Ep. 247 pits Hollywood’s anti-Trump vitriol—from Schumer’s "clown" jabs to Streep’s debunked disabled reporter claim—against Trump’s counterattacks, like calling Sessions’ racial allegations "baseless." Michael Knowles mocks Golden Globes’ lazy Trump jokes and Moonlight’s niche appeal while defending Ripley as proof identity politics can thrive in bold storytelling. The episode frames PC culture as a leftist weapon, with Trump outmaneuvering critics, and ends by skewering Hollywood’s hypocrisy over its foreign-born dominance and political overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
The Senate is scheduled to hold hearings on as many as seven of Donald Trump's cabinet picks this week.
Senate Democrats are planning to do everything they can to obstruct those appointments, just the same as Senate Republicans did when they confirmed 10 of Obama's cabinet picks in his first week, nine of those confirmations by voice vote.
So it'll be just the same, except the opposite.
And remember how the news media, college professors, celebrities, and other Democrat hacks warned Republicans they would be accused of prejudice against black people if they opposed Obama?
Well, that's the same now too, in that some guy wandering K-Street with a grocery cart full of empty bottles is accusing Democrats of being prejudiced against orange people.
Democrats have responded that Trump isn't an authentic orange person, but only a dreamsicle who is orange on the outside but white on the inside.
And therefore, he can be opposed without the sort of anti-orange bigotry that has plagued this country since Johnny Orange was forced to change his name.
Up on the Senate schedule for appointment hearings is Rex Tillerson, Trump's choice for Secretary of State.
According to the Trump team, Tillerson is the former CEO of ExxonMobil, the second largest company in the world with an economy bigger than Ireland's, and this has prepared him to do Secretary of State-like things like drinking tea with Arab guys and then having them assassinated.
Senate Democrat leader Chuck Schumer responds that Tillerson's dealings with Russia clearly show beyond a shadow of a doubt that he's an agent of Smirsch and therefore an obvious incompetent since Smursh has been trying to kill James Bond for years and yet he's still alive even though the franchise hasn't been any good since Sean Connery left.
Donald Trump responded with a tweet calling Schumer a clown.
Schumer said Trump should stop the name-calling or he'd squirt him in the face with the giant plastic flower in his oversized lapel.
Another appointment up for approval is Jeff Sessions, Trump's choice for attorney general.
The Trump team points out that Sessions has been a senator from Alabama for 20 years and was formerly a U.S. attorney and state attorney general, so like, what's the problem?
But Senate Democrats say that Sessions was denied a federal judgeship in the 1980s when they slandered him as a racist, even though he helped desegregate schools and prosecute the Ku Klux Klan literally into the ground.
Senator Schumer says it's only right that those slanders should now be dredged up and reported as truth by the media so that half-informed protesters can scream hysterically about them and ignorant celebrities can make videos in which they keep repeating themselves.
Trump responded by saying Schumer was not just a clown, but the chief clown.
Schumer struck back by trying to kick Trump with his gigantic floppy shoes.
Whatever happens this week, you can be sure that the Andrew Clavin Show will be here to transform these confirmation hearings into a hilarious satiric parody of government dishonesty and dysfunction.
Post Jobs for Free00:02:10
Which gives me possibly the easiest job in America.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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Jokes About Trump00:05:38
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All right.
It's all Hollywood today.
We have the Golden Globe, multiple Golden Globe winning cultural reporter Michael Knowles is here.
I do want to mention that when I say he has multiple Golden Globes at the Golden Globes over the pawn shop next to his house have been missing for weeks, so I'm not sure it's the same Golden Globes that we were doing.
But we sent our cultural reporter Michael Knowles to the Golden Globe show on his TV set.
And it turned out to be the big news of the day because of what went on.
So can we bring Knowles on here?
Hey, this is amazing.
The technology of this place has just gone up and up.
We have music.
It's going to be a long show, folks.
Zip Recruiter.
That's right.
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So he's really, this is what I want you to avoid.
Now, I just want to show you, I just want to show you that wonderful white tuxedo he has.
This is Ryan Gosling last night before he went drinking with Michael Knowles.
Okay, do we have a picture of?
Okay, and this is Ryan Gosling after he went drinking with Michael Knowles.
Explains.
Excellent.
So you were there.
I assume you've just gotten back from all-nighters of Hollywood parties, sleeping with starlets of both genders.
Oh, absolutely.
And, you know, one of your Twitter fans actually suggested when you announced that I would be watching the Golden Globes on everyone's behalf.
They suggested a drinking game, which is where whenever someone makes a joke about Donald Trump, you take a shot, which is why I won the Golden Globe for cirrhosis of delivery.
That is a very special award.
Thank you.
So that would be a fatal game.
So what was your gen, we know that Meryl Streep is the big story, but what was your general impression of the awards?
Well, my general impression was just how in touch with America I would get.
It's almost like a super highway.
Straight to the heart of middle America from LA.
You know, the first three jokes of the show were Donald Trump jokes.
Really?
Yes.
And five of the first seven jokes of the show were Donald Trump jokes.
And I get that Donald Trump is sort of made for late night jokes and award show jokes, but they were so lazy.
They were so there was.
Well, were they?
See, now, I mean, obviously, real men were watching football yesterday, so I didn't actually watch the show.
But were they mean jokes?
Were they like teasing, or was it really going for the juggling?
Well, because the left has no sense of humor whatsoever in general, but certainly about this election, the jokes aren't that funny.
They're just sort of sad and mean-spirited, but they're not even punchy.
You know, they don't even have a real edge to them.
The only good joke I thought was Hugh Laurie's, which is that this would be the last Golden Globes.
Do we have that clip?
I suppose made more amazing by the fact that I'll be able to say I won this at the last ever Golden Globes I don't I don't mean to be gloomy It's just that it has the words Hollywood Foreign and Press in the title.
I just don't know what.
You know, does he have a green card?
I could play a voice that's criticizing our country.
Not for long.
Yeah, not for long.
Maybe we should build a wall like an eclipse of Dover would be like a good place.
The Atlantic Ocean's about to get 10 feet higher.
In part because of all the global warming.
That's right.
Now, here is one thing that I noticed, and I think this is actually culturally important, that the two winners, they give movie TV awards, and they give two different movies, right?
It's for drama and comedy.
The drama winner was Moonlight, about a gay black guy in the project.
So you know that that's going to win everything, right?
I mean, that's kind of basically, it's written on it.
As far as I can tell, every single person who watched Moonlight was actually in Moonlight.
I mean, it's like the cast and crew.
You know, that's what Hollywood is moving toward.
They're moving toward movies where only the cast and crew watch the movie and then give each other awards.
I mean, that's kind of, so this completely culturally irrelevant film, right?
I had never, this is not a joke, I hadn't heard of the movie until I was watching the Golden Globes.
I have the screener, and it's excellent because it's keeping the little ring, my coffee mugs making little rings on my table.
You know, I'm not running it down.
I'm sure it's good.
I made this point about Manchester by the Sea as well, that these are, I feel like I'm at Versailles when I'm watching these films.
I feel like, isn't it wonderful that we have this high color that nobody else is watching?
Oh, Your Highness, there's a mob outside.
Yes, but I'm watching a movie now that nobody else has seen.
And it's so wonderful.
It's just so elitist.
And the other movie that they give it to is La La Land, which is a celebration of a Hollywood that no longer exists.
And one of the things that really got me about La La Land is we're supposed to really care about this woman's desire to be a movie star so that she can have her face on a big poster while her baby is taken care of by a nanny.
I mean, and that scene in that movie, I just sat there and I thought, you know, this is shallow.
I mean, she's a shallow, she's a shallow person with shallow dreams about an industry that no longer matters.
I mean, that's kind of the way I feel.
There's a stink of cultural irrelevance.
What's so absurd is if La La Land was going to win all of those awards, why not give it to the good version of La La Land, which is Hail Caesar?
Vanessa Redgrave's Critique00:16:20
You don't want to nominate that for anyone.
Totally true, totally true, because there's too much truth in Hail Caesars to do it.
All right, so let's get to Meryl Streep.
So now Meryl Streep gets up.
She wasn't in a movie, right?
She just won some kind of...
So she won...
So she's won eight Golden Globes before.
She's won three Academy Awards.
She's been nominated for, I think, 100 million of each.
And we've seen her a lot at these awards shows.
And you knew you were in for a treat because I think it was last year's Oscars, Patricia Arquette or somebody gave a speech about how we need to end the wage gap between men and women.
And Meryl Streep is hollering and shouting, Meryl Streep, who's worth untold sums of money.
I would just like to have equal pay with Meryl Streeper.
I would be happy.
So you knew you were in for it.
And then she wins the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes.
And she did not disappoint.
Okay, so let's hear a Meryl Streep cut.
But there was one performance this year that stunned me.
It sank its hooks in my heart.
Not because it was good.
There was nothing good about it.
But it was effective, and it did its job.
It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth.
It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back.
Disrespect invites disrespect.
Violence incites violence.
When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.
Wait a minute.
What's Merrill Streep if not the powerful using it?
First of all, let us just take a look.
You know, I have scored Donald Trump.
I've hit Donald Trump for being a bully occasionally when he has, you know, when he said nasty things to people on the debate stage.
But this thing about the reporter is a canard.
Let's look at, we have pictures of Donald Trump making the same joke about half a dozen other people.
Just play that role of Trump insulting people.
And we'll get some of these regulators out of the bank so you can borrow and you can help.
Because, you know, the banks, the banks now, they can't do anything.
They're run by the regulators.
In all fairness to the banks, they're run by the regulators.
When you see the president of the bank, I mentioned the word regulator.
These guys come in, they run the banks.
And I watched a general recently on television.
And they said to him, what do you think about ISIS?
Oh, ISIS is very tough.
And I'm saying, first of all, why is a general on television?
I don't want my generals on television.
I heard Ted's a good debater.
I said he is a good debater, but he can't talk, okay?
Bad talker.
He's a good debater, bad talker.
So he's over here.
They asked him about waterboarding.
They said, Senator Cruz, what do you think of waterboarding?
Oh, I don't want to talk about it.
You know, he didn't want to talk about waterboarding.
Because too controversial.
And I'm saying to myself, they're chopping off heads.
He doesn't want to talk about waterboarding.
A couple of good paragraphs.
It said, talking about northern New Jersey draws the probers eye.
Written by a nice reporter.
Now the poor guy, you got to see this guy.
Oh, I don't know what I said.
I don't remember.
He's going like, I don't remember.
I thought, oh, maybe that's what I said.
This is 14 years ago.
He's still, they didn't do a retraction.
14 years ago, they did no retraction.
That's his imitation of somebody caught out in a lie or caught, you know, looking, being cowardly or something like that.
That's what he does.
It had nothing to do with the fact that the reporter was disabled.
It's a canard, and it wouldn't matter if it was a canard, except they do the same thing with homosexuality.
Trump may be the most pro-gay person ever to be elected president.
Remember, Barack Obama was not in with the gay agenda when he was elected.
He was saying he was against gay marriage.
Trump could, you know, Trump's a New Yorker.
He's like me.
We don't care.
We grew up in a circus, you know, so we don't care.
Like, people come in, they were dressed different ways.
There were guys dressed like women, women dressed like, it's New York.
You know, it's the whole world.
That's the way the world looks to us.
He doesn't care.
But they hit him on this, that he's anti-gay in some way, just completely untrue.
And it's just, you know, Tim Allen made this point.
He was talking to Megan Kelly.
Tim Allen has a show nobody ever hears about.
It's a hit, but nobody ever hears about it because he plays a conservative on it.
And he made this this, he said all his writers are liberals.
And when they go to make a joke about Donald Trump, they go to make a joke.
Well, here he is.
Let him say it himself.
What I find odd in Hollywood is that they didn't like Trump because he was a bully.
But if you side, if you had any kind of inkling that you were for Trump, you got bullied for doing that.
And that's where this, it gets a little hypocritical to me, is that you can now bully people.
And you're always on the defense with this.
But mostly what I'm finding is there's no source material for comedians.
Like, if I want to find a joke on the show, we go upriver to find the joke.
And there's no, like, he was against homosexuals somehow.
And I said, where do you, whoever, Donald Trump, yeah, whoever said that.
And didn't he wave the flag at the convention, the LBTT flag?
And I said, that was an unusual thing.
They've got to beep with Mike Pence on that, but Donald Trump.
So, all right, we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but come on over to thedailywire.com and you can listen to the rest of the show.
If you subscribe, you can watch the show on the site and send your questions into the mailbag.
You can also watch Ben's back today, isn't he?
Yeah, Ben is back.
So, you can also watch Ben Shapiro.
He must have something to say about something.
All right, we'll be right back.
Okay, so that's the start of Streep, you know, using this Hollywood canard thing, you know, that they...
They heard it somewhere in their bubble that he was mean about something, so it must be true.
Let's hear a little bit more of Streep's speech.
You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now.
Think about it.
Hollywood, foreigners, and the press.
But who are we?
And, you know, what is Hollywood anyway?
It's just a bunch of people from other places.
I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey.
Viola was born in a sharecropper's cabin in South Carolina.
Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Veneto, Italy.
And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem.
Where are their birth certificates?
So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners.
And if we kick them all out, you'll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.
All right, we have cultural, Nobel Prize-winning cultural correspondent Michael Knowles, who actually sat and watched the Golden Globes so you didn't have to.
I mean, come on, this is a man.
This is a guy who stood up for America so you didn't have to watch.
What do you make of that?
That's an amazing statement.
The only part of her speech that actually surprised me was the vitriol and the contempt for the vast majority of Americans who don't watch these movies that were being honored at the Golden Globes, but watch football and mixed martial arts, which is an art, by the way.
It is an art.
She is an art.
And to correct the record on her for a little bit, she says, you know, she went to public schools and scraped her way up.
She went to one of the 80 best public high schools in the entire country, and she went to Yale.
So I don't have, I'm playing the world's smallest violin for her right now.
Well, really, the idea of Hollywood is persecuted.
I mean, please, that gown costs more than everything I own.
And talk about the way you know that Hollywood is particularly unoriginal at the moment is that Meryl Streep had to steal Hugh Laurie's joke that he had made about 15 minutes prior.
And he is at least a satirist, you know.
So here's Donald Trump responding via Twitter as always.
Meryl Streep, one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood, doesn't know me, but attacked last night at the Golden Globe.
She is a Hillary flunky who lost big.
For the hundredth time, I never mocked a disabled reporter, would never do that, but simply showed him groveling when he totally changed the 16-year-old story that he had written in order to make me look bad.
Just more very dishonest media.
And then Obama came out, and Obama made a comment too, because he's a lame duck.
You know that?
That's one of the smartest things I ever heard him say.
That is.
It's really exactly.
So I really liked Kelly Ann Conway.
She went on Fox, and she basically struck back.
And I thought she took her down pretty well.
Well, my initial reaction is I'm glad that Meryl Streep has such a passion for the disabled because I didn't hear her weigh in and I didn't hear her even use her platform last night, Ainslie, to give a shout out to the mentally challenged boy who last week was tortured live on Facebook for half an hour by four young African-American adults who were screaming racial and anti-Trump expletives and forcing him to put his head in toilet water.
So I'd like to hear from her today if she wants to come and continue her platform on behalf of the disabled.
And Donald Trump is absolutely right.
He has debunked this so many times.
She sounds like 2014.
The election is over.
She lost.
And he's absolutely right about something else too, which is everybody in that audience, with very few exceptions, was of a single myopic mind as to how they wanted the election to go and how they expected the election to go.
They lost, and I really wish she would have stood up last night and said, look, I didn't like the election results, but he's our president, and we're going to support him.
But this is Hollywood.
I think where there is self-pity, a lot more self-awareness would do them some charm.
I'm talking about how vilified poor Hollywood is in their gazillion dollar gowns.
Can I borrow a couple of those from the inaugural story?
So here are two quick personal stories.
When I was a very little kid, I guess, John, I think it was John Kennedy.
I'm telling this story from memory.
I couldn't find it online.
John F. Kennedy was elected president, and John Wayne showed up at the inaugural, you know, they did an inaugural show, and John Wayne showed up and said, and wished him good luck from the loyal opposition.
And I remember you said, and I put the emphasis, and I put the emphasis on loyal, you know.
And I remember as a little kid thinking, what a great country.
And I was a big John Wayne fan, and I was a liberal.
I was growing up in a liberal family.
That made a lot of, that really touched me as a kid.
And it made me think of America as a place where sometimes you won, sometimes you lost, but you stood up and you took it and you went on and you worked with your fellow Americans.
That was the whole idea, was you could disagree with each other ferociously, but then you went out and had a beer together because you were all Americans.
These, these are the people, these people in Hollywood are the people who have abandoned that ethos because they lost and because they're so encased in their double, in their bubble.
And here's the other story I just want to tell.
Back in 1978, Vanessa Redgrave, fantastic actress, probably the best actress of her generation, won an Oscar for the movie Julia, which was Lillian Hellman's supposed memoir of her friendship with an underground fighter against the Nazis, Julia.
And Vanessa Redgrave was in it.
And later, this was Mary McCarthy, a competitor for Lillian Hellman, went on Dick Cavito and said everything she writes, everything Lillian Hellman writes is a lie, including and and the.
And Lillian Hellman sued her and Cavett and PBS, but died before the suit came out.
And so that, you know, it's very controversial.
It really does not seem like anything Lillian Hellman said was true.
It seems like the whole Julia story was a lie.
So Vanessa Redgrave got up and she was a fierce supporter of the Palestinians.
And she got up and made this little speech.
And I salute you, and I pay tribute to you, and I think you should be very proud that in the last few weeks you've stood firm and you have refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and to their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression.
Okay, so liberal, talking to liberals, but she went after the Jews and a lot of Jews in Hollywood and they didn't like it one little bit.
Right after that, Patty Chaevsky, nobody remembers Tchajevsky anymore, but he won.
He's one of the very few writers to ever win three Oscars for a solo screenplay.
Woody Allen is another one.
And I can't remember the other ones, but very few of them.
And he did Network, which was a big thing.
Marty, which is a great movie if you've never seen a great black and white film from a Playhouse 90 script.
He did Hospital, a film that I happen to like, but nobody remembers.
He got up and made this speech.
Before I get on to the writing awards, there's a little matter I'd like to tidy up.
At least if I expect to live with myself tomorrow morning, I would like to say, personal opinion, of course, that I'm sick and tired of people exploiting the occasion of the Academy Awards.
for the propagation of their own personal political propaganda.
I would like to suggest to Ms. Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history.
does not require a proclamation, and a simple thank you would have sufficed.
I love that.
It's not a pivotal moment in history.
Here's the one thing I want to add, okay?
1998, so now we're talking like 20 years later, I wrote a novel called The Uncanny that had an old British lady ghost hunter in it.
And I was brought over from England.
I was living in England.
I was brought over to Hollywood to pitch the movie.
And I wanted Judy Dench to be in it, but no one had ever heard of Judy Dench at that point.
This was before she became an American star.
She was a big, she was in England.
She was obviously a huge star.
So I would say, Judy Dench or Vanessa Redgrave, every room I went into, they said, we don't hire Vanessa Redgrave.
She was blacklisted.
She was blacklisted.
And somebody said to her, you know, somebody said to me, I said, we're blacklisting people now.
You know, I actually opened my big mouth.
And the guy said, well, it's not blacklisting when Jews do it.
That's what he said.
That was the joke he made.
She was blacklisted.
Guess who broke that blacklist?
Guess who hired her when she was blacklisted?
Charlton Heston, one of the very few right-wing movie stars.
He hired her to play Lady Macbeth in his version of Macbeth, one of his stage shows of Macbeth, which he was always putting on.
John Wayne, Charlton Heston, speaking up for two separate voices, different kinds of disagreement.
It's the left.
It is the left that has closed conversation down everywhere.
Let's hear the last cut we have of Meryl Streep.
Okay, this brings me to the press.
We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage.
That's why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in our constitution.
So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the committee to protect journalists because we're going to need them going forward and they'll need us to safeguard the truth.
Matt Damon Defends Meryl Streep00:07:58
Thank God Meryl Streep is there to safeguard the truth.
What do I do with that?
What am I supposed to do with that?
Where is there room for parody?
Can I go home?
When do we go ahead?
You take it.
We need the principled press.
That was enough.
I started laughing.
Okay, here's another one.
And then Meryl Streep at the Golden Globes prattling on and on about how we need to protect and defend the Constitution.
Oh, my goodness gracious.
We are through the looking glass now, aren't we?
I mean, if we had a principled press, I would agree with her.
But we've had this.
It is one side that has shut.
You know, this is the new meme.
This is the meme we're going to get for the next four years, that political correctness was nothing.
There's a piece in the New York Times today.
It's not political correctness that's a threat to free speech.
It's people who don't want us to teach our anti-male classes.
Let me see if I have just a cut of.
Yeah, this is a guy from the University of Wisconsin.
He's been attacked by legislatures for teaching about homosexuality, gender, and race, and for having a class on the problem with being a white male, basically.
And so that's the threat to free speech, because we know that the other side is being well-aired in the University of Wisconsin.
Political correctness has been a chokehold on the mind of the nation for 30 years.
And now people are striking back.
And suddenly it's like, oh, no, we were just doing it.
It's just silly.
It's just this little political correctness.
These people are tyrants.
And you know what bothers me?
One of the things that bothers me is that they get under Trump's skin, that he's tweeting about Meryl.
Meryl Streep is a good actress.
She's gotten a little mannered over time, but she was a good actress.
You know, she's not overrated.
It's like, why is he, why does he fall for this stuff?
And they know it.
You know, they know they get under his skin.
But having said that, he has defeated them in every battle.
He has beaten them everywhere.
And so we just have to hope he keeps doing that because frankly, I don't care what they think.
I mean, I don't know about you, but like, you were there.
You were watching the Golden Globes.
Have you changed your mind?
Well, what's incredible with Meryl Streep is that, you're right.
Maybe she has been a little mannered in certain performances, but she can be transcendent when she is reciting other people's words.
That's her gift.
That's her superpower.
You know, keep doing that.
And to watch all of, I forget if it was her or someone else talked about how we, the actors, with our vastly superior empathy, need to lead the way.
I love actors.
I have the utmost respect for the craft of acting.
I'm an actor myself.
You need to know your place.
There is nothing about acting is a wonderful art, and it's a wonderful craft, probably more than an art.
But there is nothing about acting that can, there is nothing about saying words on screen and even developing an inner life of a character that gives you any authority to speak on politics or politicians or constitutional republics.
I can't, there was a great photo of Neil Gibson and Vince Vaughn watching Meryl Streep's speech.
And I think I can probably perform it a little bit, but something like this.
Something to that effect.
I know those listening can't see that, but that's why you need to look at the shock.
That's right.
All right, let's end this conversation with one more parody of these celebrity videos that's come.
I think this is from Town Hall.
It's got my friend Essie Cupp and Mary Catherine Hamm in it doing their version of a celebrity political video.
Dear members of the entertainment community.
Entertainment community.
Entertainment community.
We know that you're more famous than any of us.
Well, most of us.
I'm mad, distressed, alarmed.
Infuriated.
It's your job to be creative.
Creative.
Creative.
And yet, how many of these lame-ass videos have you made that look exactly like this?
Like this.
Like this.
You entertain us.
It's literally your whole job.
Here's what we ask.
No.
Here's what we demand.
That you reject anything that is anti-original, anti-interesting, anti-convincing.
We demand that you try harder.
Harder.
Harder.
If you do, we'll be with you.
But if not, we'll continue to not care about anything.
Anything.
Anything you have to say.
Signed.
The majority.
The majority, the majority of the American people.
All right, brace yourself, folks.
This is going to go on for four years, maybe eight years.
Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural correspondent Michael Knowles, thank you very much for your service to your country and watching the Golden Globes while everybody else was watching football.
We appreciate it.
Thank you for coming on.
Thank you for my awards.
All right, we'll see you.
All right, stuff I like before we go.
Let's give some props to Hollywood after we've attacked them.
Here is a movie.
Here's the thing about this picture, Moonlight.
Okay, it's about this very small class of people, obviously, you know, black gay guys in the project.
It hasn't got a kind of universal appeal.
There's nothing that is going to draw the universal audience.
Here is a picture that I love of one of my favorite crime films, totally underrated, called The Talented Mr. Ripley.
It's based on Patricia Highsmith.
Patricia Highsmith was a crime writer, a gay crime writer back in the day, who wrote the first series of books she ever wrote, was ever written starring a psychopath, a psychopathic killer.
Before there was Hannibal Lecter, there was Ripley.
And the Talented Mr. Ripley is the first story about this, starring Matt Damon as the talented Mr. Ripley, and it has Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow, a great, great cast.
And here is, and basically, throughout the movie, Matt Damon, we sort of increasingly realize is a gay guy.
And here is a scene in which he talks about something that is true of every human being everywhere.
It's a universal idea that draws you into this relationship he's having with a man in a way that, like, you know, that in the midst of this wonderful entertainment about murder and deceit and all this stuff, you can put these, you can tell your stupid stories about your stupid, like, political, correct, identity politics.
You can tell those stories as long as you're telling a good story.
Let's just listen to Matt Damon, the best performance of his career as the talented Mr. Ripley.
Whatever you do, however, terrible, however hurtful, it all makes sense, doesn't it?
In your head, you never meet anybody who thinks they're a bad person.
No, no, but you're still tormented.
I mean, you must be.
You killed someone.
Don't you just take the past and put it in a room in the basement and lock the door and never go in there?
That's what I do.
Of course, in my case, it's probably a whole building.
And then you meet someone special, and all you want to do is toss them the key.
Say, open up, step inside.
But you can't because it's dark and there are demons.
And if anybody saw how ugly it is now, there's the music talking.
Matt Damon, great performance, really great performance.
Terrific crime film, The Talented Mr. Ripley, based on one of the great crime novels by Patricia Highsmith.
That's our show for today.
Thank you, Hollywood, for providing us with some entertainment.
You know, as that video said, it is literally your whole job to tell us stories and amuse us so that we can take care of the country by voting in better people than you support.