Ep. 12 dissects the "gaff"—Republican truths twisted by media—like Giuliani’s Obama critique and Jeb Bush’s economic warnings, while mocking the NYT’s leftist shift via its satirical "27 Ways to Be a Modern Man" piece. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ MacArthur grant and Between the World and Me face scrutiny for cherry-picking systemic racism claims despite his family’s self-made success, contrasting with Shelby Steele’s rejection of white paternalism; the host accuses the MacArthur Foundation of ideological bias. The episode ties media manipulation to racial grievance politics, framing it as a weaponized narrative. [Automatically generated summary]
It's time for a fresh installment of the left-wing dictionary, the online reference that helps you understand what the people who don't know what they're talking about are talking about.
Today's word is gaff.
A gaff is anything a Republican says that might interrupt the dismantling of American freedom and prosperity by the left, especially if, one, the statement can be misconstrued by the news media to sound mean or stupid, and two, it's entirely true.
Let's look at an example.
Let's say Barack Obama attends a church for 20 years where the minister repeatedly condemns America and calls for God to damn our country.
Then let's say Obama befriends an America-hating terrorist who actually helps launch his political career, even though Obama later lies about how close their relationship is.
And then let's say Obama campaigns on the promise to fundamentally change the U.S., makes speeches around the world blaming America for the world's problems, apologizes for America to bloodthirsty tyrants, and offends our strongest allies in the U.K. and Israel while offering deals to our enemies in Russia and Iran.
Now, let's say unquestionably patriotic former mob-busting prosecutor and heroic New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani says, quote, I do not believe that the president loves America.
That's a gaffe, because it's spoken by a Republican, threatens the left's agenda, can be misconstrued to sound mean, and is obviously true.
Now you try it.
Let's say that under Barack Obama's stewardship of the economy, the number of people on government assistance has skyrocketed 23%.
Let's say the percent of people in the workforce has fallen to the smallest number since the Carter administration, with labor participation by blacks particularly low.
And let's say the median net worth of minority families is almost a fifth lower than it was when Obama took office.
Meanwhile, let's say Obama has been repeatedly suggesting that white police are targeting black citizens, which has encouraged devastating riots in black neighborhoods and left police disaffected, which in turn has led to spiking crime rates among blacks.
Now, let's say Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush says, quote, our message to black voters is one of hope and aspiration.
It isn't one of division and get in line and we'll give you free stuff.
Gaff or not a gaffe?
Let's find out.
One, it's spoken by a Republican.
Two, it endangers the left's anti-freedom agenda.
Three, it can be misconstrued to sound mean and stupid.
And four, it's obviously true.
That's right, it's a gaff.
You're beginning to catch on.
Modern Man Misconceptions00:04:15
Pretty soon you'll be able to get a job at CBS or the New York Times or the LA Times, or you would be able to get a job in those places if they didn't keep laying people off because no one wants to get the news from them because they keep lying about everything.
Oh wait, I think I just made a gaffe.
Here's another one.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin show.
One of the many sacrifices I make for you people as I prepare for the show is I read the New York Times so you don't have to.
You know, the New York Times, I always refer to the New York Times as a former newspaper, and that's because it actually used to be a good newspaper.
I mean, conservatives never liked it, but when they did surveys of its stories, the stories were actually fair and on both sides.
And then somewhere around the 80s, it just completely changed, and now it's been totally gutted to become this kind of almost sophomoric college paper with still good reporters in it.
I worked with a guy when I was a newspaperman.
I was a newspaperman in a small town, worked in this kind of crummy little box of an office, always filled with cigarette smoke.
It leaked when it rained.
Worked with some of the best reporters in the country, guys who would go on to have very big jobs.
And one of them was this guy, I won't tell you his name, but he was a guy who all he wanted was to work at the New York Times.
He just guided his entire life around working at the New York Times.
And one day he finally got the job.
He would write sentences.
He would sculpt his sentences to work at the New York Times.
And one day he got a job.
The New York Times became one of their biggest reporters and then one of their biggest editors.
And somewhere along the line, famously came out as being gay and wrote a book about it and all this stuff.
And I always wanted to ask him, was he gay when I knew him, or did he just become gay to land the Times job?
You know, because I think that the Times, I found this article in the New York Times that is called 27 Ways to Be a Modern Man.
27 Ways to Be a Modern Man.
Now, there's an old expression in the news business, there used to be an expression in the news business, that news is what happens to your editor's friends.
So whatever your editor's friends are doing, that's what the guy thinks is a trend.
That's what he thinks is happening.
If the editor has gay friends and they get manicures, you will see an article, sure as you can bet on it.
You will see an article that says, men are now getting manicures.
And you go like, gee, I don't know any men who get manicures, but the editor's friends are doing this.
So here's what the New York Times thinks are 27 Ways to Be a Modern Man.
This was written by Brian Lombardi.
I'm just going to pick out a few.
I seriously do not know whether this is a parody or not.
And if you can tell, you're a better person than I am.
This is truly, I'm not making this up.
This is truly what it says, 27 Ways to Be a Modern Man by Brian Lombardi.
This is number one.
When the modern man buys shoes for his spouse, he doesn't have to ask her sister for the size.
And he knows which brands run big or small.
Now, ladies, let me tell you something.
If your husband buys you shoes and doesn't have to ask your size and knows which brands run big or small, he's not only having an affair, he's having an affair with the pool boy.
It's just not something that, here's another one.
The modern man makes sure the dishes on the rack have dried completely before putting them away.
That sounds familiar, right, ladies?
That's what your modern man is doing.
Does the modern man have a melon baller?
Does the modern man have a melon baller?
What do you think?
How else would the cantaloupe, watermelon, and honeydew he serves be so uniformly shaped?
I swear that's this is why, this is why it's worthwhile to subscribe to the New York Times because I don't have to write the satire.
The modern man has no use for a gun.
He doesn't own one and he never will.
Then how does he toss his melon balls up in the air and blast them away?
That's really difficult to understand.
The modern man cries is the last thing.
The modern man cries, he cries often.
I would say if this is the modern man, he probably cries all the time.
The funniest thing, the funniest thing to me is that someone at the New York Times actually thought that any man in America was turning to the New York Times to find out how to be a modern man or any kind of man at all.
All right.
I just had to read that off.
Kyle Davis On Coates00:10:27
I just love that.
That melon ball thing was priceless.
This is something that I've been wanting to get to for a couple of, a long time.
I've been wanting to talk about this, and I keep running out of time.
I want to talk about one of the MacArthur grants.
You probably know the MacArthur grants.
They call them the genius grants.
They come out of the blue.
I don't think you can be proposed for them.
I don't think you can try to get them.
They just come out of the blue.
You are selected out of nowhere.
And you get something like $600,000, no strings attached, over the course of five years.
And I mean, that used to be like a tremendous windfall, but it's still pretty good, and it carries a lot of prestige with it.
And one of them this year went to a guy named Tan Nahisi Coates.
I don't know if you have heard of Tan Nahisi Coates.
is a writer for the Atlantic Monthly.
A black guy writes this stuff about how America is out to destroy black people.
And his memoir called Between the World and Me has been a smash.
This is Kyle Davis writing in commentary.
Coates' recent memoir, Between the World and Me, an instant number one bestseller, dubbed immense by Publishers Weekly and deemed essential like water or air by A.O. Scott of the New York Times, will not only win every prize in sight, they'll have to invent some new prizes for it.
Perhaps Coates will be tapped to be our first public intellectual laureate.
Not only is the book selling by the boatload, but as it is very angry, very left-wing, very topical, and very short, it also seems certain to be ushered into the exclusive club where the real money of publishing is, college and high school reading syllabi.
This thing is a smash between the world and me.
Kyle Davis, who is attacking it in commentary, says it's a febrile cry of hurt that takes place in a murk of vague and poetic language.
The reminiscences often further occluded by euphemism and the passive voice reading it requires decoding it, which is true.
I haven't read the book, but I've read an excerpt of it, a long excerpt of it in The Atlantic.
Take a look at Coates.
He's talking here to Charlie Rose, I think.
He's a very big proponent of paying blacks back for slavery, reparation payment.
And here he's making the point that behaving well, acting well, isn't enough to overcome the white supremacy of America.
Now, listen carefully, because Coates is not an untalented writer.
He actually is a pretty good writer, even though what Davis says is right in commentary, that he's, because his thinking is unclear, his writing is unclear, but his writing is very poetic and attractive.
Listen to what he's saying, and listen if you could spot the flaw in his argument.
He's saying blacks can't just get ahead by being personally responsible because the deck is stacked against them.
I quarrel with the notion that individual virtue is somehow a match for the forces and the resources of a society angled in a particular direction, in this case towards white supremacy.
I don't think individual virtue, which some people will call personal responsibility, is enough.
I did not get you there.
No, no, no, no.
My parents were very virtuous and were very morally and personally responsible.
This did not change the fact that they lived in a community that was shaped by housing segregation.
You can't.
So it's structural.
My grandmother, my grandmother, raised three kids in the project, sent all three of her young daughters off to college.
She scrubbed white people's floors and went to school at night.
And when it was time for her to buy a home, she had to buy a home on contract in a way that white people did not.
That decreased the ability of my family to accumulate wealth.
No amount of personal virtue on the behalf of my grandmother would have stopped that.
That goes to the issues of the state and the society.
Can anybody spot the problem with that argument?
I mean, his parents and his grandparents sent their kids to college.
He, Coates, is now a lauded writer for the Atlantic Monthly who was just awarded $600,000.
The American dream never took place in a single generation.
It was always generational.
It was always people working hard to get ahead.
He is living proof that what he's saying isn't true.
I'm not saying there hasn't been prejudice against blacks.
That would be ridiculous.
Of course there has.
The country, all countries have had terrible problems with prejudice, ours as well.
But you can't deny that that has changed because Coates is sitting there.
His parents worked hard and played by the rules, sent their kid to college, and now he's a big success.
He's a big success.
The problem with his logic and everything he writes, his argument, what commentary said about him is true.
It's hard to tell exactly what his argument is, but I think I've decoded it.
He wrote a letter to his son in the Atlantic Monthly where he talks about his 15-year-old son, and he talks about Eric Garner being choked to death for selling cigarettes and all the people, the blacks who have been killed by policemen in the last year.
And he says, You know now to his son, he says, you know now if you did not know before that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body.
By the way, they've been endowed with the authority to destroy my body too, if I happen to be breaking the law, but never mind.
It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction.
It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding.
It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy.
Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed.
Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed.
The destroyers will rarely be held accountable.
Mostly, they will receive pensions.
There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers, or even in this moment.
The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy.
This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies.
It is hard to face this, but all our phrasing, race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, so on and so forth.
His argument is, his argument is that race is a construct, which basically I agree with, that blacks have been oppressed so that whites could create a white race who would be privileged.
So his body is being sacrificed.
This is, as I get the argument, his body is being sacrificed so that whites can create a white privileged race.
He brings up something that has always bugged me.
Saul Bellow, one of the great American writers, a Nobel Prize winner for literature, wrote The Adventures of Augie March, one of the great American novels, and Henderson the Rain King, one of the greatest and funniest American novels.
Terrific writer.
Toward the end of his life, he was asked about multiculturalism, and he said, multiculturalism makes no sense.
Show me the war and peace of the Zulus.
In other words, the Zulu culture had never produced a novel as great as War and Peace.
he was crucified.
I mean, Bellow, one of our greatest writers, was absolutely wiped off.
His books stopped getting reviewed.
He was wiped off the front pages of newspapers.
He just couldn't get, you know, no one, he couldn't get any attention.
One of our finest writers at the peak of his career and the end of his career just completely erased from the literary canon for that remark, even though, of course, like a gaffe it was completely true that the Zulus have never produced a novelist as great as Tolstoy because they haven't produced a culture as great as the culture that produced Tolstoy.
Coates takes issue with this and quotes somebody as saying, well, Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.
In other words, Tolstoy is a world writer.
You can't just seal him off in his race.
Race is a construct, and that is what Coates is saying.
And my problem with that is if race is a construct, if we're all individuals, he says, no one of us, no one of us were black people, says Coates.
We were individuals, a one-of-one.
And when we died, there was nothing.
Always remember that, he says to his son.
Trayvon Martin was a boy.
That Tamir Rice was a particular boy.
That Jordan Davis was a boy like you.
When you hear these names, think of all the wealth poured into them.
Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting them to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League.
In other words, it's not their race that matters.
It's their individuality.
I completely agree.
Then how are you going to take a white baby born today with no stain of guilt, of racial guilt on him, and ask him to pay you for things that were done to dead men by dead men?
That doesn't make any sense.
His thinking is muddy, and because his thinking is muddy, his writing is muddy.
And he should really ask himself what Tanahisi Coates should ask himself is why are these old white liberals like Charlie Rose and Bill Moyers bringing him on their show and talking to him in these reverential tones?
And the answer is because he's giving them what they want.
He's giving them a way to feel a sense of righteousness about race without ever really having to do anything because it's not going to cost Bill Moyers and Charlie Rose a dime.
But even if it did cost them a dime, it lets them off the hook.
Shelby Steele, a far, far greater writer on race, who will never be invited on Charlie Rose, will never win a MacArthur Prize.
He has said to white men, stop helping us.
The things you've done to help us have hurt us.
He stripped them of their righteousness.
He's taken away their sense that they have done something good, and that's why he'll never get on.
Tanahisi Coates is being lauded by the white establishment because he is giving them what they want.
He is giving them a pass by this creepy little idea that somebody who was not alive at the time can pay back somebody who was not alive at the time for something that was done by dead men to dead men.
And it's just absurd.
And giving him a genius grant is a sign of just how every, it's O'Sullivan's Law, how everything that is not designated as conservative becomes liberal leftist over time and is emptied out of any worth or value.
And that's true of the MacArthur grant.
Found Footage Horror00:02:34
I just have to bring that up.
All right, stuff I like.
Halloween stuff I like.
We've been talking about ghost stories.
And all the Halloween stuff I like is not about horror.
I hate blood.
I hate these gory things.
There are a couple of good ones now and then, but mostly what I like is the chill up the spine.
And of course, most of the really good ghost stories are big hits, so you know them already.
You know the ring, you know, paranormal activity, great, the sixth sense, all of them.
I love those movies.
This one is really obscure, but really good.
And it's what they call found footage, which is paranormal activity.
The going wisdom in Hollywood is that found footage, which is like, you know, it looks like a video camera or it's on the security camera or on a computer, and it's patched together.
The first one was the Blair Witch Project, right?
And that's called found footage.
And the common wisdom in Hollywood is found footage is over.
It's been done.
Everybody's seen it.
Everybody's bored of it.
Probably true, but my feeling is if it's a good story and it works and there's a reason it's found footage, then it's good.
This is a little Australian film made in 2008 called Lake Mungo.
We actually have just a little scene.
I'll tell you what the story is about.
It's about a girl who drowns and they start to set up cameras.
Her family sets up cameras around their house because they feel that she's coming back, that she's haunting the house.
And so it's patched together from the video of this.
And this is a scene where before she drowns, she goes to a psychiatrist and she tells him that she's having dreams of drowning.
And this is the conversation there.
Would you like to tell me a little bit about what happens in these dreams?
I feel like something bad is going to happen to me.
I feel like something bad has happened.
It hasn't reached me yet, but it's on its way.
And it's getting closer.
And I don't feel ready.
I feel like I can't do anything.
Don't forget when you watch this picture, it really is spooky.
Don't forget when you watch this picture, to watch the ending credits, because they're the best part.
The final credits are the best part.
Really spooky film, Lake Mungo.
I think they've been planning to remake it in America so they can ruin it, because if there's a good film made overseas, you have to ruin it with an American version.
But so see it on the Australian version, 2008, Lake Mungo.