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

Episode Date: May 7, 2023

SPONSORED BY: The Tired Moderate - get his brilliant new satire 'Danielle's Passion' here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BYGKX8NM/ Andrew Klavan is a writer of crime and suspense novels, several of which have been adapted into Hollywood movies including 'True Crime' starring Clint Eastwood, and 'Don’t Say a Word' starring Michael Douglas. He has also written screenplays for several films. He is now the host of 'The Andrew Klavan Show' podcast on The Daily Wire. Get The Tired Moderate's other work here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092W9YPJM/ FOR UK READERS:  'Danielle's Passion': https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BYGKX8NM/  Other novels: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B092W9YPJM/ Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Intro  01:09 Sponsor Message: The Tired Moderate 02:44 Who Is Andrew Klavan? 06:39 Every Good Story Begins With a Boy & a Girl 10:02 Women in Today’s Culture 14:35 What is Going on with the Film Industry? 17:56 The Constructs of Power 22:24 Sponsor Message: Locals  23:26 The Film Industry & American Values 29:38 Is the West Coming to an End? 33:32 Why Are the Arts No Longer Open to New Ideas? 39:34 Old-School Liberal Values 42:30 The Power of the Left  48:37 America’s Loss of Rebel Spirit 54:46 The True Artists Are the Rebels 57:38 Andrew’s Thoughts on Donald Trump/DeSantis 1:02:26 How Do We Reach an Anti-Woke World? 1:08:21 What’s the One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Women no longer exist as characters in the movies. You cannot go to the movies and see a woman who is anything like a woman that you would actually meet unless you date wrestlers. And when my daughter was growing up, there would be a scene and a woman would punch a guy and the guy would roll ass over teacquivel off the door. And I would say to her, you know, if you punch a guy, the first thing that happens is your hand breaks, and the second that happens is he beats the living crap out of yours, you know?

And so don't ever think that that's a real thing. So feminism destroyed the character of the woman. And yet that's what stories are about. They're about whether a woman can be womanly enough and whether a man can be manly enough to keep life going. Is the West coming to an end? Something is coming to an end. And when things come to an end, it's a very dangerous moment.

And I think that there are probably 100 good years left to the Republic, or 100 years left to the Republic. They may not be that good. And then I think, Something else will come. Hey, Constantine, do you like romantic novels? No. In my country, men who read romantic novels are executed, which is correct.

This is why we don't have men with pink hair or women with unshaved armpits. All right, mate, chill out. How bad if the character was woke? Even worse, Lenin would have been spinning in his glass case. But what if it's satirical? In my country, we do not have satire. Laughing is not allowed. If you want humor, read Dostoevsky.

Well, if you are blessed with a sense of humor and enjoy a bitingly funny take-down of romance novels and world culture, then you have to read Danielle's Passion, a new satire that follows a young Ivy League grad as she battles white supremacy, the patriarchy and late stage capitalism in the hellscape that is Irvine, California. This is not natural. Live, laugh and love through the eyes of one of your moral superiors. Suffer every microaggression, judge every co-worker, betray every family member as if you were doing it yourself and come out feeling just as smug.

This sounds like communist Russia. Now I'm interested in this book. It's comedy done the right way. No lectures, no messages, no characters banging on about the same tired talking points. Satire as it's meant to be. Solve, if you want great book, go to Amazon and click on link below. We also recommend you,

by Tide Moderates, other books, woke fragility, and a little book of woke jokes. Click on Link and laugh like you're reading War and Peace. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry on the road from the USA. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

Our terrific guest today is an author and former Hollywood screenwriter. Andrew Claven, welcome to Trigonometry. It's great to see you guys. Listen man, it's an absolute. It's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. There's so many things we're going to talk about that I can't wait. But for anyone who is not familiar with your story, it's a very interesting one.

It's a very interesting journey you've had in terms of your religion and views and all sorts of things. So who are you, how are you where you are? What's been your journey through life? Well, I've been a writer all my life is all I ever wanted to be. I was a mystery writer. I kind of fell in love with the American Tough Guy writers when I was a kid. And so I made my way as a mystery writer and did very well, you know, won awards and how to had movies made. And then, as you say, I kind of thought, before I age out, which is, I think,

about the age of 22, I wanted to try Hollywood. So I went to Hollywood, and I did that for a while. And that was working well, except that I... You were hugely successful, done on the play itself. You were hugely successful. I was doing quite well, yeah, in Hollywood. I mean, in Hollywood, you can do well without any movies getting made. You just sell the script. You're making a bundle, and it was... But I was having fun, but unfortunately, I had been living in the UK for... seven years, all through the 90s. And I came back, and shortly after I came back, 9-11 happened. And I had come back from the UK without realizing it, I had become politically conservative.

And I didn't even know it because I wasn't dealing with American politics. I was dealing only with British politics, and, you know, I didn't really care. I just was paying attention to them. And I came back and I suddenly found that all of the people that I liked listening to from Rush Limbaugh on were conservatives. And I thought, well, that's a shock because I had left. I had been a Jewish liberal, you know, typical Jewish coastal liberal. And at the same time, or really slightly afterwards, a long, long journey

of conversion came upon me. And so when I say I was Jewish, I was racially Jewish, but I had no religion, and I suddenly began to realize I was a Christian. And so at the same time, I became a loudmouth conservative because 9-11 had happened, and Hollywood was making these movies showing us as the bad guys. And they were making movie after movie showing us as the bad guys. And I thought,

This is a terrible thing to do. Even the movies that were opposed to Vietnam were made after Vietnam was over. And so I started to talk about that and write about that. And I even went to Afghanistan and had myself embedded with the troops so I could speak with authority. And I said, you guys are really messing this. This is wrong. It's wrong when their guys, it's not wrong to disagree with the war. But while our guys are being shot at, you shouldn't be making movies like this.

Well, that on top of becoming a Christian, my Hollywood career died like that. I mean, it was instantaneous. But simultaneously, because God does take care of his poets and his fools, and on both, I started to do these kind of satirical videos about conservatism, and that became a second career. And so now I have this kind of remarkable career. It's like this is now, as I enter what must be the last phase of my life, unless I'm immortal. You know, I find myself having the career of my dreams. I'm writing nonfiction about the things.

things I understand in the culture and how Christianity speaks through them. I'm still, I have a new mystery series going on, and I'm working at the Daily Wire as a podcaster. And it's really been a remarkable journey. The only thing I'm not doing anymore is Hollywood. And to be honest with you, I never really liked the movie business anyway. I mean, it was just something I did because it seemed like the next step in my career. So that's the one thing that has been, I was literally canceled. I mean, I was literally just blacklisted and went dark there.

But other than that, things have been remarkable. Yeah. And one of the things you said to him, because we met here last year, and I still remember this, we were talking about screenwriting and writing in general. And you said every great story begins with a boy and a girl. And once I got past the transphobia and the homophobia of that statement, it really made me think because that is so fundamentally true. And yet I think we've become quite uncomfortable with telling a story as basic as that,

or a story that's based on such a simple thing. Well, women no longer exist as characters in the movies. You cannot go to the movies and see a woman who is anything like a woman that you would actually meet unless you date wrestlers. Probably, I mean, when you talk about, you know, before the cameras started rolling, we're talking about all the controversial things we say and how people get angry. Maybe the thing that made people angrier than anything else I've ever said on the air was I saw a show The Witcher in which the woman was fighting a duel. And I said, women can't fight duels with men.

That's not the way that worked. I mean, if it's the Middle Ages and you're in an actual battle, not on a fencing field, those guys were like, you know, it's not like you'd be fighting me. You'd be fighting a guy, this gigantic guy, and he'd come and just wipe you off the face of the earth. If you have a character in a fantasy who's a woman, she should have some magical power because women do have that. But you can't keep putting women in who fight because that doesn't happen in real life.

And when my daughter was growing up, there would be a scene and a woman would punch a guy and the guy would roll ass over teackel up the door. And I would say to her, you know, if you punch a guy, the first thing that happens is your hand breaks and the second thing that happens is he beats the living crap out of you, you know? And so don't ever think that that's a real thing.

So feminism destroyed the character of the woman, and yet that's what stories are about. They're about whether a woman can be womanly enough and whether a man can be manly enough to keep life going, to keep the planet, you know, the human race continuing. And in telling that story, you are telling an essential, what's called a psychomachy, the inner battle that we all fight, to bring together the pieces of ourselves, because we all have female and male elements and when you put those together you are getting something like

the image of God, you know, in which we are made. And so that story is the story. And once you lose that story, you're not telling any story at all. And it really is interesting. I mean, I went just the other day, my wife and I went and saw the new Dungeons and Dragons movie.

And the first thing that happens is a giant bad guy comes in. This is a classic scene because this is the scene where Brad Pitt is reading the script. and says, oh, yeah, I'd want to play that part. Bad guy comes in, he's a monster, he's huge, comes up to a woman, the woman just beats the crap out of it.

And I thought, yeah, you've already lost me, you know, the rest. And in fact, the film is entertaining, it's beautiful, but it's dead inside. It has no inside, because that character, that female character, women no longer know who they're supposed to be, and they get insulted if you say to them, well, you may be many things, but the one thing you're not is a man, you know. And so you have to understand what you are as a woman.

and that has been outlawed as an idea. And signifies something in the culture to me, that very basic, it's like a house without a foundation. Well, you know, I wrote this book, The Truth and Beauty, and I have a chapter on Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. And I point out that when people read Frankenstein, it really starts the science fiction genre.

She basically invents the modern science fiction genre. When people read that, they always say, well, Frankenstein wanted to be God. He wanted to create life. And Mary Shelley herself said this. And I thought, no, men do create life. Men and women do create life. He wants to replace not God.

He wants to replace the mother. He wants to create life without a woman. And that is to a large degree what science fiction is about. And to a large, an even larger and worse degree, what science is about. It has been a long attempt to eliminate the fertility and the difference of women because men are afraid of that power.

And that's what Mary Shelley I thought foresaw. If you think of a movie like The Terminator, the machines take over, and the people rebel. So how do they stop the rebellion? They go back in time to kill the hero's mother. And if you watch that first brilliant film, the woman they want to kill,

she has nothing special about her except she's a girl. That's her superpower, you know? And they know they've got to kill her because the machine world depends on women being taken away. This is, you know, just right this moment, people were yelling at me on Twitter because I said we should boycott Anheuser-Busch for putting a boy pretending to be a girl on one of their beer cans.

They said, oh, this is such a small thing. Why are you getting so upset? This is everything. This is everything. The role of women in a society, who, after all, create humankind, is everything. And that's why societies that have freer women who liberate women, who have respect for women, that's why they thrive. And societies that don't get stuck in a kind of medieval half-life.

And it's important because soon there'll be machines that give birth. And then we'll turn to women and say, and what's special about you? I can run faster than you. I'm stronger than you are. I can do math better than you can do it. What does it you do again? And they'll have lost their vocation. It's a dangerous, dangerous moment.

because our humanity depends on them. It's such a profound point, and that is really what we're seeing, and we're seeing it right the way through our culture. When are we going to wake up from this, Andrew? Well, hopefully, you know, we're not going to wake up until women get angry, and this is the thing.

You know, my friend and colleague at the Daily Wire, Candice Owens, was just saying, when they did it to Budweiser beer, suddenly Budweiser beer took an economic hit, and she said, why? Because men drink Budweiser beer, And they get angry, but women... Not real men.

Not right? No, of course not. Of course not. And certainly not men with any taste in beer, I think. But she was just saying that men don't take this stuff quite as much as women do. Women have been convinced. My problem with feminism was always the same thing. It was always, it was not that women shouldn't have choices.

It was that their values are men's values. They say, oh, you're just a homemaker. You know, you think really just a homemaker? I mean, isn't the home that? the basic building block of the state. You're just raising children, you're just creating new people. That has been the feminist archetype from the very beginning. Simone de Beauvoir said women should not be allowed to stay home and raise their kids

because too many women will choose to do that. And they have been convincing women that this is a minor thing. This is being thrown out of the society. So when you say how long will this last, the answer is until you start to have women. men saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, we've been duped, we've been duped out of ourselves. And you're starting to see it now. I mean, we were talking about Mary Harrington, who's just this brilliant, you know, Oxford educated thinker, and she, you know, had a baby. She was totally in with the left, had a baby, and she thought, no, I actually kind of like this.

I actually kind of want to do this. And when more thinking women have that kind of courage, then you'll have ideas trickling down that will counter feminism. Because feminism has just been mistake. It has made everybody miserable. You wonder why I get it. I wonder why people get upset you in Twitter. But let's move to the movie business for a little bit. I'm a huge movie fan. I've loved movies right the way from year dot. It's my passion, my love, movie buff, movie nerd, whatever. What's going on with the movies? I can't remember, I mean, there's the odd movie that comes along and I go, oh, I'd like to see that. But nothing really compels me like it used to. Yeah.

What's going on? Well, there's two things. One is that art forms have a natural life cycle. You know, they can come back. They don't necessarily die forever, but they rise up at their peak. Usually very early on. To me, the peak year of the movies is 1939. I mean, and what happens at that peak is that the popular movies

and the critically acclaimed movies are the same movie. So when you get it, when you get it... Oh, I see where this is going. Well, it's true. You know, you get an era like where the theater is thriving. Shakespeare is the popular playwright. You get the novels of Thriving Dickens. You know, one of the greatest novelist ever is also the best-selling novelist.

1939, if you look at the 10 Oscar nominees, there are also some of the greatest films ever made, including The Wizard of Oz and, you know, I don't know if gone with the wind was that year, but it was almost that year. Mr. Smith, one of the Frank Capram movies, is just brilliant movies. As an art form ages out, they split into popular trash, like these Marvel movies, these superhero movies,

and these kind of tiny little intellectual exercises that the critics think are, oh, so important, but the rest of us can't stay awake through. And that's the one thing that's happening. It's simply a matter of the art form aging out, and a lot of that energy went over to TV in the 2000s, the early 2000s. I remember watching a show here called The Shield and thinking, oh gee they're doing everything I did in the golden the second golden age of mystery writing I was writing characters just like this and now they've all moved over to TV and that and we had 20 years of

great TV here I mean it was really brilliant stuff but the other thing is this this idea of of wokeness which is actually a very deep we use it as a slogan as a catch word but it's actually a very deep philosophical moment. It is the bottom of atheistic philosophy. And it's impossible to make a good story out of it because it has no inner life. The whole premise of wokeness is there is no spiritual life. There's only power.

Everything that we believe in is power. Femininity is power. Masculinity. The constructs of power. And so they can't say anything. You can't, you can't say anything about what it is to be a human being. you know, there is, we're talking about there are no women characters.

I've always thought, what would happen if you told a story in which a woman character starts out as a powerful business woman and then says, you know what, I don't want to do this. I want to make a family. I want a man to take care of me so I can do this. You know, you can't make that movie. And yet, that is the movie, right? You can't make a movie where a guy comes to town and builds a business and he's the hero of the movie, you know, because it's all about power.

So if he has power, he must be the bad guy. when you get rid of the spiritual life, there's only power. And that's not a good story. Wow. You know, Uri Besmanov, I don't know if you're familiar with him, he was a KGB defector from the Soviet Union. Yes. In the, like, he has lectures on YouTube, and this is one of the things he talked about how in the movies at a certain point,

the police, the generals, the army, they all became the bad guys. The criminals are the good one. The KGB, not the KGB, the Army Colonel, he's always the dumb, one, the whatever. But I want to come back to the first of those two, Andrew, because what you're talking about is a perfect metaphor for politics more broadly, because you have an elite that is so up its own ass. It is completely out of touch with the ordinary person. And so... Which is typical, by the way. Right. Well, right. And so that's why the movie, or that, the screen, the screenshots from like the Rotten Tomatoes ratings for comedy shows like a Dave Chappelle

latest show or a movie and now their parodies on themselves where like critics 100% you know for the for they like or dislike something and it's the opposite way for the ordinary person right and it seems to me like it's not just about aging out it's about a fundamental detachment of the people in a in like in this case in Hollywood from the people who they're supposed to provide services or content or whatever it is. Right, but this is how an art form dies. Right.

It is a coagulation of power in a way. You know, we're sitting a few miles from Washington. In Washington, you can go to Georgetown named after Washington and walk down a street that used to be called Washington Street within sight of the Washington Monument in the middle of Washington, D.C.

So you get the picture that George Washington had a lot of big effect on this country. And the thing that is Washington's signal moment is having defeated the British in this, defeated the greatest empire on earth with this rag-tag band of half-starvelings

wandering around in the snow. He's got, he's the king of a continent. He can be the king of a continent. There was nothing to stop him. And he takes, he goes to somewhere in Maryland, Annapolis, and he turns over his sword to the civilian powers because he believed that much in the idea of the sovereign people. That also, just like you said, has aged out

so that at that moment the most popular man in America was also the best man in America. And probably one of the best men who ever lived, you know, he was also the most. Now, like, the people who are popular are completely detached from the power and the people who are powerful, are completely detached from the people. the advent of Donald Trump, which even at the time I said, you know, this is a tragic moment

when it takes a man like Donald Trump to speak for the people. Because everybody, and you saw the way the power just came to shut him down. This is not about whether Trump's a nice person or a good person or anything like that. It's simply what he represented to people for 50 years. For 50 years, the powers that be told people in this country, you stink. Your country stinks. Your religion stinks. The color of your skin stinks.

everything about your history it stinks you know like your god doesn't exist and then they thought well why did they elect Donald Trump it's like you know my feeling was you're lucky they didn't show up outside your house with a torch and a pitchfork and toss you into the Potomac you know this was the nice thing electing Donald Trump was the nice thing to do so you're absolutely right I mean I think that as as people people think their way out of morality as they think their way out of your individuality, the importance of your individuality. It's easy for me to feel my individuality and my reality, but you have to have to sort of really think about it to think, oh, you know, maybe that guy sitting across from me is just as important to himself as I am to me, and that

we're both equally important to God. Then you have art, then you have the enlightenment. Then, you know, once you get that idea, then you have all the kind of beautiful things that Europe produced. And once you lose that idea, you lose everything. And I think you're absolutely right, that kind of coagulation of power, money, political ideas in an aristocracy that does not care anymore for the people that has no, nobles, oblige, is the way a country ages out as well. IP vanish protects every device you own, your phone, your laptop, your smart TV. If it connects to the internet, it should be protected. IP vanish encrypts your connection and masks your IP address, helping keep your browsing private at home and on public Wi-Fi. And with no device limits,

account covers everything. Stream with added privacy. Browse securely. Connect with confidence. Right now, save 83% off the two-year plan. Get started today at IPVanish.com slash audio and take control of your privacy with IP Vanish. And you can see it, but going back to this idea of the movies, where the values that America used to embody and used to celebrate, if you think about the movies of the 80s and 90, strength, resilience, independence, taking responsibility for, you. yourself, you look at the movies now, they just, it's unrecognizable. You think to yourself, what message are you trying to send me? How are you trying to inspire me?

Yes, well, that's, well, that is, you know, it's an amazing thing. The people who built the movie industry, the people who made the movies I love and probably you love as well. Many of them were immigrants, many of them were Jews. And they loved this place. They loved America. I mean, because they'd seen what the rest of the world was like, especially the Jewish guys.

They knew exactly what they had going on. in America. And they were liberal in the sense that they wanted to be included. But there were businessmen who thought their business depended on the audience liking what they did. So if the audience was Christian, they'd give them Christians. They have a scene where the Christian guy would be nice to a Jew. And then, you know, that would give you a good feeling. And they would say, yes, we're part of this country too. And everybody said, yes, you are. That was great stuff. But they loved, they may not have loved the people individually, but they loved them as the audience. They were their source of their income.

They were the source of their popularity, their power, everything. And they served them. They served the people. Partially because the studio system was destroyed by the courts, essentially the inmates took over the asylum in Hollywood. This is part of the death's throes of the industry. But you had this moment when they lost the studio system. Studios had a monopoly.

They had a monopoly on theaters. The courts said you can't. It was a trust-busting case, and they did. destroyed that. So ultimately now, the power rested with actors and not with businessmen. And so you've got, you have actors who were great businessmen like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Cruise, they're great businessman, but they're still not about the people. Those are bad examples because Cruz and Schwarzenegger actually are about the people, but so many of these guys. You know, you make a movie, you give an Oscar to a movie like, what was it called Moonlight?

It was that was what it was called? It was an Oscar-winning film about a black gay guy, that he's gay, you know? It wasn't a bad film, but it was like a slice of life about this, you know, like this. And then you think about Gone with the Wind. You think about the movies that have won Oscars that just gave you all of life. You know, they gave you so many,

Casablanca. I mean, that movie, you can watch that movie today. You can watch it twice in a row today, and it'll still break your heart. Whereas, you know, a black gay guy in the ghetto is an interesting story. I'll watch that once, you know. But it's not telling me something

that I need to know to get forward in life. Whereas the fact that sometimes you have to give up the thing you love for a greater cause is something I needed to know. The movies shaped, you know, it's funny, the arts shaped me, you know. I wasn't happy at home, I had a bad relationship with my dad. I went to the first to novels

and then to movies for male role models. And I found Bogart, John Wayne, these, you know, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, the great detective, guys, Sam Spade. And they taught me these simple things, you know, they taught me how to walk. They taught me, you know, what you would sacrifice for. They taught me that you would sacrifice for something. During the pandemic recently, there was this moment when Donald Trump got COVID and he came back to the White House and he said, now I've had COVID. Don't be afraid. Don't

let it dominate your life. And there is this montage that I play on my show from time to time of the news media coming on going, what a horrible thing to say. Of course you should be afraid. Of course. This could kill you. What's wrong? And I don't know if I was the last person in America with all those movies in my head

saying, wait a minute. There are things that are more important than dying, you know, like slavery, like losing your freedom, like losing your dignity, like, you know, losing the chance to be the thing that you want to be. People have died for all those things through time. And yet here was the news media, one of them after another, say, no, no, no, that mean, awful Donald Trump,

you know, you must be afraid, you must be afraid. And then they sit around going, why would anybody vote for Donald Trump? You know, these are the things we learned from the movies, and we learned them before that from, you know, British novels, I think, more than anything else. And these are the things that are gone, in my opinion.

from a world without God, because why would you risk your life if there's nothing beyond yourself? You know, why would you risk your life for anything if there's nothing beyond yourself? If something doesn't have a quality of the eternal to it, like freedom, like, you know, justice, if those things, why would you die for them if everything is just material, you know, you're here, you're gone, meanings? And that's the reason I'm such a huge Arthur Miller fan, the playwright Arthur Miller. And it's why for me, the play The Crucible resonates harder than ever, especially now when you have Proctor and he'd give John Procter at the end when he's about

to, he's about to die and he refuses to give up anybody else. And he says, but leave me my name. That's all I have. That's all any man has. Yes. And then think of Andrew Cuomo, who was made a hero. He was the governor of New York. And he was made into a hero, the anti-Trump. Yeah. And he said, you know, we have to do all this stuff because it's death and nothing is worth than death.

Death is death and death when you're dead, you're dead. You know, you're just like, who are these people? It's like, run and hide everybody. And, and, you know, this is kind of the instrument of power. Everything is a catastrophe. Everything is an emergency. The climate is an emergency. You go like, you know, it's a little warm today.

Oh, my, it's an emergency. Give me more power. You know, racism is an emergency. Racism is a health emergency. You know, give us more power. COVID is emergency. Give us more power. There's always back to that.

You know, it's always basically they're going to take care of you. Let me ask you a question. I don't like asking it because I don't like hearing the answer. But if Hollywood is aged out and comedy is aged out and if we're seeing the same thing in Western political systems, is the West coming to an end? Well, it's a good question. The West has come to an end before. and it came slowly back.

My guess is I don't think so. Something is coming to an end. And when things come to an end, it's a very dangerous moment. The baby boom generation is dying. There's no generation to take their place. I did a show recently about King Lear, which is about the same situation.

The old man is dying. There's nobody to take his place because they haven't learned the things you need to learn to take the last generation's place. the post-World War II order is dying. The post-Cold War order is dying. A lot of stuff is coming to an end right now. And in times like that, certain things happen.

There's gender confusion. Always, gender confusion in moments like this. There's the threat of war because there's no common ground. Right now, in America, we have no common ground. There's no common ground between left and right. There's plenty of common ground among the people. Like I would say about 70% of the people probably agree on 70% of the ideas, but among the loudest people, there's no common ground. And that could lead to actual shooting war.

However, I think that the foundation on which America stands and the alliance that it has built with both what was once great Europe and some of Israel, in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I think there's a lot of energy still in there, political energy and military energy and possibly financial energy. And if I had to predict something, what I would say, I'm much more afraid of losing the American Republic than I am of losing America.

So remember, after the Roman Republic fell, Roman Empire still lasted another 400 years. It lasted as long as it had already lasted. So I'm fearful for our republic because it's not working. It has ceased to work the way it's supposed to operate. But I still feel, you know, China, I don't think so. People keep telling me, oh, China's the future. I don't think so.

I think it's a stagnant, it's an already dying society. I don't think you can have a free market without political freedom. I think they've made a mistake. I think they're going to age out to, you know. I think that the West still has something in it. And that what we're really seeing now, I mean, one of the things that happened in Rome, like if you were in Rome,

you were thinking, where are all the Romans? All these immigrants are coming in? This is bad. Roman, Romans. But actually, that's the sign of an idea spreading. All these people who are shouting at us that they're not being treated fairly are shouting British ideas of us.

It's like, you don't go to Africa and say, you know, we want to be equal because that doesn't mean anything in Africa, you know? It only means something here because we're all British. That's why. So what's happening really is we're bringing in the people of the world. We're anglicizing them. That's our job.

I think that's just the same way the Roman job was to spread the ideals of Greece. I think the American job is to spread the ideals of England. I think that's actually happening. And I think that there are probably 100 good years left to the Republic, or 100 years left to the Republic. They may not be that good. And then I think something else will come. But I think it will still be Western for a long time.

That's my guess. say that and we could all blow up as we're speaking here, but that's my guess. You know, I see when I talk, when I talk to you, Andrew, I enjoyed so much because when I went into the arts, I expected it to be full of people like you, people questioning, people opening, who are open, we could debate, we could discuss, you disagree, you see yourself as a conservative, I remember you, when we were having a conversation, you're looking at me and going, you're a conservative, you just don't know it yet, which is what I get from everybody when I come here. But the arts isn't full of people like you. It isn't full of people

who are interesting and interested and curious and open to new ideas. Why is that? What's gone wrong? You know, it's a really good observation. When I was coming up, I was, you know, I fell in with some really talented writers. Some of them went on to have really, great careers and the discussions that we would have were fantastic, you know, talking about what is happening to storytelling, where we wanted to take storytelling, what storytelling meant us. Within years, we had all done fairly well and we were talking about, who's your agent? How did you get that? Why did you get that deal? I didn't get that deal. Nobody said, you know, and I thought, I hate these people. I'm not talking to the people. And one of the things that

was kind of lovely about becoming a writing, thinking conservative was suddenly I saw that again. when we were building the Daily Wire. The Daily Wire started. It was me and Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boring and soon Michael Knowles came in. And we did nothing but fight with each other. We fought so much that some of the times the women, I remember once I went home and one of the women called me up and said,

are you in Ben okay? And I said, yeah, that's how we talked to one another. Because we were screaming and, you know, but it was totally friendly. It was just, we were just absolutely. And something about success. takes that out of people, you know, they want to hold on to what they've got and they lose that.

I've never lost it. I mean, this is why I'm here. I'm here to talk and debate and hear things. I'm here to be proved wrong. You know, I mean, being proved wrong doesn't mean anything to me because it means I've now learned something new. You know, I've actually broken through a wall, a cage that I was in. But this, it's a remarkable thing because one of the drawbacks to this internet culture

is that if you're wrong, people are like, You were wrong. Yeah, as that happens to me something. It may happen again before I'm done, you know. But to me, that's the glory of doing what we do, that you can grow and you can change and that the books that you write at 50 are not the books you write at 30,

and the books that you write as 70 shouldn't be the books you write at 50 too. You know, you should get deeper and richer, and that means leaving things behind. But you're absolutely right. We are in a culture that has shut that, first we were in a culture. I just saw it as people got rich, they stopped doing it.

That may just be part of nature, you know. But also we're in a culture that doesn't allow you to do that. Like, you know, there's a problem in this country where I think 50% of the murders in this country are committed by black people. Now, to me, that's a really big question. Why is that? Now, I have a theory about it.

My theory is that has to do with the programs that the left instituted during the 60s, 70s and 80s that made them a dependent class, turning blacks into a dependent class. But Charles Murray is a terrific thinker, and he believes it's genetics. And of course, then the left has their theory that it's all racism and they're, you know,

we did this to them. You can't have that conversation, you know, for saying what I, even for saying what I just said, I'm a racist. Oh, I flinched, even though I know the statistics, and I've listened to Larry Elder and Thomas all talk about it, and I've looked at the arguments.

I flinched when you say it. Yeah. Because that's the culture we're in. I brought up Charles Murray at a dinner party in L.A. And somebody said, isn't he that racist? You know, he's not a racist at all, but he does believe in genetic more than I do. I'm not like a big... And he could be wrong.

He could be totally wrong, you know. But I had him on the show. I wanted to hear what he had to say. And he made a... You know, we had a really interesting conversation. And I pushed back against him. He was absolutely civilized and, you know, pushed back against me. It was great stuff.

But we have now shut that down. And that, too, is contributing to the atrophy of the arts because what are the arts but you know that kind of open-mindedness I mean they you can't even write a story you can't even write a story if you don't have an open mind because your story has to mean things that you didn't mean it to mean for a story to come to life you have to let it set it free you know

you can't just say oh this this has to happen to that character because I'm a you know I'm a capitalist and I don't want the communist to win you can't write a story like that you have to let the story tell itself you know and all of that stuff requires a certain fearlessness that artists are renowned for but have no longer got. You know, you can... I mean, I'm writing this new series of mystery stories.

And I have a new one. The third one is coming out in October, at the end of October. And I handed it in and had a glancing reference to transgenderism, maybe five lines. They said, oh, you have to take this out. I said, I will pull that book before I take out. anything for political reason. You know, you know, what am I, the New York Times is going to give me a bad review? I've said things about the New York Times. I think they may show up in my house

one day. Like, no, you know, that's insane. It's insane to have to cowtow to, you know, a bunch of basically adolescents who've been taught something in college and don't know enough to disagree, you know, I mean, that's, it's very stultifying. And it's also, as you say, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's You know, I want to be with people who disagree and are fearlessly disagree and don't call each other names, you know, when they say something. And, Andrew, forgive me for saying this, but what you're describing to me are old school liberal values. Yes. So this is what I find mind-boggling. I'm 40 years old when I was a young guy watching comedy and being inspired by it.

The people who were really pushing back against the dogma of their day were people like George Carlin and Bill Hicks. whose targets were religious conservatives. Right. So if you talk about stultifying, they were the ones, you know, Bill Hicks' last letterman appearance wasn't broadcast for, I think, over a decade because he made fun of religion, right?

So when I came into adulthood, it was conservatives, at least that was kind of the way it was presented, who were the people who were refusing to have the conversation. Right. And it was the liberals who were, let's have that robust debate that you're talking about, That was the lifeblood of my young adulthood. That was what I loved.

I cherished that. So what happened? Like you talked about it in your own life. You were this, you know, liberal, went over to the UK, came back conservative. And we, neither of us is conservative, but we find ourselves mostly talking to people who are in the center or right of center. Right. Because the left does the six degrees of white supremacy thing where if you talk to this guy and he sat next to that guy whose dog blah, blah, blah, blah, then you can't, you know, you can't talk to them anymore. How are the three of us sitting here?

Well, because when I said to you that, you know, Francis, that you're a conservative, I said this to Mary Harrington, who also tells me she's on the left. But there is no left. There is no left. You know, in the 50s, I think it was, a famous literary critic named Lionel Trilling said there is no such thing as an intellectual conservative. There are no conservative ideas. They're only conservative gestures.

You know, it's a face snobby, snooty thing to say. But he had a point. Now that's true of the left, but it's not true of the right. On the left, there are no ideas. There are no ideas on the left. I mean, you know, their ideas are like, yeah, you can print money because that's fine. And, you know, you can't arrest black people because they're brown. They have this color skin and, you know, you're white and therefore you're evil.

You know, those aren't ideas. Those are gestures. Those are kind of virtue signaling movements of the chin, but they're not like something that you can debate in any serious way. A man can become a woman, you know, as if. What are you even talking about? On the right, basically, the right now contains those people like me. I mean, I always say this. I always say I'm a conservative because I'm a liberal.

I'm a conservative because I want people to be free. I want other people to be able to have the life that they want to have, not the life I want them to have. I know how everybody should live. You know, I could explain to you, but it's none of my business, you know. You know, that actually is my religion. That's actually in the gospels, you know, leave people alone. Don't judge people, you know, let them do what they're going to do, let them work out their salvation with fear and trembling.

That attitude is now a right-wing attitude. So if you have that attitude, you are somewhere on the right. How did that happen? Well, I think it happened because ideas, first of all, follow themselves out to their furthest extreme. And the idea that the government should, is the solution to problems has followed itself out. to its furthest extreme, but also power corrupts. And the left has so much power. You know, this is what killed me during the Trump administrations. They called themselves the resistance.

So I thought, so you've got the deep state, you know, the deep cover, the permanent government. You've got the media. You've got the entertainment and the news media. And the big tech. The academies. You've got now the corporations. You've got big tech. What are you resisting against?

I thought, oh, yeah, you're resisting the people. the ordinary guy. So, you know, the idea of the left has played itself out. As I keep telling my friends on the right, if we come back and win the power, we'll become corrupt because power corrupts. I mean, that was the whole point of the country, the whole point of this country was to create a sort of Rube Goldberg machine that every time somebody came too powerful, somebody else knocked them down. You know, oh, you know, you've got the states, we've got the federal government, you've got the courts, we, you know, we've got the states, whatever it was, there was always some power center to take it away. But beginning with the turn of the

century, beginning really with Woodrow Wilson, the federal government started to become so powerful. And that is the left-wing's dream to have a federal government that can tell everybody what to do. So they've got, they won. They won. And when you win, you lose. You know, when you win, your ideas stagnate. You know, there's no one, there's no one they can't crush. There's no one they can't destroy. There's no idea they can't demonize. You know, there's one... Now this is not quite true, but for the last, say, 30 years,

there's been one conservative news station, Fox News. And all you heard was, oh, Fox News. Oh, my God, you know, you would say to people, like I heard yesterday on Fox News, oh, no, don't tell me about Fox News. You think, like, there's one news station, and that's the problem with the country is that one group of people? You know, now it's Tucker Carlson. You know, Tucker Carlson, you know, has, I don't know,

always agree with Tucker Carlson, but he's like, he's like you mentioned his name, and it's like you mentioned Satan. They're so powerful. They can demonize anybody. They can silence anybody. They can cancel anybody. So why should they discuss things? Why should they discuss anything with anybody? And so that, to me, is death. If it's all about power. It's all about power, you know. And we have forgotten, if you go back and read the Federalist papers where they're arguing for the Constitution against the people who didn't want, who thought the federal government was going to get too strong, they only turned out to be right several hundred years later, all they talk about is power. All those people, you know, this is Madison and, you know, all these guys, and all they talk

about is how do we keep people from getting too much power? And we have forgotten that that's even a problem. So when you say, when you say, for instance, you know, we've got all these shootings in this country, these mass shootings, we should get rid of people's guns. Nobody, even on the right, people don't think to say, well, isn't that giving the federal government a monopoly on violence, and isn't that giving them too much power? You know, the answer is always no, guns save lives, guns, you know, protect us. We need guns for home protection. That's not why they gave us guns. They gave us guns so the states would have the power to form militias to fight the army of the federal government. That is why they gave us guns.

I tried to explain this to a conservative British broadcaster, and he looked at me like I was a savage, you know, and I said, I get it. You know, I don't want people getting shot, but that's why we have guns. Are we not going to at least debate the real reason why Americans are supposed to carry guns? When you say, oh, here's a poor person, I'm going to start a federal program to save that person. My question is, isn't that a temptation? You know, aren't we giving you money

so that now you can buy that guy's vote, essentially? You know, I don't want people to be poor. I want, you know, I want charity to flow in this country. When people are rich, I want the charity to flow to those who are disadvantaged. But don't we even debate? how power collects, how power follows money. Are we not even going to talk about that?

It's all about power when it comes to politics is. And we don't even talk about it anymore. The idea that, you know, obviously if a right winger starts to do something, the press will gang up. Oh, he's a fascist, you know. He disagreed with me. He's a fascist. But if the left does something, no matter how much power. A great example.

Recently they indicted Donald Trump on an absolutely nonsense charge, absolute nonsense. complete abuse of power by the New York DA. All we heard from the left was no one's above the law. No one's above the law. I kept saying about what law was he even? I don't know. But all right, no one's above the law.

Then the Supreme Court made a decision that Alexandria, Acacia Cortez, our left-wing, firebrand, you know, congresswoman didn't like. She said, well, we should ignore the courts. So no one's above the law, but they have so much power that no one's above the law you're a conservative. Well, you saw it during COVID. You mentioned it earlier, right? We saw it in the UK.

Everyone must stay at home for the safety of everyone. BLM happens. Everyone must go out into the streets because protesting is a health intervention. Right, right. But yeah, but if you protest the lockdowns, then you're right-wing scum and you should have your face-caping. That's the thing. That's power. And when you have that kind of power, you don't argue with that.

Why would you argue? And you can just silence people in a rest of people, you know? And then your ideas die and you have no ideas. And that's basically where the left is now. I mean, they are a rotten branch. And that's why, I mean, everything is, what's the word? Everything's circumstantial. So we have circumstances here that may make it difficult to win power back from them.

But they're just a rotten branch. And eventually they're going to just break off because they have nothing to say except give me more. You know, give me more power. It's an emergency. Give me power. You know, the more I spend time in this country and I love America so much, I really do. And I hope that I one day come to live here. It seems to me that America, the thing that set it apart from every other country is that it was forged with rebel spirit.

And I look at it now, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of that spirit left. Is that part of the problem? Yeah, you know, even the right, even the right has fallen foul of, has tripped over its own ideas. you know, when the right, Ronald Reagan gave us 25 good years, and what he did got translated into business is everything, the market is everything. That's not what Reagan believed, but that's what the Reaganites believe. And so we had this market, market market.

They would talk about Ein Rand, who to my mind is just a sociopath, you know. Not to mention a terrible, terrible writer. But that's kind of empty, too, you know, like this whole notion that some system is going to take care of us. It just doesn't work. I think we definitely need. There's a lot of things we need, and I hesitate to say to Englishmen

that one of them is a rebirth of religion, but it's true. I mean, if we don't at least start talking as if we live, we're spirits instead of animals, I think that we're finished, you know, we're finished. We can't make the arguments we need to make in a materialist way. You know, I forgot, what was your original question?

It was about the rebel spirit of America. Oh, the rebel spirit, yes. Well, that is also this question. Well, it does go back to materialism, because if you're afraid to die, if everything comes down to, I must save my life at all costs, how can you be a rebel?

Why would you be a rebel? Against how powerful would you be? How powerful, how much would you go against the power to say what you have to say? New York, I lived in New York during one of the worst times in the 70s, 1970s, you could hardly go out without, you know, dodging bullets.

I mean, it was really something. I used to go to work at three in the morning, and I would run from my apartment to stand in front of a marketplace where there were prostitutes, because I figured if there were prostitutes, the mob wouldn't let there be violence. And I was the only guy in my newsroom who didn't get mugged because that's what I would do every morning.

It was terrible, but it was tough. I mean, New Yorkers were tough, and they were, they really, They really would not kowtow to anybody. When COVID came, you know, my daughter still lives in New York. I'd go and visit and everybody was like, oh, you're not wearing a mask, you know, don't come near me. They were terrified.

They were terrified. So something, you know, maybe it's wealth, maybe it's too much wealth, maybe it's too much safety. You know, this is a wealthy, safe country in a lot of ways. But also this kind of idea that death is the end, you know, this, this, this flesh is all you've done. got and you've got to take care of it, you know, because now we can be so healthy for so long. We mustn't sacrifice all those wonderful years that we've got. You know, I don't want to die. Nobody wants to die, but like that you must believe in something bigger than yourself.

We have become cowardly, haven't because, you know, people talk about cancel culture and, you know, people shouldn't be canceled. I agree. But, you know, people say to us, oh, you're so brave. You know, you stood up to the comedy industry and started, what are you talking about? What's brave about it? I said this, you know, when I got thrown out of Hollywood, we had to sell our house. We were living in one of the nicest areas in the country.

We had to sell our house because my income went from sometimes seven figures to nothing like that. I mean, just gone, you know. I never lost a moment's sleepover. I mean, I wasn't happy about it. But I kept saying to people, you know, people are in Afghanistan, they're having their legs blown off. Like 18-year-old kids are being blown to kingdom come fighting for something that they think has to be fought for. I can't work in Hollywood you know

I don't really am I that scared you know and like believe me as you say we're not heroes I mean those guys were heroes you know we're not but but

we're men we have to stand for something you have to be somebody you know and so yeah that that has gone terribly terribly wrong

this idea that some you know it's funny like my career has gone well and I've been really thrilled but it wasn't until I got to the Daily Wire that I became a celebrity, that I became somebody who gets recognized. And I remember, and so I was old, you know, I was like, and I remember walking into a hotel

and being mobbed, like a rock star, because I was talking politics on the internet, you know, just like, I pressed to the wall by, like, a hundred kids. Like, I thought, well, if this had happened to me when I was 20, I would be, like, genuinely lost. I mean, I would have genuinely become a fool, you know. But now I think like, you know, it comes and goes, you know, I get it. But this has become so important to people that once they get their hands on it, they don't want to let go of, and they become afraid. Yeah.

The idea, oh my God, I might be canceled. And you see it, it's so pitiful. It breaks my heart to see people come out and say, you know, something so obvious, like a man can't become a woman, you know. Somebody, I can't remember who it was, just said, J.K. Rowling is right. Within minutes, she apologized. Oh, I'm so sorry. you know, that kind of Soviet show trial thing.

Like, I'm so sorry, I'm a sinner, I'm, you know, please. I comrade Kishen in this, yeah. You know when someone has really messed up because they take a screenshot of an apology and then pin it to their Twitter. Yeah, you have to zoom in. Yeah. That's the moment, you know.

Oh, somebody's done something. They really fucked up. Yeah. They have really messed this one up. I have reached a point where, like, I don't even apologize for things that I should apologize. for. You know, like, I mean, there are things you really should apologize for. Yeah. But at this point, it's just blood and the water to these people, you know?

I mean, yeah. No, you have to apologize when you've done something wrong. Of course. We have to model that, I think, more than anything. Don't you think part of the problem with the arts is, to me, the artist, the true artists are the rebels. And there's no rebellion anymore. If you think about the great writers, they were the rebels. The comedians were the rebels, the actors. Who did we fall in love with? the Jimmy Deans, the Jack Nicholson's, the Marlon Brandos, do you want people accepted by society?

No, that's true, that's true, and they represented that force. Certainly, since the romantic era, that was the idea of the artist. The artist was a special thing. He was, you know, it almost was a replacement of the priest. But, you know, rebellion, yes, but I don't think it's necessarily that rebellion is the key thing. I think it's freedom. It's freedom because even a conservative,

an artist who is writing for the conservative cause, a trollope, say, you know, somebody who's actually more, who likes the established things than the traditional things, he's got to be free to say that in exactly the way he means to say it. And so I don't require of an artist that he rebel because, first of all, rebellion now has become just virtue signaling.

I mean, people rebel, like I said, they call themselves the resistance, but they're really the power. But I don't think rebellion is the thing I'm looking for. I'm looking for freedom. You know, talking about J.K. Rowling, when I read some, I have, I'm not a child, so I didn't read all of the Harry Potter books, but I read a couple of them just to sample them because my kids were so into them.

I thought, yeah, there's a, there's someone who is free with her creativity. She has been generous. She's just saying, I'm not saving this for the next page. I'm throwing it on this page. I'm getting, you know, that kind of liberty that you see, in genuine artists. And I think it's liberty more than rebellion. I think it becomes rebellion because the minute power sees liberty, it seeks to crush it. So it becomes rebellion, you know, so you have to stand where you're going to stand.

But, you know, I think of Shakespeare sometimes, and sometimes the great movies that were made during the Hayes' office years. And they didn't necessarily rebel against the power. They subverted it by being free. You know, they just subverted it by saying things, you know, that you should have gotten arrested for, but you didn't because they didn't say it in a rebellious way. but they were free. And I think that that's what artists have to be. And I think, you know, when you were talking about the fact

that we're having a kind of conversation that people don't have, that's what it is. We're free, you know? And in order to be free, you have to understand that somebody's going to want to come and get you for it and do it anyway. You're going to lose some money. You're going to lose some friends.

You're going to lose some... You may be thrown off Twitter, you know, all those things. You know, that is what freedom is. Freedom is not being afraid of losing those things. And once you become afraid, you're not free anymore. Or maybe you are afraid, but you do it anyway. Well, yes, of course.

That's real courage, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew, a couple of questions before we wrap up. Given everything we've talked about, Dr. Sebastian Gorker was sitting where you're sitting a while back. We left it exactly as it is just for you. He's very big on Trump, and you've talked about how it was a sad day that Trump had to come along.

You're not on the Trump train now. Yeah, that's right. I said from the very beginning, I have to say that I think the two people who got Trump exactly right were me and Victor Davis-Hansom. And I think I said it first, but Victor wrote a great book about it. So he wins. But still, it was that he was a tragic figure from the start. And he was a tragic figure because the very things that made him great also made him wrong.

And also we're going to destroy him. I mean, that's what tragedy is. The things that made him worth seeing. and worth supporting, we're ultimately going to destroy him. I think he lost that second election. I said he was going to, I knew he was going to, about two years in, because we had reached a point where it took a loud mouth without many of the traits that we think of as common decency

to say the simplest truth. You know, I mean, that was the thing that was beautiful about Donald Trump. He would say things that could easily be interpreted as racist. He was not a racist. I don't think he was a racist at all. But he would say things that could easily be interpreted as racist because he didn't care if they called them racist. But he also treated people badly. He fired men who deserve, you couldn't disagree with them.

You can say they're doing a bad job. But he fired men who were deserving of respect in public. Or he, you know, it was like he pulled the rug out from under them. He called people names. He made up names, which is an adolescent thing to do. It all worked, you know. I got it. I understood it.

The minute I saw the people react to it, I didn't understand it at first, but the minute I saw the people react to it, I thought, oh, he's speaking for them. He is the voice of the people. But at the same time, he was the voice of the people. He was also this narcissistic guy without very good manners.

And I think that that's what killed him. I think it'll kill him again if he runs. I think he's the only Republican who could possibly lose to Joe Biden. He might not. He might beat him, but I think he's the only one who could lose to him. So you're a dissentist guy?

Yeah. I like DeSantis. He hasn't been tested on the national scene, you know, but I really like his fighting attitude. And as Gorka will tell you, he wouldn't exist if it weren't for Trump. Everything good in the Republican Party has come down from Trump.

He recreated the Republican Party. The guts they sometimes show now, which they never did before, the unwillingness to simply drift to the left, which they'd been doing for decades. All of that was a gift of Trump. The big idea, which somebody told me years ago was the idea that Republicans need to understand is you're not running against the Democrats, you're running against the press.

The news media in this country is the enemy of the people, just like Trump said it was. He was, if there was one thing he was 100% right about, it was the news media. I just the other day played a montage of him, taking the press apart. I couldn't stop laughing. I mean, it was delightful. He was the man of the moment. He was the man we needed. I have many, many good things to say about him.

People who say, oh, you're never Trump or just lying. I was the first guy at the Daily Wire to come in and say, I'm voting for Trump, and Shapiro yelled at me for like hours, you know, like if you've ever heard the way Shapiro talks, is like that scene where's in the Godfather where Sonny gets machine gunned. I was like, puss. And I voted for him twice, and I vote for him again if I have to. But I think if he had an ounce of grace,

he would say, I christened DeSantis, the new me and let him go. If nothing else, I'm so tired of 80-year-old men running our government. You know, 70 and 80-year-old men, it is time for this new generation to come along.

And the census is good at what he does. I mean, he took that state, and he took a purple state, and he turned it into a red state by sheer competence, you know, by getting it right. Trump didn't really accomplish that much in terms of long-term because he wasn't,

you know, people always say, well, he's not a politician. being a politician is a profession, so he couldn't get any laws passed. Everything was executive orders. It was all wiped away by Joe Biden. So, yeah, I think his time came. I think he was the man of the moment.

Come at the hour, come at the man. He was a gift. I always say he was a godsend, but so was King's soul. You know, after a while, you know, your time runs out. He was a godsend. He was the man of the moment. And I think that moment is passed. and if the Republicans can learn what he taught them,

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Browse securely. Connect with confidence. Right now, save 83% off the two-year plan. Get started today at IP Vanish. and take control of your privacy with IPVanish. And the final thing I want to ask you, before we do, our usual last question is, you know, I've talked about how what we need is a post-woke world, because wokeness is crazy, we all know.

I think it's the, every action causes an equal and opposite reaction. I see the anti-woke side, which we are part of to some extent, going crazy to now, staring into the abyss thing and we need to move beyond that. Do you have a vision for how we do that? I do. You won't like it though. Go to church? Well, you know, I mean,

our churches, your churches are empty. Our churches are sort of collapsing. But we should make new ones. We need to make new ones. We need to make churches. We need to gather in our homes together as they did it first and talk about what it means

for there to be a God. because here's the thing. There actually is a God. It doesn't matter whether you believe in or not. There actually is one. Even the things you believe in only make sense if there's a God. The only leap of faith I ever took, the only leap of faith I ever took was to say

it's better to give a beggar bread than it is to torture a child to death. You can't make that case without God. That case, once you believe that, you believe in God. Once you believe that there is some level above us that our actions refer to, right? Because what you're saying when you're saying something is good is you're saying there is some place where there is good and bad and our actions speak that. It's not that I have a little ghost inside me that's going to float up to heaven when I die. It's that I am, I speak an idea.

I am a word that speaks an idea of me, the idea of me. And that idea exists somewhere. You know, it exists in the mind of God. And so I don't think we have to go back to the Middle Ages. I don't think we can go back to the Middle Ages, and we shouldn't if we could. But I think we need to talk about what it means. If no, this is not a multiverse where we just happen to live in the universe

that looks very much like it was created by a gigantic, invisible Jew, you know. That there actually is something spiritual, something supernatural, something supernatural, something above nature in the world. And if we don't, if we don't say that, we have no argument. This is what I, it's hard to accept. I understand why it's hard to accept. But if we don't make that argument, then the left is right. Why should you embrace your gender?

You know, I heard, I was Mary Harrington. I was reading Mary's book and she was talking about a man, a young man who went into puberty and said, I'm being poisoned by these chemicals. These chemicals are turning me into. to something I don't want to be. And I thought, well, that's a rational statement if there's no God. You know, you don't want to be this and these chemicals are, in fact, turning you into something. But if that's something that you are refers to something above yourself, which that's what I believe.

I believe we are a language. Material is a language. Then there's a reason to sort of say, well, what am I going to do with this manhood that's been given to me? This, you know, what is this manhood? What if it's a gift? What if it has obligation? What if I have an obligation to open the door for my wife, even though she's perfectly capable of opening the door for herself? What if I have an obligation to throw myself in front of her if there's danger? What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman?

What are the sacrifices I'm willing to make to be that person? You cannot make that argument without some sense of the spiritual. And to be honest, even though I'm a devout Christian, and I believe that that is a... the great expression of truth because it's so human. You know, I just think you have to start from somewhere, you know, that we're not just, what's the word they, you know, we're not meat puppets, you know, we're not, we're something else, we are, we speak a word. So that is the beginning of the anti-woke thing that, you know,

C.S. Lewis, great Christian apologist, said, you can't really, he was talking about a poem, he was talking about Paradise Lost, He said, you can't really judge a thing until you know what it's for, you know. You can't really judge a corkscrew until you know what it's supposed to do. And so you can't really judge people and society until you have some, you can state what it's supposed to be. And for too long, the right has been saying, well, you're happier if you can make money. You know, yes, America gives you the right to make money and then you can make more money. And if you can even make more money, you think like eventually people turn around and say, you know, that's not doing it for me.

You know, that does it for some people. Some people want to be billionaires, you know. Never occurred to me. If I want to be a billionaire, I certainly wouldn't have gone into the writing profession, you know. There's something that we're here for, and I do think it involves love and relationship and love of something beyond ourselves that this world only expresses.

And when you begin with that, you get very quickly to ideas like freedom, to ideas like relationship, marriage, respect, you know. Again, we don't have to go back to the Middle Ages to realize that those are things that matter to us and that you can build a society on. You can't build a society on like, oh, you know, you're a black guy, so you committed a crime, but you're not a criminal because black people were oppressed. That's like, you know, then you get what we have in Chicago now, which is being torn to pieces as we sit here talking. People pouring into the streets tearing into pieces. You cannot build a society like that. Woke is right if there's no God.

Woke is some bits of woke makes sense if there's no God. There better be a God. Bingo, if there's not, we're in big trouble. Andrew, what a pleasure it's been. Thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want to find your books, if they want to follow you online, if they want to watch you on the wire, how do they do that? Well, you can start by going to Andrew Claven.com.

As I always say, there's no ease in Clavin. It's K-L-A-V-A-N. but Andrew Claven.com will send you all my other places. And Andrew Claven, at Andrew Claven is my Twitter feed. And the Daily Wire, I've got, my podcast is now on every Friday. And it's different. No one else does what I do. So it's worth tuning in. Fantastic.

It's great to talk to you. Well, thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure. And of course, we're not going to let you go without some questions for paid supporters or locals that only they will get to see. But before that, the last question we always ask, and you may have done this. already, but what is the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Yeah, that was my last answer. I mean, I think this started in the 1500s, this decline, you know, the long withdrawing roar of the tide of faith. I think we have now reached the bottom

of that. Nietzsche said, you know, this is a catastrophe that God is dead and the moral network on which Europe is based has gone. And he said this is going to be a catastrophe. It certainly has been, you know. And so that's the thing we're not talking about because we've got this idea that you can't make an argument from God because not everybody accepts that premise. But when you make the argument

that there's no God, that's a premise I don't accept. So I think that we should be fearless in saying, asking the questions of the left. You know, I think that was what was so great about Matt Walsh's documentary, what is a woman? He asked the question. That's a spiritual question, you know? That's not a physical question. That's a spiritual, you know, because when you say, what is a woman,

it's not really the X's and the Y's and the this and that, a woman is. We know what a woman is the minute we see it, you know. And I think we have to ask those questions. What do you think you're here for? What is your purpose? You know, you tell me, because I'll build that society. And I think once you do that, you get very quickly to something that looks kind of like the Constitution.

you know, power being kept at bay so the individual can thrive. There we go. Andrew Claven, it was absolutely pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Join us on locals where we're going to ask Andrew some of your bonus questions. Take care and we'll see you soon.

Take care and see you soon, guys. Do you ever envisage a politically neutral filmmaking industry and what steps events would it take to achieve that outcome?