, I needed more. I needed to be with them. So now I found a way to do
01:22:44.040
it all right now. I actually am doing it all because I get to work from home. I'm it's in the middle of
01:22:48.020
the day when they're at school. And now what I get Spencer is tons of people saying like,
01:22:51.240
when are you going to get it back on TV? When are you going to get back on TV? And I tell them the
01:22:54.600
truth, which is I have no desire to do that. I love my life right now. And it's not like I didn't
01:22:59.860
get here without some bumps and bruises, but you know, if you know what to prioritize, what's
01:23:05.160
important to you, you just keep trying and trying and trying again until you, until you, you know,
01:23:10.600
for you, you nail it for me right now, I'm nailing it. And it's in large part because I see my
01:23:15.680
children. Well, that reminds me in a weird sort of way. It reminds me of this amazing
01:23:21.580
moment in an essay by Wendell Berry, who's not really a man of the right at all. He's more of
01:23:27.660
an environmentalist, you know, essayist who kind of wrote about his life on a farm and so on and so
01:23:34.400
forth. But one of his essays, he recounts telling his, I think it was his grad school professor,
01:23:41.620
somebody, some mentor in New York, you know, the big city, he's starting to make it as a writer.
01:23:47.320
And he comes to this guy and he says, I think I need to go back to Kentucky, I guess it was,
01:23:51.660
you know, and I feel a call to the land, I feel a call to some more authentic engagement. And
01:23:57.380
he recounts it, it's as if he's speaking Swahili to this guy, because this is a person that can't
01:24:02.700
imagine that any writer would ever want to be anywhere but New York, right? How could you possibly,
01:24:07.200
what's, you know, reality is there for you to invest yourself in? And of course, this was the
01:24:12.340
making of him. You know, this was Wendell Berry's whole career was then to go back and his engagement
01:24:16.620
with the earth and with farming, that was everything he would write about. But we do have, I think,
01:24:22.720
largely among the laptop class, this vision of life that is purely commercial and incredibly provincial,
01:24:31.280
highly urbane, right? Just you live in the cities, you maximize your career ambitions,
01:24:36.340
and everything else is just weakness or failure or inadequacy. And that story you tell, right, is
01:24:43.180
anything but any of those things, right? Obviously, this is a journey for you toward
01:24:48.640
fullness and self-actualization. And that, you know, the family would be central to that,
01:24:53.660
I think is like, very foreign to a lot of our elite classes.
01:24:58.320
Mm-hmm. And it's almost like people were sort of advising me, you'll be weaker, right? You're
01:25:06.000
weakening yourself. When exactly the opposite was true. I was at my lowest. I was empty. I couldn't
01:25:15.300
have cared less that I had a powerful post and a bunch of dough. It's not like NBC didn't pay me well,
01:25:19.680
but I'm just saying like, that wasn't my driving motivation at all. I was empty. And not like that
01:25:26.200
was a great experience at my next organization. But now, now being with them, raising my own
01:25:30.860
children, having all this great time with them, not to mention my husband, I'm full again. I'm
01:25:35.540
great. I'm not going to make a stupid mistake with this full tank of gas and going back into that
01:25:40.140
mess, right? And people are like, do it. We're talking about cable. Come back to Fox. I'm like,
01:25:44.020
sister, I'm good. All right, listen, pause because we need another hour. This is when I'm sad I don't
01:25:49.560
have another hour. So much more with Spencer Cleven just ahead as we go into our last block. Don't miss it.
01:25:56.200
So Spencer, my team found you on a podcast. Forgive me, I don't have the woman's name in
01:26:04.400
front of me, but it was actually a really interesting exchange you had with this gal who
01:26:07.540
seemed to be into the classics as well. And you on this podcast, we're talking about
01:26:12.080
the concept of freedom that humans should strive for. And you were making the point that most people
01:26:17.280
think about freedom as freedom from something like big government, the thumb, the boot, or freedom
01:26:23.780
to do something, whatever you want. But you had a different notion of freedom and the way people
01:26:30.220
should be thinking about it. And I'd never heard it described in this way. Do you remember what that
01:26:35.260
was? Yeah, yeah. And I actually remember the name of the podcaster whom I'll shout out because she's
01:26:41.420
really a wonderful, her name is Alex Kashuta. And the podcast is called Subversive. And she does a
01:26:46.720
really awesome job living up to that title. So yeah, so she was asking me about, you know,
01:26:53.260
there's all this debate on the right right now about do we have too much freedom? Or, you know,
01:26:57.980
is drag queen story hour a natural result of our American idea of liberty? Because you just let
01:27:05.740
everybody do what they want. Eventually, they're going to do depraved and harmful things. And
01:27:10.060
my take on this is a little bit different, as you indicate. And it goes back in part to book nine
01:27:18.320
of Plato's Republic, which we just recorded an episode about this on Young Heretics. So it's
01:27:22.720
fresh in my mind. And Plato says something kind of one of those mind blowing insights that you carry
01:27:28.880
with you, which is that the tyrant, the man who rules over a city is actually the most enslaved man
01:27:36.580
alive. And you think of him as the guy that can do absolutely anything. He snaps his fingers and
01:27:41.280
one man is beheaded and he snaps his fingers again, and he has a feast in front of him. And this
01:27:46.000
whole idea of the tyrant is that he has freedom according to the ways of the world. But says Plato,
01:27:52.220
in fact, the tyrant is the man who is completely enslaved to his desires, to his appetites. And the
01:27:59.760
whole idea of the Republic is that your soul has these different conflicting parts in it. It has its,
01:28:05.320
you know, appetites and its hungers, but also you have reason and you have courage and you can
01:28:09.320
use these things in the right way, which is to orient them toward the reason, or you can use them in the
01:28:14.860
wrong way, which is to just follow the commands of your desires. And you see this a lot now people
01:28:21.680
will say, Oh, well, my desire, you know, is just that it should self justifies, right? Like you,
01:28:27.360
Andrea Long Chu, one of the famous transgender writers wrote in the New York Times, you know,
01:28:31.760
the desire shouldn't be measured by happiness, I should just be able to follow my own desires,
01:28:36.080
even if they make me miserable. And this is a kind of perverted idea of freedom that is just the
01:28:42.180
maximal freedom from right, nobody can tell me what to do. Nobody can tell me the government can't
01:28:48.360
tell me what's right and wrong. And, you know, if you if you go all the way down the road of freedom
01:28:52.560
from then you have freedom from the moral universe itself, which you're getting now to write freedom
01:28:56.580
from biology, freedom from absolute truth, whatever I say is the truth for me. And that's obviously
01:29:04.640
not the highest good. That's obviously not the way we're supposed to live our lives. But that's why
01:29:10.260
the tyrant is enslaved, because you ultimately become just the puppet of your own momentary
01:29:15.020
desires, whatever sex, whatever food, whatever anything I want in this moment, that's where I'm
01:29:19.220
going. And I have no control over myself. And that's where you get to freedom to because to really
01:29:23.900
have freedom to do good things, to strive and to work and to triumph. You need to dominate your
01:29:31.300
desires. You need to have control over. It doesn't mean you never indulge yourself. It doesn't mean
01:29:34.900
you don't have to take pleasure in things. It just means that you need to be in the driver's seat.
01:29:39.320
Your logos, your reason, your mind needs to be the one pointing the way toward the good. And this was
01:29:45.760
very live for the founders. The founders knew that this was something that was necessary for our
01:29:50.180
republic to work. It was a strong religious and virtuous people who gained freedom mastery over
01:29:57.120
their desires so that they could have freedom to do all of the great things and build civilization.
01:30:02.980
And we've taken our political idea, which is freedom from, that the government can't infringe
01:30:08.060
upon your God-given rights, and made that into our entire idea of freedom. It's my freedom just to
01:30:14.080
debase myself. And it's like structurally, formally speaking, you do have that freedom. But
01:30:18.700
in truth, that's actually not freedom. That's slavery, slavery to your desires. And so what we
01:30:24.260
ought to be doing is calling people to full freedom out of their baser instincts and toward what we all
01:30:30.540
know we are, which is embodied souls, souls oriented toward the good who do best when we let our reason
01:30:37.600
guide us rather than our lower passions. How much does your own Christianity play into that belief of
01:30:45.480
yours? Because I know you came to it like your dad late in life. He was, he was, he converted age 50,
01:30:56.080
Yeah, that's, that's right. That's when I was baptized. And it was a long process, maybe another
01:31:00.240
time we can get into that whole story, because it would probably take, probably take the hour. But
01:31:05.380
yeah, I would say this, you know, there's an ancient debate in the West about Athens versus
01:31:12.180
Jerusalem. And in some ways, the West just is, we're talking about the West, we're talking about
01:31:15.540
the cultural inheritance of Athens and Jerusalem, these two great centers of thought and belief and
01:31:20.820
striving. And Jerusalem, obviously, the holy city where, you know, where God's temple is, and where
01:31:29.460
the Messiah comes and where, you know, crucifixions of Judaism and Christianity, basically, and the
01:31:35.900
thought that comes out of those traditions. And then Athens, the pagan side of things, right? The,
01:31:40.460
the, the great Athenian philosophers, and all of the Greek tragedies, and, you know, everything that
01:31:47.500
we cherish from that side of the ancient world. And Tertullian, one of the great Christian
01:31:53.040
polemicists of the early church says, famously, what hath Athens to do with Jerusalem, meaning
01:31:58.220
everything true is in the Bible. And you already you don't want, you know, if it's true, in Aristotle,
01:32:03.300
you don't need Aristotle to tell you, you can get it from from Revelation. And my approach to this is
01:32:07.740
a little bit different. I think, you know, I hope and strive for my Christianity to inform all that I
01:32:14.640
do and to be the last word on everything. And, you know, people can quibble with me about how I live
01:32:20.060
that out. But I'm sincere in my desires to do that in my effort to to think seriously about that. But
01:32:26.980
that doesn't mean that, you know, there's nothing to be gained from from the pagan world. In fact,
01:32:31.580
when when in Revelation, it says he who is sitting on the throne makes all things new.
01:32:35.980
And when in on the road to Emmaus, Christ opens the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures and shows
01:32:41.880
how it was all always pointing to him. I think that applies to everything good and true in the
01:32:46.340
world. It's obvious to me that there's wisdom and truth in in pagan literature. But to me, what it
01:32:53.160
looks like is that there's this kind of Christ shaped hole in it that they're like almost tapping on
01:32:58.260
the glass of what would be revealed at Calvary. And Thomas Aquinas is somebody that I often read to
01:33:04.220
discover this because he's a great they call him the baptizer of Aristotle, that he he basically
01:33:09.000
consummated the truths of the ancient pagan world by Christianizing them. And that's, you know,
01:33:15.100
John says through him, all things were made and not one thing was made that was not made through him.
01:33:20.540
And that means anything true, all whatsoever things are true, lovely and of good report,
01:33:24.760
come ultimately from God and can be best understood through that lens, even if they come from elsewhere.
01:33:30.720
Hmm. I asked your dad, what's a great place to start for people who want to start getting into
01:33:35.580
classics? I don't have to ask you that because I do know young heretics is a great place to start.
01:33:40.920
Spencer, he talks like this on his podcast. You'll get some of the references. You won't get all of
01:33:45.560
them if you're like me and newbie to it, but you'll follow enough to learn. And he makes it
01:33:50.700
entertaining. And it's quite dazzling, to be honest with you, just listening to you talk like
01:33:55.500
this and inspirational to make, you know, the rest of us crack open these, these wonderful books.
01:34:00.300
Thank you so much for what you do every day and for what you've done today and to be continued,
01:34:04.780
I hope. You're so kind, Megan. As you know, I'm a longtime fan, longtime listener, first time caller,
01:34:09.700
and I hope it will be the first of many. Thank you for a really lovely time. Same.
01:34:15.020
Thank you all so much for joining us today. I feel enriched. Do you feel enriched? I hope you feel
01:34:19.020
enriched. Tomorrow, you're going to feel good too, because we have an exclusive interview with
01:34:23.600
Richie McGinnis. He testified in the Kyle Rittenhouse case. He was on scene that night
01:34:28.480
for the first time since the trial. He's ready to talk. He was also smeared by the New York Times
01:34:34.820
when he was on site on January 6th as a reporter. We'll get into that as well. Fascinating guest.
01:34:40.120
You don't want to miss him. Download the show. Follow us on YouTube. Help us get to 500,000.
01:34:45.820
Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.