Andrew Klavan Interview with Think Outside Politics featured in the Washington Examiner

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Check out Anthony Leonardi and Norman Young's latest report on the Washington Examiner detailing their interview with Andrew Klavan.

Excerpt:

"Andrew Klavan, bestselling author, screenwriter, and host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” has a message for young college students: embrace freedom.

“The founders were dealing with a very simple, yet complicated question. Simple because the point was how do we make people as free as it is possible to be, complicated because the answer is incredibly complicated,” remarked Klavan when speaking about his college lecture tour through Young American’s Foundation.

“I’d like [college students] to come away and think what is their liberty made of? … If you woke up in the morning, and there was a guy standing over you with a gun … and all day long told you what to do, and his advice was better than your decisions so that everything went better in your life, you still wouldn’t want him there.”

Klavan encouraged young conservatives to find a central message when discussing politics. “I think we have to tell them what we’re for, and I’m for freedom. As an elder statesman in life, there are so many things that I can tell people that can make them happy, but that’s not what I want the government to do for them … I just want the government to do what it says in the Declaration: to secure the rights that God gave them.”

Having paved his own way toward a belief in Christianity, Klavan’s uniquely freedom-focused theology appeals to the progeny of the religious Right. Young students of religiously conservative parents are fast becoming one of the most tolerant and open-minded political demographics in the nation. They have long been searching for ways to square their religious commitments with laissez-faire politics.

From a background of secular Judaism, Klavan can also to speak to secular-minded individuals who have felt alienated by the increasingly radical left-wing. If there is one place where leftists are not afraid to get radical, it is on college campuses. Klavan’s jovial personality and unique ability to break down complex conservative ideas into common-sense soundbites help him to fill what has been a comedic void on the political Right.

College students who would have once watched Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert can now get a daily dose of news and entertainment from a conservative angle delivered to them at their convenience.But it’s not all soundbites. The new internet medium is a place where long-form discussions can take place, not only in the realm of politics but also religion and philosophy.

In an interview with Think Outside Politics, Klavan explains his theory on the next Great Awakening to individuals who possess an entirely freedom-focused worldview.

“My theory is basically that this revival [the next Great Awakening] ... is actually coming at the intellectual level because theology needs to be reframed in the context of the world we know … In the same way that modernism collapsed when it was questioned by postmodernism, relativism is nonsense. It is internally contradictory. It makes no sense inside itself, and that too will fall apart.”

When asked about how to conduct a civil free exchange of ideas on college campuses when discussing politics, Klavan said “Why would you train someone not to listen to other opinions? Clearly, the only reason you do that is to keep control over them. Clearly, these people are actually less free than anyone who is willing to debate … People are easily controlled when they’re angry. They’re easily controlled in a mob. They’re easily controlled when you control the narrative around them ... the Left has done all that stuff.”

Klavan went on to say that college students should emphasize the liberty that civil discourse provides. "If you can start to make the meta-argument, not that you’re right, that by discussion you become free, you become free to consider other ideas,” said Klavan. “I think you can win over the middle of the populace, which is most people. Once you’ve done that, I think you exclude the violence, you exclude the irrational, and you exclude the people who don’t want to discuss.”