Andrew Clavin dissects media hypocrisy, contrasting the treatment of grieving parents—Khan (criticizing Trump), Smith (criticizing Clinton), and Sheehan—exposing double standards in moral outrage tied to political loyalty. He slams Trump’s botched response to Khan while accusing Clinton of repeating debunked email claims despite Comey’s direct rebuttal, framing it as a pattern of partisan media bias. Hollywood’s glorification of violence, like Jason Bourne, fuels the divide, he argues, before pivoting to his memoir’s Christian conversion, leaving listeners questioning whether art’s critique or complicity drives today’s polarization. [Automatically generated summary]
At this point in the election cycle, many of you may be confused.
You may be saying to yourself, wait, if my child gets killed, does that mean I can criticize politicians or not?
After all, you saw Kaiser Khan at the Democratic Convention.
His son was a heroic American soldier who died in the Iraq War, and he criticized Donald Trump for wanting to limit Islamic immigration.
Trump attacked him back, and the media said Trump was very bad.
But what about Patricia Smith?
Her diplomat son died at Benghazi, and she criticized Hillary Clinton at the Republican convention for not sending help and for lying about it.
And the media said Patricia Smith was very bad.
Likewise, when Cindy Sheehan's son, an American soldier, was killed in Iraq, she protested against George W. Bush, and she received international media attention.
But when Cindy Sheehan's son, an American soldier, was killed in Iraq, she protested against Barack Obama and was completely ignored.
So you might be forgiven if you turned to your spouse where she lies prostrate, sobbing inconsolably on the kitchen floor and said, jinky winkies, honey, now that the kid's dead, are we supposed to make political statements or not?
Well, luckily for you, the mainstream media, in conjunction with the Democratic National Committee, have issued these official guidelines to help you figure out whether your soul-crushing tragedy has political value or is just one of those things and tough luck.
For instance, if your child is black and is shot dead by a white police officer while trying to kill him, congratulations.
You're a mother of the movement, and you now have so much moral authority that you can speak tearfully about the problem of systemic racist policing, even though the problem doesn't actually exist.
So that's good, right?
But if your child is black and is shot dead by another black person while lying in her mom's bed doing her homework, ooh, sorry.
You should really keep your anguish to yourself because bringing that up would make you kind of hateful and racist, like Rudy Giuliani or someone.
If your child is gay and killed by a homophobe, excellent.
You have a great talk show career ahead of you.
If your child is gay and killed by a Muslim, that's not so good.
But you're still young.
Maybe you could have another gay child and have him killed by a homophobe next time.
So buck up.
If your child is killed by an illegal alien, try to forget about it.
Just pretend she never existed.
You have no future in politics.
If these official MSM DNC guidelines of how much moral authority you have after your child's death still leave you feeling confused, here's what you can do.
Just arrange to have your child killed before he's even born.
Then you're golden and can spend the rest of your life going on television to talk about how happy you are.
Because the kind of dead child the Democrats and the media like best is the one they've killed themselves.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin show.
I hope that hurt.
I'm sorry, but I'm surrounded by hypocrites, buffoons, and idiots.
So that's all I have to say about that.
You know, well, this was not the worst Clavin this weekend ever.
I think only two police officers were killed, so we're actually improving over the time being, and just the rest of it was the usual stupidity and nonsense.
And I saw Jason Bourne, so we will be talking.
I have a lot of interesting stuff.
There'll be no spoilers, but I have a lot of interesting stuff to say about Jason Bourne and other movies like it.
So stay tuned.
I know you can watch on Facebook for 15 minutes.
Have I got that right?
Jason Bourne Insights00:09:57
And then move over to the Daily Wire and hear the rest of it.
And if you subscribe, you can see the rest of it, and it's so beautiful.
I mean, I just can't even begin to describe what you're missing if you're not watching it.
And if you subscribe, you can be in the mailbag and we'll answer all your questions on the Wednesday mailbag show.
We have a good week coming up.
I think Steve Crowder is going to be here on Thursday, so that should be.
And I guess the cleanup crews will have to come in after that.
So early polls are showing a convention bounce for Hillary Clinton.
Still not sure.
It hasn't shown up on the RCP average, but then that's an average going back into July.
But it seems like it's hard to tell whether she, did she have a good convention or is it just easier to have a convention when the media is cleaning up the mess for you and talking about how great everything is?
And, you know, whereas the Republican convention, the media is just hitting them again and again.
Everything's dark and everything's wrong and oh, there's divisions.
I mean, there were people outside the Democrat convention not only burning the flag, but setting themselves on fire while they were burning the flag, the ultimate in karma.
The reporters just don't, they're just not covering that.
We're just not going to do that.
But the top of the convention, I mean, Hillary Clinton's speech was one of the dullest things.
That woman, like I keep saying, she has to reinvent, you know, she has to really show us who she is.
Like, we don't know.
She's been in the public eye for 40 years.
We know who she is.
That's the problem.
The problem is who she is.
But she gets up and she gives this terrible speech, but it was all the lead-ins.
I mean, Obama gave a good speech.
Michelle gave a good speech.
And then, of course, there was Kaiser Khan and his wife who stood up.
And these people are gold star parents of a son who was a genuine, Captain Khan.
He was a genuine, genuine hero in Iraq.
Was, you know, sent his, his, saw a truck coming toward them, sent his underlings away from the truck, ran toward the truck, and the truck was, of course, loaded with an ID.
It was a suicide bomb, and it blew up.
So Khan gets up and he essentially chastises Donald Trump for wanting to limit Muslim immigration.
So here's a portion of that speech.
Donald Trump, you're asking Americans to trust you with their future.
Let me ask you: have you even read the United States Constitution?
I will.
I will gladly lend you my copy in this document.
Look for the words.
Look for the words, liberty and equal protection of law.
Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery?
Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America.
You will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities.
You have sacrificed nothing and no one.
So, great speech.
It really is a powerful speech.
And of course, the Democrats, he holds up the Constitution.
The Democrats are cheering.
They're turning to each other.
What are we cheering for?
The Constitution.
What's that?
That's the thing we're always trying to get rid of, the Constitution, so we can do what we want.
And also, just listen, for all I know, the guy really does walk around with the Constitution in his pocket.
Most of the people I know who walk around with the Constitution in their pocket are Tea Party people.
Those are the people.
So this whole thing about Democrats cheering for the Constitution, still, look, you got to give him, this is politics.
They landed a good punch.
They landed a good punch.
So now Trump responds on the George Stephanopoulos show.
And the best thing I can say about Donald Trump is he tried not to be himself.
The best thing I can say about him is Donald Trump tried for a few minutes not to be Donald Trump.
So here's his first response to the Khan speech with Stephanopoulos.
He was very emotional and probably looked like a nice guy to me.
His wife, if you look at his wife, she was standing there.
She had nothing to say.
She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say.
You tell me, but plenty of people have written that.
She was extremely quiet and it looked like she had nothing to say.
A lot of people have said that.
And personally, I watched him.
I wish him the best of luck.
He tries.
He's trying not to be Donald Trump.
And I can't help it.
I'm Donald Trump and I have to be Donald Trump.
He insults the guy's wife into sort of making the point that because she's a Muslim woman, she's not allowed to say anything.
And of course, she responded.
She writes him a very eloquent letter telling him to get stuffed as he deserved.
You know, I mean, like, shut up, shut up.
All he had to say was, yeah, that's very sad.
But it was Hillary Clinton who voted for the Iraq war, not Donald Trump.
It was Hillary Clinton who, when the going got tough, started to stand against the Iraq war.
turned her back on Captain Khan and his fellow soldiers.
It was George W. Bush who went in and fought for those guys and gave them the surge against everybody's advice, against everybody's urging.
George W. Bush went in and won that war, essentially, with a surge.
So Trump has nothing to apologize for.
He's talking about something else.
As he makes this point, here's the second cut.
What would you say to that, Father?
Well, I'd say we've had a lot of problems with radical Islamic terrorism.
That's what I'd say.
We have a lot of problems where you look at San Bernardino, you look at Orlando, you look at the World Trade Center, you look at so many different things.
You look at what happened to the priest over the weekend in Paris where his throat was cut, 85-year-old, beloved Catholic priest.
You look at what happened in Nice, France, a couple of weeks ago.
I'd say you got to take a look at that because something's going on and it's not good.
Fair enough, right?
I mean, that's what he's talking about.
He's talking about Islamic terrorism.
We all know that there are great Islamic patriots around.
That's not the point.
There is a problem in the Islamic world.
There is a cancer of violence.
We don't know whether it grows in, you know, it's inherent in Islam itself.
That's the great question of the age.
I think a lot of people should be studying that.
But we do know that it's a problem.
And the problem is, is that if you're going to get blown up, if you're going to get shot, it's probably going to be by an Islamic guy.
And that's what he's worried about, which is fair enough, but he just can't stop.
You know, there's something in this guy.
It's not that he doesn't want to win.
I can't speak to that.
I don't know.
Maybe he's doing the whole thing as a lark.
But when he is personally attacked, he personally attacks back.
He has not got that thing in him that most of us have where they say, you know what, maybe this wouldn't be the best idea.
Maybe this person has a right to be emotional or angry.
It doesn't make, you know, the fact that their child died heroically doesn't make their political point any better.
He could have, there was a way to respond.
I mean, and yes, I know Hillary Clinton has essentially dissed Patricia Smith, brought home those coffins from Benghazi and lied and stood by those coffins and lied into the faces of those parents.
It's inexcusable, but this is also ridiculous, too.
Here's Stephanopoulos asks him, has he sacrificed anything?
He said, you have sacrificed nothing and no one.
Well, that sounds, who wrote that?
Did Hillary's script writers write it?
How would you answer that, Father?
What sacrifice have you made for your country?
I think I've made a lot of sacrifices.
I worked very, very hard.
I've created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs.
I think I've done a lot.
Those are sacrifices?
Oh, sure.
I think they're sacrifices.
I think when I can employ thousands and thousands of people, take care of their education, take care of so many things.
Even in military, I mean, I was very responsible, along with a group of people, for getting the Vietnam Memorial built in downtown Manhattan, which to this day people thank me for.
I raised and I have raised millions of dollars for the vets.
I'm helping the vets a lot.
I think my popularity with the vets is through the roof.
His popularity with the vets.
Remember the story of the frog and the scorpion?
The scorpion says to the frog, take me across the river.
And the frog says, well, won't you sting me?
And the scorpion says, no, I wouldn't sting you because then we'll sink and we'll both drown.
So the frog lets the scorpion ride on his back and halfway across the river, the scorpion stings him and the frog starts to die and they both go down.
And before they both drown, the frog says, well, why did you do that?
And the scorpion says, I'm a scorpion.
It's my nature.
It's the same thing with Donald Trump.
It's like, Donald, why did you attack the gold star parent?
Well, I'm Donald Trump.
It's my nature.
And here he is explaining to Megan Kelly why he does these things.
I go hard.
I go hard hard.
If I was lost, I would not have gotten this far.
I go hard.
I'm familiar.
I said sit down, everybody who they do sit down, they refuse to sit down, they don't sit down, sit down, they refuse to sit down.
They don't shut down.
If I don't, go all the way.
If I don't win, it'll be a mistake.
I used to pay and money, and money, and money, and money, and money, I don't look back, I'm not stupid.
It's a fact.
And everybody can't begin to lose a retreat.
Watch out in the tree.
I go hard.
I go hard hard.
If I was lost, I would not have gotten this far.
I go hard.
I'm a million.
That's from Song of Five 2016.
They're auto-tuning all the candidates.
I love that one.
I go hard.
He's got wave.
If you can see, he's waving a gun around and all this stuff.
Director Comey's Controversy00:06:59
Anyway, so that's Trump.
But let's take a look at Clinton for a minute, because Clinton now has, you know, the New York Times doesn't even mention this on their front page today.
It's all about Trump.
This is a turning point.
He attacked Khan.
You know, it's the wrath of Khan.
It's a turning point.
You know, I mean, this has happened to Trump maybe 15 times where he's been pronounced dead, and every time his poll numbers go up.
So we'll have to wait and see what the people's reaction to this is.
But meanwhile, meanwhile, Hillary Clinton gives an interview to Chris Wallace on Fox, and Wallace asks her about the emails, and she lies again.
She lies.
Listen to this.
We'll play to the first cut.
After a long investigation, FBI Director James Comey said none of those things that you told the American public were true.
Chris, that's not what I heard Director Comey say.
And I thank you for giving me the opportunity to, in my view, clarify.
Director Comey said that my answers were truthful and what I've said is consistent with what I have told the American people.
That there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails.
I was communicating with over 300 people in my emailing.
They certainly did not believe and had no reason to believe that what they were sending was classified.
Now, in retrospect, different agencies come in and say, well, it should have been, but that's not what was happening in real time.
Okay, so she lies again.
And then we're going to have to stop here just for a minute and say goodbye to our friends on Facebook.
Come over to the Daily Wire and hear the rest of the show.
So Comey, the entire nation heard Comey call her a liar, point after point after point.
He illustrated, he had investigated this for months and months, and he said, you know, she said this, but this wasn't true.
But she's still, that's not what I heard.
That's not, you know, in Clinton world, in my imagination, everything's fine.
So Wallace goes after her again, and she still does it.
Listen to this.
He plays the tape for her.
In a congressional hearing on July 7th, Director Comey directly contradicted what you had told the public.
Secretary Clinton said there was nothing marked classified on her emails, either sent or received.
Was that true?
That's not true.
Secretary Clinton said I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email.
There is no classified material.
Was that true?
There was classified material emailed.
He directly contradicted what you were saying.
And let me just, he not only directly contradicted what you said, he also said in that hearing that you were extremely careless and negligent.
Well, Chris, I looked at the whole transcript of everything that was said.
And what I believe is, number one, I made a mistake not using two different email addresses.
I have said that, and I repeat it again today.
It is certainly not anything that I ever would do again.
I take classification seriously.
I relied on and had every reason to rely on the judgments of the professionals with whom I worked.
And so in retrospect, maybe some people are saying, well, among those 300 people, they made the wrong call.
At the time, there was no reason, in my view, to doubt the professionalism and the determination by the people who work every single day on behalf of our country.
So she throws the entire State Department under the bus.
It's like, yeah, yeah, okay, it may look like I lied, but it was really their fault.
You know, she's a terrible human.
These people, they should really get married.
They should really get married and leave the rest of us alone.
They deserve each other.
On top of which, I have to say this.
When Kaiser Khan says Donald Trump hasn't read the Constitution, I believe that is 100% accurate.
I do not believe that Donald Trump has the attention span to read the Constitution and try and understand what's in it and try to understand why when people say, oh, maybe you shouldn't torture our prisoners, why there may be a reason for that or why, you know, you can't stop the press from saying what they want to say.
I truly believe that.
My problem is that Hillary Clinton has read the Constitution and she wants to destroy it.
You know, every time you hear her say, I'm going to repeal, every time she says the words, citizens united, you should hear First Amendment.
When she says Citizens United, she means the First Amendment.
Because all Citizens United says is that you do not lose your First Amendment rights when you form a corporation.
If I form a corporation with the people in this room and we make a film criticizing Hillary Clinton, we do not lose our right to publicize that film before an election because it's a corporation giving money.
She says, oh, that's corporate donations.
It's money out of control.
Money is speech.
That's all it is in a political context.
Money is speech.
And so when she says she wants to ban money and force disclosure and overturn Citizens United, she's talking about getting rid of the First Amendment.
And she even says, I'll pass an amendment to do it.
And so, you know, the thing that's so galling about this election, I have to say, is that for me as a conservative, I've said this a million times.
The election's over.
I lost.
We already know this.
The constitutional governance is not on the ticket this election year.
So we've lost.
And all I sit around and think about at this point is who do I hate more?
Do I hate these alt-right Nazis who attack me every time I attack Trump and they're anti-Semitic and they're white supremacists and they're just trash.
I mean, it's everything.
It's everything I think all of us on the right, on the principled right, despise.
We don't like these guys.
And I hate them, but I have to say, I just don't think there are that many of them.
I think they have a billion Twitter accounts.
I think they troll every website relentlessly and compulsively.
But I don't think they're going to have that kind of effect.
And also, just talking in terms of pure venom from me, on pure hatred, I think they already have their punishment because they're themselves.
I mean, I can't imagine anything worse than sitting in your mother's basement, stewing in your racial hatred and rage.
And like, who has nothing to be proud of except the color of their skin?
You know, like, who goes, oh, look, I'm a white person.
That's a good thing.
You know, I mean, like, that's a terrible, oh boy, oh boy, I got a pink skin.
And that's a good thing.
You know, that's a terrible life.
So I feel like they've already been punished.
But the press, the Scott Pelleys of the world, and the Dean, I don't even know how to pronounce the name, Dean Bicket or Backette, who runs the New York Times, and the David Muirs, who treat Hillary Clinton like some kind of god-queen.
These liars, these deceptive people who lie by omission and by commission and just constantly are attacking the Republicans and praising the Democrats because they're all Democrats.
There's something like 7% of mainstream journalists or Republicans.
7%.
Killing Wellington00:05:45
That's not by accident.
That doesn't happen by accident.
It's not that conservatives don't make good journalists.
They're great conservative journalists.
They just can't get work.
They can't get work at CBS, at NBC, at ABC.
And when they do get work, they can't get their stuff on and they have to leave.
I mean, Shyal Atkinson, who's not a conservative, just a good investigative reporter, had to leave CBS because they wouldn't let her print.
They wouldn't let her run stories critical of Barack Obama.
So these people are so awful that the prospect of their horror and shock if Donald Trump gets elected at least gives me a little bit of pleasure.
The only pleasure I'm going to get out of this.
And I guess I do think that there's this infinitesimal chance that Donald Trump will do what he says he will do and appoint conservative Supreme Court justices where I know Hillary Clinton is going to appoint a Supreme Court justice to overturn Heller, your gun rights, take away your gun rights, take away your First Amendment rights.
I know she's going to do those things.
So I have this slight, slight preference for Trump, but he's also, he's a terrible person, and he will endanger the polity.
I mean, I think the question is whether the Congress will restrict him.
And I think they're more likely to do that with Trump than with Clinton.
So just, what can I say?
It's election 2016.
Run for your life.
Start paddling.
We're all going to be going to Cuba.
Billy Whittle always says, you never see anybody paddling trying to get to Cuba.
They're all trying to get out of Cuba.
I think after this election, that may change.
All right, let's talk about stuff I like.
Jason Bourne is not the stuff I like.
It's a B movie.
It's a good movie.
I said that there's not going to be any spoilers, and there's not.
But if you haven't seen, there will be a spoiler about the Bourne Identity, the first film.
I'm going to assume that you know who Jason Bourne is, that he is a guy who lost his memory.
He found out he's a CIA assassin and he wants out.
He doesn't like the fact that he's a killer.
He's now a trained killer and he doesn't want to be that guy.
So the latest one is one of these shaky cam things that what's Greenground?
What's his first name?
Paul Greengrass, yeah.
His entire directorial thing is he shakes the camera and that's supposed to be active.
And you get nauseous by the end of it.
You're like, oh my God, I can't watch this.
But it's got a lot of high-toned action, a couple of great chase scenes, dumb plot.
The thing about it is, though, is here, let's take a look.
This is from The Bourne Identity, the first Bourne film, which was a great film directed by Doug Lyman.
Doug Lyman, he did a great job, and he's a really talented director.
Greengrass is this British leftist, and he just, I just don't like what he does, and I haven't liked any of the Bourne films since the first one, which is one of my favorite films.
Born Identity is one of my favorite thrillers.
So this is the moment when Bourne basically expresses his philosophy because he remembers who he is.
I don't want to do this anymore.
I don't think that's a decision you can make.
Jason Bourne is dead.
You hear me?
He drowned two weeks ago.
You're going to go tell him that Jason Bourne is dead.
You understand?
Where are you going to go?
I swear to God, if I even feel somebody behind me, there is no measure to how fast and how hard I will bring this fight to your doorstep.
I'm on my own side now.
When I saw this movie, I thought this is a great movie, but it takes place in the 70s because the book is written, I think it's published in 1980.
Robert Ludlam, wonderful book, by the way, wonderful thriller.
It's published in 1980, and it's about the 70s.
You know, in the 70s, we thought America didn't do assassinations.
You know, that goes back way, way back.
There's a famous story about the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo.
I don't know if the story is true, but it makes it into a lot of biographies about Wellington.
He's riding along the lines before the battle is joined, and he comes upon a soldier taking aim at Napoleon.
He's going to assassinate Napoleon.
He's a sniper.
And he asks Wellington for permission to fire, and Wellington is absolutely enraged.
How he did, that's a terrible thing to do.
You know, we don't assassinate people.
We let all these people die in order to fight the Battle of Waterloo, and he doesn't want to end it with an assassination because it's just not the way the game is played, you know.
And that has so changed that now we have Barack Obama killing people with drones, assassinating people with drones, and there's a lot of ancillary damage, a lot of women and children getting killed when he does this.
But he is defending it.
We have Obama defending these drone strikes.
Simply put, these strikes have saved lives.
Moreover, America's actions are legal.
We were attacked on 9-11.
Within a week, Congress overwhelmingly authorized the use of force.
Under domestic law and international law, the United States is at war with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.
We are at war with an organization that right now would kill as many Americans as they could if we did not stop them first.
So there's Obama making the argument that the sniper makes to Wellington.
Now, Wellington says, No, no, that's not the way the game is played.
We fight the battle.
This is a war.
We don't just kill the general.
Once they start killing generals, where does it stop?
So, but now that's all gone.
Here's Obama, the hero of the left, saying, No, we kill, we assassinate people because otherwise these assassinations save lives.
They're drone assassinations, but that's what they are.
So after, in the 70s, after we found out that the CIA did do assassinations, three presidents in a row, Ford, Carter, and Reagan, passed laws saying no more assassinations.
I mean, no more CIA assassinations, because we didn't do those things.
But now we do do them.
The president says, Yeah, I'm blowing people away.
He said at one point, I'm good at killing.
Obama's Argument For Assassination00:05:27
It turns out I'm very good at killing people.
He bragged about it.
So now you've got this left-wing director who's got a problem because Tommy Lee Jones in this new Jason Bourne movie plays the evil CIA director, and he says exactly what Obama just said, you know, to Jason Bourne.
He says, You saved lives by doing these things.
On top of which, by the way, we find out this is not a big reveal in the movie, it's just a plot point.
We find out that Jason Bourne is responsible for one of our guys, our agents in Syria, getting captured by, because all Bourne ever does is he exposes evil CIA plots, and he exposes an evil CIA plot.
One of our agents in Syria gets captured and tortured.
So Jason Bourne in this movie is the bad guy.
I mean, I just, about halfway through the movie, I stopped rooting for him.
I thought, wait, you got one of our agents captured in Syria?
I'm supposed to think that's a good thing, you know, that you're the good guy.
And so it's very, very confusing.
It started me thinking about the fact that there is a lot of art that is good.
And now, this is, you know, I won't call this art, this is entertainment, but there is a lot of really high-level art that is good that puts forward bad ideals.
You know, I mean, some talented people, I mean, Eminem is just to use a modern example, very talented lyricist.
When you listen to him, he's a very clever lyricist.
His stuff is evil.
You know, he writes about the things he says about women.
It's just evil stuff.
But that doesn't mean talent is blind.
Talent falls on anybody.
It does not care where it goes.
It's like the spirit.
It just falls on the people that it falls on.
Some good people have talent, some bad people have talent.
And I've talked about, you know, I've been peddling this book to you, my memoir, The Great Good Thing, a Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, which will be out in September, and you can pre-order it now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Great Good Thing.
But in it, I talk about the fact that one of the things that led me to God was reading the Marquis de Sad, who is where we get the name sadism, who was a brilliant philosopher and pornographer who wrote about how much fun it is to kill women, to rape women, to rape people, rape boys, kill everyone.
You know, his stuff is evil, but he makes the only solid argument for atheism I've ever read.
He makes the only argument with integrity for atheism I've ever read.
So when I read the Marquis de Sade, I thought, oh, well, that's atheism.
Count me out.
So that's part of what I want to say about the way we engage.
The stuff I like for today is a movie called Bonnie and Clyde.
So here is the trailer from its day.
This is the old-fashioned trailer from Bonnie and Clyde.
They roared off on what might easily have been a wild romantic lark.
But almost before they knew it, with the giggles still in their ears, they had bloodied up poor state.
Honey?
I'm not saying nothing.
Frank just figured on some easy pickings, didn't you, Frank?
You know, Texas Ranger, you ain't hardly doing your job.
You ought to be home protecting the rats of poor folk, not out chasing after us.
What do you want to do with him then?
Hang him.
I don't know.
Take his picture.
And then everybody's going to see Captain Frank Hammer of the Texas Rangers with the Barragang.
Now, you know, we are just about the friendliest folks you would ever want to meet.
So this is 1967.
Director is Arthur Penn, one of the great directors, and it's a brilliant and beautiful film.
But it takes these two thugs, Bonnie and Clyde, and they were thugs, and it turns them into, I mean, it's Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, so the most beautiful human beings on earth.
And you could hear the narration.
You know, it was just a lark.
They were so in love.
The giggles were still.
These were stone-cold killers.
These people widowed and orphaned people in cold blood.
I think they killed nine police officers.
And the cop who's in there, this guy, they call him Frank Hammer.
I think his name was pronounced Hamer.
I just read his biography.
There's a new biography called Texas Ranger.
I think we have an image of it.
Yeah, there it is.
And I just finished reading this, and he was one of the great lawmen of the 20th century.
And his wife sued the filmmakers, and they had to pay her for slander because they used his real name like a fool.
He was never captured by Bonnie and Clyde.
He tracked them down relentlessly and he blew them away, basically.
He was an old-fashioned Texas lawman.
I mean, this was a guy who grew up in a white supremacist world.
He was a white supremacist himself in the sense that he thought blacks were inferior.
He risked his life 20 times against lynch mobs, sometimes 1,000 people strong, to defend black people because that was his sense of justice.
Even though, you know, I mean, he liked black people.
He just thought they were inferior.
But that didn't stop him from risking his life, sometimes single-handed, like a sheriff in a western, to stand up for people who were not.
And most of these black guys were criminals and they were guilty, but he was not going to let them be lynched.
So he was a great hero in this movie, which is a beautiful movie.
It makes violence balletic and beautiful and poetic.
It makes these two thugs romantic and beautiful.
And it takes this great lawman and it slanders him, basically.
I mean, it basically makes him look like a fool and a buffoon, which he simply wasn't.
Art as Engagement00:00:50
And so the question then becomes, what do you do with entertainment or great art that sells values that are despicable?
And we're going to have to talk about this more tomorrow, but let me just start by saying that art is an engagement.
It's something that you have to engage.
It's not a passive thing.
You have to bring your values to the show.
And you have to be able to criticize art and think about art without coming across, or even being, without being stick in the mud, without not enjoying what is beautiful about the art.
Because there's always something in great art that's true.
I found the truth in the Marquis de Saud, even though it was not the truth that Saad was selling.
And so that's what you are part of the artistic process and have to bring those values to the process itself.