Ep. 6’s host skewers media trust with absurd stats—like four Americans tricked into buying Everglades land—while branding journalists as "squirmy snakes" serving Democrats, not truth. Pope Francis’s Kim Davis visit gets dismissed as ignored, his climate stance a "power grab," and his "who am I to judge?" remark twisted by media; the host demands clearer Catholic stances on abortion. NYC’s Ethel Rosenberg "Day of Justice" is mocked as leftist denial of Venona-proven espionage, before pivoting to praise Empire’s V. Bozeman’s a cappella—proving even satire can’t outrun cynicism. [Automatically generated summary]
The Gentlep Polling Service reports that Americans' trust in the mainstream news media is at an historical low.
Six in ten Americans have no trust in the news media, although the four Americans who do trust the news media were absolutely delighted when the news media sold them a parcel of land at the bottom of the Everglades.
Of the six in ten Americans who don't trust the media, three said mass media reporters should be allowed to continue living.
But they were apparently only creating a diversion while the other three stormed CBS in an effort to tar and feather anchorman Scott Pelley.
Pelley managed to escape by telling the four Americans who do trust the news media that he was really Batman and needed a lift back to the cave.
The four news-trusting Americans said they thought Pelly looked familiar, but they'd never really seen him before because they never watched the news.
They just trust it.
It's just a feeling they have, that's all.
Sometimes you get feelings and you have to go with them.
According to Gallup, trust in the media is significantly lower among younger people, ages 18 to 49.
It rises in people 50 or older until it tops out among people over 90 who trust the news media completely and wish it would bring them some soup.
Trust of the news media is higher among people with low IQs and among Democrats, but I repeat myself.
Some people feel the news media has lost the trust of the public because reporters are now so biased toward the left, they've essentially become political operatives doing imitations of journalism as they go about scurrilously omitting stories and twisting facts in order to create a good impression of the Democrats, who, let's face it, are now more a criminal organization than an actual political party, so that the so-called journalists who protect and defend them have debased themselves to a level lower than squirmy snakes,
abusing the tone and aspect of objectivity to sell an almost endless parade of lies and distortions while hiding behind a tradition of network newscasting established long before leftist trash like themselves stripped those networks of every vestige of trustworthiness with their ideological corruption.
Others disagree.
One network spokesman, for instance, speaking from the floor of the men's room in PJ Clark's, said the public had only lost trust in his objectivity because they were evil, stupid Republicans and didn't recognize their moral superiors even when he passed out before he could finish.
Some feel the problem with the news media is that they're too cozy with the left-wing political class.
But George Stephanopoulos, former Democrat operative and now chief anchor of ABC News, felt that was untrue, and so did the 30 or so other major Democrat players who have moved between high-level news posts and the Obama administration.
Pope And The Culture War00:14:38
These Democrat news people claim that without their hard-hitting questions, Hillary Clinton might never have revealed where she got those fabulous shoes.
As trust in the MSM's reporting wanes, others have sought elsewhere for news, turning their eyes to the West and listening carefully, their hearts on fire with anticipation to hear those immortal words, trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clayton Show.
All right, here we are again, the end of our week and the beginning of October.
The autumn leaves are falling.
Not really, this is LA.
We're in Los Angeles.
William Faulkner, the great American novelist, said when he was in the movie business, he got angry.
He said, in LA, one damn leaf falls into one damn canyon and someone says it's autumn.
And I guess that's what's happening here.
But you know what we're going to do?
We're working with a skeleton crew today because it's October.
But I think as we move into next week, I think we'll start on the stuff I like portion.
I think we'll start doing some scary stuff to welcome Halloween.
We've got all weeks and weeks, and there's one thing I know, it's good, scary stuff.
So we'll deal with that later.
Meanwhile, we're still doing this shortened version of the show as we get up and running.
But the site is now open, right?
The site is open.
Yeah, I think you can now actually, first of all, I think I'm no longer talking to myself.
I may be talking to myself, but now I don't have to be talking to myself.
And you can subscribe and get the visuals, my beautiful face as well as my resonant voice.
And I think that you can now subscribe and the whole thing.
Lots of, one of the things that has been frustrating about doing this shorter version of the show is lots of crazy stuff has been happening.
This is a conservative show about the culture.
This is a conservative look, not necessarily at who's up in the polls or what's happening in politics, but in how we live and in the arts and in how we live in the arts.
Things are going insane.
I mean, the visit from the Pope was one of the most bizarre experiences.
Now it turns out that the Pope visited Kim Davis.
Nobody even talked about this, but secretly he went and visited that Kentucky clerk who refused to issue gay marriage licenses and actually went to jail briefly, I think, for doing that.
And the Pope visited with her, which was completely off the mainstream news media's version of this Pope.
If there were a museum of corruption and stupidity, and there is a museum of corruption and stupidity, it's called Earth.
But if there were a smaller, within the grander museum of corruption and stupidity, there were a smaller one, one of the main exhibits would be the mainstream news media's coverage of the Pope.
If you combine their ignorance with their dishonesty and the way they cover this guy, the way they cover all popes, I mean, not just Francis, which is also made difficult on the conservative side by the fact that we disagree with a lot of what this pope says, A, and B, there are a lot of Protestants, evangelical Christians on the right who don't like popes to begin with because no 500-year-old quarrel should be allowed to die.
If you can continue to be enraged over something that's been going on for 500 years, don't let it go because it's rage that holds our society together.
If you stop being angry, everything just unravels.
I have a very different philosophy about this.
I mean, first of all, for much of my life, the two last popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, I'm not Catholic, so I don't know that much about it, but these two guys were monster great men.
These were great men in any religion.
The fact that they were in the Vatican together at the same time is one of those acts of God, like Madison and Adams and Jefferson and Washington being together at the same time, or the poets Keats and Shelley and Byron and Wordsworth and Blake and Coleridge all being alive at the same time.
These are acts of God when these things happen.
Reagan and Thatcher and the Pope being around together has just got the feeling that God was turning off the Soviet Union.
I was like, thank you.
I've enjoyed the show.
Thanks for murdering hundreds of millions of people.
Now I'm turning you off.
And so the popes have been great men.
And Benedict was also a genius.
I love theology.
I love theology.
And there are parts of Catholic theology, obviously, I disagree with, but nonetheless, Benedict was writing some of the most brilliant theology of our day.
And if you don't respect Catholic theology, then you don't respect Western thought because Western thought grows out a lot of it from Catholic theology.
This guy, Francis, I got to be honest, I'm less impressed.
I think he was brought in for certain reasons.
I think there's a lot of corruption in the Vatican, just finishing cleaning out these molesting guys who've really got to go.
And the banking system is really corrupt.
And I think that's why they brought Francis in.
And that's, you know, he's doing Pope stuff.
He's not doing conservative stuff.
He wakes up every morning, tries to be the best Pope he knows how to be.
He's not trying to be a conservative.
So when he gets out and he gives a speech and he's talking about global warming, I got to be honest, I don't care what he thinks about global warming.
I think global warming is an utter nonsense.
Man-made, disastrous global warming is a myth that was created in order to let powerful people seize more power, the power of energy, and who controls the energy.
It's a complete scare story.
It's utter nonsense.
And I think the Pope has fallen for it completely.
That's not his area of expertise.
That's not what I turn to any Pope for, and I don't even think that that's what Catholics turn to the Pope for.
On capitalism, when he attacks capitalism, I understand he's from South America, where capitalism has been historically so corrupt that they've never actually seen capitalism.
All they've seen is crony capitalism, which isn't capitalism at all.
So when he gets up and talks about capitalism and neglects the fact, even the New York Times, today, one of the most liberal columnists in the New York Times was writing about the fact that poverty has been halved, halved in the last several years.
World poverty.
What do you think did that?
Magic?
Do you think it was us giving charity to people?
It wasn't.
It was greater trade, people doing work for what for us are slave wages.
For them are great wages.
The spread of capitalism.
All those guys in Seattle, the anarchists rioting against capitalism, are rioting in favor of poverty because capitalism is what lifts people out of poverty.
The Pope was formed under this corrupt crony capitalism.
He doesn't know anything about it.
I don't care.
I don't care what he's saying about this.
What bothers me about this Pope is subtlety about things that you shouldn't be subtle about.
I mean, first of all, let's talk about the way he's reported.
Remember the Pope said something, he was asked about homosexuality and he said, who am I to judge?
And the mainstream media went nuts.
Oh, he's changing 2,000 years.
I mean, Catholic teaching is that Soviet, so Catholic teaching is that homosexual behavior is a sin per se.
Now, it doesn't matter whether you agree with it or not.
That's the teaching of the Catholic Church for 2,000 years.
And suddenly the mainstream media is acting like he's just rewritten that.
And that's something he is an authority on, is Catholic teaching.
The fact is that he was sent in to clean up this banking system.
And he appointed a watchdog, I think his name was Rika, to oversee the banking system.
And he was really tough about it.
He was throwing people out the door.
I mean, if they stood in his way, they were gone.
And he put in this Monsignor.
And of course, when you try and reform a corrupt system, there are a lot of people who are taking money out of it.
They don't want you to do it.
So immediately, they exposed this Monsignor, this guy Rika.
They exposed the fact that he had had an affair with one of the Swiss Army guards.
And on the plane, so, you know, the Pope's no fool.
He knows what they're doing.
They're undermining his watchdog so they can keep the bank corrupt because they're bleeding the bank of all this money.
So the Pope is on a plane and a reporter comes up to him and says, what about this affair Rika had?
And the Pope said, who might you judge?
Because he's not throwing this guy out.
This guy is a watchdog.
He's an honest man who's cleaning up the banks.
And so he's not going to get caught in that kind of baloney.
And of course, immediately the mainstream media just think, oh, good, now, you know, homosexuality is fine with the Catholic Church.
It's just not the way it is.
And I think this visit with Kim Davis was his subtle way of saying that.
I don't mind him being subtle about that.
I really did mind when he was standing up in front of Congress and he made this speech and he said that we have to respect life at every stage of life.
And then went on to talk about the death penalty.
And Catholics who love him on the right were saying, well, he was sending a subtle message about abortion.
Why is he being subtle about abortion?
He's the Pope, you know, and if Catholics aren't going to stand up about abortion, why not just come out and say it?
Why not come out and say, shut down these abortion mills, shut down Planned Parenthood.
He's a courageous man.
He's a good man.
I believe that.
But I don't understand why he's being subtle about what has been Catholic teaching.
So that stuff is nuts to me.
I mean, I'm not a partisan about this thing.
I'm a Christian.
I really don't care what churches do.
I don't believe that all roads lead to God.
People who say that don't believe in God.
People who say that are atheists because everything that exists has a quality.
If it's a noun, it's a chair, it ain't a table.
If it's a lamp, it's not a microphone.
That's what nouns are.
They describe things with qualities.
If it's God, he's either the God who wants you to love your neighbor, or he's the God who wants you to kill the infidel.
He can't be both.
He's one or the other.
If one is true, the other's not true.
And if the Buddhists are right and everything's an illusion and there really is no God, that's a whole other way of looking at things.
They're not going to get you to the same places.
But the rites of churches, you know, we forget this, but people used to burn each other at the stake.
Literally, that's not an exaggeration.
They used to burn people at the stake because they didn't or did believe that the bread and wine in the Mass was transubstantiated into the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
Or, you know, it was just a metaphor.
And they'd kill you.
They'd set you on fire.
The authorities would set you on fire.
And you have to imagine Jesus sitting at the Last Supper and saying, you know, this is my body.
Eat this bread in remembrance of me.
This is wine.
Drink this in remembrance of me.
The apostles going, and then we kill people, right, because they think it's really you or not.
No, no, just do this in remembrance of me, you know.
But then we set them on fire.
When do we set them on fire?
No, just eat the bread and drink the wine and remember me and love your neighbor.
And then we killed them, right?
It's just madness.
And I just can't get into it.
And I know people get very fierce about it and they say, oh, the Pope is, you know, believing in the Pope is idolatry.
I don't buy it.
I mean, I think he's like the king.
It's like the king of England, the queen of England.
People, she embodies the nation.
She doesn't enslave the nation.
She's not that kind of monarch.
So anyway, I've just been watching this Pope.
To me, it's utter madness.
I don't think he's, I think they should only allow devout Catholics who really understand the Vatican to report on the Pope because they're the only ones who understand what he's talking about or what matters to him or what's important.
That's been crazy.
The other thing that is absolutely nuts, I think this happened just yesterday.
I have a Wall Street Journal piece about it.
New York City, which is now run by a communist, honored Ethel Rosenberg, who helped her husband Julius Rosenberg.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg sold the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviets.
The reason, they were spies.
They were Russian spies, and they sold our atomic secrets to the Soviets, and they were executed.
They were caught for it and executed.
It has been a mythology of the left for now what's got to be, what is it, 70, 80 years, that they were completely innocent.
Famous novel, the Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow, who just died.
This novel was his first, I believe, and it launched him to fame, the Book of Daniel, because it was about the son of these martyred two innocent people who kind of liked the Soviet communism, but they would never sell Soviet secrets.
And then the Venona transcripts came out.
The decoded the things that we picked up and decoded from the Soviet Union.
It turned out they were guilty.
They were guilty all these years.
E.L. Doctor, I don't think one reporter ever said to E. L. Doctorow, How do you feel about this novel now, now that it's all been exposed as a lie?
So yesterday, I think it's yesterday, New York City issued a proclamation honoring Ethel Rosenberg on what would have been the convicted Soviet spy's 100th birthday.
Manhattan Borough President Gail Brewer.
This is an article by my friend Ron Radosh in the Wall Street Journal.
Manhattan Borough President Gail Brewer joined the festivities, declaring September 28th, it's Ethel Rosenberg Day of justice in the borough of Manhattan.
Hurrah!
You know, She sold Adam's secrets to Stalin's Russia, this mass murdering tyrant.
Proclamations mention Rosenberg's work only as a labor organizer, but the emphasis was on showing that she was wrongfully executed.
Now, the thing is, they know that Julius did this.
They have virtually proved that Ethel was in on it, but by leftist standards of proof, the smoking gun, that she wasn't standing there with a big Adam bomb in her hands, handing it to Stalin, that it hasn't been proved.
But it has been all but proved.
And there is this line.
Let me see if I can find this line.
It's just amazing.
A lot of hysteria.
This is Councilman Daniel Drom of Queens, Democrat of Queens.
A lot of hysteria was created around anti-communism and how we had to defend our country.
And these two people were traitors, and we rushed to judgment, and they were executed.
I mean, no fact can penetrate these people's minds.
It's amazing.
This myth has been going on forever and ever and they will not let it go.
And they're honoring this Soviet spy who sold the atom bomb, the secrets of the atom bomb, to Stalin, who is starving tens of millions of his own people, executing people.
I just read a biography of him this year, a couple of months ago.
If he appointed you his successor, the next thing he did was kill you.
He killed everybody.
He killed the wives of people, and they would go to their deaths saying, we love Stalin.
And he would shoot them, and then he'd shoot their wives.
He'd kill their children.
And he killed millions and millions of people.
And he was the guy trying, and he was trying to take over the world, talk about imperialism.
An Hour Of Empire Insights00:03:43
And that's who they're honoring.
So it's just amazing.
Like, no fact can penetrate.
You know, I was going to, as I'm talking about crazy stuff, I was going to go on to talk about the MacArthur Grants because that's maybe the craziest thing of all.
But I'm already out of time and I want to get to the, as we're leaving, I want to get to the stuff I like.
And so I'm going to talk about, I'm going to talk about first Empire.
Empire is not the stuff I like.
I watched Empire.
My wife was out of town and I sat down and I had recorded Empire because I keep track of what's going on.
And I have to tell you, I sat down to watch An Hour of Empire.
I watched three hours in a row.
I never do that.
I mean, it's very hard for me to find time to watch a movie.
The reason I watched the entire season, I watched every day of it.
The reason I can't recommend it, it would be like me having a portion of the show called Food I Like and recommending potato chips.
I mean, that's how much entertainment nutrition is in Empire.
It is a, you know, it's Dallas.
It's a riveting soap opera about the music business, the soul music, rap music business.
And it's got murders.
Every two minutes, somebody's getting murdered.
They're having affairs.
You never know who's TV on it.
But you can't stop watching it.
But it's not really very good.
However, every week they have a musician, a singer on who is obviously well known in the black music community, but the rest of us probably haven't heard of.
And so they're not giving, you know, sometimes they'll have a really top performer on, but a lot of these people are new.
And one day I'm watching this thing, and this woman sings a cappella, the song that I'm about to play, which is called Black and Blue.
Not the old song, Black and Blue, but a new song called Black and Blue.
And she's supposedly auditioning in the show, and she sings this thing, and it blew me out of the back of my chair.
Now, music is probably, popular music is probably my least, the area of culture where I'm least knowledgeable.
My son always teases me that all I really care about are the words, the lyrics.
And I grew up listening to music that was made before I was born, because my father was a DJ on a station that played old music, Frank Sinatra and Cole Porter music.
So I grew up listening to the greatest lyricists who ever lived in America, the greatest pop music lyricists.
And they were writing these sophisticated, complex lyrics.
I loved them.
Carl Porter, Irving Berlin, these guys, just one after another of great writers.
And I grew up in the era of rock and roll.
And all my friends were listening to songs that had lyrics like, She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, I Want to Hold Your Hand.
And they thought it was genius.
And I was going, those aren't good lyrics.
So I missed, I missed the entire rock movement because I just was in love with the lyrics.
So I don't always know what the best new song is, but I know a great instrument when I hear one.
And the last time I heard an instrument like this one was Whitney Houston, who I never liked Whitney Houston because I thought she had one of the greatest voices ever, but like Barbara Streisand, I thought she had no soul.
I thought she was just, you know, but that voice was an amazing piece of material.
So this is V. Bozeman.
Her first name is just one initial.
And my son is well trained as a musician.
And so I actually sent him this to say, is that as great a sound as I think it is?
And he confirmed, this woman is really something.
I don't think she has an album out.
I think she has one YouTube video that's got 12 million hits.
This one has under a million hits.
I think it's terrific.
So that's the show for this week.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show, and we're going to end, go out playing V. Bozeman, singing on Empire Black and Blue.