The Megyn Kelly Show - Silencing Free Speech and BLM's $6 Million Mansion, with Andrew Klavan | Ep. 293

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Andrew Klavan, Daily Wire host and author of the new book "The Truth and Beauty," to talk about Elon Musk joining the board of Twitter, the silencing of free speech and the end of a culture of free speech, the status of gender in 2022 and the truth about gender differences, the destruction of femininity and motherhood in our culture, Black Lives Matter buying a $6 million mansion with donation money, the corrupt news media, Hollywood hypocrisy, faith and theology, being raised Jewish before moving to atheism and then Christianity, how he went from liberal to conservative, the life of a writer, his son and wife, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Judge Katonji Brown-Jackson, one step closer to the Supreme Court, with three Senate Republicans now supporting her nomination. That plus Black Lives Matter secretly bought a six million dollar home and actively worked to conceal it from the media and then conspired when the media got a hold of it on how to mislead them. So we'll talk about that. And also a mother has now been fired for speaking out against New York City Mayor Eric Adams mask policy. Remember, we showed you and talked about that. The folks that showed up to protest the fact that he's masking toddlers still. He he lost a legal battle. The court said, you don't have the power to do that. The master coming off the two year old kids in New York. And then he filed an appeal and the appellate court

sided with him. And he's delighted. And the parents are angry. And a woman who spoke out about it just got fired. She works for the city it's insane here to discuss that and so much more is somebody i've been trying to interview for a long time his name is andrew clavin he has a podcast over the daily wire once a week which is well worth your time but he's an extremely successful writer thinker um just one of those people who's got a lot of built up wisdom thanks to his time in this earth. And it spans from faith to philosophy, some of which is espoused in his new book. It's just out today. It's called The Truth and Beauty, How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding

of the words of Jesus. Andrew, welcome. So great to have you here. Thanks, Megan. It's great to be here. Oh, I'm a big fan. You're brilliant. My only complaint about your podcast is that it doesn't come out enough. You need to do more. I had to cut back. I was doing it four days a week, and I just thought, you know, I don't have that many opinions. I know that's not true, but you have other things that you do. I mean, it's not like if I only believed you were doing the podcast, I'd be on you more, but I know you write and you do a lot of other things. And so there has to be time to think and to actually build that beautiful

brain. Let me make a confession to you. My first introduction to you on a more serious note was through your son, Spencer. So long time ago, we first launched the podcast going on two years ago now. I interviewed, I've had him on many times, Victor Davis Hanson, who's a professor of classics and so on, and a deep thinker. And I confessed to him, I didn't really understand what it meant to be a professor of classics. I'm very low bar, Andrew. This is what you need to know about me. Just that's what you're dealing with. Okay. I'm like, what does it mean? Like, explain it to me. So he did. And I was like, oh, I really want to know more about that. And one of my listeners said, you should try Spencer

Claven's podcast called Young Heretics. And he talks about the classics and he sort of gives you a, it's, it's actually not a base level education. It's much, much, much more than that, but he makes you love them and just sort of walks you through a lot of things that I never learned in my schooling. So then I got connected to you and blah, blah, blah. And I'm so delighted to have the man who created Spencer Claven here on the show today. One of my better works. I appreciate that. He's a rotten little kid for being that smart, but he is a brilliant, brilliant guy. And he is also, he got his PhD in classics from Oxford. So he is a brilliant, brilliant guy. And he is also, he got his PhD in classics from Oxford. So he is well-educated. Yeah. Oh my God. Like his resume is crazy good.

And when I started to read up on you more in depth and preparing for today, I realized how he got to be that way. I mean, just your stories about how you guys used to spend time together and the amount of time you've put into your children. And even to this day, writing about how you were preparing this book that I mentioned in the intro, sitting there with Spencer, both of you guys now drinking a whiskey. He's a grown up now, talking about philosophy, talking about God, talking about how to figure out the meaning of the gospel. It's great stuff. It inspired me to try to elevate

my own relationship with my children. Well, it is something. He and I have been walking and hiking and drinking a little bit as we get older and talking for so long that we frequently joke that we no longer know whose ideas are which. And I call him Clavin 2.0 because I expect him to take our joint ideas into the next generation. And you're absolutely right. This book would not have been written without him, not just because his ideas are now interwoven with mine inextricably, but also because I was talking to him. The book starts with a conversation I was having with him in which I was saying, some of the words of Jesus are actually kind of puzzling, you know, to say, you know, love your enemies. And I don't even like my enemies and

turn the other cheek. And I would happily like just deck anybody who attacked him or his mother. And he said to me, you're trying to understand a philosophy, but you should be trying to get to know a man. And I realized the minute he said it, I thought that's the most brilliant thing anybody's ever said to me, because, you know, when you know somebody, your father, your mother, your wife, whatever, when you really know them, you don't think, well, this is their philosophy of life. I don't think this is my wife's philosophy of life. I just think this is what she would say if she were here. This is what she would be thinking if she were here. And that's where the book began. It began with me trying to reread the gospels without any theology whatsoever,

even the theology of Paul, and just try to get to know the guy. And it was a genuinely powerful experiment that resulted in this book. And I hope the things that I found, which have increased my joy level substantially, will have the same effect on other people. Well, this is going to be very useful to me in my own relationship with my youngest child, Thatcher, who's only eight, and he's about to make his first communion in the Catholic Church. And he's got to, they're going to perform publicly, obviously, in the church together. And he's responsible for the last two lines of the Our Father, because I know you wrestle with Sermon on the Mount, it's right in there, and talk about the meaning of the words. And you could read them, obviously, you're

brilliant, you understand the meaning of words, but you were looking for sort of a higher level, like what's really being said here. And I thought the same thing last night as I was trying to explain the Our Father to Thatcher in those last two lines and how, you know, what do they mean and why are you saying them and why are we making you memorize all this stuff in advance of this event? Too often we go through it in a rote manner as opposed to just pausing to figure out what is God trying to tell me here? It's really true. And for me, it's really important because I'm one of these people, I don't really care that much about theology. I like to discuss theology, but I don't care. People ask me all the time,

are the ends of days coming? And I have no idea. It actually says in the gospel that I have no idea. And they, you know, they talk about other people's sins and I don't think about other people's sins too much. What I really think about a lot is what does God want me to do today? This minute, you know, what does he want me to say? What does he want me to write? How does he want me to work? How does he want me to live? And that's the only thing I have any control over. So that was kind of my approach to the gospels. And it's kind of been what I've been trying to get out of the gospels. You know, I talk about the fact that in the Nicene Creed, which is the basic statement of Christianity, it says Jesus was born of a virgin and he died under Pontius Pilate. And there's nothing between those two things. It's as if he never lived, you know, he just was born and

he died. And so figuring out what he was doing in between and why he was doing it and what he was trying to say, I think is a big deal. And you're absolutely right. When you say the Our Father, you don't really think about it. I mean, we can all say it by heart and we all know it by rote, but it just kind of goes silent in your head when you say it that way. You have to stop and look at every line. You're so good at, forgive the term, but punditry. You're really good at it. Not everybody can do what you do, what Ben Shapiro does, what Matt Walsh does, just wind up and talk for an hour straight and release it as a podcast that people actually want

to listen to. They just want to hear one man's opinion for an hour. And so the people like you who make that a success are important. Clearly, you have something valuable to say. There's a reason people flock to. So I was surprised to read that you kind of recognized that doing that, the culture wars, I think is how you put it, wasn't necessarily God's mission. It wasn't necessarily going to make you feel more joyful, but writing this book did. Yeah. Writing this book, the experience of writing this book was like standing on a little laser

dot, you know, in those cop shows when the bad guy gets the laser dot on his chest. You know, that's, I felt like I was standing right on the dot of where God wanted me to be doing exactly what he wanted me to do. And I often feel like that giving the podcast, but not as precisely. It was just, my whole brain went silent while I was writing the book. what he wanted me to do. And I often feel like that giving the podcast, but not as precisely. It was just, my whole brain went silent while I was writing the book. I could barely even pray in words anymore because I felt I didn't have to ask any questions. I just knew I had to finish this book. It was a remarkable experience. And when that happens, you just got to follow that. And one of the reasons I cut the podcast back to once a week was because I wanted to get

back to my writing. It's kind of what I've trained myself to do. It's what I've worked at. It's where I think I express myself with the kind of precision that matters to me. Doing the podcast has been a joy and it has been a shock as well because writers, as you may know, they live very solitary lives and most of us are very well suited to that life. We're meant to be solitary. I would go for weeks sometimes without seeing anybody but my family and never even notice it. It used to kind

of worry me a little bit. And suddenly here I was in front of a camera. Suddenly people recognized me on the street, which was a shock because that doesn't happen to writers either. It was a real change in my life, but I obviously, I knew that it was where I was supposed to go and what I was supposed to be doing. I wouldn't have done it 30 years ago. I wouldn't have known what to say. I wouldn't have known what I thought about anything. But at this point, as you say, I've been here, I think I'm now 157 years old and I've seen so much and I do understand certain things, especially, you know, I have a very young audience and there are things that they don't quite get yet and they don't quite know what's up ahead. And I do, I actually do know what's up ahead. You know,

you can get older and wiser, you can get older and no wiser. And I have kept my eyes open. And so I do have something to say. It's been a gift. The podcast has absolutely been a gift, but I never feel so much as homes at home as when I'm sitting in front of the computer and just putting words on on a page, but right now he's in the middle of a book. It's nonfiction and it's his favorite yet. Anyway, he basically describes writing as you observe for a living. And I like that. That's true. Right? And so that's what you've done. Great description.

And yet you've given us the gift of then repeating back to us in the podcast form, which is so easy to consume, right? A book takes longer for the person consuming it. Those observations, right? A book takes longer for the person consuming it. Those observations, right? Like all the goodness of those observations poured into today's news and giving us perspective on what's really happening. That's what I find invaluable about it. Somebody who's a little older, wiser, who's able to sort of take all of your learning and your exposure to all these great writers and all these great cultural icons and so on and say, this is what's really happening. This is why this is a problem. This is why a moral code is important. This is why the Bible is important. This is why actually learning religion and understanding and living by it can make a difference in your life as opposed to just going

through the road like, okay, yes, church on Sunday. And interestingly, it all comes from a man who was raised Jewish and then meandered over into agnosticism and then atheism for a time. So we'll get to the conversion. But before that, let me just tell the audience about your resume because it's great. Author of such internationally bestselling novels as True Crime. Hello to people. Remember True Crime? They made it into a film starring Clint Eastwood. And Don't Say a Word, also made into a film starring Michael Douglas and Brittany Murphy, if my memory serves. Right. Poor Brittany Murphy. She wound up dying too young. You've been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award five times.

You've won it twice. Your books have been translated around the world. And Stephen King calls you the most original American novelist of crime and suspense since Cornell Woolrich. I got to look up Cornell Woolrich now, but it sounds like a massive compliment. Anyway, so that's awesome. And it explains your writing, your devotion to writing. You've clearly done very well. So talk to me about being raised Jewish culturally, though not necessarily religiously, and how you meandered away from that. Well, yeah, that was the problem, actually, that I was raised to respect the traditions and to

understand the traditions of Judaism. But God was really not a presence in my house. My mother was the most committed atheist I think I've ever met. She thought the entire thing was silly. When I converted, she didn't care because she thought it's all nonsense anyway. My father had more of a sort of deal-making relationship with God, but none of it really informed the Jewish traditions that I was learning. So when I was bar mitzvahed, which I was very reluctantly, I already knew, I didn't believe in any of it, you know, I was given a lot of presents, a lot of jewelry and gold and savings bonds. And after about six months, I felt so guilty for having gotten up on a stage and said things that

I didn't believe that I actually crept out in the middle of the night with this leather box full of jewelry and thousands of dollars worth of bonds. And I stuffed it into the garbage and threw it away. And I thought I am, I am done with religion. I don't want to have that sense of hypocrisy anymore. And that really continued throughout my life in spite of the fact that as I trained myself to be a writer and read the great works of literature that meant so much to me, I started to realize that the gospel was at the center of all of them, that there was no Western culture without the gospel, that there was no Western sense of morality, no sense of freedom without the gospel. And all of these things started to speak to me and say, you know, if all of these, if all the things that you think are true are true, and if all the things that you find beautiful are beautiful, the gospels must be

real, or at least there must be a God. And the problem I had is that I was a very troubled young guy and I had a difficult relationship with my father. And in my late twenties, I went nuts. I went insane. And it was quite an experience. I was in so much emotional pain. I was suicidal. I was delusional. I was in so much emotional pain that I thought, well, if I grab hold of God now, it's just a crutch. It's just a way of escaping this terrible pain that I'm in. And so I had this kind of, it was kind of this ornery sense that at the moment when I needed God most, and when I look back, I realized God was calling to me most. I can't embrace God because it would be fake because I'm just in so much pain. By what I now consider to be a miracle,

I found possibly the only psychiatrist who has ever healed a patient and the patient happened to be me. He was a brilliant man who died only a couple of years ago. And he made me go sane. I've never seen anything quite like it. I've never met anybody who even claims to have gone from the place that I was to the sense of adjustment and joy and happiness and success in life that I then had. And I started to think to myself, well, gee, all of the logic that I followed to bring me to God still stands now that I'm no longer unhappy. And so I thought, well, maybe now I can believe because it's not a crutch. I'm perfectly happy. So funny how we reason with ourselves. Keep going.

Yeah. And I started to pray and just kind of accidentally started to pray and it transformed my life. I wasn't praying to any specific God, but it transformed my life. And after about five years, I turned to God and I said, you know, you've transformed my life. You've made my life so much happier, so much fuller, so much richer. What can I do for you? You know, you're God. I'm just some schmo. You know, there's really nothing I can do, but I want to respond. And it was as if God spoke to me. I didn't hear a voice or anything, but very immediately in response, I felt you should be baptized. And I remember I was driving my car at the time and out loud,

I said, you got to be kidding me, you know, because at that point I was working in Hollywood. I had a terrific career writing very hard boiled mystery novels. I had had a tough time with my father all my life, but now we've kind of developed a separate piece. We were distant, but we were friendly, but that's all going to blow up if I become a Christian. But I had to. I went back and I reread the Gospels. I'd been reading them all my life as literature. And I went back and thought, well, what if I read them as the truth? And when I did that, I thought, oh, yes, this is what I believe.

This is who I am. This is the person I've been talking to all this time. And so I was baptized. And it was remarkable. I was baptized kind of offhandedly. I didn't really believe in the ritual. I just thought, well, I should do it as a matter of integrity. Within three weeks, my wife, who knows me quite well, turned to me and said, you know, you're a different person. Your kind of serenity and joy and intensity has come over you that hasn't been there before.

And it has continued in that vein. And the more I explore the gospels, the more I come to understand them and kind of move away from sort of rote Christianity to a deeper relationship. That joy is only deepened and expanded. So it's been quite an experience. Yeah. I know you joke that your wife married a liberal Jewish guy and she wound up with a conservative Christian guy. It's a very patient woman. I know. Yeah. So, because that was another transition in your life, all of this weaves together in your book and in your, you know, presentation and your thoughts today, this, all these transitions,

but you, you used to be liberal. I mean, you were raised in New York, like most New Yorkers, you'd leaned left and you've been, you've said something to the effect of, you know, part of the thing that made you rethink it was the lies told about Ronald Reagan versus the truth of his results. Right. Well, right. Every day, you know, I remember when the Berlin Wall fell down, I thought everything that old guy said came true and everything that he said was going to happen happened. But what really cemented this was that I left the country. You know, it's funny, this is back at the end of the 80s. I was at a dinner party in New York and we had a son and we had a daughter. And I made the remark at this dinner party, I said, you know, boys and girls are really different. And this is way back now, right? It's about 89. And the table fell silent. And everybody was embarrassed that I would make such an inept remark and a politically incorrect remark. And I remember we left, we were in a

restaurant and we left the restaurant. I turned to my wife and I said, we're leaving the country. That's it. I'm not going to be in a country where I can't speak the obvious truth. And so I moved to England for seven years. We all went to England for seven years. And what happened there was I was away from American politics. I didn't need to have an opinion about what was happening, what Bill Clinton was doing this week. I didn't need to have any opinions about American politics. I was completely immersed in the life of England. And when I got back, I suddenly realized that all my opinions were suddenly aligned with people who were on the right. And I remember Rush Limbaugh became a thing while I was in England. And I heard about how evil he right. And I remember Rush Limbaugh became a

thing while I was in England and I heard about how evil he was. And so when I got home, I thought, well, I want to just hear this evil guy. It's kind of interesting. I was listening to him thinking, gee, you know, he's not really that evil. I kind of agree. I too am evil. Yeah, I too am evil. And so it was a surprise. I'm not sure I would have been able to make that transition if I had stayed in the country. After all, like, as you say, I was a liberal Jew from the coasts. You know, I was surrounded in the arts. I'm working in the movies. I'm working in publishing. I wasn't meeting any conservatives. I used to call the guys at National Review online. I used to call my imaginary friends

because I would go on and kind of read their conversations online and think like, yeah, that's what I think. That's what I think too. And once 9-11 happened, I remember the moment, it was when David Letterman after 9-11, obviously the late night comic at the time, came on and he said, I really have to think about this. Why do they hate us? And I thought, what do you mean? Why do they hate us? They're the bad guys. They're supposed to hate us. You know, they have this backward, angry, hateful religion talking about these Islamist fanatics, you know, they're supposed to hate us. We're the free guys, we're the freedom people, we're the people, the tolerant people. And I realized that something, having been out of the country for so long, I realized something had gone terribly wrong with our culture. And I started going to conservative meetings and making little speeches about how we had lost the

country at the movies and how conservatives don't pay attention to the culture. And Megan, they used to look at me like I had wandered in off the street. It was kind of cute that I worked in Hollywood, but they had no idea what I was talking about. Now it's 20 years later and more. And people call me and they say, you know, we remember you talking about the culture. We really have to do something about this. It really does matter. It really does matter what happens, what goes into our minds, what comes out of our comes out of Hollywood, what comes out of the publishing industry. The left knows it matters. That's why they silence us. That's why they blacklist us. When I started speaking out conservatively as a conservative, my Hollywood career ended and it ended really fast. I mean,

my salary, my income went from seven figures to zero in a great, great big hurry. And it was quite amazing. So they know, they have always known, they have known for at least 60 or 70 years that the culture matters. And we are only now finding out and we're only now fighting back and trying to not get kicked off Twitter and Facebook and not be blanked out in the movie making business and the book writing business. But it's taken a long time for us to realize that, you know, my friend Ben is right when he says facts don't care about your feelings. But as I always point out to him, feelings are a fact too. And you really have to take care of the inner life of the, of not just yourself, but of the community. If you want them to want to be

free because you can't force people to be free. It's a contradiction in terms. Oh, that's, can you expand on that? That's a good that's a good line. And it's a good point. But what do you mean? How do we do that in practice? Well, I mean, the people, you know, as it was noted at the time of the founding, they said this constitution is only for a moral and religious people. You have to want to be free in order for that constitution to mean anything. Once you have the New York Times saying, you know, free speech,

you're weaponizing free speech, we have to stop all this free speech, and people nodding their heads and agreeing with them, that First Amendment is not going to protect you from anything. I mean, you know, studies have shown that the Supreme Court makes its decisions mostly in keeping with public opinion. And as Lincoln said, public opinion in a free country is almost everything. Once the culture has transformed the heart of people to lose their respect for free speech, to lose their respect for disagreement, for the inner lives of other people, what I call the great speculation, the idea that your inner life is as important to you as mine is to me, and they are both equally important to God. This is the great speculation on which our entire country and our religion is based. It is the idea that your freedom, your inner freedom matters, and you should have the right

to speak your mind. Once you lose the commitment to that, nothing's going to protect you. And we see it all the time. We see it on social media has been silencing conservative voices. They silenced the president of the United States and nobody really protested. I mean, obviously people on the right protested, but the mainstream of the culture did not say, wait a minute, you know, I don't care how rich you are. I don't care about the fact that you're a private business. You have no right to destroy

the culture of free speech that keeps this country going. So culture is what, you know, James Joyce said, it forms the uncreated conscience of our race. And if our uncreated conscience is created in a small-minded, punitive way, it's going to be a small-minded, punitive country. Up until the present, up until the present, it was really fashioned in the open-minded, freedom-seeking traditions of the West. And that's who we were. And so it was easy to keep free speech alive, not just keep it alive, but to expand it continually. Now we're really fighting tooth and nail to keep that culture of free speech alive. And as I say, if people don't want to be free, how will you make them be free? I hear people on the right say all the time, we need a strong man leader who's going to enforce prayer in the school. Well, I think prayer in the school is important, but how do you enforce it without taking people's freedom not to pray away? We have to shape people's consciences. We have to shape their souls to the good, not in a coercive way, but simply shape them to the good as Western culture has been doing for thousands and thousands of years. And if we don't do that, if we lose the people's hearts, the Constitution won't do a thing for us. If we lose the I'm also energized by the new thoughts. Of course, I've heard it originally was Andrew Breitbart's. I've heard Ben say it, that politics is downstream of culture. But as a lawyer, I practiced law for 10 years. I always believed that the law would be this bulwark against some of these cultural insanities and it would hold the Constitution would hold. You know, it takes some dings here and there. You don't have a perfect Supreme Court or courts of appeal or judges at lower levels. But that ultimately, you know, when push comes to shove, it will hold. And that and I've been heartened this year to see that the justice system has gone, in my view, the right way in some big cases where there's been a lot of public pressure for it to come to different results. Kyle Rittenhouse is just one

example. But your point is, it resonates so deeply. It must be true. I agree. You're right. How can the court, Constitution notwithstanding, hold the line against a culture that if it grows and grows and grows, you know, it was 10% of the people, then it was 15% of the people, now it's growing, growing, growing. They're capturing institutions. They're capturing, of course, universities and the media and sports and major corporations now. How can it hold forever if all of these cultural forces, and if it becomes the majority, look at them and say, no, free speech is not what you think it is. No, the first amendment does not protect quote, hate speech and hate. Hate is what I deem it to be. You're right. Is that the writings on the wall?

Yeah. You know, it's why it is why the founders kept insisting that we had to be a religious and a moral people. It's because if you don't govern yourself, you literally can't govern yourself. If you don't govern yourself, you can't have self-government. And once you lose that, you know, I frequently talk to people and, you know, Lincoln said that it's the declaration that informs the constitution. And that means that our rights are given to us. They're endowed in us by our creator. The government is simply there to protect our rights. It is instituted to protect our rights. It is instituted to protect our rights, but the rights are already there. The rights are there before the government gets there and they are endowed in us by our creator. If people stop believing

in at least that creator, you don't have to be a Christian. You don't have to be, you know, you can be Jewish, Muslim, you can be anything you want. But if they stop believing in that creator, the creator who endowed us with our rights, then we've got a serious problem. I had this discussion with Alan Dershowitz once when he said, no, no, no, we can't make our rights depend on God because everybody has a different God. Well, in fact, as an American, you are essentially required to have the God who endowed you with rights. You don't have to believe in them, but you have to act as if you believe in them. You have to live as if you believe in them because it's all based on those things. And those, those basic things have to be taught and they have to be instilled in people's hearts and they have

to be embraced and loved. Or again, you know, what's going to happen when the Supreme Court says, as you, as you just said, if the Supreme Court says, well, free speech doesn't include hate speech, like saying a woman is not a man when she wants to be a man, that's hate speech. That has to be eliminated. Well, who's going to stand up for that principle? Not the New York Times. They've already made it clear they're ready to get rid of free speech if it disagrees with them. So who's going to stand up for it if not the people, if not a people trained and schooled

and acculturated to freedom. Yeah. And not Twitter. Of course, we've literally just seen that, right? The Babylon Bee, they tweet out that Rachel, what's her name? Levine. Levine, thank you, who's working for HHS. She's a trans woman. They tweet out and she's recognized by USA Today as woman of the year. And the Babylon Bee tweets out, we recognize Rachel Levine as man of the year. And their Twitter account gets shut down and they won't bend the knee. And what does the head of Twitter say? He says, yeah, I'm not really that pro free speech.

I actually think we should be cutting away at free speech around the edges and that, you know, we should be cutting sort of cracking down more on hateful speech. Well, on the bright side, Elon Musk had something to say and then something to do in response to that. That's why I'll pick it up. I'll squeeze in a quick break right here and more with Andrew Klavan picking it up with Twitter and Elon Musk right after this. So, Andrew, Elon Musk, it's been great because he was sort of teasing the world about possibly creating an alternative to Twitter and probably took a look at the fact that none of those has worked out so well, like Parler, Gitter, Gab, whatever they are, none of them has really resonated. The one that was getting some traction, Parler, got shut down and never really totally recovered. So now we find out that he is making a huge investment in Twitter, Twitter itself, the Twitter. And has, as a result of his latest investment, billions of dollars, become the largest single shareholder

in Twitter, almost 10 percent of the company's stock now in his hands, which is cause for celebration, right? Because Twitter is the one that shut down the Babylon Beat. Twitter is the one that silenced the president of the United States, among others. But Twitter is controlled by the left. It's largely leftist, and yet it is the public square. And so it's wrong. It's wrong to have conservatives shut down there to the extent that they are. What do you make of it? Well, I have been railing about this for years because it drives me crazy on the right. I expect leftists to be against free speech. They're authoritarian, they're small-minded, and the things they're saying are untrue. So they can't stand debate or argument. But on the right, I expect people to defend the basic structures of our country. And what I hear instead is, oh, you know, Twitter, Facebook, Google, these are private

businesses. So they have the right to do whatever they want to do. We don't want the government shutting down private business. Well, that's nonsense. I mean, new businesses, and these are new businesses, demand new regulation. When you had factories, they sent children to work in factories. The government had to say, no, you can't put children in factories and you can't have people working 14-hour days for no pay. Everything that we do has regulations, but you need intelligent regulations. The power that social media has was created by the government they gave them the power to put out content without getting sued which a publisher uh can't do but they also gave them the power to edit it which a platform can't do the phone company can't come on and say i don't like what

you're saying megan so you're not going to be on my phone company anymore they can't do that and these guys shouldn't be allowed to do it either. Obviously, it's a new medium. So there has to be new regulations and a new way of protecting both the rights of the business owner and the rights of the people. But most important is protecting free speech. And so I'm glad that Elon Musk is in there. Let's see what he does. They just put him on the board, which I think is good and gives him power. But as you say, the CEO of Twitter is not committed to free speech. He believes that, yes, as he said, well, most people can talk, but it's just the people with opinions he disagrees with that he's going to silence. And again, once they silence the president of the United States, no, these are people with too much

power. They have to be curtailed. This is what the government is for. The government, as I say, is instituted to protect our God-given rights. The First Amendment protects those rights from the government, but the government has to protect those rights from others as well. And when you have the kind of power that social media has, when you have Amazon selling 90% of new books, when you have Google basically in control of 90% of information, the government has to keep that flowing information free. It just has to. And so, you know, I'm glad Musk is doing this in a free market way. Obviously the less government, the better, the less regulation, the better, but that doesn't mean that we can just let it go and let people be censored by venues with this

kind of power. It's so massive. I do not understand why right-wingers don't get this, that they have to understand that the government is there for a reason. We don't have no government. We need some regulations, just like the industrial revolution required new regulations to deal with factories and mass production. This is something that needs to be regulated too. The invention of the internet is the biggest thing to happen to mankind since the printing press. It means we have to make sure that our basic rights and our basic humanity is protected from. Yeah, because right now we're talking about the culture wars and why they matter and, you know, sort of people's core beliefs and secularism and how that's changed. I mean, that really just set the entire country off down a dangerous path of amoral behavior and decision making. And it's infested virtually all of our

major institutions right now. OK, so people want to fight. Now you see it. I mean, I don't know if it's reaching its pinnacle. I certainly hope this is the pinnacle. I have no idea. But, you know, the Andrew Klavan making these arguments in 2001 after 9-11, if you could have seen us here 21 years later, I wonder if even you could have predicted there'd be no more gender, you know, there'd be open racism taught, segregation is back, you know, all the, I don't even know if you would have foreseen that. Okay, so people want to fight because things have gotten so insane. How do they fight? Well, you have to use your words. You have to speak them. You have to write them. You've got to think them and you've got to come to understand them so that you can think them through by reading other people who have written about them and so on. Well, so we're talking about

how does one do that through a process of going on the Internet, through a process of buying somebody's book, through a process of listening to podcasts. They're shutting all that down. It's the same as a boxer going into the ring and having both hands tied behind his back. He can't win. He can't win if you don't have the means to fight. And they've ever been. So we need to fight for the process to remain fair, for our voices to be heard, for us to have a chance to opine and listen to other people's opinions. But then we get to the matter of what should we say? What should we believe? What should we think? What is the counter argument? And that leaves me to gender, because I've heard you talk about the gender issue a lot, both gender roles, which I'd love to discuss with you and gender as a you know, is it is it determined by one's biology? Is it something you pick like a color palette? And let's just talk about gender as a biological matter first, right? Like, are there women? Are there men? And Katonji Brown Jackson, you know, I couldn't tell you, right? And the fact that we've come to that place in society where you've got someone who's about to take a Supreme Court seat, not able or willing to define what a woman is.

Yeah. I mean, what the left has succeeded in doing is they've succeeded in convincing us that generalizations are an insult to anyone who doesn't fall within that generalization. So if I say human beings are a two-legged creature, somebody is going to write to me and say, well, my beloved son was born with only one leg. Is he not a human being? Well, yes, he is. But human beings remain a two-legged creature. There are men and women. This is a fact of life that has been recognized since the beginning of time. Men and women have traits. Those traits are different from one another. They have needs.

They have abilities. They have powers. They have roles, all of which are different from one another. Until you secure the core, until you secure the core of what people want, you can't be tolerant toward exceptions. So what the left does is they say, well, this guy is an exception because he thinks he's a woman. What are you going to do? Are you going to be hateful to this person? Well, no, I don't think we should be hateful to that person. But first, we're not going to lie to him. We're not going to tell him he is a woman just because he says he is. So that's the first

thing. We can't lose the truth just to make people feel good. That's absurd. The second thing is, yeah, I understand there are exceptions, but the fact is the mom and dad family is a bulwark of freedom. It is the way people learn to be. It is the way people learn to control themselves. It's where they learn discipline. It's where they learn values. All of those things happen in a family without the government intervening, and they keep

us free by happening there. That some people can't participate in mom-dad families, that some people are different. All of that is fine, but you don't have tolerance for them until your core is secure. So when I think mentally ill teachers come in and say they have the right, this somehow amazing created right to tell our children that they're the wrong gender or that they get to choose whether they're a man or a woman, that they may want to have an operation and that they should check that out and their parents don't have a right to know that. When you see them doing that, you really see them violating certain core ethics and certain core values without which tolerance can exist. So the left always gets ahead of these things by

inventing language to make you sound hateful if you want to discuss it with them. So you're phobic, you know, you're racist, you're sexist, you're all these different things. I think that the first thing we should recognize is that gender and gender differences are one of the chief joys of most people's lives. They are the lives. They are sources of untold beauty. They are a consolation for the tragic facts of life. Most of us find meaning and happiness and security and home in the love of someone of a different gender. Now, that there are people who don't do that and there are people who have trouble with that, that's fine. I can live with that. But since this is the vast majority of people and since this is the core of society and since this is the source of our freedom, I think first we protect that core and then we can have tolerance. And when you have people invading that core, I think you have to brush them back. So how do we do that? Right. Because and by the way, all the stuff that you just said actually happened to my child at our New York City private school, all that stuff on everything,

every single thing you listed, you know, you are you sure you're really a boy? You could possibly be a girl. Here's how you would become a girl, including you would take puberty blockers. And then it's not like my child had any of these issues. They were saying it to his entire third grade class, third grade class. You could take puberty blockers. And then it's not like my child had any of these issues. They were saying it to his entire third grade class, third grade class. You could take puberty blockers. And then when you get to be 18, you can have an operation to have your penis chopped off and build a vagina. And then you'll be a woman. I mean, this literally happened to my my son's class of eight and nine year olds. And hence, we are no longer at that school, which is one of the best schools in the nation. But it's not right. No, it isn't. If they're abusing your child, they could be they could be getting them into Princeton and Harvard

and Yale all day long, which is not our goal. But that's how they determine whether it's great school or it's not. But if they're if they're punching your child in the face behind the scenes, you would see how abusive it was. Well, that's what they were effectively doing. These are rhetorical punches in the face. And they were every day and they were everywhere and they were on race and they were on gender and all the other favorite things. So, but what, this is something I, I'm somebody and I get a lot of crap from my audience sometimes. I will say somebody's pronouns, their chosen pronouns. If somebody says, you know, they're trans woman, I'll call them she, I'll, I don't refer to them as a woman. I'll say they're a

trans woman because facts are facts, right? There's a difference between a trans woman and a woman. That's just it's trans woman means you're a biological male and you've decided to walk around and live the rest of your life identifying as female, which is fine by me. I actually don't mind that. But why would you say the pronoun and why wouldn't you if not? Well, you know, it's a thing that the left has ruined is good manners. You say the pronoun like that because you're polite. You want to be nice to the person. The person has this issue in life, you know, that you're not trying to exacerbate. You're not trying to make his or her life worse. You're trying to be nice. And they use that to essentially eradicate reality. And that becomes unfair. So yeah, in talking to an individual person, I might well say, look, I don't agree with you, but I'll call you whatever you want. I might

preface it with that. But of course, I would try to be polite and try to be kind, but I will not let my kindness and I will not let my politeness be used to eradicate basic truths and basic values. When you're describing your son's experience in school, and I find it appalling. I mean, I find it appalling that you should have that happen to you. The left manages to skip over first principles so that when you go in and say, you don't really have the right to say that to my son,

they say, well, you're hateful because you don't accept transgenderism. No, no, you've got to go back a minute. The first thing is that child is your charge. They didn't create them. They don't take care of them. They're not responsible for them. You are. So they're violating a basic first principle of your rights. I mean, teach them to read, teach them math, teach them history, but you have no right to teach them values that are in conflict with the values of his family, not only in conflict with them, but really completely opposite of the values of his family. You don't have that right.

And so that's the first thing. You know, that's the first principle. You have the right to your opinion, but you don't have the right to have your opinion. Wait, before we move on to the second thing, let me give the counter argument. It would be, well, I mean, the KKK members would have come into this class back in the 1950s and said, what you're teaching is anti my core values. I created my child and I don't want you to be teaching them that that race doesn't matter. Right. Back then, that was that was controversial to the racists. They were the ones who believed that race mattered and it mattered entirely.

So right. So what so the teacher's response would be this is basic. This is about basic goodness and tolerance. Those are school and societal values. And if you don't stand for those, you don't belong at this school. Well, there are a million true and nuanced reasons why that's not true. I mean, first of all, there's a tremendous difference between the color of a person's skin and the actions that he takes. Actions are, in fact, responsible to morality. And people of different sexualities take different actions. We have the right to hold

different opinions and different values about those actions. We don't really, I mean, you have the right to be a racist, I suppose, but it doesn't make the same kind of sense to hate someone for the way he looks or the way he speaks or the way his skin color is, as it does to say you are taking certain actions, which I find immoral. So that is one important difference. But the other important difference is this, all through human history, it has been recognized that there are men and women. There's exactly 0% science that says you can change from one to another. Every cell in your body is gendered. And so they're actually teaching something that's false. They're telling people something that's false. And to say that, you know, it's morally okay to be transgender, it's morally okay to be schizophrenic, but you don't want to be. It may not be something that is desirable. And that's something that each family really thought before is the moral order that they've suddenly discovered, but no, they don't have a right to teach that to your child. And it is far, far different,

obviously, than what you're talking about with racism and the KKK. That said, I do believe that a Klansman, as much as I despise racism and as much as it hurts my heart, I do believe that people have the right to teach their children, their values, even when those values are bad, you know, and I think that in this case, in this case, you're talking again about values that have been the human values since the beginning of time. There's zero science to contradict those values. All the science in fact, confirms them. So what, what on earth are they talking about except teaching your child their delusions? Well, you know, you know that now it's your child's going to kill himself if you don't get more affirmative.

You have to start affirming him. And unlike you, we care about him. Unlike you, we care about your child's mental health and his well-being. And, you know, that's that's really what they do to parents now when it comes to this transgender stuff and their justification for not looping parents in if a child under these enormous pressures starts to submit and just to get these people off the back and be like, OK, yeah, maybe I'm a girl. I mean, truly, it's like they're trying to recruit.

It's it's as if it's recruiting ground. I think your latest episode of your podcast, I looked it up and I listened to it. It was called OK, groomer. That's something you can say to these teachers. They were saying, don't say gay. And they were putting up bill I listened to it. It was called OK Groomer. That's something you can say to these teachers. They were saying, don't say gay. And they were putting up billboards that said gay. And I thought we should put up billboards and say, OK, groomer, because really, I mean, there is no excuse.

There is a really zero percent excuse to talk to a third grader about his sexuality if you are not his parent. I cannot understand. Listen, I think 90 percent of the country, 70% at least, would say that that's immoral. If you put it in those terms, if you say you have no right to talk to someone who is not your child about their sexuality when he is little, I think we all agree with that. When I was a kid, the police used to come and visit our classroom and teach us if anyone did that, you should call the cops. You know, now now

they want to make a Disney movie about it. I think that they have gone well, well arrived where the mainstream of the country is. And I think that's going to be reflected, by the way, in the next election. OK, now we because this is another thing I heard you say you're optimistic, you're optimistic about culture, about these things we're talking about. And that's what that's a good place for a pause. Quick commercial break. More with Andrew Klavan coming up. Back with me now, Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show with The Daily Wire team and author of the new book, The Truth and Beauty, in which he explores the gospel and the meaning of God's word through poems, through literature, through great writers who you would know.

And he found it a very joyous exercise. And that brings me to, I want to continue our discussion of gender. One of the works that you took a look at was Frankenstein. And this, I never saw this coming. This is what's so creative and innovative about your book. Frankenstein, the way you studied it and the way you see it is basically a story about the usurpation of the power of women that they made a man without a mother. The science eliminated the principle of femininity from the creation of human life. This is so interesting to me because to me, this dovetails with what we're talking about because, you know, the next question in the discussion of our gender discussion is who cares? if somebody wants to say they're a tree

they're a tree like what does it bother you that some guy suddenly says you know what i think i'm a woman or some woman says you know what i think i'm a man i'm gonna live my life like that what do you care and you make the case kind of through the examination of mary's Frankenstein and other works here, advertently or not, that it does matter. It matters incredibly. I mean, beginning with the question of your inner life. I mean, this is what you lose when you lose your faith is you lose the sense that your inner life means anything. So we've come to a place where either people think your inner life doesn't mean anything, that your morals are as good as my morals and your culture is as good as my culture, or they think it means everything. You can change your sex on the spot. Well, one of the people dealing with these questions was Mary Shelley, who was a teenage girl. She had run away with the poet Shelley. He had left his wife for her. Both

Mary Shelley's mother, who was one of the first feminists, her father, Shelley himself, they all believed in free love and they all despised marriage. And as a result of this, Mary Shelley got pregnant several times, lost her children. Nobody felt much sympathy for her when her children died. Byron was sleeping with everybody, man and woman. And so she conceived of this horror story, this horror story about a man who creates a creature out of old body parts, basically, and brings it to life. And she herself said, this is a story about what happens when man usurps the rights of God to create life. And I point out in the book, it's really not because man creates life all the time. Men and women create life all the time out of the materials they have.

What Frankenstein does is he creates a creature without a woman and he takes away the power of women. And this is all throughout the book. Frankenstein becomes a monster because he has no parents. He has no one to love him, to teach him how to be a human being. He hides out, the monster Frankenstein hides out at one point with a family, and all he can do is drink in what it means to watch a mother raise her children, to watch a father take care of his wife and his family. And he ultimately, the monster comes back to Dr. Frankenstein and says, I will leave you alone if you will just do one thing, build me an Eve. You made an Adam, now build me an Eve so I can become a complete human being. This has become, Mary Shelley, like I said, she was a teenage girl when she wrote this. She invented the modern science fiction genre. And this is a theme in science fiction to this day.

When you watch the stories about dystopia, when you watch stories like The Matrix about machines taking over the world, the first thing to go is the woman. When you think about Aldous Huxley's great movie. Oh, you watch a Disney movie. Andrew, watch a Disney movie. This is a running joke in our family. They kill off the mother in virtually all these. Before we got to Disney's current craziness, we had the mother being killed off. I mean, Bambi is the most famous or infamous.

Right. But I mean, every other Disney movie, the mom's dead within the first two scenes. This is it, you know, because how do you find your humanity then? If you live in a world in Brave New World, the dystopian novel, the first thing they do is they raise children in incubators and they get rid of mothers. And The Giver, which is also a famous dystopian novel, they relegate motherhood to the lowest women in the society. If you watch The Terminator, when the machines want to destroy the rebel leader, what do they do? They go back in time and hunt for his mother, who's in the first movie,

she's just a girl. She's just a girl who wants to date and talk about her hair, but her power is that she becomes a mother. And the poets wrote about this so beautifully, Wordsworth especially, who lost his mother young, wrote in his autobiographical poem, he wrote about how a mother in communicating with her baby turns that baby into a human being and connects that baby to the world through her love. This turns out to be a scientific fact. I mean, babies are born with what's called motor neurons. When they're born, they're really not distinguished in their own minds from their mother. They're really actually still connected to their mother, even though they're outside the womb. It's in that interchange between the mother

and the child that those motor neurons come to life, that the child realizes himself as an individual and as a creative person and can go forth on his own. This is a spiritual task of motherhood that we don't think about. I do not believe, I know we're all supposed to say, oh, men can do this too. No, they can't. It's actually a special task. And I think it is a task best performed by the person who gave birth to that child, even though sometimes we have to make do in this tragic life without that. This means that when somebody says to you, oh, she's just a homemaker, she's just a mom, she's a stay-at-home mom and relegates that to a second tier, they're actually relegating the

most important task a person can do to the second tier of our business, which means that a woman who goes in and types words into a computer or shuffles paper or goes to get coffee for her boss or even is the boss is actually not doing something more important than the woman who is raising that child to be a full soul. And I don't say this in a condescending way. One of the reasons that feminism became a thing at this moment, one of the reasons Mary Shelley's mother was one of the first feminists is because if you look back at the Bible, Megan, you look back at Proverbs 31, Christians are always talking about, oh, I want a Proverbs 31 woman. A Proverbs 31 is the description of the best woman, the virtuous woman.

It's not a description of some 50s housewife vacuuming in her heels. It's a description of a businesswoman who buys land, of somebody who plants an orchard, who sells the fruit of that orchard, and then also has time to feed her family and take care of her home and make her husband proud and give her husband honor through her behavior. That's a very extensive thing. When the industrial revolution came along, which is right around the time I'm talking about in this book, when the industrial revolution came along, all of those home industries were taken away from women. Suddenly clothes, women used to be called the distaff because they made the clothes, which was a major, major industry. Suddenly clothes were going to be made in factories. Suddenly food was manufactured off the farm. Suddenly children were taken off to the cities to work in factories and didn't come back to help on the farm. So even the children that women were producing weren't as valuable as they used to be. And I'm just talking about economics, but it was just true. What you had after that was a kind of idealization of women. You had this kind of idea that was big

in the Victorian age of the angel in the house. And a woman was an angel in the house. Women weren't people anymore. They were kind of these high goddesses of domesticity, the domestic goddesses we joke today. Well, no wonder feminists started saying, you know, I'm really a human being. I would like to have an important place in my society. If you've stripped away my home industries, if you've stripped away the economic value of what I do, all I'm left now is as a dependent, as we say in the tax business. You know, what is my value? I want to have value like men have value. So that's why Mary Shelley, I think at this moment, actually perceived that something was happening, that machinery and science were actually antithetical to the spiritual task of womanhood. I personally, when you talk about me being hopeful,

one of the things I'm hopeful about is that computers have brought back home industries, have made it easier to run a business out of your home, and that women will start to discover. I think some of them started to discover during this pandemic and its lockdowns that they're needed. They're needed by their children. You don't just create a child in a moment when you go into labor. As you know, you create a child in every moment that you're with that child and every moment that that child sees his mother's love or her mother's love in her eyes. So, you know, what Mary Shelley perceived was that science, which was then and still now was largely a masculine pursuit, was somehow undermining the position of women in the world, the essential position of women in the world. And it continues to do that. I mean,

who can deny that soon babies can be born out of a machine? They probably will be born out of a machine. Who will be the woman wise enough to say, you know what? It's painful to have labor, but actually it's necessary that I have this connection to my child, that this child grows under my heart. You know, that's going to be probably, you know, the fewer women who actually say that, but they're going to be the most important women in the world. So I just think these, you know, poets aren't prophets, writers aren't prophets, but if they observe the world they're in closely enough,

it actually will tell you where the world is going. And I think Mary Shelley was a seer. I think Frankenstein is not just the source of great horror movies and great jokes and great imitations like the Mel Brooks, Young Frankenstein. It is also one of the wisest books of gothic horror ever written and an absolute work of genius. It's so exciting. I'm going back and reading it today. Today.

It's a great book. It's a great book. Right. I mean, it gives me something else to think about. And this is how you write about it in the book. This is in part, you say, perhaps this is what she's envisioning, but perhaps the humanizing tasks of femininity, creating life out of matter, homes out of houses, minds out of brains, and souls out of bodies.

Before I move on, that's great. The humanizing tasks of femininity include creating life out of matter, check, homes out of houses, check, minds out of brains, check, and souls out of bodies. I love this definition. Love will fall equally. This is the sort of dystopian future envisioned will fall equally on the genders or will be chosen like a profession by anyone who happens to have the talent and the proclivity. You go on to write, or perhaps by losing those passions and fears, by losing our genders and our mortality, we will have lost our essential selves, right?

Think about that. Perhaps your femininity is central to your essential self or your masculinity, depending on the case. Perhaps in eradicating our troubles, we will have created nothing but a convenient little nightmare of purely materialistic existence, a depersonalized personhood in a world less fit for man than for machines. I never thought of my femininity as central to my essential self, but it is. I mean, when asked the question directly, of course it is. I mean, just when asked the question directly, of course it is. Yes, of course. That's absolutely right. You know, one of the things these poets rediscovered was that the inner life is in collaboration with creation. Wordsworth called it collaboration with the one great mind. And this is an essential fact about us, that we're not just rattling around in our brains. It's not just us talking about our sex drives or talking about our history or our past or

what has happened to us. It is us in collaboration with reality. No matter what you do, it is a new thing. When Megyn Kelly walks down the street, it is different than when Andrew Klavan walks down the street. It has never happened before. It will never happen again. That experience that you're having is unique.

It is an act of creation and it is an act of creation out of creation, but it is also a collaboration with creation. Not to write a poem myself, but it's a collaboration with the creation. If you stop collaborating with the creation, you have gone off in a way that is not going to be healthy for you. If you start saying, well, I have a man's body, but I'm not really a man. I'm a woman. You're just fantasizing. It's when you collaborate with the facts of I have a man's body, but I'm not really a man, I'm a woman, you're just fantasizing. It's when you collaborate with the facts of your body, it's when you collaborate with the facts of your life, including death, that you start to understand who you are.

And this idea that we are free of that, that we are liberated from our physical selves, it's so, well, it's basically insane. I mean, it is insanity when you're free from reality. That is almost the definition of insanity. Well, there's a reason it's in the DSM-5. I mean, there's a reason. It's also unhealthy. It's unhappy. If you want to have joy, if you want to have real joy, ask yourself what you're supposed to do, what God wants you to do with this moment in time, and you will find an amazing amount of joy. And by joy, again, I don't mean happiness when I say joy, I mean gusto and life in abundance. Sometimes you're sad, sometimes you're happy, but you can always be deeply involved in life. If you're escaping

from reality, you're not going to have that experience. Okay. But to me, this whole discussion explains why I personally and many other women and men for that matter have such a visceral reaction when even even those of us who are more tolerant right towards like more supportive I'd say of you know the terminology and the pronouns and all that okay have such a visceral reaction when you use terms like um you know uh chest feeding right or like people who have whatever vaginas instead of women, right? Um, birthing peoples. It's offensive. It, it deeply cuts. I haven't able, been able to actually define why I just know it's really offensive to me. That is not an inclusive effort. That is an effort along the Mary Shelley lines of eradicating women, of erasing us entirely,

of changing things that I know are fundamental to me, although I hadn't totally been able to articulate why. You know, the left is always talking about social constructs. Gender is a social construct. That's a complete falsehood. I mean, what gender is, is a social construct in collaboration with the reality of gender. So in other words, there's no inherent reason why a woman should wear a dress and a man should wear pants. That is a performance to remind us of who we are. We perform our gender roles, but they are enhancing something that's already there. The idea that we should create a world that has no reference to reality is a Marxist idea, the idea that we can correct our false consciousness because then Marx will have been right about everything instead of wrong about

everything. This is the problem the left is trying to solve, the fact that Marx was wrong about everything. And so what they want to do is they want to change the rules of reality. But no, social constructs grow out of reality. These are our traditions, and our traditions are the wisdom of the dead. Our traditions are passing down things that we've already figured out. When we say, oh, all men are created equal, meaning all are equal in God's eyes We're done with that. That's our tradition. We can now move on in keeping with that tradition, just like we move on in keeping with our genders when we say, you know what, now because of technology and because times have changed, women can have a fuller role, more choices, they can be free. That is in keeping with the traditions of freedom and respect for women that have been with the West since forever. We've always been a society that was basically respectful of women, even though women had a certain role. So all of those things are collaborations with reality. When the left says, oh, it's just a social construct, ask yourself what it's constructed of. It's constructed of an interaction between the

human heart and the spirit, the heart that made the human heart. And I think that, you know, we don't just take those things down and throw them away. You don't tear down a fence until you know what's on the other side of it. And as the left has proved, what's on the other side of it is misery and chaos. I know you're, you're big. You've mentioned it on the husband, wife, you know, male, female partnership at the helm of the family. Of course, I'm living my own life that way, but I have lots of friends who are in same-sex couples who are not just living joyfully, as you would say, but have children. They've either used artificial insemination or they've used a surrogate or

what have you. And I know this is personal to you. Spencer's out as gay and he's written in The Atlantic a great piece about telling you about it and how awesome you are, by the way. Now, you know, people thought maybe you weren't going to be great because you were conservative Christian, but you were great. So how does that how do we process that? Because at the beginning of that LGBTQ is the LG. Right. And to me, I I think a two parent household is what's important. I don't think it's as important that they be a man and a woman. I can see the pluses, clearly.

I can see it just in my own marriage. I've got certain gifts. My husband's got others. We meld together like a yin and a yang. But I can see two gay men having a lot of those same differences that I have for my husband, from one another, and same for women. So how do you look at that? Well, first of all, I've lived my life in the arts. So half the people I've known and worked

with are gay. They've been my respected colleagues and my very, very close friends. And, and again, Spencer was as close to me as my own beating heart is, is a gay guy. And I knew that I suspected that from the time he was three years old. So, yeah, of course, we should love one another. We should treat one another with respect. I don't see anything wrong with saying that the best thing for a child is a loving male and female or loving male and female parents. You know, life is very unfair and it's very tragic. And in America, we want to say, well, this is just as good. That's just as good. I don't think it is. I think this is the best thing. That doesn't mean that there are not accommodations that can be made. If a gay couple adopts a child who would not have no parents if he didn't adopt them, if they weren't adopted, you know, I think that's an improvement. That's a step up in the world. But there's nothing wrong with saying this is the best situation. And I actually think that society has a right to privilege male-female families, to elevate them

in the eyes of the society without discriminating necessarily against other kinds of families. Again, when your core is strong, you can be very accepting of exceptions. And I think that we should understand that, yeah, this is a value. This is a natural value. It is a natural thing for man and woman to come together. It is a natural thing for them to want their child to form a family as they formed a family. All these things are part of nature and we can collaborate with that nature without excluding or attacking or bullying the people who don't fit in with that basic pattern. This idea, which originates, I think, with Nietzsche, that we have to make allowances for every exception and rewrite the rules of society and rewrite the rules of nature for every

exception that comes along is ridiculous. We can be loving to people who don't fit the mold, but we shouldn't get rid of the mold. The mold was actually given to us. When you talk about gender assignment, we have a gender assignment. It's our gender. That was assigned to us. We didn't choose that. It was given to us. But again, the guy who doesn't fit in, the lady who doesn't fit in, the person who has no domestic feeling, the guy who's a gay person who doesn't want to have a female partner, these are things that can all be accepted and all be loved. I think America has been traditionally very accepting of eccentrics and offbeat people. But the idea that that should then become the center of life, which cannot support life, cannot create life, and is not the thing that got us to the place to which we have come is absurd. This is one of the key things and one of the things that Wordsworth, a poet in my book, discovered is that your traditions make you who you are. So when you tear down a statue of Thomas

Jefferson because he held slaves, you are tearing down the statue of the person who taught you that slavery is wrong. We live in time. We travel through time. We become who we are both as an individual and as a society over time. And if you get rid of the people who brought you here because they weren't't see how you can have tolerance when every single exception becomes the rule. That doesn't make sense to me. both sort of BLM sort of woke people and people who are pushing the sort of crazy gender ideology. You need to center me now. Me and my people, they need to be centered. You are not centering the LGBTQ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah community in that comment. He's like, right. This is absolutely true, by the way, that we're not centering them.

And if you talk to Spencer, he would say, I'm not in the center. I'm, you know, I'm not in the center. I'm an artist. Most people aren't artists. You know, I live in the house made by ordinary people. I shouldn't say ordinary people, but people who aren't artists. If there are no, look, we could get rid of every male artist on earth and survive, but we can't get rid of soldiers and cops.

You know, we could get rid of every lady doctor who's around, but we can't get rid of moms. You know, there are certain things that are absolutely essential and those essentials need to be kept in place. and cops. We could get rid of every lady doctor who's around, but we can't get rid of moms. There are certain things that are absolutely essential and those essentials need to be kept in place. I live in the house made by people who are not eccentric artists like me. I respect them. I work for them. My job is to entertain and amuse and hopefully enlighten them. But if I say, put me at the center, that society is not going to last very long. You do not want me at the center. I wasn't made for the center. I was made to be what I am. And I think the same thing is true of gay people.

Andrew's got a special relationship with his wife and writes some very funny things about their process when he writes his books. I want to ask him about that. And then speaking of BLM, more trouble coming their way on how they spend the money they get and their attempts to cover it up. All right, Drew. So New York Magazine, to its credit, because you're not expecting this story to come from New York Magazine, reporting now that Black Lives Matter secretly purchased a $6 million house. And not only was it $6 million, but it was spectacular. So they got a lot for their money. Apparently they got, it's in Southern California, 6,500 square feet, more than half a dozen bedrooms and bathrooms,

several fireplaces, a soundstage, a pool, a bungalow, parking for more than 20 cars, and so on and so forth. They paid for it in cash in October 2020, as the donations were pouring in post-George Floyd. They report that the transaction has not been previously reported. BLM's leadership had hoped to keep the house's existence a secret. Well, then they shouldn't have filmed their little promo videos for YouTube sitting in front of it because somebody noticed. Look at that. That's the BLM three leaders sitting in front of their beautiful home. Patrice Cullors, Alicia Garza and Malina Abdullah. In that video, which we're showing a picture of for the YouTube watchers, there, Patrice Cullors, who was under fire for having $3 million worth of homes, again, linked to her charitable work as the head of BLM, she was lamenting the right-wing media attacks, saying, I've just been in survival mode, as she sat before a six million dollar home that the donations had purchased the new york magazine points out uh to the benefit of black lives matter leaders personally a little bit of extra uh flair here new york magazine reached out to blm on march 30th

asking about the house which is known internally as, quote, campus. And the writer, Sean Campbell, writes, quote, afterward, leaders circulate an internal strategy memo with possible responses ranging from can we kill the story to our angle needs to be to deflate ownership of the property. The memo also describes the property as a safe house. It's a safe house for leaders whose safety has been threatened. Then he writes that the notion that the house is simultaneously a confidential refuge and a place for broadcasting to the widest possible audience with their YouTube videos might be somewhat intention.

So what are we to make of BLM now with the benefit of hindsight and the number of investigations into this group, state after state after state, but then misusing funds and not filing the proper reporting and failing to disclose what they're doing with people's dollars? There's always been a con grafted on the larger con of the mainstream news media. I mean, they call themselves Black Lives Matter because the left is so good coming up with these titles, like so good with language, you know, making the good sound evil, making the evil sound good. They're just great at it. So Black Lives Matter, I got to give them applause for that. If you went on their website early on before they got caught and changed it, it was not just a Marxist website. It was a Maoist

website. It was dedicated to the destruction of the family, dedicated to the destruction of the culture, dedicated to the destruction of most of the things that people in this country hold dear, but they called them Black Lives Matter. I wanted to start my own organization called Kittens Are Nice and have you send money to me because if the mainstream media would fall for that, I thought they would fall for anything. Again, they skip fall for anything. You know, again, they skip over, they manage, the left always manages to skip over first principles. Is there such a thing as a black life? I mean, is that really something that Americans accept as a reality to begin with? When I moved recently and I was looking for a new church, the first thing I excluded was any church that had a banner on it saying black lives matter. Cause I thought, you

know, in Christ, there is no black and white in In Christ, we're all one part of this one body. So if you believe Black Lives Matter, you don't believe in Christianity. And I think that this is a very, it's always been, it has always been a con. And the problem we're facing, and this is a genuine bigger problem, is we're in an information crisis. The left is right about this. When they talk about misinformation, the problem is they're the ones who generate it. But when we have a news media, I started out in newspapers. I started out working in newspapers with guys who were left-wing and right-wing. Half the time, you didn't know where they stood. And if you strayed, and I was a liberal then, and I would stray to the left, if somebody would take you outside and say, hey, that is not the way we do this here. We report the facts and just the facts. The media has become corrupt. Our news media is vividly,

vividly corrupt and deeply corrupt. And so when you come along and you say Black Lives Matter and you participate in riots with the open intention of destroying our society, and you have clowns on the media saying, oh, well, these riots were mostly peaceful. You know, it's like you have a serious problem. I'm not sure the problem is these particular con men and women. They are con men. They are con women. But really, I think the larger problem is a media that has lost touch with its actual job, its job of reporting the news, not objectively, just fairly.

All they have to do is give both sides and tell both sides. And when you see violence, you call it violence. This is a violent Maoist organization. And the fact that it uses your money to buy themselves a $6 million house doesn't surprise me even a little bit. Yeah. Same. So what, what would you recommend? You know, a lot of, a lot of people are still being subjected to this DEI mandatory training at their workplace or it's being foisted on their kids at their school. You know, you see it in the books that come home with your kid or you'll find out they

have to go to these mandatory DEI trainings even to get into some of, in particular, the New York City private schools. What would you say to people faced with that command in order to work, in order to send their kid to school? Two things. I would say the first thing is courage is required. It is a requirement. We got here by people dying face down in the mud, fighting tyrants in order for us to be free. You don't have to do that, I hope. All you have to do is you have to speak up. You have to tell people what you think when you say it, when in those moments when it matters, right? Now, that doesn't mean that you stick your head in the

cannon's mouth. That doesn't mean you get your kid thrown out of school. It doesn't mean you get fired from your job. What it does mean is you start to find the people who agree with you and band together so that you have some force in the workplace. I mean, this is something that happened at Disney. At Disney, they have this LGBTQ minority that is vicious and will destroy you and will take your job away. Well, the people who are conservatives at Disney, and there are many, many of them, are cowering away. I saw it in Hollywood when I worked in Hollywood and people would come up to me in meetings and they would whisper and say, you know, I saw you on Sean Hannity. You were great. I say, why are you whispering? We're in the right. Why are you whispering? You know, and I think we have to stop that. We have to stop assuming that we're going to blow ourselves up just by speaking the truth. But again, that doesn't mean to be foolish. That means strategize,

find people to gang, to gang together with you and fight back because what they're doing is wrong. They are in the wrong, not you. It is wrong to teach people that whiteness is an essential quality, just like it's wrong to teach people that blackness is an essential quality. It's wrong to teach people that you have to believe in that somebody can change his gender when in fact they can't. So I think these are things that we can do. Hopefully it doesn't have to go into court, but maybe it does have to go into court. If you can fight back against this, as long as you don't fight alone and as long as you have courage. And I think those are the two things we have to do. We can't let it go. I've been fighting now for American culture, been talking about American culture for all this time, for decades. But American culture is not

just the movies and it's not just guys like me writing novels and it's not just plays and all that. It's every single thing that we do. Every single one of us has a little piece of the flame of our culture in his hands and has to keep that flame alive. And you can't do it by hiding it under a bushel. You can't do it by saying, oh, I'm going to fly under the radar. I'm going to stay safe. You have to do what people have done for freedom from the beginning of time, which is you have to fight for it. And that means fighting the domestic battle as well as battle sometimes overseas. You know, I said last week in the wake of the Will Smith slap, I felt like culturally we lost a little something that night, you know, that 30 years ago, that wouldn't have happened. That just the guardrails that were up would have made very

clear to any actor thinking about doing that. Your career will end. Even if you win Best Actor later, it will end. You will be shunned. We don't tolerate that kind of behavior. And we saw something very different with Will Smith that night. Now that the Hollywood crowd has realized people didn't like that and you shouldn't support it, they're more like, oh, it was horrible, horrible. And then you've got the glommers like Amy Schumer, like I was deeply triggered and traumatized.

Like, lady, it's not your trauma. Just stop it. Take a seat. This isn't about you. Hello. Sorry, sweetheart. This one's not about you. But I do think culturally it said something not good about where we are right now as Americans. What did you make of it? Yeah, I think it said something essential. It's not that the people in old Hollywood were necessarily better people. It's that the people in charge were businessmen and they were deeply responsible to the American public. They wanted to give the public what they wanted so they could have people in the seats. When the movie business was taken over by the artists, when the studio system was destroyed, and when the movie business was taken over by the artists, when the studio system was destroyed,

and when the movie business became an international business so that they're making more money in China than they're making it here, they no longer feel that responsibility. So Will Smith knew that he could get up and smack Chris Rock, or thought he could, without any consequences whatsoever. These people have been getting up. The Oscars used to be watched by 55 million people. These are watched from between 10 and 15 million people.

And the reason is, is these guys felt it was OK to get up and tell us that we were idiots if we voted for somebody that they didn't support. They're actors. You know, I mean, they're actors. They're they're writers. They're talented. They're blessed genetically. They look great. That's their job. It's just like news people have to do their job and report the news. Entertainers have to do their job and entertain. We don't care what they think. And the same spirit that made them think that they could get on stage and lecture us and we would continue to watch their crummy award show where they patted each other on the back is the spirit that made Will Smith think that he could get up

and smack a guy smaller than he was, who was holding a mic and trying to run a show. So it was essentially a sucker punch and show himself to be some kind of chivalrous man after allowing or basically agreeing to his wife sleeping around and saying, I'm not in a monogamous relationship. It's like he said, keep my wife's name out of your mouth, but you could put other pieces of her in your mouth. So, I mean, I don't really think that that was an act of chivalry we were watching. It was an act of entitlement. And our entertainers have become so rich, so protected, so elite that they no longer feel entitled to the audience who made them what they are. And it's amazing to me. It is amazing to me to watch late night comedy like Stephen Colbert and have him tell you like, hey, you know, you shouldn't be complaining about gas prices. Drive a Tesla like I do defended my honor more than once, but he's never punched somebody in the face or sucker punched

anybody. But he certainly, when I was under attack, like somebody shouting right at me has gotten in people's faces saying, you talked to my wife, you know, like that you get, and you're going to get it. I appreciate that. I, to me, that's what a real man does. Yes. He will stand up for you, but he won't sucker punch somebody who's just trying to make a joke is literally getting paid to tell jokes and be up there and keep the crowd entertained. It's not all about one person. It's about entertaining the greater crowd. And you understand sometimes it involves you taking a couple of licks because it's fun to make fun of the rich and famous. We all sort of understand that going into these Oscars, they lost it for a minute. But anyway,

I, so I, I like chivalry. That wasn't chivalry. That was a big ego who saw an opportunity to try to make himself look like a big man, and it wound up having the opposite effect. Absolutely true. And I myself have done that, what you're talking about, stood up for my wife and gotten in people's faces. But in that case, I think if it had really bothered me or if it had bothered her, which seemed to be the case because Smith was laughing at the joke until he looked at his wife, I would have spoken to the guy afterwards. And I think in that case, I really would have put my arm around his shoulder and said, my brother, you went over the line there. That's the way you handle that particular situation because the guy is not being hostile. He doesn't mean to do anything insulting. He meant to tell what sounded to me like a friendly joke. So it was a complete overreaction. I think it came from the fact that

Smith has been humiliated by his wife in public, where she went on podcasts and talked about the affair she was having. You know, and I think his career has been undermined. Denzel Washington said to him, when you get to the top, that's when the devil comes after you. And that's exactly what happened to this guy. This guy was one of them. You know, he was really the last movie star. He was the last guy who could open a movie. The last guy where he went to a Will Smith movie. You know, there aren't that many stars like that anymore.

I mean, you might like somebody in movies, but you don't go to his movie necessarily. Will Smith was the last guy where you actually went to a Will Smith movie. And he has blown that entirely and he'll never get it back because nobody is going to forget that they saw that and he can no longer be the hero in the film without us bringing that to mind. So it was really a big, big mistake. Now you and your wife do not have an open marriage, I presume. We do not. Only because I fear for my life, though. You have to explain to me. So you and Ellen have been married since 1980,

solid marriage. You met her hitchhiking? Yeah. What? She was hitchhiking. I kept my car. I lived in San Francisco and went to school in Berkeley. I kept my car in a garage there and I was walking back and she was an absolute beauty. She was a model level beauty, very tall. And I saw her hitchhiking and I said to myself, look at that gorgeous Amazon. Those are the words that went through my mind. I thought I got to get my car and I ran up to get my car so I could pick her up. So you weren't even naturally driving. I wasn't even driving the car, no. And it was a one-way grid. I had to go all the way around the corner. I went through this residential area at 50 miles an hour. I can still see the old lady. I almost ran over, like looking at me with terror as I kind of swerved around her. And yeah,

I pulled up and then, of course, it was very suave. I said, you know, going my way, my dear, you know, and she got in the car and she sat down and I immediately I just felt this little click. And I just thought, huh, you know, this is actually new. And we were living together very shortly after that and married a couple of years later. And we really it really has been a gift from God. You know, it's been 42 years of marriage. We had we have had one fight about 35 years ago. It's not that we always agree.

It's not that we don't have to discuss things. It's just the only time we ever lost our tempers with each other. It's been a romance. And we frequently joke that we did everything wrong. We lived together. We sort of just didn't pay attention to the rules. But we just were chosen to be together like this. And it has been one of the great gifts of my life.

It really has. Love hearing that. This is what you write about her. She is one of, you say wonderful things, and she is also one of the best editors I've ever met. My process is she reads it, critiques it. I scream at her and tell her she doesn't know what she's talking about. Then I do what she says. It works great. Works great for me, I'd say. Wait, and then you go on, then you go on on this is from the truth and beauty prologue um my wife ellen to her uh to her alone falls the unenviable task of reading my shambolic first drafts into which i seem to throw every thought

i ever had since childhood when she heroically took on my earliest effort at the truth and beauty she told me it was such a mess that there were times while reading it when she actually doubted my sanity. My serene reply should be printed on t-shirts and sold at writers' conferences. Quote, no, no, it's a great book. I just have to cut out all the bad parts. It's true. I've written two nonfiction books, my memoir and this one, and both of them were twice the size in the first draft. And I essentially handed Ellen a pen and said, just tell me what parts have to go. And it's funny, in both cases, more of this one, more of The Truth and Beauty, I knew I had a wonderful book at the core and I just had to take away all the other stuff that I thought

was so important that I put in there. But it's wonderful to have an in-house editor like that. She is great at it. Yes. That's how it goes between my husband and me, too. So he writes his draft. And then I'm pretty honest on my feedback. And I'll write in the margin, boring, boring, boring. And I'll be like, wow.

I didn't have to be quite so brutally honest. I'm like, you know what? Better you hear it from me now than you hear it from some editor or some would-be publisher or some critic later. And he's always happy. But you know, was it Hemingway? He said, little darlings, no writer wants to get rid of his little darlings and you need your actual darling. Samuel Johnson. Yeah. Okay. You need your actual darling to help you separate and realize that they're not all that important to you. Absolutely true.

And it really does make a huge difference to have somebody who cares about you, even though, as you say frequently, my wife is blunt as well, but it makes a difference that, it's really a gift to have somebody who will criticize you while rooting for you. Not everybody gets that.

A lot of times people who criticize you are actually trying to tear you down. But when someone is trying to build you up, criticism is actually a beautiful thing. Yes, that's exactly right. Okay. So now on that sunny note, talk to me more about your optimism, because I know you're feeling actually, unlike so many, pretty good about where we are right now in the culture wars in the country. It's not that you don't recognize the problems, not at all, but you're seeing some signs of hope. And so like some green shoots, what is it that's making you feel good? Well, for one thing, we have a party, the Democratic Party is now as their central platform

is we have the right to take your children away and tell them to be mutilated to change their sex. That's actually like central to their point of view. It's not like a side thing that they're saying. Everything that they have done has been exposed. So for instance, the Green New Deal was a major component of the Ukrainian invasion. Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if we were still doing what we've done under Trump and producing enough energy to share with the world so we can undercut his petro economy. So that's pretty much kind of done. Globalization, which was a real threat because globalization doesn't make sense unless it

is colonized by American values or Western values of freedom. Globalization, we now understand, was a mirage. And of course, the economy is a mess. The inflation, I loved in the Washington post, Jennifer Rubin wrote, if it weren't for inflation, you know, Joe Biden would be doing a great job. You know, it's like, if I weren't dead, I'd be alive. Yeah, that's all true. So, so the failure, you know, Republicans get thrown out of office when they don't do the conservative things they say they're going to do. Democrats get thrown out of office when they do do the leftist things they're going to do, because not only is leftism wrong per se and

wicked per se, it also doesn't work. I mean, this is also a gift from God that the thing that is bad also makes things worse. So I'm looking at a genuine red wave in the midterms, but more important than that, more importantly than that, I'm looking at a culture that is turning the corner, that is starting to say, you know what, we've had enough. This is enough. You cannot take my child and do that to my child. When mom comes home, when we wake up mom and you're messing with her kid, it's not a good look. I mean, ever since you were a kid, you know that when mom comes home, you got to straighten up. When these school board people started saying, you've got to investigate parents as terrorists, the Democrats, like a bunch of idiots, actually did it. They actually did it.

You know, what do you think the parents are going to do? They're going to go, yeah, I want to vote for those people who see us as terrorists. But I think more importantly is the culture. The Daily Wire is taking strides in the culture. I think a lot of conservatives suddenly understand that you cannot, it's not free to go to some toxic left-wing movie and have them pour this garbage into your brains or your child's brains or any of our brains. And I think that that turning point has been a long time coming, but time's up for these guys. They're creeps and they're wrong about just about everything. And it is time to take the culture back from them. And look, like I said, I've been talking about it for 20 years. Now I see it happening and it does make me

extremely hopeful. Love it. Great note to end it on. I hope you come back. Will you come back? Oh, it's been a delight. Yes. I would love to come back anytime. Awesome. It's truly, it's the chewing rubies in my mouth listening to you speak. It's like, yes, great. more. Just go. Every topic, we need two more hours, and hopefully we'll get them on another date. Andrew Klavan, thank you so much. Again, the new book is called The Truth and Beauty, How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus. And he writes in the book that it advanced his heart's journey toward God.

Okay. Advance your heart's journey toward God by reading a book that will help you learn on so many different levels, right? Anyway, our thanks to Andrew. I want to tell you that we're going to have Gary Kasparov tomorrow for the full show. We wanted to do an in-depth profile of him and all the crazy, crazy chess success he had at such a young age in Russia. He's a fascinating guy. And what's his take on where things stand right now in Ukraine? We're going to go through all of that together. There are updates there and across the country on several items. And if you want to post a comment about the show, just go to the review section in Apple Podcasts. Make sure you subscribe to the show

and give us five stars, por favor, and then give us a review. I love reading them right now. I read them every day and love all the guest suggestions on there. I go through them all the time and I screen grab the ones that are good for me and I forward them to my team

so you could be of help. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.