Ep. 271 dissects Trump’s chaotic yet effective presidency through satire—imagining him smashing D.C. while media cries bias, then pivoting to dismiss Russian election interference as overblown compared to economic grievances. It contrasts Trump’s blunt leadership (Gorsuch, Tillerson) with Obama’s perceived deception and mocks ESPN’s leftward tilt, citing 14% rating drops and conservative exclusion amid BLM debates. The episode also defends idealized historical portrayals like Young Mr. Lincoln, arguing modern cynicism risks losing aspirational narratives—while Trump’s unfiltered style thrives in a media landscape where outrage often outpaces substance. [Automatically generated summary]
President Donald Trump held a press conference on Friday.
Emergency crews are still cleaning up the wreckage and removing the charred bodies from the scene.
Witnesses say the trouble began immediately when the president entered the press room by driving his gigantic clawed foot through the roof, flattening several newsmen beneath him, even while sweeping others up in his massive hands and roasting them with his fiery breath before devouring them whole.
The tragic, blood-soaked scene of carnage in the aftermath featured journalists with their credibility destroyed and their careers reduced to irrelevance and caused many members of the American public to laugh uproariously, clinking their beer cans together in a heartfelt toast at the sight of justice being done.
But journalists complained that this only showed the mean-spiritedness of Trump supporters who had no compassion for innocent journalists whose only fault had been to lie every minute of every day for the last 16 years.
Reporters who survived the presser complained that the gigantic, beast-like president ranted and raved against them in an un-American manner by accusing them of using such biased terms about him as rant and rave and un-American, which of course they would never do.
After a week in which prominent journalists claimed that Russian hacking of some Democrat emails constituted an attack as bad as 9-11 or Pearl Harbor, that an official's legal conversation with his Russian counterparts constituted a Category 5 political hurricane,
and that a series of events in which no laws seemed to have been broken was a scandal worse than Watergate, journalists were absolutely shocked when the president retaliated by lifting the press room above his head in his mighty arms and throwing it into the Potomac River with the shrieking and panicking journalists still inside.
As one wounded reporter managed to whisper as he was carried out of the rubble on a stretcher, quote, just because we hate this president and lie about him and purvey fake news, that's no reason to say we're hateful, lying purveyors of fake news.
Or okay, maybe it is, but the First Amendment says no one can criticize us.
At least that's what someone told me, unquote.
The journalists later died on the operating table from complications of stupidity.
After what reporters are now calling the great press conference disaster, President Trump continued to rampage through the streets of the Capitol, crushing several bureaucratic and intelligence agencies underfoot while swiping fighter jets out of the sky where they had been scrambled in a useless attempt to stop him.
Government workers, fearing the loss of their well-paying and largely useless jobs, ran shrieking through the streets, as did scores of elderly Japanese people who turned out to be the surviving extras from the 1961 movie Mothrow.
Finally, with the entire capital city in flames, the president stomped back to the White House, ripped the wall off the Oval Office, and returned to his desk.
After a shocked public watched Washington, D.C. crumble into scorched dust, Trump's popularity rose 27 points.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Hooray for Lyft Promo Codes00:03:18
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All right, it's President's Day.
It's actually, that's a stupid name for this holiday.
It's Washington and Lincoln Day, right?
It's not James Polk Day, you know, and it's not Millard Fillmore Day.
It's President's Day.
It's Washington and Lincoln's Day, and we'll be talking about our president and taking a look at him.
We've survived the storm here in California, which blew down a tremendous tree blocking my road.
It was an amazing storm.
And we have cultural correspondent Michael Moles, who actually won a prize for the first time.
The first time all these prizes I made up for him, he actually won a really good one.
And we'll be talking about that.
And meanwhile, studies, there have been studies recently that show that listening to the Andrew Clavin show is a gateway drug to more dangerous things like cocaine and alcohol.
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All right.
Listen, it's time to take a pause on this President's Day.
It's time to take a breath and ask ourselves what it is we are looking at because we are hearing, it's like the movie Rashamon.
I don't know if you ever saw the Rashamon.
It's this great movie.
I think it probably affected Clint Eastwood's life enormously because a lot of his movies harken back to it.
But it's just, it's a movie about an incident that takes place and then everybody tells the story and everybody saw something different.
Everybody saw something different happen.
Russian Mischief Revelations00:15:38
And I feel like that's happening not just in Washington, D.C., with different people reporting different stuff, but it's happening to me.
I mean, I myself, who am at this point a fairly sophisticated political observer, I'm not sure what I'm seeing.
And the reason is this president is always speaking honestly, right?
This president talks weird.
I mean, he talks in a funny way and he says things that aren't true, even though you kind of understand what he's saying.
So he says, you know, I got the most electoral votes ever or the most electoral votes since Reagan.
And they say, well, that's not true.
And he says, well, that's what someone told me, you know.
And they're like, yeah, but, you know, he gave a speech in Florida and everybody's piling on to him because he said, oh, what happened in Sweden last night talking about the damage that refugees and immigrants, unvetted immigrants are doing in countries.
He said, it's like what happened in Sweden last night.
So everybody started tweeting Sweden last night because nothing had happened in Sweden last night.
What he meant was he had seen a show on Fox News about a documentary maker who was saying that in Sweden, they are underplaying the violence that has come from immigrants.
You know, and there's a lot of rapes that have taken place in Sweden because of immigrants and all this stuff.
And he was talking about that, but he's always kind of off.
He's got this very aggressive way of speaking.
And meanwhile, the press is insane.
They have gone insane.
And they blow, they jump the gun on everything.
All right.
So let's pause for a minute.
Like, let's talk about the Russians.
Let's talk about the Russians.
What has happened?
What do we know has happened with the Russians?
We know that the DNC had its emails hacked, and the intelligence agencies say it was the Russians.
All right.
All right, so let's believe them.
So let's say it was the Russians.
So that's a mischievous thing to do.
And the Russians are a bad lot.
The government of Russia is a wicked, evil, criminal government.
And so they hacked into the DNC.
They have been playing with our elections forever.
I mean, forever.
They have been messing with us forever.
Most of these college professors who are teaching your children nonsense, most of them in their youth were in peace movements and anti-missile movements.
A lot of them were funded by the Soviet Union.
They have been screwing with us forever.
And mostly the left has been their willing idiots.
They've gone along with this whole thing.
So now this is a kind of a minor piece of mischief.
It should be investigated.
It's not good.
It's bad.
But it's minor.
And it's not what swung the election.
What swung the election is that people are out of work across the middle of the country and Hillary Clinton and the left are too arrogant to pay any attention to them whatsoever.
Trump heard that.
He heard him.
He went and talked to him.
That's how he won the election.
It's this minor thing.
Meanwhile, Mike Flynn, former national security advisor, had a call that seems perfectly legal, perfectly reasonable, had a call with the Russian ambassadors.
He lied to Pence.
My theory, and it's actually some of the stuff, the information that's coming out kind of confirms my theory.
My theory is that by this time, Trump realized he was not going to do a good job, that I think Flynn may be a little bit, you know, a little bit boingo in the bongo.
I think they maybe just used this as an excuse to get rid of him.
But no laws have been broken so far that we know of.
You know, there have been investigations into other people in the campaign who may have spoken to Russia.
No charges.
No one is even saying there was any illegality.
The New York Times keeps trumpeting these headlines, but nothing.
So not that much is happening with Russia, really.
I mean, who knows?
Tomorrow, maybe some earth-shattering piece of news will come.
But it's nothing.
It's nothing.
This thing, the Keith Olbermann, that we're now a wholly owned subsidiary of Russia, it's just, it's crazy.
It is crazy nonsense.
And Thomas Friedman, you know, New York Times from Knucklehead Row, he's saying this is like 9-11.
This is like Pearl Harbor.
Are you kidding me?
And Chuck Todd, this is worse.
This is a category five hurricane.
Dan Rather, this is worse than Watergate.
Like you take a breath and you just step back and you say like, not that, we don't, as far as we know, not that much is going on.
You know, Trump says nice things about Putin because he wants to get along with him.
As he said, we're both nuclear powers.
He thinks it would be a good thing if we can get along.
Good luck with that.
Obama said the same thing, tried the same thing, didn't work, probably won't work now.
But go ahead.
But it doesn't make him a Russian spy.
And it's this nonsense, this high-pitched hysteria from the press that is making it very hard on that side to see anything.
Then on the other side, you have Trump and he talks in this funny way.
But think of what he's done so far.
I mean, he's picked a great justice for the Supreme Court who will.
And look, you can't get rid of how we got here.
We got here by voting for Trump against Hillary Clinton.
This means that our First and Second Amendment rights may be safe for another generation.
I mean, it's a big, big deal.
His appointments have been good, with the exception of Flynn.
Rex Tillerson is good.
Mad Dog Mattis seems to be good.
The Attorney General Jeff Sessions, very good.
You know, these are really good people, and he's appointed people to the agencies, which he said he would do, who are suspicious of the agencies.
Scott Pruitt at the EPA, Betsy DeVos at Education.
These are people who are suspicious of the agencies they are sent in to run, which is part of what he said he was going to do, that he was going to return power to the people.
He's frozen federal hiring.
He's had a new rule about regulations that you have to get rid of two if you want one.
I mean, this is all, and he's righted relations with Israel, our ally.
So two big errors that he seems to have bobbled the ball on this executive order banning travel and he's trying to rewrite that.
And Michael Flynn seems to have been a bad appointment and he's resigned.
What's the big deal?
What is the big deal?
I mean, where is the fascism coming from?
Where is the authoritarian?
You know, I get it.
He talks in this funny way.
So let's take a look at this press conference on Friday because it was kind of like the greatest show on earth.
I mean, it was fantastic.
So we go into this press conference.
Remember this.
There's no getting around that we go into this press conference.
As we enter the tunnel of the press conference, the press is like, it's the biggest scandal since Watergate.
It's the Russians are coming.
The Russians are coming.
This is terrible.
And Trump isn't calling on us.
He's not calling on the people who will ask him the tough questions.
Trump gets up there for an hour and talks to, I mean, he almost called me up at home.
You know, he talked to everybody.
He let everybody talk.
And we come away, and where's the Russia story?
I mean, it was a work of genius.
It was a work of artistic genius.
Here's his response to the Russian thing.
Speaking for myself, I own nothing in Russia.
I have no loans in Russia.
I don't have any deals in Russia.
President Putin called me up very nicely to congratulate me on the win of the election.
He then called me up extremely nicely to congratulate me on the inauguration, which was terrific.
But so did many other leaders, almost all other leaders from almost all other countries.
So that's the extent.
Russia is fake news.
Russia, this is fake news put out by the media.
So unless he pulls off his orange hair and he's really Boris bad enough from the Rocky cartoons, he's like this Russian spy, like his smirsh from the James Bond.
You know, unless that happens, they got nothing.
They got nothing on the guy, you know?
So I'm saying he's got this weird tone.
He's got this weird way of talking.
Sometimes I look at him and I think, is there something wrong with him?
Is he tracking?
He says this stuff.
Then they come after him.
The big complaint they had is he won't let us ask.
He won't call on people who will ask him about the real story of the day, Michael Flynn.
That's the real.
So they ask him.
And here he is on leaks, number two.
When I was called out on Mexico, I was shocked because all this equipment, all this incredible phone equipment.
When I was called out on Mexico, I was honestly, I was really, really surprised.
But I said, you know, it doesn't make sense.
That won't happen.
But that wasn't that important to call.
It was fine.
I could show it to the world and he could show it to the world.
The president, who's a very fine man, by the way.
Same thing with Australia.
I said, that's terrible that it was leaked, but it wasn't that important.
But then I said to him, I said, what happens when I'm dealing with the problem of North Korea?
What happens when I'm dealing with the problems in the Middle East?
Are you folks going to be reporting all of that very, very confidential information, very important, very, you know, I mean, at the highest level, are you going to be reporting about that too?
So I don't want classified information getting out to the public.
And in a way, that was almost a test.
So after talking about Flynn and saying Flynn's a good guy, he turns the narrative around and he says, this is really about these leaks and you guys are endangering people.
And then, then the attack on the press begins.
And this is really, really something.
But if you're on Facebook and YouTube, you've got to come over to thedailywire.com to hear it.
If you subscribe at TheDailyWire.com, you can watch it, and you can be in the mailbag, which is warm and cozy.
So now he goes after the press, right?
And remember, we go into this with the narrative is scandal Watergate 9-11, Pearl Harbor.
That's the narrative as we're going in.
As we come out, it's, he attacked us, he said mean things about us.
So they ask him why it's fake news, and here he is on number three.
This is a great cut.
And I'll tell you what else I see.
I see tone.
You know the word tone.
The tone is such hatred.
I'm really not a bad person, by the way.
No, but the tone is such, I do get good ratings, you have to admit that.
The tone is such hatred.
I watched this morning a couple of the networks, and I have to say, Fox and Friends in the Morning, they're very honorable people.
They're very, not because they're good, because they hit me also when I do something wrong.
But they have the most honest morning show.
That's all I can say.
It's the most honest.
But the tone, Jim, if you look, the hatred.
It's so true.
It's so, I mean, think back for a minute.
Like, remember when Obama was hit on Jeremiah Wright, Jeremiah Wright saying, damn America, Damien, and Obama gave a speech in which he said, I never heard him make these controversial statements.
Okay?
He's in this church for 20 years.
I can't even count.
I can't do the math how many Sundays that is.
This is the core of Jeremiah Wright's theology.
He's never heard it.
And David Brooks of the New York Times says that speech is a symphony.
It's a symphony.
You know, it's a symphony of lies.
Bill Ayers, a terrorist who helped start his career, unrepentant terrorist to help start his career.
It's just a guy in the neighborhood.
A lie, right?
If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.
If there's a red line in Syria, if there's gas, you know, poison gas in Syria, that's a red line for me.
Oh, I didn't make the red line.
Not a smidgen of corruption at the IRS.
Compared to Barack Obama, Donald Trump is honest to Abe.
I mean, Donald Trump does do these weird things, but they're questioning him about the fact that he said, oh, I got more electoral votes.
Who cares?
I mean, I get it.
I get it.
He should be precise in his language.
He's not.
He has a Carney Barker sense of exaggeration.
I get it.
But I mean, the last president lied and lied and lied, and we did not hear this tone.
The question then from the New York Times was, what enchants you about the presidency?
What enchants you about?
You know, it's crazy.
It is crazy, the disparity.
That's what makes the news fake.
It's not all the mistakes they're making, and the list of mistakes they've made is insane.
It's not that.
It's the tone.
He's absolutely right.
And the other thing about him is, I mean, this was a culture.
What we saw at this press conference, this was a cultural event, not a political event.
What we saw was Trump calling them out and saying, people don't believe you anymore because you do this.
You do it all the time.
And it was true.
And the other thing was, you could see that he was having a good time.
And the press is angry and the press is, you know, tight and they want to get out.
But Trump is having fun.
Play number four.
Tomorrow they will say, Donald Trump rants and raves at the press.
I'm not ranting and raving.
I'm just telling you.
You know, you're dishonest people.
But, but, I'm not ranting and raving.
I love this.
I'm having a good time doing it.
Okay.
And here is number eight, the media round.
Here's the media reaction to this press conference.
The president holds a raucous and combative face-to-face with the media.
That news conference was both totally shocking and entirely unsurprising.
This was a rare glimpse into the mind of the president, basically the verbal equivalent of a tweet storm for freewheeling at times jaw-dropping 77-minute news conference.
President Trump defiantly dismissed the flood of controversies and crises engulfing his White House.
The president defends his first month in office in a fiery face-off with the press.
President Trump unfiltered 77 minutes.
His critics said he was unhinged.
Big goal of the press conference for the president to advance his campaign to delegitimize the mainstream media.
President Trump's first solo news conference at the White House was an unprecedented display of accusations and exaggerations.
The president's outburst of frustration left many observers bewildered.
President Trump flatly denied the notion that he's running a disorganized and ineffective White House.
Critics said he was unhinged.
He didn't produce the critic.
Look, of course you can find a critic to say he's unhinged.
There's nothing unhinged about him.
You know, the other thing about the way he talks, and look, Trump is a creation of the culture, and we live increasingly in a nonverbal culture.
I mean, people go on Instagram, you know, we've gone from like, oh, you can have 126 characters to just put up a picture.
You know, that's it.
We don't even have to just put up a picture and grunt.
He is inarticulate.
He says these things, but I have to admit, I understand what he's saying.
I understand what he's saying.
You know, he says this crazy stuff when he said that thing about Sweden.
Oh, yeah, he's talking about that show that was on last night on Fox.
You know, it's jarring.
It is jarring to me.
I'm not saying it's not jarring.
I'm not saying that he's the most honest guy in the world.
I'm just saying compared to the things that Barack Obama said.
You know, there's a thing in politics called perfuming the ticket.
When you perfume the ticket, you put a guy who can't be touched in terms of corruption at the top of a corrupt administration.
That was Barack Obama, okay?
The White House was run like Tammany Hall during the Obama years, but Obama couldn't be touched because he never left his fingerprints on anything.
They perfumed the ticket.
We, on the right, have not perfumed the ticket.
We put the guy who is saying exactly what he means.
You know, Obama was an ideological leftist, but he always talked like a moderate when he could until the last few minutes of his presidency.
Trump is doing exactly what he said.
We can't tell.
We are really bad about culture.
We can't tell the difference between politics and culture.
And I just, before I bring on the amazing Mr. Knowles cultural correspondent, Michael Knowles, I just want to deal for a minute with Milo Yiannopoulos, okay?
Because Milo Yiannopoulos has been asked to speak at CPAC, which is the conservative, let's see, what does it stand for?
The conservative political action conference, thank you.
All right, so it's called CPAC, big gathering of conservatives.
Milo's not a conservative.
He has said repeatedly that he's not a conservative.
And you know Milo, he's this flamboyantly gay guy who supports Trump and he calls Trump daddy and he's very funny and all this stuff.
And they now have revealed these tapes where Milo seems to be saying that it's okay for gay people to have sex with young boys, basically.
I mean, that's basically what he says.
So here's just a clip of this tape, cleaned up a little bit, but it's number 11.
Milo Yiannopoulos Controversy00:15:01
We get hung up on this kind of, on this, you know, this sort of child abuse stuff and to the point where we're heavily policing even relationships between consenting adults, you know, sort of grad students and professors at universities.
This arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent, which totally destroys, you know, the understanding that many of us have of the complexities and subtleties and complicated nature of many relationships.
You know, people are messy and complex.
And actually, in a homosexual world particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men, the sort of coming-of-age relationships, the relationships in which those older men help those young boys to discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable sort of a rock where they can't speak to their parents.
Some of those relationships are some of the most...
It sounds like pre-soulstation to me.
It sounds like...
Yeah, but you know what?
It sounds like Catholic priest molestation to me.
And you know what?
I'm grateful for Father Michael.
I wouldn't give nearly such good if it wasn't for him.
So first of all, it is very, very encouraging.
The left just, of course, fell on him like a ton of bricks.
And it's very, very encouraging to hear the left coming out against child molestation because that is not their usual thing.
You know, they made all those movies.
The Woodsman, they made the reader at a child.
The heroine was a, we were supposed to feel like my feeling about the reader, I was watching it.
She's a child molester and she's a Nazi.
Oh, she's dead good.
That was my feeling.
Doubt.
Remember the play Doubt about the Catholic priests and the mother comes and says, oh, well, maybe he did molest, but maybe he needed that.
They've been doing Roman Polanski raped a 13-year-old girl.
We love him.
Hey, give him an Oscar.
Don't arrest him.
He's a great artist.
So it's very, very encouraging to see the left suddenly realize that child molestation is wrong.
The problem is on the right, okay?
Milo Yiannopoulos has a role to play that is actually a positive role.
I have some animus toward Milo because he comes after Ben, and I actually, I'm the person, some people wonder, is there anybody who likes Ben?
I'm the guy who likes Ben.
So I don't like it when he goes after him.
And I have some animus against him.
And I've talked about the fact that he dances with evil too much.
But the thing is, Milo is a performance artist, and performance artists are out of their minds.
Back in the 80s, there used to be a performance artist named Karen Finley.
And Karen Finley would do, let me see how the politest way for me to describe this.
She would stand on stage and take a yam and shove it where the sun don't shine while screaming, I am an ass man.
And the left loved her.
They loved her because that was showing how evil and violent and vicious men were.
She was a feminist performance artist.
Obviously, a woman who does that is probably not that put together inside her head, but they love this performance artist.
They gave her awards.
They gave her she got grants.
I guess she got a government grant, as I recall.
They didn't invite her to speak at the Democratic National Convention, right?
You don't invite a guy like this to CPAC.
He is a performance artist.
If he says unforgivable things as a performance artist, we can all sort of like, you know, titter and say, oh, he shouldn't have said that.
That was terrible.
But he's a performance artist.
We all get it.
It's art.
It's art.
Like they say about the rap music when they say, let's go out and kill a cop.
Well, it's art.
You can defend him from that position.
You cannot defend him as a speaker and a purveyor of ideas.
It's just because the right is so dumb about the culture.
It doesn't understand how the culture works.
Milo could have been an asset, could still be an asset to us as a performance artist who extends the bounds of what is possible to say, but not like this.
Trump remains an asset because he is a culture guy.
He gets the culture and he understands that the atmosphere, the tone of hatred coming from the press cannot stand.
You have to seize the narrative by the throat and turn it around.
And he did that on Friday, and good for him, because really, so far, despite the way he sounds and despite the panic coming out of the press so far, he's doing a good job.
I mean, all in all, he's got some problems.
He's doing a good job.
All right, that brings us to cultural correspondent Michael Knowles.
And today, I did not give you a phony award because you actually won a real award.
I am shocked to say that this is the first one ever.
You actually found one of the nicest, most charming, most attractive women I know.
You actually talked her into agreeing to a proposal of marriage.
I will say, the Clavenless weekend was very good to me.
Unfortunately, for her.
It's going to go on a long time.
It's an eternal Clavenless weekend for her.
It worked out well for me.
We have to explain to the people that Alyssa is one of the nicest, sweetest.
I mean, she's just wonderful, and we're all weeping for her today.
I'll give your viewers a point of reference.
To think about sweet little Alyssa, think of me.
And then just think of the opposite.
The opposite.
Exactly the opposite.
And that would be her.
All right.
How did you, let's hear how you pop the question.
I don't understand how you could have convinced her.
Well, you know, our pal, Ben Shapiro of Czech writing fame almost proposed on my behalf on his show last week.
He did.
He did.
Ben has always got that sensitive feel for the matters of the heart.
He always says feelings matter more than facts.
Or something like that.
Actually, Ben on his show, when we were doing that checkwriting bit, he was building it up and he said, listen, Knowles, he needs the money.
He doesn't have any money.
And he's engaged.
And every jaw drops in the studio.
And he said, or he's maybe engaged, I don't know.
And then I come on.
Luckily, we cut out the audio clip so that Alyssa didn't hear it.
But anyway, we go down over the weekend.
We were at Beach Comer Restaurant in Newport Beach, and I turned around and popped the question, and it was just this really nice, sort of romantic day.
We went to the montage and had a drink, and then we finished up our lovely, romantic, beautifully meaningful day by watching videos of ESPN so that we could cover this question.
We're not going to talk about ESPN.
Well, we are going to talk about congratulations.
Thank you so much.
My condolences to Alyssa.
She really is.
You really lucked out.
I mean, I hope every day from today to the day you die, you understand that you have hit the jackpot.
She deserves that Arthur Ashe Courage Award.
Yes.
ESPN award.
Maybe next year.
All right.
So, what I want to talk about, we're talking about the culture.
And what I want to talk about is sports, because sports is generally considered to be on the conservative side of the culture, but sports coverage is on the left.
The trouble with the sports journalism is that journalism part.
That journalism part has gotten worse and worse over time.
You know, the story that we've noticed throughout the last year, but especially in the last three, four months or so, is that ESPN is falling apart.
ESPN is hemorrhaging viewers.
You'll see my heart bleed in just a minute.
Yeah.
I have to give you a little bit of credit.
You called, I thought you called this about a year ago in a column about Sports Illustrated.
That column was now almost four years ago.
I canceled my subscription.
You canceled your subscription because I only ever subscribed for one issue.
For one issue, I know.
But you saw it coming.
You saw this leftward trend in journalism.
And it's gotten so bad that the ESPN public editor, Jim Brady, actually admits it.
He published a piece acknowledging some of the readers' concerns.
He quoted, here are some of the readers' concerns.
Why do you think there are almost no conservative political voices at ESPN or its related properties? asks reader Eric Dannis.
ESPN seems to almost exclusively feature liberal writers and on-air personalities who are quick to share their political opinions in print, on television, via their social media accounts.
And then the conclusion, which I think we would all agree with, I would like to see ESPN either severely reduce the injection of politics into its coverage or create a more politically diverse staff so that issues can be discussed from multiple sides.
What is so astounding is that Keith Olbermann, left-wing lunatic Keith Olbermann, was a major ESPN anchor in the 90s, and it was much, much better then than it has been for the last year.
Yes, the one thing Olberman actually knows about is sports.
He does know about that.
One thing he's good at, one thing he knows about.
Do we have, there's a clip of an ESPN anchor, Max Kellerman, talking about BLM.
Here we have it.
And this is what the idea of Black Lives Matter is about.
It's not, philosophically, we're not just talking about police brutality against black victims.
We're talking about the fact that black life seems to be cheap in this country, and that if this were happening to a population that wasn't black, what's happening in Chicago, you could say, well, it's black on black crime.
Still, the victims are people of color, are people.
You know, those lives matter too.
And it's being underreported.
I'm glad you brought it up.
If they have a negative reaction to what Barclay said, is the idea of, let's take again, philosophically, black lives matter in parentheses, too.
Black lives matter, too.
So when people say things like, well, he's an idiot.
First of all, he's talking about Charles Barkley, who said, you know, we shouldn't blame the cops.
We need the cops.
And he's going off in this withering, right?
I would remind Max that butts negate sentences.
You know, this happened.
Another, who was it?
Let's see, we'll pull up the clip.
This was from the Espy Awards last year.
Another BLM rant, another butthead.
Do we have it?
Cool.
And in my case, as an African-American man and the nephew of a police officer who was one of the hundreds of thousands of great officers serving this country, but Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Gardner, LaQuan McDonnell.
We can catch up here.
I think he just continues to list names of people who were, in almost all instances, justly killed by the police or by people defending themselves.
And then there's Colin Kaepernick not standing for the national anthem.
There's all this stuff and the journalists refusing to basically condemn it.
But they're paying a price.
They're paying a massive price for this.
You know, the president of ESPN, John Skipper, he refuses to admit that ESPN has a problem.
He refuted Jim Brady, the public editor's claims.
And when he was asked about, I think, the firing of Kurt Schilling for posting a comment about the transgender debate, he said, we have no tolerance for points of view that aren't inclusive.
Remember that?
Kept his money in a nutshell.
And remember when Rush Limbaugh wasn't allowed to buy a team, a football?
Oh, yeah.
And just in the past year, ESPN moves a golf tournament away from Trump National Golf Club, moved it to Pelican Hill.
ESPN fired Kurt Schilling for talking about the transgender debate.
ESPN fired Mike Ditka for criticizing Obama and supporting Donald Trump.
The price that they've paid so far is that during the fall, during this presidential race, ESPN's ratings were down 14% year over year.
And if you take the whole year together, and it's been a pretty crazy year for sports, so you would expect ratings to be through the roof.
They're down 8% over the year.
That's amazing.
You know, they lost, in the month of October, they lost 621,000 subscribers, according to Nielsen ratings.
And Nielsen has its own issues, but that's the estimate.
They followed it up the following month by losing still more than half a million subscribers.
The worst month and the second worst month.
That means that ESPN has lost an estimated 3 million subscribers in 2016.
That's insane.
You know, when I canceled my subscriptions to Sports Illustrated, I loved Sports Illustrated.
All I wanted to read was I wanted to read a baseball player saying, you know, it's a team sport.
I love there's a great bunch of guys.
Play one day at a time.
Got to go out there.
We're just thinking about winning.
Just get next game.
That's right.
And every week they insulted George W. Bush.
And the one that finally got me was this article they did about God, where it was like, does God care who wins the Super Bowl?
Nobody prays to win the Super Bowl.
They pray to be excellent, you know, and God does care about excellence, I think, you know.
And it's like it was the stupidest, most poorly researched hard to call.
I just thought, enough, enough, you know?
And when the New Orleans States quarterback, Drew Brees, thank you.
When Drew Brees said the thing that guided him was faith, they explained what faith meant to you.
Oh, faith can be faith in your team.
It can be faith in.
Drew Brees is a devoted Christian.
He was talking about faith in Jesus Christ.
Let the man speak.
It's insane.
And I think it is part of the insanity of the left that they do not hear themselves.
They don't hear it.
They even, I'll just show you.
I'll leave you.
This so astounded me.
Do we have that tweet that ESPN sent out?
ESPN sent out a tweet.
Are you marching tomorrow?
We want to hear your stories.
Submit your photos.
Hashtag moving forward.
And it was for the women's march in D.C., the anti-Trump march in D.C.
So ESPN makes its point.
We're going to make our point too.
So see you later.
I think we are on the verge of a major victory in the culture wars if we don't blow it.
If we don't elevate guys, performance artists like Milo from performance artists, where they actually serve a purpose, to making them people of ideas, which they're not.
I mean, I will take like the ideas that Shapiro throws away over the ideas that Milo puts forward as his best stuff.
But as a performance artist, I think he serves a purpose.
If we can understand that culture matters, we never have gotten this.
If we can understand that, yes, Trump does have a right to fight.
You know, this is the other thing about the press.
Oh, it's the First Amendment, the First Amendment.
You go, like, where does it say in the First Amendment?
Trump can't yell at you.
He's not passing any laws.
He's not stopping anybody from covering anything.
He's doing exactly what he should be doing.
He's fighting back against a hostile force.
You know, he overstates everything.
And when he says they're enemies of the people, I don't know if they're enemies of the people, but they're enemies of the Republican Party, certainly.
And maybe, you know, that's certainly true.
I just think we're on the verge of an actual victory, and we should ride it, you know, and let it happen and help it happen without making the stupid mistake of mistaking culture for politics.
That's right.
And we are, just technologically speaking, this is finally a moment where new media has broken through.
Certain new media personalities are making as much money as Megan Kelly is on their online platforms.
And the cracks are forming in what you would call empire of lies.
And it's such an exciting moment.
So ESPN doubles down.
They're free to do that.
But Donald Trump became the president of the United States.
They're hemorrhaging viewers.
And these shows and these podcasts are getting upwards of half a million people an episode.
So good luck to you.
We're talking a couple of years.
Yeah, and I don't think anybody, I seriously don't think anybody outside of New York or L.A. watched that press conference and thought like, oh, he's being unfair to the press.
Cracks Forming00:03:51
I don't think anybody did.
I was so envious that you got to cover.
That's why I had to watch these stupid ESPN clips.
That was like the best entertainment of the last year.
It was hilarious.
It was hilarious.
I was in stitches, I got to say.
All right, stuff I like.
Thank you, Michael Rolls, and congratulations again.
You've done much, much better than you deserve.
Stuff I like.
You know, for President's Day and for all this week, I'm taking a look at a couple of movies that, are they all movies?
Yes.
That mythologize American history, okay?
And let's take a look at young Mr. Lincoln.
This is a very famous film.
1939 was a magical year for films.
Almost every film that came out was a classic.
This is John Ford directing Henry Fonda in the life of Abe Lincoln before he became president.
And this is a courtroom scene where you will see that everything that he ever did with Colombo comes out of scenes like this, although really all those scenes come out of crime and punishment originally.
But this is young Mr. Lincoln as a lawyer cross-examining a witness to a murder.
How'd you see so well?
I told you it was moonbright, Mr. Lincoln.
Moonbright?
Yes, sir.
Courts, if it hadn't been moonbright, you couldn't have seen 100 yards, could you?
Of course not.
But you did see it.
I told you I saw it, didn't I?
You can step down.
No further questions, Your Honor.
Oh, Mr. Cass, I forgot there's just one other question I want to ask you.
Cass, what'd you have against Scrub White?
Well, nothing, huh?
What'd you kill him for then?
Kill him.
I don't know what you're talking about, Lee.
Yes, you do.
Look at this.
Go on, look at it.
It's the Farmer's Almanac.
Go ahead, look at it.
Look at page 12.
You see what it says about the moon?
That the moon was only in its first quarter that night and set at 1021.
Now, almost, I won't say none of this film is true, but I mean it's a mythologizing of Lincoln.
He was a tremendously ugly man.
Now he looks like Henry Fonda, and yet Henry Fonda sort of looks like Lincoln at the same time.
What I wanted to talk about a little bit, and I'll have to go on tomorrow since I'm running out of time, but that mythologizing America, the best values of America and the best people in America, actually did have a positive effect.
Now, you can look at this and say, well, it's none of it's true.
And Lincoln had this problem.
He was depressed, and he did this.
He didn't understand slavery.
He wasn't born understanding slavery.
He had to come to understanding like the rest of us.
But it actually did sell an image of America that had to do with its ideals.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Now, obviously today, old movies are a little corny, but you can sell ideals.
You're allowed to talk about ideals.
I think Star Wars does that.
I think Lord of the Rings does that.
And to do it with history and to really get at the essence of what makes these people great is not entirely a bad thing.
Everything that we do now is debunking, and everything that we do now is not about really, it's often not about great achievement, but simply about suffering.
It's simply about the fact that they were victims and how terrible that is.
These people who are heroes, guys like Lincoln, guys like Washington who created Liberty, they all had their flaws.
They all had the things that they did wrong.
But it's not such a bad thing to hold them up to the light in an ideal way to remind us who we are.