TRIGGERnometry - Andrew Klavan： Why The West Isn’t Over

00:00:00.840 Women no longer exist as characters in the movies. 0.97

00:00:04.300 You cannot go to the movies and see a woman who is anything like a woman 1.00

00:00:08.100 that you would actually meet unless you date wrestlers, you know.

00:00:13.040 And when my daughter was growing up, there would be a scene 0.98

00:00:15.440 and a woman would punch a guy and the guy would roll ass over a tea kettle 1.00

00:00:19.060 out the door. And I would say to her, you know, if you punch a guy, 0.99

00:00:21.640 the first thing that happens is your hand breaks. 0.98

00:00:23.640 And the second thing that happens is he beats the living crap out of you, 0.98

00:00:26.540 you know. And so don't ever think that that's a real thing. 0.65

00:00:30.040 So feminism destroyed the character of the woman. 1.00

00:00:35.380 And yet that's what stories are about.

00:00:37.060 They're about whether a woman can be womanly enough 1.00

00:00:41.040 and whether a man can be manly enough to keep life going.

00:00:44.600 Is the West coming to an end?

00:00:46.040 Something is coming to an end. And when things come to an end,

00:00:49.420 it's a very dangerous moment.

00:00:51.260 And I think that there are probably a hundred good years left to the Republic,

00:00:55.180 or a hundred years left to the Republic. They may not be that good.

00:00:57.480 And then, and then I think something else will come.

00:01:10.300 Hey, Constantine, do you like romantic novels?

00:01:14.160 No. In my country, men who read romantic novels are executed, which is correct. 1.00

00:01:19.320 This is why we don't have men with pink hair or women with unshaved armpits. 1.00

00:01:23.600 All right, mate, chill out. How about if the character was woke?

00:01:26.680 Even worse, Lenin would have been spinning in his glass case.

00:01:30.060 But what if it's satirical?

00:01:31.540 In my country, we do not have satire. Laughing is not allowed.

00:01:35.240 If you want humor, read Dostoyevsky.

00:01:37.420 Well, if you were blessed with a sense of humor and enjoy a bitingly funny takedown of romance novels and woke culture,

00:01:45.980 then you have to read Danielle's Passion, a new satire that follows a young Ivy League grad

00:01:52.880 as she battles white supremacy, the patriarchy, and late-stage capitalism in the hellscape that is Irvine, California.

00:02:01.240 This is not natural.

00:02:02.360 Live, laugh, and love through the eyes of one of your moral superiors.

00:02:07.260 Suffer every microaggression.

00:02:09.100 Judge every co-worker.

00:02:10.720 Betray every family member as if you were doing it yourself and come out feeling just as smug.

00:02:17.120 This sounds like communist Russia. Now I'm interested in this book.

00:02:20.840 Is comedy done the right way?

00:02:22.760 No lectures, no messages, no characters banging on about the same tired talking points.

00:02:28.740 Satire as it's meant to be.

00:02:30.660 Stolt, if you want a great book, go to Amazon and click on the link below.

00:02:35.500 We also recommend you buy Tired Moderates, other books, Woke Fragility, and a little book of Woke Jokes.

00:02:42.720 Click on the link and laugh like you're reading War and Peace.

00:02:46.540 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry on the Road from the USA.

00:02:51.480 I'm Francis Foster.

00:02:52.660 I'm Constantin Kishan.

00:02:53.800 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:02:59.060 Our terrific guest today is an author and former Hollywood screenwriter, Andrew Klavan.

00:03:03.480 Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:03:04.360 It's great to see you guys.

00:03:05.420 Listen, man, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show.

00:03:08.600 There's so many things we're going to talk about that I can't wait.

00:03:12.180 But for anyone who is not familiar with your story, it's a very interesting one.

00:03:15.560 It's a very interesting journey you've had in terms of your religion and views and all sorts of things.

00:03:20.540 So who are you?

00:03:21.760 How are you?

00:03:22.200 Where you are?

00:03:22.540 What's been your journey through life?

00:03:23.800 Well, I've been a writer all my life.

00:03:26.260 It's all I ever wanted to be.

00:03:27.540 I was a mystery writer.

00:03:28.860 I kind of fell in love with the American tough guy writers when I was a kid.

00:03:32.180 And so I made my way as a mystery writer and did very well, won awards and had movies made.

00:03:37.940 And then, as you say, I kind of thought before I age out, which is I think about the age of 22, I wanted to try Hollywood.

00:03:44.800 So I went to Hollywood and I did that for a while.

00:03:47.220 And that was working well, except that I...

00:03:50.280 You were hugely successful.

00:03:51.340 Don't underplay yourself.

00:03:51.980 What's that?

00:03:52.280 You were hugely successful.

00:03:53.560 I was doing quite well, yeah, in Hollywood.

00:03:55.340 I mean, in Hollywood, you can do well without any movies getting made.

00:03:57.980 You just sell the script.

00:03:58.840 You're making a bundle.

00:03:59.860 And it was...

00:04:00.940 But I was having fun.

00:04:03.100 But unfortunately, I had been living in the UK for seven years, all through the 90s.

00:04:08.440 And I came back.

00:04:09.160 And shortly after I came back, 9-11 happened.

00:04:11.640 And I had come back from the UK without realizing it.

00:04:15.120 I had become politically conservative.

00:04:17.640 And I didn't even know it because I wasn't dealing with American politics.

00:04:21.020 I was dealing only with British politics.

00:04:22.940 And, you know, I didn't really care.

00:04:24.800 I just was paying attention to them.

00:04:26.300 And I came back and I suddenly found that all of the people that I liked listening to from Rush Limbaugh on were conservatives.

00:04:33.140 And I thought, well, that's a shock because I had left.

00:04:35.360 I had been a Jewish liberal, you know, typical Jewish coastal liberal.

00:04:39.080 And at the same time, or really slightly afterwards, a long, long journey of conversion came upon me.

00:04:48.520 And so when I say I was Jewish, I was racially Jewish, but I had no religion.

00:04:51.700 And I suddenly began to realize I was a Christian.

00:04:54.320 And so at the same time, I became a loudmouth conservative because 9-11 had happened and Hollywood was making these movies showing us as the bad guys.

00:05:03.120 And they were making movie after movie showing us as the bad guys.

00:05:06.080 And I thought, this is a terrible thing to do.

00:05:08.780 Even the movies that were opposed to Vietnam were made after Vietnam was over.

00:05:14.260 And so I started to talk about that and write about that.

00:05:16.120 And I even went to Afghanistan and had myself embedded with the troops so I could speak with authority.

00:05:20.200 And I said, you guys are really messing this.

00:05:21.980 This is wrong.

00:05:22.760 It's wrong when their guy, it's not wrong to disagree with the war.

00:05:25.900 But while our guys are being shot at, you shouldn't be making movies like this.

00:05:30.660 Well, that, on top of becoming a Christian, my Hollywood career died like that. 0.98

00:05:35.240 I mean, it was instantaneous. 0.90

00:05:36.760 But simultaneously, because God does take care of his poets and his fools, and I'm both, I started to do these kind of satirical videos about conservatism. 0.58

00:05:47.940 And that became a second career.

00:05:49.580 And so now I have this kind of remarkable career.

00:05:53.880 It's like this is now, as I enter what must be the last phase of my life, unless I'm immortal, you know, I find myself having the career of my dreams.

00:06:04.080 I'm writing nonfiction about the things I understand in the culture and how Christianity speaks through them.

00:06:10.780 I'm still, I have a new mystery series going on, and I'm working at The Daily Wire as a podcaster.

00:06:17.160 And it's really been a remarkable journey.

00:06:20.380 The only thing I'm not doing anymore is Hollywood.

00:06:22.620 And to be honest with you, I never really liked the movie business anyway.

00:06:25.800 I mean, it was just something I did because it seemed like the next step in my career.

00:06:30.700 So that's the one thing that has been, I was literally cancelled.

00:06:35.120 I mean, I was literally just blacklisted and went dark there.

00:06:38.820 But other than that, things have been remarkable.

00:06:40.880 Yeah.

00:06:41.020 And one of the things you said to me, because we met here last year, and I still remember this, we were talking about screenwriting and writing in general.

00:06:50.540 And you said, every great story begins with a boy and a girl.

00:06:54.120 And once I got past the transphobia and the homophobia of that statement, it really made me think, because that is so fundamentally true. 1.00

00:07:04.720 Yeah.

00:07:05.720 And yet, I think we've become quite uncomfortable with telling a story as basic as that, or a story that is based on such a simple thing.

00:07:12.460 Well, women no longer exist as characters in the movies. 1.00

00:07:16.640 You cannot go to the movies and see a woman who is anything like a woman that you would actually meet unless you date wrestlers.

00:07:24.000 You know, I mean, probably, I mean, when you talk about, you know, before the cameras started rolling, we were talking about all the controversial things we say and how people get angry.

00:07:33.300 Maybe the thing that made people angrier than anything else I've ever said on the air was I saw a show, The Witcher, in which the woman was fighting a duel.

00:07:44.840 And I said, women can't fight duels with men. 1.00

00:07:48.280 That's not the way that works.

00:07:49.360 I mean, if it's the Middle Ages and you're in an actual battle, not on a fencing field, those guys were like, you know, it's not like you'd be fighting me.

00:07:57.560 You'd be fighting a guy, this gigantic guy, and he'd come and just wipe you off the face of the earth.

00:08:01.660 If you have a character in a fantasy who's a woman, she should have some magical power because women do have that. 1.00

00:08:07.660 But you can't keep putting women in who fight because that doesn't happen in real life. 0.96

00:08:12.840 And when my daughter was growing up, there would be a scene and a woman would punch a guy and the guy would roll ass over a tea kettle at the door. 1.00

00:08:19.580 And I would say to her, you know, if you punch a guy, the first thing that happens is your hand breaks. 0.99

00:08:23.460 And the second thing that happens is he beats the living crap out of you, you know.

00:08:27.020 And so don't ever think that that's a real thing. 0.98

00:08:29.460 So feminism destroyed the character of the woman. 1.00

00:08:35.360 And yet that's what stories are about.

00:08:36.820 They're about whether a woman can be womanly enough and whether a man can be manly enough to keep life going, to keep the planet, you know, the human race continuing. 0.84

00:08:46.680 And in telling that story, you are telling an essential, what's called a psychomachie, the inner battle that we all fight to bring together the pieces of ourselves.

00:08:59.000 Because we all have female and male elements. 1.00

00:09:00.960 And when you put those together, you are getting something like the image of God, you know, in which we are made.

00:09:06.920 And so that story is the story.

00:09:11.320 And once you lose that story, you're not telling any story at all.

00:09:14.800 And it really is interesting.

00:09:16.480 I mean, I went just the other day, my wife and I went and saw the new Dungeons and Dragons movie.

00:09:21.420 And the first thing that happens is a giant bad guy comes in.

00:09:25.040 And this is a classic scene because this is the scene where Brad Pitt is reading the script and says, oh, yeah, I want to play that part.

00:09:31.780 Bad guy comes in. 0.92

00:09:32.720 He's a monster. 1.00

00:09:33.500 He's huge. 1.00

00:09:34.480 Comes up to a woman. 1.00

00:09:35.360 The woman just beats the crap out of him. 1.00

00:09:37.500 And I thought, yeah, you've already lost me. 0.98

00:09:39.580 You know, the rest.

00:09:40.160 And in fact, the film is entertaining.

00:09:42.520 It's beautiful.

00:09:42.940 But it's dead inside.

00:09:44.040 It has no inside because that character, that female character, women no longer know who they're supposed to be. 1.00

00:09:50.880 And they get insulted if you say to them, well, you may be many things, but the one thing you're not is a man, you know.

00:09:56.500 And so you have to understand what you are as a woman.

00:09:59.120 And that that has been outlawed as a as an idea and signify something in the culture to me that that very basic it's the core.

00:10:08.940 It's like a house without a foundation.

00:10:10.860 Right.

00:10:11.260 Well, you know, I wrote this book, The Truth and Beauty, and I have a chapter on Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

00:10:18.340 And I point out that when people read Frankenstein, it really starts the science fiction genre.

00:10:23.400 She basically invents the modern science fiction genre.

00:10:26.480 When people read that, they always say, well, Frankenstein wanted to be God.

00:10:29.300 He wanted to create life.

00:10:30.480 And Mary Shelley herself said this.

00:10:32.520 And I thought, no, men do create life.

00:10:35.740 Men and women do create life.

00:10:37.340 He wants to replace not God.

00:10:39.000 He wants to replace the mother. 0.90

00:10:40.060 He wants to create life without a woman. 1.00

00:10:43.620 And that is to a large degree what science fiction is about.

00:10:46.820 And to a large and even larger and worse degree what science is about.

00:10:51.500 It has been a long attempt to eliminate the fertility and the difference of women because men are afraid of that power.

00:11:01.880 And that's what Mary Shelley, I thought, foresaw that, you know, if you think of think of a movie like The Terminator, you know, the machines take over and they and the people rebel.

00:11:12.240 So how do they stop the rebellion?

00:11:13.820 They go back in time to kill the hero's mother.

00:11:15.620 And if you watch that first brilliant film, the woman they want to kill, she has nothing special about her except she she's a girl. 0.99

00:11:24.960 That's her superpower, you know, and they know they've got to kill her because that's the machine world depends on women being taken away. 1.00

00:11:31.940 And this is, you know, just right this moment, people were yelling at me on Twitter because I said we should boycott Anheuser-Busch for putting a boy pretending to be a girl on one of their beer cans. 0.95

00:11:45.020 And they said, oh, this is such a small thing.

00:11:46.740 Why are you getting so upset?

00:11:48.060 This is everything.

00:11:48.720 This is everything.

00:11:49.960 The role of women in a society who, after all, create humankind is everything. 1.00

00:11:57.400 And that's why societies that have freer women, who liberate women, who have respect for women, that's why they thrive. 1.00

00:12:03.600 And societies that don't get stuck in a kind of medieval half-life.

00:12:10.820 And it's important because soon there'll be machines that give birth.

00:12:14.600 And then we'll turn to women and say, and what's special about you? 0.88

00:12:18.840 I can run faster than you.

00:12:20.040 I'm stronger than you are.

00:12:21.060 I can do math better than you can do it.

00:12:22.920 What is it you do again?

00:12:24.520 And they'll have lost their vocation.

00:12:26.420 It's a dangerous, dangerous moment.

00:12:28.400 And because our humanity depends on them.

00:12:31.380 It's such a profound point.

00:12:33.080 And that is really what we're seeing.

00:12:35.120 And we're seeing it right the way through our culture.

00:12:38.160 When are we going to wake up from this, Andrew?

00:12:40.020 Well, hopefully, you know, we're not going to wake up until women get angry. 1.00

00:12:43.820 And this is the thing.

00:12:45.900 You know, my friend and colleague at the Daily Wire, Candace Owens, was just saying when they did it to Budweiser Beer, suddenly Budweiser Beer took an economic hit.

00:12:55.640 And she said, why?

00:12:56.380 Because men drink Budweiser Beer. 0.95

00:12:58.240 And they get angry.

00:12:59.380 But women... 1.00

00:12:59.920 Not real men.

00:13:00.780 No, of course not.

00:13:01.980 Of course not.

00:13:02.720 And certainly not men with any taste in beer.

00:13:05.380 But she was just saying that men don't take this stuff quite as much as women do.

00:13:10.160 Women have been convinced... 1.00

00:13:12.160 My problem with feminism was always the same thing. 1.00

00:13:14.620 It was always...

00:13:15.180 It was not that women shouldn't have choices.

00:13:17.760 It was that their values are men's values.

00:13:20.860 They say, oh, you're just a homemaker. 1.00

00:13:22.780 You know?

00:13:23.240 You think, really?

00:13:24.760 Just a homemaker? 0.99

00:13:26.020 I mean, isn't the home the basic building block of the state?

00:13:30.080 You know, you're just raising children.

00:13:33.380 You're just creating new people.

00:13:35.300 That has been the feminist archetype from the very beginning. 1.00

00:13:39.540 Simone de Beauvoir said women should not be allowed to stay home and raise their kids because too many women will choose to do that. 1.00

00:13:45.560 And they have been convincing women that this is a minor thing.

00:13:51.300 This is being thrown out of the society.

00:13:53.260 So when you say, how long will this last?

00:13:55.240 The answer is until you start to have women saying, wait a minute. 1.00

00:13:59.660 Wait a minute.

00:14:00.040 We've been duped.

00:14:00.960 We've been duped out of ourselves.

00:14:02.580 And you're starting to see it now.

00:14:03.840 I mean, we were talking about Mary Harrington, who's just this brilliant, you know, Oxford-educated thinker.

00:14:09.640 And she, you know, had a baby and she was totally in with the left, had a baby and she thought, no, I actually kind of like this.

00:14:16.200 I actually kind of want to do this.

00:14:18.020 And when more thinking women have that kind of courage, then you'll have ideas trickling down that will counter feminism. 1.00

00:14:26.600 Because feminism has just been a mistake. 1.00

00:14:28.760 It has made everybody miserable. 0.73

00:14:32.100 You wonder why I get upset.

00:14:33.580 I wonder why people get upset at you on Twitter.

00:14:36.640 But let's move to the movie business for a little bit.

00:14:39.160 I'm a huge movie fan.

00:14:41.020 I've loved movies right the way from year dot.

00:14:44.800 It's my passion, my love, movie buff, movie nerd, whatever.

00:14:49.140 What's going on with the movies?

00:14:50.460 I can't remember.

00:14:51.560 I mean, there's the odd movie that comes along.

00:14:53.440 I go, oh, I'd like to see that.

00:14:55.320 But nothing really compels me like it used to.

00:14:58.520 What's going on?

00:14:59.700 Well, there's two things.

00:15:01.660 One is that art forms have a natural life cycle.

00:15:06.720 You know, they can come back.

00:15:08.060 They don't necessarily die forever, but they rise up at their peak, usually very early on.

00:15:12.340 To me, the peak year of the movies is 1939.

00:15:15.120 I mean, and what happens at that peak is that the popular movies and the critically acclaimed movies are the same movie.

00:15:22.580 So when you get it, when you get it.

00:15:24.600 Oh, I see where this is going.

00:15:26.680 Well, it's true.

00:15:27.300 You know, you get an era like where the theater is thriving.

00:15:29.620 Shakespeare is the popular playwright.

00:15:31.340 But you get the novels are thriving.

00:15:33.260 Dickens, you know, one of the greatest novel novelists ever is also the best-selling novelist.

00:15:38.800 1939, if you look at the 10 Oscar nominees, they're also some of the greatest films ever made, including The Wizard of Oz.

00:15:46.020 And, you know, I don't know if Gone with the Wind was that year, but it was almost that year.

00:15:48.640 But Mr. Smith, one of the Frank Capra movies, they're just brilliant movies.

00:15:54.920 As an art form ages out, they split into popular trash, like these Marvel movies, these superhero movies,

00:16:04.580 and these kind of tiny little intellectual exercises that the critics think are oh so important,

00:16:10.160 but the rest of us can't stay awake through.

00:16:13.400 And that's the one thing that's happening.

00:16:16.340 It's simply a matter of the art form aging out.

00:16:19.040 And a lot of that energy went over to TV in the 2000s, the early 2000s.

00:16:23.180 I remember watching a show here called The Shield and thinking,

00:16:27.060 oh, gee, they're doing everything I did in the golden, the second golden age of mystery writing.

00:16:31.500 I was writing characters just like this.

00:16:34.000 And now they've all moved over to TV.

00:16:35.840 And we had 20 years of great TV here.

00:16:38.500 I mean, it was really brilliant stuff.

00:16:40.720 But the other thing is this, this idea of wokeness, which is actually a very deep,

00:16:48.020 we use it as a slogan, as a catchword, but it's actually a very deep philosophical moment.

00:16:56.420 It is the bottom of atheistic philosophy.

00:16:59.420 And it's impossible to make a good story out of it because it has no inner life.

00:17:05.780 The whole premise of wokeness is there is no spiritual life.

00:17:10.660 There's only power.

00:17:11.920 Everything that we believe in is power.

00:17:13.780 Femininity is power. 1.00

00:17:15.180 Masculinity, the constructs of power.

00:17:16.920 And so they can't say anything.

00:17:19.380 You can't, you can't say anything about what it is to be a human being.

00:17:23.020 You know, there is, we've talked about, there are no women characters. 1.00

00:17:26.640 I've always thought, what would it, what would happen if you told a story in which a woman character starts out as a powerful business woman and then says,

00:17:33.460 you know what, I don't want to do this.

00:17:34.920 I want to make a family.

00:17:36.180 I want a man to take care of me so I can do this.

00:17:38.980 You know, you can't make that movie.

00:17:40.360 And yet, that is the movie, right?

00:17:42.500 You can't make a movie where a guy comes to town and builds a business and he's the hero of the movie, you know, because it's all about power.

00:17:50.820 So if he has power, he must be the bad guy.

00:17:53.480 When you get rid of the spiritual life, there's only power.

00:17:56.440 And that's not a good story.

00:17:58.000 Wow.

00:17:58.560 You know, Yuri Bezmenov, who, I don't know if you're familiar with him, he was a KGB defector from the Soviet Union.

00:18:05.320 Yes.

00:18:05.980 In the, like, he has lectures on YouTube and this is, this is one of the things he talked about, how in the movies at a certain point, the police, the generals, the army, they all became the bad guys.

00:18:17.080 The criminal is the good one. 0.99

00:18:18.740 The KGB, not the KGB, the army colonel, he's always the dumb one, the whatever.

00:18:23.620 But I want to come back to the first of those two, Andrew, because what you're talking about is a perfect metaphor for politics more broadly. 0.99

00:18:33.000 Because you have an elite that is so up its own arse, it is completely out of touch with the ordinary person. 0.98

00:18:42.660 And so... 0.99

00:18:43.300 Which is typical, by the way.

00:18:44.660 Right.

00:18:45.020 Well, right.

00:18:45.780 And so that's why the movie, or the screenshots from, like, the Rotten Tomatoes ratings for comedy shows, like a Dave Chappelle latest show or a movie.

00:18:56.320 And now there are parodies on themselves where, like, critics 100%, you know, they like or dislike something and it's the opposite way for the ordinary person.

00:19:06.320 Right.

00:19:06.600 And it seems to me like it's not just about aging out, it's about a fundamental detachment of the people in a, like, in this case in Hollywood, from the people who they're supposed to provide services or content to or whatever it is.

00:19:20.900 Right. But this is how, this is how an art form dies.

00:19:24.240 Right.

00:19:24.600 It is a coagulation of power in a way.

00:19:27.140 You know, we're sitting a few miles from Washington.

00:19:30.140 In Washington, you can go to Georgetown, named after Washington, and walk down a street that used to be called Washington Street within sight of the Washington Monument in the middle of Washington, D.C.

00:19:38.500 So you get the picture that George Washington had a lot of, a big effect on this, on this country.

00:19:45.080 And the thing that is Washington's signal moment is having defeated the British in this, defeated the greatest empire on earth with this ragtag band of, you know, half starvelings wandering around in the snow. 1.00

00:20:01.120 You know, he's got, he's the king of a continent.

00:20:05.200 He can be the king of a continent.

00:20:07.060 There was nothing to stop him.

00:20:08.920 And he takes, he goes to somewhere in Maryland, Annapolis, and he turns over his sword to the civilian powers because he believed that much in the idea of the sovereign people.

00:20:20.820 That also, just like you said, has aged out so that at that moment, the most popular man in America was also the best man in America and probably one of the best men who ever lived.

00:20:32.560 You know, he was like, but he was also the most.

00:20:34.440 Now, like the people who are popular are completely detached from the power and the people who are powerful are completely detached from the people.

00:20:43.740 Um, the advent of, of Donald Trump, which even at the time I said, you know, this is a tragic moment when it takes a man like Donald Trump to speak for the people because everybody, and you saw the way the power just came to shut him down.

00:20:57.560 This is not about whether Trump's a nice person or a good person or anything like that. 0.92

00:21:01.060 It's simply what he represented to people for, for 50 years, for 50 years, the powers that be told people in this country, you stink. 0.99

00:21:09.100 Your country stinks, your religion stinks, your color, the color of your skin stinks, everything about your history. 1.00

00:21:14.420 It stinks, you know, like your God doesn't exist. 1.00

00:21:17.340 And then they thought, well, why did they elect Donald Trump?

00:21:20.180 It's like, you know, I was, my feeling was you're lucky they didn't show up outside your house with a torch and a pick pitchfork and toss you into the Potomac.

00:21:27.960 You know, this was the nice thing.

00:21:29.540 Electing Donald Trump was the nice thing to do.

00:21:31.400 So you're absolutely right.

00:21:33.000 I mean, I think that as, as people, people think their way out of morality, as they think their way out of your individuality, the importance of your individuality.

00:21:46.220 It's easy for me to feel my individuality and my reality, but you have to have to sort of really think about it to think, oh, you know, maybe that guy sitting across from me is just as important to himself as I am to me.

00:21:55.940 And that we're both equally important to God, then you have art, then you have the Enlightenment, then, you know, once you get that idea, then you have all the kind of beautiful things that Europe produced.

00:22:07.620 And once you lose that idea, you lose everything.

00:22:09.640 And I think you're absolutely right.

00:22:11.300 That kind of coagulation of power, money, political ideas in an aristocracy that does not care anymore for the people, that has no noblesse oblige, is the way a country ages out as well.

00:22:25.940 And you can see it, but going back to this idea of the movies, where the values that America used to embody and used to celebrate, if you think about the movies of the 80s and 90s, strength, resilience, independence, taking responsibility for yourself.

00:22:43.280 You look at the movies now, they just, it's unrecognizable.

00:22:47.740 You think to yourself, what message are you trying to send me?

00:22:50.920 How are you trying to inspire me?

00:22:52.500 Yes, well, that's, well, that is, you know, it's an amazing thing.

00:22:55.620 The people who built the movie industry, the people who made the movies I love and probably you love as well, many of them were immigrants, many of them were Jews.

00:23:03.120 And they loved this place.

00:23:05.320 They loved America.

00:23:06.540 I mean, because they'd seen what the rest of the world was like, especially the Jewish guys. 1.00

00:23:09.980 They knew exactly what they had going on in America.

00:23:12.560 And they were liberal in the sense that they wanted to be included.

00:23:16.800 But they were businessmen who thought their business depended on the audience liking what they did.

00:23:22.740 So if the audience was Christian, they'd give them Christians. 0.99

00:23:24.560 They have a scene where the Christian guy would be nice to a Jew.

00:23:26.900 And then, you know, that would give you a good feeling.

00:23:29.300 And they would say, yes, we're part of this country, too.

00:23:31.320 And everybody said, yes, you are.

00:23:32.500 So that was great stuff.

00:23:34.760 But they loved, they may not have loved the people individually, but they loved them as the audience.

00:23:40.340 They were their source of their income.

00:23:41.960 They were the source of their popularity, their power, everything.

00:23:44.760 And they served them.

00:23:45.660 They served the people.

00:23:47.720 Partially because the studio system was destroyed by the courts.

00:23:52.760 Essentially, the inmates took over the asylum in Hollywood.

00:23:55.900 This is part of the death throes of the industry.

00:24:00.980 But you had this moment when they lost the studio system.

00:24:04.400 Studios had a monopoly.

00:24:05.420 They had a monopoly on theaters.

00:24:06.820 The courts said you can't.

00:24:08.220 It was a trust-busting case, and they destroyed that.

00:24:11.620 So ultimately now, the power rested with actors and not with businessmen.

00:24:17.640 And so you have actors who are great businessmen, like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Cruise.

00:24:22.460 They're great businessmen.

00:24:23.340 But they're still not about the people.

00:24:26.300 Those are bad examples because Cruise and Schwarzenegger actually are about the people.

00:24:29.180 But so many of these guys, you know, you make a movie, you give an Oscar to a movie like, what was it called?

00:24:34.700 Moonlight?

00:24:35.240 It was an Oscar-winning film about a black gay guy discovering that he's gay, you know?

00:24:42.180 It wasn't a bad film, but it was like a slice of life about this, you know, like this.

00:24:46.700 And then you think about Gone with the Wind.

00:24:48.780 You think about the movies that have won Oscars that just gave you all of life.

00:24:53.520 You know, they gave you so many things.

00:24:54.740 Casablanca.

00:24:55.480 I mean, that movie, you can watch that movie today.

00:24:58.340 You can watch it twice in a row today, and it'll still break your heart. 0.75

00:25:01.660 Whereas, you know, a black gay guy in the ghetto is an interesting story. 0.99

00:25:06.560 I'll watch that once, you know?

00:25:08.080 But it's not telling me something that I need to know to get forward in life.

00:25:12.580 Whereas the fact that sometimes you have to give up the thing you love for a greater cause is something I needed to know.

00:25:18.340 The movies shaped, you know, it's funny, the arts shaped me, you know?

00:25:24.140 I wasn't happy at home.

00:25:26.100 I had a bad relationship with my dad.

00:25:28.200 I went to the, first to novels and then to movies for male role models.

00:25:32.660 And I found Bogart, John Wayne, these, you know, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, the great detective guy, Sam Spade.

00:25:43.720 And they taught me these simple things, you know?

00:25:47.300 They taught me how to walk.

00:25:48.960 They taught me, you know, what you would sacrifice for.

00:25:53.020 They taught me that you would sacrifice for something.

00:25:55.420 During the pandemic recently, there was this moment when Donald Trump got COVID and he came back to the White House and he said, now I've had COVID.

00:26:06.560 Don't be afraid.

00:26:07.860 Don't let it dominate your life.

00:26:09.660 And there is this montage that I play on my show from time to time of the news media coming out going, what a horrible thing.

00:26:16.020 Of course you should be afraid.

00:26:17.900 Of course this could kill you.

00:26:19.840 What's wrong?

00:26:20.460 And I don't know if I was the last person in America with all those movies in my head saying, wait a minute.

00:26:26.800 There are things that are more important than dying, you know?

00:26:30.840 Like slavery, like being, like losing your freedom, like losing your dignity, like, you know, losing the chance to be the thing that you want to be.

00:26:39.680 People have died for all those things through time.

00:26:42.200 And yet here was the news media, one of them after another, saying, no, no, no, that mean, awful Donald Trump, you know, you must be afraid.

00:26:50.720 You must be afraid.

00:26:51.500 And then they sit around going, why would anybody vote for Donald Trump?

00:26:54.500 You know, these are the things we learned from the movies.

00:26:57.720 And we learned them before that from, you know, British novels, I think, more than anything else.

00:27:02.180 And these are the things that are gone, in my opinion, from a world without God, because why would you risk your life if there's nothing beyond yourself?

00:27:14.280 You know, why would you risk your life for anything if there's nothing beyond yourself?

00:27:16.960 If something doesn't have a quality of the eternal to it, like freedom, like, you know, justice, why would you die for them if everything is just material, you know, you're here, you're gone, meanness?

00:27:30.620 And that's the reason I'm such a huge Arthur Miller fan, the playwright Arthur Miller.

00:27:34.540 And it's why, for me, the play The Crucible resonates harder than ever, especially now when you have Proctor and he gives John Proctor at the end when he's about to die and he refuses to give up anybody else.

00:27:51.080 And he says, but leave me my name.

00:27:52.600 That's all I have.

00:27:53.420 That's all any man has.

00:27:55.220 Yes.

00:27:55.440 And then think, you know, of Andrew Cuomo, who was made a hero.

00:27:58.720 He was the governor of New York.

00:28:00.140 Yeah.

00:28:00.560 And he was made into a hero, the anti-Trump.

00:28:02.640 Yeah.

00:28:03.000 And he said, you know, we have to do all this stuff because it's death and nothing is worth than death.

00:28:08.320 Death is death and death when you're dead, you're dead.

00:28:10.600 You know, you're just like, who are these people?

00:28:13.520 It's like, run and hide, everybody.

00:28:16.080 And, you know, this is kind of the instrument of power.

00:28:20.360 Everything is a catastrophe.

00:28:21.480 Everything is an emergency.

00:28:22.760 The climate is an emergency.

00:28:24.120 You go like, you know, it's a little warm today.

00:28:26.600 Oh, my, it's an emergency.

00:28:27.820 Give me more power.

00:28:28.520 You know, racism is an emergency.

00:28:30.400 Racism is a health emergency.

00:28:32.640 You know, give us more power.

00:28:34.180 COVID is an emergency.

00:28:34.980 Give us more power.

00:28:35.640 It's always back to that.

00:28:36.740 You know, it's always basically they're going to take care of you.

00:28:39.660 Let me ask you a question I don't like asking because I don't like hearing the answer.

00:28:43.500 But if Hollywood is aged out and comedy is aged out and if we're seeing the same thing in Western political systems, is the West coming to an end?

00:28:57.700 Well, it's a good question.

00:29:00.020 The West has come to an end before and it came slowly back.

00:29:03.880 My guess is I don't think so.

00:29:07.900 Something is coming to an end.

00:29:09.080 And when things come to an end, it's a very dangerous moment.

00:29:13.680 The baby boom generation is dying. 1.00

00:29:16.120 There's no generation to take their place.

00:29:20.040 I did a show recently about King Lear, which is about the same situation.

00:29:23.160 The old man is dying.

00:29:24.180 There's nobody to take his place because they haven't learned the things you need to learn to take the last generation's place. 0.99

00:29:33.000 The post-World War II order is dying.

00:29:36.440 The post-Cold War order is dying.

00:29:39.400 A lot of stuff is coming to an end right now.

00:29:42.300 And in times like that, certain things happen.

00:29:45.420 There's gender confusion.

00:29:46.860 Always.

00:29:47.400 Always gender confusion in moments like this. 0.52

00:29:49.720 There's the threat of war because there's no common ground.

00:29:54.900 Right now in America, we have no common ground.

00:29:56.860 There's no common ground between left and right.

00:29:59.200 There's plenty of common ground among the people.

00:30:00.820 Like I would say about 70% of the people probably agree on 70% of the ideas.

00:30:05.380 But among the loudest people, there's no common ground.

00:30:10.060 And that could lead to actual shooting war.

00:30:15.520 However, I think that the foundation on which America stands and the alliance that it has built with both what was once great Europe

00:30:28.040 and some of Israel in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I think there's a lot of energy still in there, political energy and military energy and possibly financial energy.

00:30:41.100 And if I had to predict something, what I would say, I'm much more afraid of losing the American Republic than I am of losing America.

00:30:51.340 So remember, after the Roman Republic fell, the Roman Empire still lasted another 400 years.

00:30:57.460 It lasted as long as it had already lasted.

00:31:00.440 So I'm fearful for our republic because it's not working.

00:31:05.800 It has ceased to work the way it's supposed to operate.

00:31:08.020 But I still feel, you know, China, I don't think so.

00:31:13.600 People keep telling me, oh, China's the future.

00:31:15.480 I don't think so.

00:31:16.460 I think it's a stagnant, it's an already dying society.

00:31:20.000 I don't think you can have a free market without political freedom.

00:31:23.020 I think they've made a mistake.

00:31:24.280 I think they're going to age out too.

00:31:25.580 You know, I think that the West still has something in it and that what we're really seeing now, I mean, one of the things that happened in Rome, like if you were in Rome, you were thinking, where are all the Romans?

00:31:37.320 All these immigrants are coming in. 1.00

00:31:38.560 This is bad.

00:31:39.200 Romans, Romans.

00:31:40.080 But actually, that's the sign of an idea spreading.

00:31:44.160 All these people who are shouting at us that they're not being treated fairly are shouting British ideas at us.

00:31:48.960 You know, it's like you don't go you don't go to like Africa and say, you know, we want to be equal because that doesn't mean anything in Africa.

00:31:56.880 You know, it only means something here because we're all British.

00:31:59.220 That's that's why.

00:32:00.160 So what's happening really is we're bringing in the people of the world.

00:32:03.460 We're anglicizing them.

00:32:04.660 That's our job.

00:32:05.340 I think I think that's just the same way the Roman job was to spread the ideals of Greece.

00:32:09.700 I think the American job is to spread the ideals of England.

00:32:12.300 I think that's actually happening.

00:32:13.540 And I think that there are probably 100 good years left to the Republic or 100 years left to the Republic.

00:32:19.260 They may not be that good.

00:32:21.160 And then and then I think something else will come, you know, but I think it will still be Western for a long time.

00:32:28.220 That's my guess.

00:32:29.580 I say that we could all blow up as we're speaking here.

00:32:32.160 But that's my that's my guess.

00:32:33.360 You know, I see when I talk when I talk to Andrew, I enjoy it so much because when I went into the arts,

00:32:43.540 I expected it to be full of people like you, people questioning, people opening, who are open.

00:32:50.000 We could debate.

00:32:50.960 We could discuss.

00:32:52.000 You disagree.

00:32:52.920 You see yourself as a conservative.

00:32:54.920 I remember you when we were having a conversation, you looking at me and going, you're a conservative.

00:32:58.960 You just don't know it yet, which is what I get from everybody when I come here.

00:33:03.940 But the arts isn't full of people like you.

00:33:07.260 It isn't full of people who are interesting and interested and curious and open to new ideas.

00:33:15.100 Why is that?

00:33:15.940 What's gone wrong?

00:33:16.780 You know, it's a really good observation.

00:33:19.160 When I when I was coming up, I was, you know, I fell in with some really talented writers, some of whom went on to have really great careers.

00:33:28.140 And the discussions that we would have were fantastic, you know, talking about what is happening to storytelling, where we wanted to take storytelling, what storytelling meant to us.

00:33:37.400 Within years, we had all done fairly well.

00:33:39.960 And we were talking about who's your agent?

00:33:41.820 How did you get that?

00:33:42.380 Why did you get that deal?

00:33:43.200 I didn't get that deal.

00:33:43.920 Nobody said, you know, and I thought, I hate these people.

00:33:46.060 I'm not talking to people.

00:33:47.080 And one of the things that was kind of lovely about becoming a writing, thinking conservative was suddenly I saw that again when we were building the Daily Wire.

00:33:58.500 The Daily Wire started.

00:33:59.500 It was me and Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boring.

00:34:02.360 And soon Michael Knowles came in and we did nothing but fight with each other.

00:34:08.500 We fought so much that sometimes the women I remember once I went home and one of the women called me up and said, are you and Ben OK?

00:34:15.440 And I said, yeah, that's how we talked to one another because we were screaming and, you know, but it was totally friendly.

00:34:21.220 It was just we were just absolutely.

00:34:23.880 And and something about success takes that out of people.

00:34:27.740 You know, they they want to hold on to what they've got and they lose that.

00:34:30.740 I've never lost it.

00:34:32.240 I mean, this is why I'm here.

00:34:33.520 I'm here to talk and debate and hear things.

00:34:36.120 I'm here to be proved wrong.

00:34:37.640 You know, I mean, I being proved wrong doesn't mean anything to me because it means I've now learned something new.

00:34:43.460 You know, I've actually broken through a wall, a cage that I was in.

00:34:47.260 But this it's it's a remarkable thing because one of the drawbacks to this Internet culture is that if you're wrong, people are like you were wrong.

00:34:56.920 You know, yeah.

00:34:58.000 You know, that happens to me sometimes.

00:35:00.240 It may happen again before I'm done, you know.

00:35:02.520 But but to me, that's that is that's the glory of of doing what we do, that you can that you can grow and you can change and that the books that you write at 50 are not the books you write at 30 and the books that you write at 70 shouldn't be the books you write at 52.

00:35:17.920 You know, you should get deeper and richer.

00:35:19.460 And that means leaving things behind.

00:35:21.920 But you're absolutely right.

00:35:23.360 We are in a culture that has shut that.

00:35:25.240 First, we were in a culture, I just saw it as people got rich, they started to stop doing it.

00:35:30.760 That may just be part of nature, you know.

00:35:33.740 But also, we're in a culture that doesn't allow you to do that. 0.98

00:35:37.040 Like, you know, there's a there's a problem in this country where I think 50 percent of the murders in this country are committed by black people. 1.00

00:35:44.580 Now, to me, that's a really big question. 0.96

00:35:48.100 Why is that?

00:35:49.060 Now, I have a theory about it.

00:35:50.140 My theory is it has to do with the programs that the left instituted during the 60s, 70s and 80s that made them a dependent class, turned blacks into a dependent class. 0.89

00:35:59.640 But Charles Murray is a terrific thinker and he believes it's genetics.

00:36:03.400 And of course, then the left has their theory that it's all racism and they're, you know, it's we we did this to them.

00:36:11.060 You can't have that conversation.

00:36:12.460 You know, for saying what I even for saying what I just said, I'm a racist.

00:36:16.700 Oh, I flinched, even though I know the statistics and I've listened to Larry Elder and Thomas all talk about it and I've looked at the arguments.

00:36:22.360 I flinch when you say it.

00:36:23.340 Yeah, because that's the culture we're in.

00:36:25.260 I brought up Charles Murray at a dinner party in L.A. and somebody said, isn't he that racist?

00:36:29.700 You know, he's he's not a racist at all, but he does believe in genetics more than I do.

00:36:33.520 I'm not like a big.

00:36:34.360 He could be wrong.

00:36:35.160 He could be totally wrong, you know, but I I had him on the show.

00:36:38.580 I wanted to hear what he had to say and he made a you know, we had a really interesting conversation.

00:36:42.460 And I pushed back against him.

00:36:44.540 He was absolutely civilized and, you know, pushed back against me.

00:36:48.060 It was it was great stuff.

00:36:50.240 But we have now shut that down.

00:36:52.220 And that, too, is contributing to the atrophy of the arts, because what are the arts?

00:36:57.240 But, you know, that kind of open mindedness.

00:36:59.400 I mean, you can't even write a story.

00:37:01.620 You can't even write a story if you don't have an open mind, because your story has to mean things that you didn't mean it to me.

00:37:06.840 For a story to come to life, you have to let it set it free.

00:37:09.560 You know, you can't just say, oh, this this has to happen to that character because I'm a you know, I'm a capitalist and I don't want the communists to win.

00:37:17.540 You can't write a story like that.

00:37:18.700 You have to let the story tell itself, you know.

00:37:20.600 And all of that stuff requires a certain fearlessness that artists are renowned for but have no longer got.

00:37:29.500 You know, you can.

00:37:32.540 I mean, I have I'm writing this new series of mystery stories and and I have a new one.

00:37:40.480 The third one is coming out in October at the end of October.

00:37:43.760 And I handed it in and had a glancing reference to transgenderism, maybe five lines.

00:37:50.840 So you have to take this out.

00:37:52.400 I said, I will pull that book before I take out anything for political reason.

00:37:56.600 You know, you know, what am I?

00:37:58.140 The New York Times is going to give me a bad review.

00:38:00.180 I've said things about The New York Times.

00:38:01.760 I think they may show up at my house one day.

00:38:05.140 No, you know, that that's insane.

00:38:07.900 It's insane to have to kowtow to, you know, a bunch of basically adolescents who've been taught something in college and don't know enough to disagree.

00:38:18.080 You know, I mean, that's it's very stultifying.

00:38:21.360 And it's also, as you say, it's it's it's it's dull.

00:38:25.340 You know, I want to be with people who disagree and are fearlessly disagree and and don't call each other names, you know, when when they say something.

00:38:33.760 And Andrew, forgive me for saying this, but what you're describing to me are old school liberal values.

00:38:39.820 Yes.

00:38:40.400 So this is what I find mind boggling.

00:38:43.060 I'm 40 years old when I was a young guy watching comedy and being inspired by it.

00:38:48.880 The people who were really pushing back against the dogma of their day were people like George Carlin and Bill Hicks, whose targets were religious conservatives.

00:38:57.920 Right.

00:38:58.100 So if you talk about stultifying, they were the ones, you know, Bill Hicks, last letterman appearance was wasn't broadcast for, I think, over a decade because he made fun of religion.

00:39:07.000 Right.

00:39:08.020 So when I came into adulthood, it was conservatives, at least that was kind of the way it was presented, who were the people who were refusing to have the conversation.

00:39:18.800 Right.

00:39:18.900 And it was the liberals who were let's let's have that robust debate that you're talking about.

00:39:23.900 That was the lifeblood of my my young adulthood.

00:39:26.400 That was what I loved.

00:39:27.440 I cherished that.

00:39:28.760 So what happened?

00:39:29.840 How like you?

00:39:31.200 You talked about it in your own life.

00:39:32.580 You were this, you know, liberal, went over to the UK, came back conservative.

00:39:36.080 And we are neither of us is conservative, but we find ourselves mostly talking to people who are in the center or right of center.

00:39:43.980 Right.

00:39:44.340 Because the left does the six degrees of white supremacy thing where if you talk to this guy and he sat next to that guy whose dog, blah, blah, blah, then you can't, you know, you can't talk to them anymore.

00:39:54.900 How how how how are the three of us sitting here?

00:39:57.280 Well, because when I said to you that, you know, Francis, that you're a conservative, I said this to Mary Harrington, who also tells me she's on the left.

00:40:05.940 But but there is no left.

00:40:07.140 There is no, you know, in the in the 50s, I think it was a famous literary critic named Lionel Trilling said there is no such thing as an intellectual conservative.

00:40:16.500 There are no conservative ideas.

00:40:17.840 There are only conservative gestures.

00:40:19.580 You know, it's a snobby, snooty thing to say.

00:40:21.700 But he had a point.

00:40:22.800 Now that's true of the left, but it's not true of the right.

00:40:25.220 And on the left, there are there are no ideas.

00:40:27.980 There are no ideas on the left.

00:40:29.140 I mean, you know, their their ideas are like, yeah, you can print money because that's fine. 0.99

00:40:32.960 And, you know, you can't arrest black people because they're brown. 0.97

00:40:35.760 They have this color skin. 1.00

00:40:36.960 And, you know, you're white and therefore you're evil. 1.00

00:40:39.660 You know, those aren't ideas. 0.98

00:40:40.560 Those are gestures.

00:40:41.280 Those are kind of virtue signaling movements of the of the chin.

00:40:45.980 But they're not like something that you can debate in any serious way.

00:40:49.260 A man can become a woman, you know, as if. 0.96

00:40:51.940 What are you even talking about on the right?

00:40:55.620 Basically, the right now contains those people like me.

00:40:59.920 I mean, I always say this.

00:41:01.040 I always say I'm a conservative because I'm a liberal.

00:41:03.020 I'm a conservative because I want people to be free.

00:41:05.380 I want other people to be able to have the life that they want to have, not the life I want them to have.

00:41:10.800 I know how everybody should live.

00:41:12.140 You know, I could explain to you.

00:41:13.720 But it's none of my business.

00:41:15.180 You know, you know, that actually is my religion.

00:41:18.200 That's actually in the Gospels.

00:41:19.840 You know, leave people alone.

00:41:20.920 Don't judge people.

00:41:21.800 You know, let them do what they're going to do.

00:41:23.220 Let them work out their salvation with fear and trembling.

00:41:25.600 That attitude is now a right-wing attitude.

00:41:29.760 So if you have that attitude, you are somewhere on the right.

00:41:32.960 How did that happen?

00:41:34.420 Well, I think it happened because ideas, first of all, follow themselves out to their furthest extreme.

00:41:42.500 And the idea that the government should, is the solution to problems, has followed itself out to its furthest extreme.

00:41:52.680 But also, power corrupts.

00:41:55.540 And the left has so much power.

00:41:59.220 You know, this is what killed me during the Trump administration.

00:42:01.780 They called themselves the resistance.

00:42:03.000 So I thought, so you've got the deep state, you know, the deep government, the permanent government.

00:42:08.220 You've got the media.

00:42:10.380 You've got the entertainment and the news media.

00:42:12.920 And the big tech.

00:42:13.560 You've got the academies.

00:42:14.320 You've got now the corporations.

00:42:15.920 You've got big tech.

00:42:17.020 What are you resisting against?

00:42:18.180 I thought, oh, yeah, you're resisting the people.

00:42:19.980 You're resisting the ordinary guy.

00:42:21.900 So, you know, the idea of the left has played itself out.

00:42:24.640 And as I keep telling my friends on the right, if we come back and win, the power will become corrupt because power corrupts.

00:42:32.300 I mean, that was the whole point of the country.

00:42:34.580 The whole point of this country was to create a sort of Rube Goldberg machine that every time somebody came too powerful, somebody else knocked them down.

00:42:42.900 You know, oh, you know, you've got the states.

00:42:44.660 We've got the federal government.

00:42:45.800 You've got the courts.

00:42:46.700 We, you know, we've got the states.

00:42:49.000 Whatever it was, there was always some power center to take it away.

00:42:52.180 But beginning with the turn of the century, beginning really with Woodrow Wilson, the federal government started to become so powerful.

00:43:02.000 And that is the left wing's dream to have a federal government that can tell everybody what to do.

00:43:06.920 So they've got, they won.

00:43:08.280 They won.

00:43:08.860 And when you win, you lose.

00:43:10.720 You know, when you win, your ideas stagnate.

00:43:14.560 You know, there's no one they can't crush.

00:43:17.160 There's no one they can't destroy.

00:43:18.620 There's no idea they can't demonize.

00:43:21.000 You know, there's one, now that's not quite true, but for the last, say, 30 years, there's been one conservative news station, Fox News.

00:43:31.640 And all you heard was, oh, Fox News.

00:43:33.860 Oh, my God.

00:43:34.640 You know, you would say to people, like, I heard yesterday on Fox News, oh, Fox News.

00:43:37.820 Oh, no, don't tell me about Fox News.

00:43:39.340 You think, like, there's one, one news station?

00:43:41.860 And that's the problem with the country is that one group of people.

00:43:44.440 You know, now it's Tucker Carlson.

00:43:46.520 You know, Tucker Carlson, you know, has, I don't always agree with Tucker Carlson, but he's like, he's like, you mentioned his name and it's like you mentioned Satan.

00:43:53.420 They're so powerful.

00:43:54.640 They can demonize anybody.

00:43:55.880 They can silence anybody.

00:43:56.980 They can cancel anybody.

00:43:58.300 So why should they discuss things?

00:44:00.360 Why should they discuss anything with anybody?

00:44:02.560 And so that, to me, is death.

00:44:04.020 If it's all about power.

00:44:05.200 It's all about power.

00:44:06.040 You know, and we have forgotten, if you go back and read the Federalist Papers where they're arguing for the Constitution against the people who didn't want, who thought the federal government was going to get too strong, they only turned out to be right several hundred years later.

00:44:22.960 All they talk about is power.

00:44:24.780 All those papers, you know, this is Madison and, you know, all these guys, and all they talk about is how do we keep people from getting too much power?

00:44:31.760 And we have forgotten that that's even a problem.

00:44:35.420 So when you say, when you say, for instance, you know, we've got all these shootings in this country, these mass shootings, we should get rid of people's guns.

00:44:45.180 Nobody, even on the right, people don't think to say, well, isn't that giving the federal government a monopoly on violence?

00:44:51.240 And isn't that giving them too much power?

00:44:53.280 You know, the answer is always no, guns save lives, guns, you know, protect us.

00:44:58.720 We need guns for home protection.

00:45:00.100 That's not why they gave us guns.

00:45:01.140 They gave us guns so the states would have the power to form militias to fight the army of the federal government.

00:45:06.440 That is why they gave us guns.

00:45:07.880 I tried to explain this to a conservative British broadcaster, and he looked at me like I was a savage, you know.

00:45:13.340 And I said, I get it.

00:45:14.700 You know, I don't want people getting shot.

00:45:16.480 But that's why we have guns.

00:45:17.800 Are we not going to at least debate the real reason why Americans are supposed to carry guns?

00:45:22.100 When you say, oh, here's a poor person, I'm going to start a federal program to save that person.

00:45:28.860 My question is, isn't that a temptation?

00:45:31.480 You know, aren't we giving you money so that now you can buy that guy's vote, essentially?

00:45:36.700 You know, I don't want people to be poor.

00:45:39.340 I want, you know, I want charity to flow in this country.

00:45:42.000 When people are rich, I want the charity to flow to those who are disadvantaged.

00:45:45.400 But don't we even debate how power collects, how power follows money?

00:45:50.780 Are we not even going to talk about that?

00:45:52.340 It's all about power when it comes to politics.

00:45:54.560 That's what politics is.

00:45:56.200 And we don't even talk about it anymore.

00:45:57.900 The idea that, you know, obviously if a right winger starts to do something, the press will gang up.

00:46:04.980 It's always a fascist.

00:46:05.900 You know, he disagreed with me. 1.00

00:46:06.920 He's a fascist.

00:46:07.860 But if the left does something, no matter how much power, a great example. 0.98

00:46:12.580 Recently, they indicted Donald Trump on an absolutely nonsense charge.

00:46:16.120 Absolute nonsense.

00:46:17.080 Complete abuse of power by the New York DA.

00:46:21.320 All we heard from the left was, no one's above the law.

00:46:25.360 No one's above the law.

00:46:26.200 I kept saying, what law was he indicted?

00:46:28.200 I don't know.

00:46:28.660 But all right, no one's above the law.

00:46:30.640 Then the Supreme Court made a decision that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, our left-wing firebrand, you know, congresswoman, didn't like. 1.00

00:46:39.020 She said, well, we should ignore the courts. 0.83

00:46:40.280 So no one's above the law, but they have so much power that no one's above the law if you're a conservative.

00:46:46.800 Well, you saw it during COVID.

00:46:47.900 You mentioned it earlier, right?

00:46:49.000 We saw it in the UK.

00:46:50.380 Everyone must stay at home for the safety of everyone.

00:46:52.840 BLM happens. 1.00

00:46:53.560 Everyone must go out into the streets because protesting is a health intervention.

00:46:56.920 Right, right. 1.00

00:46:57.140 But yeah, but if you protest the lockdowns, then you're right-wing scum and you should have your face caked in. 1.00

00:47:01.660 That's the thing. 1.00

00:47:02.420 That's power.

00:47:03.220 And when you have that kind of power, you don't argue with that.

00:47:05.200 Why would you argue when you can just silence people and arrest people?

00:47:08.060 You know, and then your ideas die and you have no ideas.

00:47:11.540 And that's basically where the left is now.

00:47:13.720 I mean, they are a rotten branch.

00:47:16.780 And that's why, I mean, everything is, what's the word?

00:47:21.440 Everything is circumstantial.

00:47:22.860 So we have circumstances here that may make it difficult to win power back from them.

00:47:28.380 But they're just a rotten branch.

00:47:30.860 And eventually they're going to just break off because they have nothing to say except give me more power.

00:47:35.040 You know, give me more power.

00:47:35.880 It's an emergency.

00:47:36.680 Give me power.

00:47:37.240 You know, the more I spend time in this country, and I love America so much, I really do.

00:47:43.360 And I hope that I one day come to live here.

00:47:45.580 It seems to me that America, the thing that set it apart from every other country, is that it was forged with rebel spirit.

00:47:56.640 And I look at it now, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of that spirit left.

00:48:01.940 Is that part of the problem?

00:48:02.980 Yeah, you know, even the right has fallen afoul of, has tripped over its own ideas.

00:48:13.340 You know, when the right, Ronald Reagan gave us 25 good years.

00:48:18.680 And that, what he did got translated into business is everything.

00:48:22.760 The market is everything.

00:48:23.700 That's not what Reagan believed, but that's what the Reaganites believed.

00:48:27.180 And so we had this market, market, market.

00:48:28.520 They would talk about Ayn Rand, who to my mind is just a sociopath, you know.

00:48:32.460 I mean, just not to mention a terrible, terrible writer.

00:48:36.780 But that's kind of empty, too, you know.

00:48:39.960 Like this whole notion that some system is going to take care of us just doesn't work.

00:48:47.620 I think we definitely need, there's a lot of things we need, and I hesitate to say to Englishmen that one of them is a rebirth of religion.

00:48:55.940 But it's true.

00:48:57.380 I mean, if we don't at least start talking as if we live, we're spirits instead of animals, I think that we're finished, you know.

00:49:07.200 We're finished.

00:49:07.760 We can't make the arguments we need to make in a materialist way.

00:49:12.680 You know, I forgot, what was your original question?

00:49:14.660 It was about the rebel spirit.

00:49:16.040 Oh, the rebel spirit.

00:49:16.740 Yes, well, that is also this question.

00:49:20.920 Well, it does go back to materialism because if you're afraid to die, if everything comes down to I must save my life at all costs, how can you be a rebel?

00:49:29.960 Why would you be a rebel?

00:49:31.360 Against how powerful would you be?

00:49:34.280 How powerful, how much would you go against the power to say what you have to say?

00:49:39.080 New York, I lived in New York during one of the worst times in the 70s, 1970s.

00:49:44.580 You could hardly go out without, you know, dodging bullets.

00:49:47.340 I mean, it was really something.

00:49:48.640 I used to go to work at 3 in the morning, and I would run from my apartment to stand in front of a marketplace where there were prostitutes because I figured if there were prostitutes, the mob wouldn't let there be violence. 0.85

00:50:00.700 And I was the only guy who, in my newsroom, who didn't get mugged because that's what I would do every morning.

00:50:06.840 It was terrible, but it was tough.

00:50:08.980 I mean, New Yorkers were tough, and they were, they really would not kowtow to anybody.

00:50:15.120 When COVID came, you know, my daughter still lives in New York.

00:50:18.620 I'd go and visit, and everybody was like, oh, you're not wearing a mask, you know, don't come near me.

00:50:22.600 They were terrified.

00:50:23.720 They were terrified.

00:50:25.120 So something, you know, maybe it's wealth, maybe it's too much wealth, maybe it's too much safety.

00:50:31.040 You know, this is a wealthy, safe country in a lot of ways, but also this kind of idea that death is the end.

00:50:38.420 You know, this, this, this flesh is all you've got, and you've got to take care of it, you know, because now we can be so healthy for so long.

00:50:45.560 We mustn't sacrifice all those wonderful years that we've got.

00:50:49.260 You know, I don't want to die.

00:50:50.400 Nobody wants to die, but like that you must believe in something bigger than yourself.

00:50:54.860 We have become cowardly, haven't we?

00:50:56.520 Because, you know, people talk about cancel culture, and, you know, people shouldn't be canceled.

00:50:59.840 I agree.

00:51:00.720 But, you know, people say to us, oh, you're so brave.

00:51:03.240 You know, you stood up to the comedy industry and started.

00:51:07.260 What are you talking about?

00:51:09.100 What's brave about it?

00:51:10.260 I said this, you know, when I got thrown out of Hollywood, we had to sell our house.

00:51:13.380 We were living in one of the nicest areas in the country.

00:51:16.040 We had to sell our house because my income went from sometimes seven figures to nothing like that.

00:51:21.740 I mean, just gone, you know.

00:51:23.520 I never lost a moment's sleep over it.

00:51:25.680 I mean, I wasn't happy about it.

00:51:27.320 But I kept saying to people, you know, people are in Afghanistan.

00:51:30.260 They're having their legs blown off.

00:51:31.460 Like 18-year-old kids are being blown to kingdom come, fighting for something that they think has to be fought for.

00:51:38.160 I can't work in Hollywood.

00:51:39.500 You know, really?

00:51:41.560 Yeah.

00:51:41.980 Am I that scared?

00:51:43.080 You know, and like, believe me, as you say, we're not heroes.

00:51:46.680 I mean, those guys were heroes.

00:51:47.860 You know, we're not.

00:51:48.760 But we're men.

00:51:51.340 I mean, we have to stand for something.

00:51:53.560 You have to be somebody, you know.

00:51:56.020 And so, yeah, that has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

00:51:59.720 This idea that some, you know, it's funny.

00:52:03.380 Like, my career has gone well and I've been really thrilled.

00:52:06.960 But it wasn't until I got to the Daily Wire that I became a celebrity.

00:52:10.580 That I became somebody who gets recognized.

00:52:12.640 And I remember, and so I was old, you know.

00:52:14.580 And I remember walking into a hotel and being mobbed like a rock star because I was talking politics on the internet.

00:52:23.060 You know, just like pressed to the wall by like 100 kids.

00:52:26.880 And I thought, well, if this had happened to me when I was 20, I would be like genuinely lost. 0.97

00:52:33.120 I mean, I would have genuinely become a fool, you know. 0.84

00:52:36.000 But now I think like, you know, it comes, it goes, you know. 0.79

00:52:39.860 But this has become so important to people that once they get their hands on it, they don't want to let go of it.

00:52:44.740 And they become afraid.

00:52:45.780 Yeah.

00:52:45.940 And the idea, oh, my God, I might be canceled.

00:52:47.600 And you see it.

00:52:48.280 It's so pitiful.

00:52:49.520 It breaks my heart to see people come out and say, you know, something so obvious like a man can't become a woman, you know.

00:52:56.380 Somebody, I can't remember who it was, just said, J.K. Rowling is right.

00:52:59.700 Within minutes, she apologized.

00:53:01.500 Like, oh, I'm so sorry.

00:53:03.040 You know, that kind of Soviet show trial thing.

00:53:05.740 Like, I'm so sorry.

00:53:06.680 I'm a sinner.

00:53:07.400 I'm, you know, please.

00:53:08.280 I, I, Comrade Kysin in this, yeah.

00:53:11.320 You know, when someone has really messed up because they take a screenshot of an apology and then pin it to their Twitter.

00:53:18.140 Yeah, you have to zoom in.

00:53:21.840 That's the moment, you know. 1.00

00:53:23.960 They really fucked up. 0.98

00:53:25.820 Yeah, they have really messed this one up. 0.99

00:53:28.420 I, I have reached a point where, like, I don't even apologize for things that I should apologize for.

00:53:33.440 You know, like, I mean, there are things you really should apologize for.

00:53:36.300 But at this point, it's just blood in the water to these people, you know.

00:53:39.780 I mean, yeah.

00:53:40.900 No, you have to apologize when you've done something wrong.

00:53:43.000 Of course.

00:53:43.460 We have to model that, I think, more than anything.

00:53:46.420 Don't you think part of the problem with the arts is, to me, the artists, the true artists are the rebels.

00:53:53.600 And there's no rebellion anymore.

00:53:55.120 If you think about the great writers, they were the rebels.

00:54:00.200 The comedians were the rebels.

00:54:01.300 The actors, who did we fall in love with?

00:54:03.160 The Jimmy Deans, the Jack Nicholson's, the Marlon Brando's.

00:54:06.740 These weren't people accepted by society.

00:54:10.160 No, that's true.

00:54:11.280 That's true.

00:54:11.720 And they represented that force.

00:54:13.540 Certainly, since the Romantic era, that was the idea of the artist.

00:54:18.060 The artist was a special thing.

00:54:19.940 He was, you know, it almost was a replacement of the priest.

00:54:22.500 But, you know, rebellion, yes.

00:54:26.060 But I don't think it's necessarily that rebellion is the key thing.

00:54:31.540 I think it's freedom.

00:54:32.960 It's freedom.

00:54:33.720 Because even a conservative, an artist who is writing for the conservative cause, a trollop, say, you know.

00:54:41.400 Somebody who's actually more, who likes the established things than the traditional things.

00:54:46.760 He's got to be free to say that in exactly the way he means to say it.

00:54:51.360 And so, I don't require of an artist that he rebel because, first of all, rebellion now has become just virtue signaling.

00:54:58.580 I mean, people rebel.

00:54:59.320 Like I said, they call themselves the resistance, but they're really the power.

00:55:04.720 But I don't think rebellion is the thing I'm looking for.

00:55:06.980 I'm looking for freedom.

00:55:08.020 You know, talking about J.K. Rowling, when I read, I'm not a child, so I didn't read all of the Harry Potter books.

00:55:16.100 But I read a couple of them just to sample them because my kids were so into them.

00:55:19.320 I thought, yeah, there's someone who is free with her creativity.

00:55:22.840 She is being generous.

00:55:23.780 She's just saying, I'm not saving this for the next page.

00:55:26.160 I'm throwing it on this page.

00:55:27.260 I'm getting, you know, that kind of liberty that you see in genuine artists.

00:55:30.560 And I think it's liberty more than rebellion.

00:55:32.360 I think it becomes rebellion because the minute power sees liberty, it seeks to crush it.

00:55:38.300 So it becomes rebellion, you know, so you have to stand where you're going to stand.

00:55:41.780 But, you know, I think of Shakespeare sometimes and sometimes the great movies that were made during the Hayes office years.

00:55:48.960 And they didn't necessarily rebel against the power.

00:55:51.820 They subverted it by being free.

00:55:53.520 You know, they just subverted it by saying things, you know, that you should have gotten arrested for, but you didn't because they didn't say it in a rebellious way.

00:56:01.060 But they were free.

00:56:02.400 And I think that that's what artists have to be.

00:56:04.520 And I think, you know, when you were talking about the fact that we're having a kind of conversation that people don't have, that's what it is.

00:56:11.660 We're free, you know.

00:56:12.820 And in order to be free, you have to understand that somebody is going to want to come and get you for it and do it anyway.

00:56:17.840 You're going to lose some money.

00:56:18.720 You're going to lose some friends.

00:56:19.540 You're going to lose some, you may be thrown off Twitter, you know, all those things.

00:56:24.540 You know, that is what freedom is.

00:56:26.520 Freedom is not being afraid of losing those things.

00:56:29.560 And once you become afraid, you're not free anymore.

00:56:31.880 Or maybe you are afraid, but you do it anyway.

00:56:34.740 Well, yes, of course.

00:56:35.740 That's real courage.

00:56:36.560 Yeah.

00:56:36.880 Yeah.

00:56:37.280 I mean.

00:56:37.720 Yeah.

00:56:38.600 Andrew, a couple of questions before we wrap up.

00:56:41.460 Given everything we've talked about, Dr. Sebastian Gorka was sitting where you're sitting a while back.

00:56:47.560 We left it exactly as it is, just for you.

00:56:54.560 He's very big on Trump.

00:56:56.020 And you've talked about how it was a sad day that Trump had to come along.

00:57:00.360 And you're not on the Trump train now.

00:57:02.680 Yeah, that's right.

00:57:03.940 I said from the very beginning, I think that the two, I have to say that I think the two people who got Trump exactly right were me and Victor Davis Hanson.

00:57:10.520 And I think I said it first, but Victor wrote a great book about it, so he wins.

00:57:15.220 But like, but still, it was that he was a tragic figure from the start.

00:57:19.280 And he was a tragic figure because the very things that made him great also made him wrong.

00:57:25.140 And also were going to destroy him.

00:57:27.060 I mean, that's what tragedy is.

00:57:28.140 The things that made him worth seeing and worth supporting were ultimately going to destroy him.

00:57:34.760 I think he lost that second election.

00:57:36.600 I said he was going to, I knew he was going to about two years in because we had reached a point where it took a loud mouth without many of the traits that we think of as common decency to say the simplest truth.

00:57:55.980 You know, I mean, that was the thing that was beautiful about Donald Trump.

00:57:58.900 He would say things that could easily be interpreted as racist.

00:58:02.960 He was not a racist.

00:58:03.700 I don't think he, I don't think he was a racist at all, but he would say things that could easily be interpreted as racist because he didn't care if they called him racist.

00:58:10.220 But he also treated people badly.

00:58:12.460 He fired men who deserve, you couldn't disagree with them, you can say they're doing a bad job, but he fired men who were deserving of respect in public.

00:58:19.740 Or he, you know, it was like he pulled the rug out from under them.

00:58:22.740 He called people names.

00:58:24.040 He made up names, which is an adolescent thing to do.

00:58:26.200 It all worked.

00:58:27.100 You know, I got it.

00:58:28.300 I understood it.

00:58:29.580 The minute I saw the people react to it, I didn't understand it at first, but the minute I saw the people react to it, I thought, oh, he's speaking for them.

00:58:35.840 He is the voice of the people.

00:58:37.180 But at the same time he was the voice of the people, he was also this narcissistic guy without very good manners.

00:58:42.760 And I think that that's what killed him. 0.90

00:58:44.240 I think it'll kill him again if he runs.

00:58:45.860 I think he's the only, the only Republican who could possibly lose to Joe Biden.

00:58:52.140 He might not.

00:58:52.880 He might beat him.

00:58:53.880 But I think he's the only one who could lose to him.

00:58:55.840 So you're a DeSantis guy?

00:58:56.860 Yeah, I like DeSantis.

00:58:59.460 He hasn't been tested on the national scene, you know, but I really like his fighting attitude.

00:59:05.380 And as Gorka will tell you, he wouldn't exist if it weren't for Trump.

00:59:09.600 Everything good in the Republican Party has come down from Trump.

00:59:13.020 He recreated the Republican Party.

00:59:15.040 The guts they sometimes show now, which they never did before, the unwillingness to simply drift to the left, which they've been doing for decades.

00:59:25.460 All of that was a gift of Trump.

00:59:26.920 The big idea, which somebody told me years ago was the idea that Republicans need to understand, is you're not running against the Democrats, you're running against the press.

00:59:35.640 But the press, the media, the news media in this country is the enemy of the people, just like Trump said it was.

00:59:41.360 He was, if there was one thing he was 100% right about, it was the news media.

00:59:45.940 Watching, I just the other day played a montage of him taking the press apart.

00:59:49.400 I was, I couldn't stop laughing.

00:59:51.480 I mean, I was just, it was delightful.

00:59:53.280 He, he was the man of the moment.

00:59:54.980 He was the man we needed.

00:59:57.020 I have, I have many, many good things to say about him.

00:59:59.880 People who say, oh, you're never Trump or just lying.

01:00:02.220 I was the first guy at the Daily Wire to come in and say, I'm voting for Trump.

01:00:05.860 And Shapiro yelled at me for like hours, you know, which is like, if you've ever heard the way Shapiro talks, it's like that scene where, in The Godfather, where Sonny gets machine gunned.

01:00:13.180 And I voted for him twice, and I'd vote for him again if I have to.

01:00:17.740 But I think if he had, if he had an ounce of grace, he would say, I christen DeSantis the new me and let him go.

01:00:28.180 If nothing else, I'm so tired of 80-year-old men running our government, you know, 70 and 80-year-old men. 1.00

01:00:34.200 It is time for this new generation to come along.

01:00:37.120 And DeSantis is good at what he does.

01:00:38.560 I mean, he took that state and he took, he took a purple state and he turned it into a red state by sheer competence, you know, by getting it right.

01:00:46.260 But Trump didn't really accomplish that much in terms of long term because he wasn't, you know, people always say, well, he's not a politician.

01:00:54.140 Being a politician is a profession, you know, so he couldn't get any laws passed.

01:00:59.160 Everything was executive orders.

01:01:00.420 It was all wiped away by Joe Biden.

01:01:02.600 So, yeah, I think his time came.

01:01:05.280 I think he was the man of the moment.

01:01:07.100 Come at the hour, come at the man.

01:01:08.520 He was a gift.

01:01:09.360 I always say he was a godsend, but so was King Saul, you know, after a while, you know, your time runs out.

01:01:16.060 He was a godsend.

01:01:17.200 He was, he was the man of the moment.

01:01:19.540 And I think that moment is past.

01:01:21.860 And if the Republicans can learn what he taught them, they will become a great party.

01:01:26.860 And the final thing I want to ask you before we do our usual last question is, you know, I've talked about how what we need is a post woke world because wokeness is crazy.

01:01:38.640 We all know.

01:01:39.060 I think it's the reaction causes an equal and opposite reaction.

01:01:44.360 I see the anti woke side, which we are part of to some extent, going crazy to now staring into the abyss thing.

01:01:51.980 And we need to move beyond that.

01:01:53.800 Do you have a vision for how we do that?

01:01:55.560 I do.

01:01:56.160 You won't like it, though.

01:01:59.040 Go to church?

01:02:00.640 Well, you know, I mean, our churches, your churches are empty.

01:02:04.740 Our churches are sort of collapsing.

01:02:07.900 But we should make new ones.

01:02:09.960 We need to make new ones.

01:02:10.920 We need to make churches.

01:02:11.740 We need to gather in our homes together as they did at first and talk about what it means for there to be a God.

01:02:18.800 Because here's the thing.

01:02:20.960 There actually is a God.

01:02:22.060 It doesn't matter whether you believe in it or not.

01:02:23.420 There actually is one.

01:02:24.680 Life, even the things you believe in only make sense if there's a God.

01:02:28.400 You know, if there's any.

01:02:30.060 The only leap of faith I ever took.

01:02:31.960 The only leap of faith I ever took was to say it's better to give a beggar bread than it is to torture a child to death. 1.00

01:02:40.100 You can't make that case without God.

01:02:41.680 But that case, once you believe that, you believe in God.

01:02:45.280 Once you believe that there is some level above us that our actions refer to, right?

01:02:52.880 Because what you're saying when you're saying something is good is you're saying there is some place where there is good and bad.

01:02:57.440 And our actions speak that.

01:03:01.520 It's not that I have a little ghost inside me that's going to float up to heaven when I die.

01:03:06.300 It's that I am, I speak an idea.

01:03:10.080 I am a word that speaks an idea of me, the idea of me.

01:03:13.300 And that idea exists somewhere.

01:03:15.040 You know, it exists in the mind of God.

01:03:17.760 And so I don't think we have to go back to the Middle Ages.

01:03:21.360 I don't think we can go back to the Middle Ages, and we shouldn't if we could.

01:03:25.060 But I think we need to talk about what it means.

01:03:27.700 If, no, this is not a multiverse where we just happen to live in the universe that looks very much like it was created by a gigantic invisible Jew, you know. 0.98

01:03:37.320 This is not that.

01:03:39.080 There actually is something spiritual, something supernatural, something above nature in the world.

01:03:44.600 And if we don't say that, we have no argument.

01:03:47.800 This is what I, it's hard to accept.

01:03:52.280 I understand why it's hard to accept.

01:03:54.680 But if we don't make that argument, then the left is right.

01:03:59.080 Why should you embrace your gender? 1.00

01:04:02.180 You know, I heard, I was Mary Harrington, I was reading Mary's book, and she was talking about a man, a young man who went into puberty and said,

01:04:09.880 I'm being poisoned by these chemicals.

01:04:11.560 These chemicals are turning me into something I don't want to be.

01:04:14.020 And I thought, well, that's a rational statement if there's no God.

01:04:16.720 You know, you don't want to be this, and these chemicals are, in fact, turning you into something.

01:04:21.360 But if that something that you are refers to something above yourself, which that's what I believe.

01:04:26.640 I believe we are a language.

01:04:29.160 Material is a language.

01:04:30.200 Then there's a reason to sort of say, well, what am I going to do with this manhood that's been given to me?

01:04:36.980 This, you know, what is this manhood?

01:04:39.260 What if it's a gift?

01:04:41.540 What if it has obligations?

01:04:43.320 What if I have an obligation to open the door for my wife, even though she's perfectly capable of opening the door for herself?

01:04:50.780 What if I have an obligation to throw myself in front of her if there's danger?

01:04:53.480 You know, what does it mean to be a man?

01:04:55.640 What does it mean to be a woman? 0.99

01:04:57.440 What are the sacrifices I'm willing to make to be that person?

01:05:02.060 You cannot make that argument without some sense of the spiritual.

01:05:08.340 And to be honest, even though I'm a devout Christian and I believe that that is the great expression of truth because it's so human.

01:05:15.900 You know, I just think you have to start from somewhere, you know, that we're not just, what's the word?

01:05:25.860 You know, we're not meat puppets.

01:05:27.100 You know, we're not, we're something else.

01:05:28.920 We speak a word.

01:05:29.960 So that is the beginning of the anti-woke thing that, you know, C.S. Lewis, great Christian apologist, said you can't really, he was talking about a poem.

01:05:40.820 He was talking about Paradise Lost.

01:05:41.860 He said you can't really judge a thing until you know what it's for, you know.

01:05:46.160 You can't really judge a corkscrew until you know what it's supposed to do.

01:05:50.180 And so you can't really judge people and society until you have some, you can state what it's supposed to be.

01:05:56.500 And for too long, the right has been saying, well, we, you're happier if you can make money.

01:06:01.580 You know, yes, America gives you the right to make money and then you can make more money.

01:06:05.280 And if, and if you can even make more money, you think like eventually people turn around and say, you know, that's not doing it for me.

01:06:11.840 You know, that does it for some people.

01:06:13.260 Some people want to be billionaires, you know.

01:06:14.720 It never occurred to me.

01:06:15.700 If I, if I wanted to be a billionaire, I certainly wouldn't have gone into the writing profession, you know.

01:06:20.280 There's something that we're here for.

01:06:22.020 And I do think it involves love and relationship and love of something beyond ourselves that this world only expresses.

01:06:30.100 And when you begin with that, you get very quickly to ideas like freedom, to ideas like relationship, marriage, respect, you know.

01:06:41.680 Again, we don't have to go back to the Middle Ages to realize that those are things that matter to us and that you can build a society on. 0.76

01:06:48.640 You can't build a society on like, oh, you know, you're a black guy, so you committed a crime, but you're not a criminal because black people were oppressed.

01:06:55.580 That's like, you know, then you get what we have in Chicago now, which is being torn to pieces as we sit here talking, the poor people pouring into the streets, tearing it to pieces. 0.99

01:07:04.180 You cannot build a society like that.

01:07:08.360 Woke is right if there's no God.

01:07:10.520 Woke is, some bits of woke make sense if there's no God.

01:07:15.820 There better be a God.

01:07:18.120 Bingo, bingo.

01:07:19.020 If there's not, we're in big trouble.

01:07:20.380 Yeah.

01:07:23.160 Andrew, what a pleasure it's been.

01:07:25.200 Thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:07:27.040 If people want to find your books, if they want to follow you online, if they want to watch you on The Wire, how do they do that?

01:07:33.680 Well, you can start by going to andrewclavin.com.

01:07:36.180 As I always say, there's no E's in Clavin. 0.97

01:07:37.940 It's K-L-A-V-A-N. 1.00

01:07:40.020 But andrewclavin.com will send you all my other places.

01:07:42.960 At Andrew Clavin is my Twitter feed.

01:07:44.920 And The Daily Wire, I've got, my podcast is now on every Friday.

01:07:50.280 And it's different.

01:07:52.340 No one else does what I do, so it's worth tuning in.

01:07:56.800 Absolutely.

01:07:57.920 It's great to talk to you.

01:07:58.920 Well, thank you.

01:07:59.780 It's been an absolute pleasure.

01:08:00.800 And of course, we're not going to let you go without some questions for our paid supporters or locals that only they will get to see.

01:08:05.800 But before that, the last question we always ask, and you may have done this already, but what is the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

01:08:13.380 Well, yeah, that was my last answer.

01:08:15.920 I mean, I think this started in the 1500s, this decline, you know, the long withdrawing roar of the tide of faith.

01:08:23.560 I think we have now reached the bottom of that.

01:08:26.680 Nietzsche said, you know, this is a catastrophe that God is dead and the moral network on which Europe is based is gone.

01:08:35.000 And he said this is going to be a catastrophe.

01:08:37.140 It certainly has been, you know.

01:08:38.860 And so that's the thing we're not talking about because we've got this idea that you can't make an argument from God because not everybody accepts that premise.

01:08:49.360 But when you make the argument that there's no God, that's a premise I don't accept.

01:08:53.780 So I think that we should be fearless in saying, in asking the questions of the left, you know.

01:09:00.140 I think that was what was so great about Matt Walsh's documentary, What is a Woman?

01:09:03.380 He asked the question.

01:09:05.020 That's a spiritual question, you know.

01:09:07.520 That's not a physical question.

01:09:09.080 That's a spiritual, you know, because when you say, what is a woman, it's not really the X's and the Y's and the this and that.

01:09:14.940 That a woman is we know what a woman is the minute we see it, you know, and I think we have to ask those questions. 0.83

01:09:20.860 What do you think you're here for?

01:09:22.100 What is what is your purpose?

01:09:24.160 You know, you tell me because I'll build that society.

01:09:29.640 And I think once you do that, you get very quickly to something that looks kind of like the Constitution, you know, power being kept at bay so the individual can thrive.

01:09:40.860 There we go.

01:09:41.860 Andrew Clavin, it was absolute pleasure talking to you.

01:09:44.140 Thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:09:45.760 Join us on Locals where we're going to ask Andrew some of your bonus questions.

01:09:49.460 Take care and we'll see you soon.

01:09:50.900 Take care and see you soon, guys.

01:09:53.880 Do you ever envisage a politically neutral filmmaking industry and what steps of ends would it take to achieve that outcome?

01:10:00.520 Take care and see you soon, guys?

01:10:04.040 Bye-bye.

01:10:05.220 Take care and see you soon.

01:10:06.680 Bye-bye.

01:10:07.440 Have a great day.

01:10:07.940 Bye-bye.

01:10:08.780 Take care.

01:10:09.360 40 Mary Louσα.

01:10:10.120 Take care.

01:10:10.400 Take care.

01:10:11.040 There, there will be a tour.

01:10:12.720 Bye-bye.

01:10:13.760 All right.

01:10:16.620 Thank you.

01:10:17.560 Bye-bye.

01:10:21.620 Bye-bye.

01:10:22.180 Bye-bye.

01:10:22.740 Bye-bye.

01:10:23.800 Bye-bye.

01:10:24.480 Bye-bye.

01:10:25.380 Bye-bye.

01:10:26.540 Bye-bye.

01:10:26.740 Bye-bye.

TRIGGERnometry - May 07, 2023

Andrew Klavan： Why The West Isn’t Over

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