We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jashinski,
culture editor here at The Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST,
and if you'd like to support our work, make sure to go to
our website and sign up for the Federalist Community as well. I'm really honored
today to be joined by Andrew Claven. He's, of course the host of
the Andrew Claven Show over at The Daily Wire, but he also has a
new book out. It's another edition in the Cameron Winter Mystery series. It's
called The House of Love and Death. Andrew, thanks for coming on now.
It's great to be here. Emily. Thanks tell us a little bit
about the new book. And for people who haven't picked up one of the
Cameron Winter Mysteries, if you could let them know a little bit about what
they can expect when they do pick up a Cameron Winter Mystery, that would
be awesome. Yeah. This is the first time, after a life of
being a crime writer. I mean, this has been how I've made my
living most of my life. This is the first time I've ever done a
series, And the reason I've done a series is because I have this character
who really means a lot to me and is speaking into all the things I've
been working on my whole life. Is a guy who has a very checkered
past. He's done some very dirty work for the government, but now he
is kind of retired from that, and he is working as a professor of
English literature in a kind of liberal university that's always trying to shut him down.
And he's a guy who just has this kind of instinct for finding criminal
activities that he feels he can set right in some way. And the reason
he fascinates me so much, and the reason I care about him so much,
is because he's exploring something that's been kind of the theme of my life's
work, which is how to be a good man in a world that is
falling apart. And he's in in America that's falling apart, as I think
all of us feel we are right now, and he's trying to both live
down his past actions and find a way to be a good guy in the
present. So, instead of being the typical anti hero that we've seen over
these last thirty or forty years, in storytelling. He is a guy who
has been an anti hero trying to become a hero. And in this story,
a family has been wiped out in a very rich, gated community surrounded
by a city that's falling apart, and he goes in to find out how
an entire family has been wiped out while the police and the security and all
the things that we're supposed to keep these people safe were in place. And
you know, it got a starred review from Publishers Weekly. They say it's
the best in the series. I've written the book so that you can start
the series anywhere, but I'm really pleased with this one. You said something
so interesting about how you are sticking with this series because the character really means
a lot to you, and I'm fascinated by that from the perspective of an
author, what it means to create somebody entirely fictional, but at the same
time, you sort of have this very intimate relationship with that feels in some
ways like a relationship with a real person, but of course isn't. Can
you tell us a little bit about that, Andrew, Yeah, you know,
I became a crime writer a very exact, very precise moment and it's
the moment I read the first page of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep with his
tough guy detective Philip Marlowe. I was a kid, I was looking for
male role models. I was looking at tough guy literature because I was always
that was always something that was attractive to me. It spoke to me,
and Chandler at the beginning of The Big Sleep writes the scene where Philip marlow
sees a stained glass window on a mansion with a night on it who is
rescuing a lady who's tied up, and Marlowe says to himself, if I
lived in this house, I would have to climb up there and help him,
because he's not getting the job done. And the point I think the
Chandler was making is that here's a man. He's a shabby little man.
He doesn't make a good living, he's in a kind of disreputable profession.
But somehow he's carrying inside him this notion of chivalry into a Los Angeles that
is just rife with corruption. And that's kind of been the theme not just
of my work but of my life. You know, how do you become
What Chandler said in one of his famous essays, and this is where we
get the term mean streets. He said, down these mean streets, a
man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnish nor afraid.
And as a little kid, you know, fifteen years old, I
just said to myself, that's what I want to be. That is who
I want to be. And whether I failed to succeed, it is between
me and God. But at least as a character, Cameron Winter can embody
that at a moment when we don't really have an image of what a man
should be. I mean, this is the really fascinating thing that the last
great explosion of American culture, the Golden Age of television around two thousand,
when suddenly we had Breaking Bad and the Sopranos and The Shield, all stories
about men who are going bad because the only way that they could express masculinity
was as an outlaw, because masculinity itself had become more or less outlawed.
And I was writing about that in the nineties with novels like True Crime,
and I started to feel like, Okay, we've explored this, we've talked
about this, but now it's time to come back. Now it's time to
see if we can recover that chivalry that Raymond Chandler brought into a corrupt world,
especially this our world is becoming increasingly corrupt and increasingly unpleasant and even evil
in places, and so it's just important to me personally to work that out
in fiction, which is the only place you can work it out. The
only place you can work these issues out is in the arts, maybe in
philosophy, but you can't do it in politics. You're never going to get
purity in politics. You're never going to get purity in real life. You
can only work out these ideas and the culture and hopefully someone you know,
like I was looking for that kind of role model, we'll find him in
camera and winter and start to explore this in his own life as I have.
I'm so glad you mentioned that because I wanted to. You mentioned the
anti hero model earlier as well, and I actually wanted to pick up on
that point because it's fascinating and at the same time, you also wrote the
book true Crime. You literally wrote the book tr crime, which is the
most you know, the most popular genre arguably in some different ways now in
the country. Is there a cultural shift that took us from the golden age
of television, as you mentioned, the oughts with sopranos and breaking bad and
arguably Madmen, to having this obsession that we have as a culture now with
documentaries, crime documentaries, podcasts. Did something shift? Are these two entirely
different things or is there any connection between the two? No. I think
that you have a country that is a default setting. It's not just the
country, it's the era of the age is at a default setting of unbelief.
We're in a default setting of materialism, by which I don't mean greed,
I mean just the idea that everything is made of stuff and the only
thing that's real is stuff, and we don't even have We don't have souls,
we don't have any you know, we talk about people talk about having
depression. They don't talk about I am depressed, you know. They talk
about, you know, getting an endorphin rush. They don't talk about being
excited. We think, we actually think even the people who think they have
faith, underlying that is this idea that we are just material. When you
have that idea, you actually don't have any way to conceive of the good.
All you can do is conceive of the bad, and what opposes it.
So if you can find stories of evil, you can give yourself the
satisfying experience of having that evil resolved or solved in some way. But you
don't really have an image of what it means to be good. If you
think about what we think of as good soldiers, cops, doctors, all
of them are defined by what they're fighting, whether it's disease or the enemy
in war, or criminals. To come up with an idea of what it
means to be good when you're just walking down the street is much different.
That's the idea of faith, the idea that there is something actually good that
you can be, and I think we have lost that idea and therefore lost
the way of telling stories about it. We don't really know what a good
man looks like. We know what a man who fights evil looks like,
but we don't know what a man who just walks down the street and is
by the virtue of who he is a good person. We have no concept
of what that means. That wasn't true when they invented the idea of chivalry.
They knew exactly what a good person looked like. He looked like a
knight in shining armor and I think that in this moment, in this deeply
materialist moment, when we are either going to collapse into the wages of materialism,
some of which I think we see in, for instance, the philosophy
that you can cut up a child's body and change its sex. It's a
very materialist idea. If we're going to lapse into those ideas, we're going
to lose our ability to tell stories and think about ourselves as human at all.
And there's a real movement toward that anti humanism, or real movement to
say you're not a soul, you're just a body. Change your body,
change yourself, even get rid of your body and just become downloaded onto a
computer. These are issues that are all becoming extremely real and in a technological
culture that has the ability to see them through. So to go back,
for me, to go back and think about what it means to be good,
and what it means to be a man, and what it means to
be a woman, because that's what my novels are about as well. Is
very different than just looking at a crime, you know, and just exploring
the evil and a crime and just kind of getting a thrill from the evil
of crime and I think true crime in that sense, you know, in
the sense of studying criminality and studying criminal actions is kind of a philosophical dead
end. It's kind of attractive and mesmerizing and almost hypnotizing, But in the
end, I think we're going to have to return to something, to a
higher ideal than that, And again I think only the arts can do that.
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to learn more. You know, the the tough guy archetype. I want
to ask about that too, because there's an argument that before, you know,
the ravages of postmodernism were wildly or sort of over corrected. Baked into
that, of course, is the idea that something needed correction, that's something
in the sort of tough, tough guy archetype from the pre sexual Revolution days
in some ways needed to be moderated or corrected. Men needed to be more
comfortable with their emotions, and that sort of shift away from stoicism in some
sense had a benefit. Is that true? Was there something that needed to
happen to the tough guy archetype that allowed American men, Western men to be
in any way more comfortable sort of with their emotions and and you know,
was there something that was unhealthy about that pre sexual revolution archetype or was it
you know, have we strayed entirely from a basic that was much much healthier.
Yeah? Actually I think it was healthier, and I think it was
misunderstood. And one of the things that I think feminism has done has lied
a lot about what the culture was. You know, when you hear feminism
talk about women in the movies, they say, well, they were either
housewives or hookers. Go back and watch the old movies. That's just not
true. It's just not true. I mean, women played various roles in
classic American movies always, and go back and look at who the tough guys
were. I mean, look at Humphrey Bogart and Casablanca devolving into tears because
he's lost the love of his life. He sits there and cries into his
whiskey because he's lost the love of his life. So that the idea that
men had no emotions was just a falsehood about the tough guy as well as
about all kinds of men who lived all kinds of different ways. A tough
guy is, as far as I'm concerned, is a guy who sees the
world clearly and understands the price he is going to pay for going against the
values of the world. When I say that a character like Philip Marlowe had
a knight inside him, what made him a tough guy was knowing, as
he says, this is a direct quote, he said, this is not
a game for knights, And what he meant by that was he was going
to get beaten up, that the bad guys were going to win, that
he was going to be cursed and excluded and arrested and shot at because of
his values. So not that he gave up his values, but in Gospel
terms, he picked up his cross, and that is that's what a tough
guy does. A tough guy doesn't abandon his emotions. He simply doesn't live
by his emotions. A tough guy doesn't think that the world is going to
conform to his values. He simply pays the price to live by his values.
And those are the things that we got rid of when we became I
believe a kind of whiny and I hate to use the word feminized because I
think women should be feminized, I think, but I don't think everyone should
be feminized. I don't think men should be feminized. And so I think
when we lost the idea of what a person is and what he or she
is for, we lost the idea of how we could construct that kind of
person. So a really good example in feminine terms is all the women you
see in the movies now who are strong, quote unquote. They always have
their their fists on their hips. They punch men and men fall over.
I've seen women punch men and what happens is their handbreaks and then the man
just beats the living crap out of them. That scene never appears in movies
because we don't know what a woman is for anymore. We can't even define
what a woman is. The same thing is true of men. It's not
that men don't have emotions. We all have emotions. Is that they don't
live by their emotions, and they're not supposed to live by their emotions.
Nobody wants a father who lives by some emotions. We want a father who
lives by his lights. And that that's a very different way of conceiving of
a man and what he is is the idea that men don't have emotions,
it's just such a nonsense. It's such a political piece of propaganda. You
know, I have plenty of emotions. I don't live by my emotions.
I live by my lights. And that costs you, and it's painful sometimes,
and it means we're pressing your emotions and stuffing them down when you'd rather
indulge them. But it's what you do because it makes the world a better
place, and it makes your life a better life, and it makes the
people around you safer and more protected. You know. I simply think that
the things that we've been told are lies, you know, the things that
we've been told about the pastor lies. So it's not that there's no need
for reform about institutions and things. There's always need for reform and always things
can always be done better. But the idea that men were mistaken by being
men and women mistaken by following their instincts as women, it is a lie
and a mistake put forward by people who knew it was a lie. They
did it on purpose, and I think we've been living by it ever since
and living with the consequences ever since. Men and women are much less happy
because of it. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I mean one of the
thing interesting things about the Cameron Winter books is there mostly that almost all the
important characters in them, except for Cameron Winter, are women. And I
didn't plan it that way, but I saw it unfolding that way. And
I think because men and women are relational, are defined by their relations with
each other, and they're out of whack and finding out how to get them
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only the Beginning, rated pg. Thirteen. Yeah, now, this is
the moral confusion. I think that you've been talking about. You had made
a really good point on Twitter, or I guess I have to say X.
Now. A couple of days back, you tweeted, I no longer
tell the difference between I can no longer tell the difference between lets and white
supremacists. They both think George Floyd is the typical black man, and they
both hate Jews. It's like a sequel to Face Off, where Stalin and
Hitler change identities and it makes no difference at all. And I want to
ask you about that in the context of historical precedent. A lot of times
people jump to this idea that we are living in times that have absolutely no
precedent that what we see with the sex and gender have no precedent, although
that might be true, but you know, within the last one hundred years,
a blink of an eye in the course of human history, there is
some precedent for this kind of Nietzscheen moral wasteland. And I wanted to ask
andrec you could maybe flesh out how you were thinking about that post October seventh.
Well, yeah, I mean, I have this very belief that makes
people very uncomfortable, which is that the Jews are special people. Doesn't mean
that a Jew is a special person, obviously that would be ridiculous. Each
person is special or unique in his own way, but it means that the
history of the Jews is special, especially in Western culture, as being the
place where, depending on what you believe, either God reveals himself to the
world in the Jewish history or the God of our imaginations is implanted in our
imaginations. So, in other words, you don't have to believe in God
to understand that the Jews hold a very special place in a culture that used
to be called Christendom, that was formed by the Bible, that worshiped in
Christianity, a religious Jew of Jesus Christ who lived and died a believing Jew
when people hate the Jews. It is because they hate that image of God,
that image of God who requires of us that we put our idols away,
that we put our desires second to obedience to Him that expects us to
live in the kingdom, knowing that means we might be crucified because we're not
in the kingdom yet. All of those things that Christianity and Judaism before it
asked us to do, we don't like, and we take it out on
the Jews. I don't think we hate the Jews because they're successful. I
don't think we hate the Jews because they're funny. I don't think we hate
the Jews because they're doing anything wrong. I think we hate them because God
plays out his relationship with man in the theater of their history. And I
know this. I can almost prove it by simply pointing out the fact that
no matter what situation the Jews are in, this anti Semitism, this virulent
anti Semitism, rises up again and again. Some people call it. The
call the Jews the Canarian the coal mine, because they're the first to go
before Western civilization is attacked. But I call anti Semitism the devil's flagpole.
Because I think that evil can creep into any philosophy. You can be a
leftist, you can be a rightist, you can believe in God, you
cannot believe in God, and evil can get into you. And when it
does, the sign that it's there is that viru and anti Semitism. So,
of course, people who are white supremacists, I believe there are about
one hundred of them in America. But people who are white supremacists are going
to hate the Jews above all. And of course people who are leftists and
basically hate God, you know, because that's the first principle of leftism is
that there is no God. It is that we are going to make life
perfect with our own hands in our own world. Of course they're going to
hate the Jews. So eventually these two ends of the circle become one thing,
and it happens again and again. You know, there was a Stalin
and Hitler back before it invaded the Soviet Union. We're good buddies, you
know, And so this is something that we should come to recognize. The
only way out of that circle is believing in human freedom and in the idea
that man is made in God's image, that there is some connection. When
I say that, just to put it in practical terms, what it means
is that there is some connection between our conscience and objective moral reality that when
we look upon someone beheading a baby or raping a woman on the body of
her murdered boyfriend, something in our hearts says to us, this is wrong,
and we can't define it, we can't prove it, we can't even
know it, but we do know it. And it's when we develop ideologies
that silence that voice inside us, that we end up, you know,
devolving into due hatred and violence and the kind of stupidity we're seeing on our
college campuses where they have been talked out of the most basic primary information that
human beings had. What is a woman, what is she for? What
is a man? What is he for? What is good? And what
is evil? So what we're seeing now, you know, I will tell
you, in all honesty, is weird as it may sound. When I
heard, you know now it's now years ago, when I heard major institutions,
major media outlets, major colleges saying that you could butcher the body of
a child and call a gender affirming care. One of the first thoughts that
went through my mind was soon they will be killing Jews. Not because there's
a connection between killing Jews and transgenderism, but there's a connection between evil and
killing Jews, that's the thing. And it is evil to do that.
And if you've developed an ideology where you can't see that it's evil to kill
a baby a minute before it's born, and you can't see that it's evil
to teach children about deviant sexuality in school, and you can't see that it's
evil to butcher a child, you have lost your way. You've lost your
way in a way that you almost can't define it. You can't explain it,
you can't argue it. You know, my friend and I love him,
and I feel so deeply for him because I know how deeply he's connected
to Israel Ben Shapiro. I keep hearing him say, look look at what
they've done, and I keep thinking they know what they see, they see
it, they just can't feel it anymore because their ideology has overcome their conscience.
And I think that that's a situation where men and women of conscience have
to stand up and act their conscience out. You know, it's a very
painful thing to have to do it sometimes you wind up getting eaten by lions
in the you' see if you do that, but if you don't do it,
people cannot see what they know in their hearts but have shut down because
of their ideology. So that's been weighing heavily on me just the last couple
of weeks, watching and even you know, some ostensibly decent kind of members
of the online left who care very deeply they say about human rights, and
will you know, do things like pivot immediately to Gaza and say it's not
worth, you know, crying over what happened on October seventh in Israel.
You know, this is the children of Gaza, you know, deserve more
attention because what happened in Gaza was this outpouring of anti colonial sentiment whatever I
mean. There's different versions of this argument that have been circulating over the last
couple of weeks, and I wonder who's really to blame because on a certain
level, especially I'm talking specifically about young people who were born after nine to
eleven and grew up in this total moral confusion, just absolute fog, through
no falls of their own, they were born into it. At the same
time, these these horrors are stark, there can be no confusion when you
see the videos that hamas live streamed, and yet there manages to be among
ostensibly good people. So, Andrew, maybe I just want to pick your
brain a little bit about how to deal with this generation of social justice minded
young people who maybe don't know what they should know and everything that they should
know for reasons that relate back to the culture. How should we think of
their stances in these times? Well, you mentioned Niche before, and Nietzsche,
in many ways was a prophet who simply pointed out that when he said
God is dead, when he had a madman cry out in the street,
God is dead, you know what he meant by that was that we haven't
lost our faith and we are inevitably losing our faith in the face of many
things that happened at the same time, Science, the disruption in the church
that was the Reformation, all of these things made people think, well,
you know, what can we believe? What can we hold on to?
And he predicted, Dostoevski predicted many people predicted that when you lose faith in
God, morality disappears. Anything is permitted when you lose faith in God,
and so you start to say, well, I can rewrite morality, I
can rewrite my gender, I can rewrite my body. I can rewrite anything
I want, because there is no thing that I am modeled on that means
anything. And you really have to sit down for a minute and consider what
the ramifications are of that. In The Brothers Karamazov, a great, great
novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, there's a brother. One of the brothers is a
guy who believes in God but feels that God is not doing right by the
world, and that God essentially allows too much evil, and he won't forgive
God for that. And he says, when you abandon God, and when
you abandon the idea of immortality, not only do you reject morality, but
your morality becomes the opposite of what it was. And the service of the
ego, even into doing evil, becomes the moral good things that people have
been warning us about all this time. And now that bill has come due,
I mean, we have reached an utterly materialist world. Even people who
think that they're religious are materialists. They do not believe that there is something.
You know, you saw it during COVID when people would come on Andrew
Como I remember it came on and said the alternative to locking down is death.
There's nothing worse than death. Well, death is a terrible thing.
I'm no friend to death, but there are plenty of worse things than death.
Slavery is worse than death, dishonor is worse than death, all kinds
of things. Fear, living in fear is worse than death. And you
can't know that unless you believe in something beyond life, right, unless you
believe in something that is worth more than your physical body. So people have
to sit down and think about the ratlifications of what they believe, because I've
noticed this on university campuses. God is not a football team, you know,
it's not. Religion is not a team where you're the good guys and
they are the bad guys. It's a way of living, a way of
perceiving life. And a lot of people have been talked out of seeing what
they see. So you know, when you can, when you can look
at you know, when my friend Matt Watsh goes out and says what is
a woman? And people can't answer him. The reason people can't answer them
is that's just something you know, that's an axiom that's a self evident truth.
When you start to lose your grip on those self evident truths, you
have to go back and say, how did I get talked out of that?
And I think that when we talk to young people now, one of
the things that really bothers me on the right is this making fun of young
people for being unhappy because of the culture has destroyed their lives. I mean,
especially young women. Young women are so unhappy. They're so unhappy,
and I don't make fun of that. I don't think it's their fault.
I think the culture has told them something that is untrue about their lives.
And I think you have to start by daring to speak the truth to them
and daring them to embrace the truth. That's a really hard thing to do
because you come across as a fuddy duddy, You're not modern, You're you
know, it's okay, okay, boomer stuff. You know, all of
that stuff you are going to face. You're going to risk the most deadly
thing that can happen to any American. You become irrelevant. You know,
God forbid you should become irrelevant. So when you go before people and you
say, who told you that a man could become a woman. And why
did you believe it? What on earth? What on earth made you think
that? Because some clown and a you know, a liberal arts colarge told
you that that you should believe it. You know, those are questions that
have to be asked. And the reason you know that they have to be
asked is because you get demonetized on YouTube for saying them. You get thrown
off Facebook, you get silenced, you get censored, you get condemned by
the mainstream. That's how you know when you're speaking the truth. You know,
that's that's the giveaway. If you can say almost anything, you can
say you know, the Jews are to blame for their own murders, you
can guess. You can say that without losing your monetization on YouTube, But
you cannot say that a man can't become a woman on YouTube without being demonetized.
So that's how you know you're speaking the truth. So I've been saying
this now for so long that it's getting to beginning to feel like I'm beating
your drum. But if you don't have the courage, if you don't have
the courage to speak the truth, especially to the young, if you don't
have the courage to pay the price on social media. I mean, you
know, pay the price in social relevance and pay the price in money because
it costs your money to do it. Then you can bet that the truth
is going to is going to die. You can bet that people are not
going to live by the truth. They are going to live by lies.
And when you live by lies, you start killing people. That's when the
body's pilot. You know. When people used to say about Donald Trump,
and I'm no big fan of Donald Trump, when people say he's literally Hitler,
I would say, show me the bodies, show me the bodies.
That's how you know someone's literally Hitler, because because they're bodies. Now,
we see the bodies. Now since October seventh, we see the bodies,
and nobody cares. You know. The New York Times has a guy as
a videographer in Gaza who's an actual fan of Hitler, who's literally a Hitler
fan, covering the Israel Gaza War. So if you're not going to speak
the truth, you're not going to live the truth. You're not going to
pray in truth. You're not going to stand out and say, you know
what this world actually the world you want, actually doesn't make sense. If
we are living in a godless world, no one's going to hear the truth.
And that's a tough assignment, but you really have to do it,
and all of us have to do it, and all of us are going
to pay a price for you. Hey, y'all, this is Sarah from
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to ask about the value of fiction in a time when there's so much less
reading that's happening. I mean, there's a lot of binging and a lot
of binging of fiction, but there's also a lot of binging of TikTok,
a whole lot of binging of TikTok and Instagram, where you're not really watching
for the most part art. You're watching other people react to art in some
cases, but you're watching other people just go about their lives and share their
thoughts. And that doesn't lead a whole leave a whole lot of time for
actually the imagination, the moral imagination, the literal imagination. How important or
what role do you think fiction can play at helping people be better, be
better versions of themselves in such a difficult time. It's a great question,
and it's basically the core of what we're talking about. Yeah, first,
you have to know what you're talking about when you talk about art. Art
is a way that human beings communicate the experience, the internal experience of being
human, from person to person. That is what art ups. You can't
do it any other way. I cannot tell you what it feels like to
see your first child born. I cannot tell you what it feels like even
to stub your toe. I have no way of communicating those things to you
through language. I can only do it by drawing a picture, by telling
a story, by writing a song. Those are the only ways I can
communicate to you what it feels like to be a human being, the wholeness
of a human being. When you don't have that, you begin to rely
purely on reason. And I can reason my way to any damn thing I
want. I can reason my way and to murder. People have done it,
They do it all the time. You know, I have to do
this because this and this. I am doing this because it's decolonization. Decolonization
is unfair. Therefore it's fair to slaughter anybody I decide as a colonialist.
The fact that their reasoning can be disproved or doesn't make any sense doesn't matter,
because they have lost touch with the full experience of being a human,
which is only partially reasonable. There are things that we know that we don't
know how we know what is a woman, what is good? What is
evil? What is a man? Those are things we know without knowing how
we know that we cannot put our knowledge into words. If you are not
schooled by some kind of civilizing art, you will be taken over by ideology.
Those are basically your two choices. It's the difference between worshiping God and
worshiping a little statue that says it's a God. It's the difference between worshiping
God and worshiping Donald Trump or Barack Obama. You know, It's the difference
between ideas and ideals and ideology art if you use it right, I mean,
you can't just you can't just look at it. You have to engage
with it. But art and religion, which is art in a way in
itself, are the ways that you turn your you deepen the experience of being
human, So you can set it off against bad ideology, so you can
set it off against the fervor of your emotions in a moment, so you
can set it off against the mob, so you can set it off against
your desires for approbation, for approval, for fame, for money, for
sex, whatever it is that you desire. You need to be a whole
person. And the way you become a whole person is through art and through
ritual. That is what makes you a whole person. There is no other
way. And so if you're not reading, if you're not experiencing art at
a deep level, if you're not experiencing prayer and ritual at a deep level,
you are not going to be a full human being. And you can
see it. You can see. You know, the thing that makes people
angriest when I talk on my podcast. The first thing is if I say
Donald Trump is being a jerk. That makes people angry. But the thing
that makes them even more angry is when I tell them to stop smoking dope.
And that really makes me laugh, because you know, I get it.
I like a drink from time time. You know, I'm not saying
you shouldn't have vices. But people smoked op at a level that I don't
think anybody understands. They smoke it every day. It's so much more powerful
than when I was a kid, and it made you a little buzzy.
Now it makes you stone. To live in the world is a very intense
experience, and people dull it with all these things, with alcohol, with
sex, with pornography, with money. They dull the reality of life.
But when you live in the reality of life and become a full human being,
the joy of that experience and the vitality of that experience pays you back
almost for everything I would say. And so art is the way you humanize
yourself. Ritual and art are the ways you become a human being. And
if you're not a human being, I can tell you what you will become.
You will become a sheep. You will become a follower of the guy
who offers you the most pleasure, the most money, the most power.
Whatever it is that people are holding up and giving you. You will fall
for that. You will fall for that, you know. I mean.
I talk to these kids in colleges. My heart breaks for them because they
are being told that they will be a good person if they only believe this,
that they will be their authentic self, that they will only dress like
this, that they will be, you know, the master of the universe,
if they will only speak these words. All of those are lies.
That the idea of being a human being is so complex that only art,
only culture, only religion, and the experience of religion can actually give it
to you, and it's worth everything to have it. We live in a
very you know, we used to live in a healthier society. It wasn't
a better society. There's still plenty of evil in it, but it was
a healthier society. But we live right now in a very unhealthy society.
And the only way we're going to get it back is person by person.
You know. This is why, this is why for the last twenty five
years, I've been telling conservatives, stop saying that this is the election of
your lifetime. Stop saying everything depends on the next election, because you didn't
lose the country in the elections. You've lost it at the movies. You
lost it where people lied into the human heart and twisted it there. And
that's where we have to win it back. It's going to be a long,
slow slog I mean, it's not going to happen overnight. It's not
going to happen if Donald Trump wins the next election or DeSantis wins it.
It's only going to happen when we start creating beauty and narratives and rituals that
tell the human truth. The House of Love and Death by Andrew Clavin,
another Cameron Winter mystery, has a Halloween release state that's out on October thirty
first. Andrew, I want to thank you so much for joining the show.
I appreciate it. I'm such a big fan of your work. Thank
you. Thanks, Emily, it's great talking to you. I appreciate it.
Of course you've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour.
I'm Emily Rashinsky, culture editor here at The Federalist. We'll be back soon
with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the friend