Andrew Clavin dissects how Brian Williams and Dan Rather’s credibility collapses—Williams’ absurd "Smirsch" tale, Rather’s unshared Russian docs (Trumpskaya is Korupsky), and their planned media collab—while mocking leftist film snobbery (Moonlight) and Trump’s stalled agenda despite Paul Ryan’s 200-day promises. John Nulty defends Trump’s "trolling" as tactical dominance, but Clavin critiques Milo Yiannopoulos’ free-speech provocations, calling his CPAC embrace a clash of performance art and politics, while dismissing La La Land as overpraised. The episode frames media bias, protest double standards, and the cost of unchecked provocation in reshaping conservative discourse. [Automatically generated summary]
Donald Trump is diminishing the stature of the news media.
So says Brian Williams, who continues to work for MSNBC, despite reporting stories about heroic deeds he performed only in his imagination.
The seven-inch tall anchorman, speaking in a squeaky little voice from down on the floor somewhere, says Trump is making journalists look small.
Williams said, quote, and this is a real quote, when you reduce the media enough in prestige, when they do report facts, those facts are diminished, unquote.
The teeny tiny little itsy bitsy newsman went on to say, quote, Trump has derided my profession so much that people now don't believe me when I talk about how I managed to foil an attack by Smirsch on Mexico City's Day of the Dead celebration by driving my Aston Martin DB-10 off a rooftop into the basket of a hot air balloon in order to stop the archvillain Voldemort by using the sorcery skills I learned at Hogwarts.
It is endangering our First Amendment, unquote.
Another tiny newsman who has been attacking the president is Dan Rather, who has assailed Trump's honesty.
Rather resigned from CBS News after attempting to impugn George W. Bush's National Guard service with documents that were later exposed as fake by a seven-year-old boy using the handy-dandy fake document exposer ring he had gotten from a box of Crackerjacks.
Rather said the incident wasn't his fault since his Crackerjacks box hadn't had the exposer ring inside, but only had one of those stupid sailor figures who had also been fooled by the documents.
Crackerjacks have since stopped putting prizes in their boxes, which Rather says would have saved his career.
He added, quote, I was as unlucky as a cattle prod chasing tumbleweed over a Texas cornfield under the moonlight.
After congratulating himself on yet another brilliant, homey-sounding figure of speech, Rather was taken to the hospital for further tests.
Rather unleashed his recent attack on President Trump on Facebook, saying the president's dealings with Russia were a scandal worse than Watergate, and he had the documents to prove it.
Rather said the documents had come directly from the Kremlin and might be difficult for ordinary civilians to understand because they were still in the original Russian.
He then produced several pages entitled, Trumpskaya is Korupsky.
The documents read in part, We Ruskies, big friends keys with Commissars Trumpskaya, and he is very, how you say, dishonestoya.
Rather swears by the documents' authenticity, though he refused to let them out of his possession until he was assured there were no Crackerjack boxes in the room.
Brian Williams and Rather now plan to team up to investigate Trump together.
One day Rather will play the anonymous source and Williams will play the reporter.
And the next day Williams will play the source and Rather will lie in bed chewing tranquilizers and talking about how Robert Redford played him in the movies.
Meanwhile, both reporters continue to complain that Donald Trump is damaging the reputation of the news media.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety Learning also singing Hunky-dunky-dee-dee Shipshawsy Topsy, the world is it he's in.
Decay Of Equality00:09:27
It's a wonderful day.
Hooray, it's a scene!
All right, that was a long run without cracking up, but we're back to zero days without it's all Cynthia's fault.
Cynthia Ann Gulo is doing those spectacular illustrations that are making these things.
All right, we have John Nulty, the Nultenator, is on today.
And we will, just to show you, we will stay on Facebook so you can watch it, just to show you that we don't despise you because you're too cheap to subscribe to the Daily Wire for a lousy eight bucks a month.
So John Nulty will be here and we'll talk Trump and Milo and all sorts of things.
What else is going on?
Oh, the Clavenless weekend is almost upon us, so I hope you've got water stored and MREs and some rifles would be nice.
The Oscars are on Sunday.
I think Michael Knowles is actually co-hosting the Oscars this year.
So I watched Moonlight last night, which is kind of favored to win because it's got a black, gay, poor kid, I guess.
Is there any other victim category that he remember?
But it's about a gay kid in the ghetto.
And so I thought I'd better watch it.
And, you know, this is really interesting.
And this does apply.
This is relevant to the politics we're going to talk about in a minute.
You know, there's so much good stuff in this movie.
The acting is on a level I haven't seen in a long time.
The acting is spectacular.
The writing is tense and brilliant and all this stuff.
It's really condensed.
And it's touching.
You know, it's touching.
This poor kid basically lives in a culture that has no room for who he is, has no room for gay people.
Let's take a look.
You know, this is Barry Jenskin Jenkins wrote it.
And it's got this guy, Marshalla Ali, who plays a drug dealer who is kind to this young boy.
It has a singer in it named Janelle Monai, whom I've never seen before.
I have seen her because she was in House of Cards.
But she's spectacularly beautiful, just an unbelievably beautiful young lady.
But Ali, here's a scene where Ali is talking to the young man who everybody but the kid knows that he's gay, basically.
And this drug dealer has found some kindness in his heart for him.
Nope.
We've lost it?
No, it's gone.
I've been here a long time.
I'm from Cuba.
A lot of black folks in Cuba.
You wouldn't know that from being here, though.
I was wild, little shorty, man.
Just like you.
Running around with no shoes on.
The moon was out.
This one time, I run by this old old lady.
I was running, hollering, cutting a food, boy.
This old lady, she stopped me.
She said, running around, catching a boy that light.
The moonlight, black boys look blue.
You blue.
That's why I'm going to call you.
Blue.
So that's kind of the theme of the movie, that, you know, people's identities are what we see as opposed to, you know, the way they're treated.
All the talent that went into this thing, it is vanishingly small.
I mean, if this thing were a subplot on the wire on a huge TV show with a story and adventure and excitement and interest and narrative drive in this thing, you'd say, hell, that was kind of an interesting little subplot.
To make this into a movie shows you that the movies are becoming moribund.
They're dying.
And I've said this before, that when an art form starts to die, it separates into character studies with themes and interest and entertainments, right?
They can't make a movie that has interest and plots.
It's very hard to a movie like Hell or High Water, which had a plot, had a theme, had was interesting.
They can't make those movies very much anymore because the form is dying, and so it begins to particleize.
This is for an audience of 10 people.
There must be 10 people in America who want to sit for two hours and stare at this movie, and yet they spent millions on it and it took up space in the theaters that could have gone to a movie of more general interest.
It's nominated for the Oscar, and maybe the racial social justice warriors have bullied the Oscars enough where they're going to give it to this tiny, tiny, tiny little picture.
It's not to detract from what it is, it's just nothing.
This is what is happening to the left.
Okay, I have long said that leftism is a form of decay.
Leftism is what happens when things fall apart.
We who believe in freedom have all kinds of vitality.
We want people to go out and do crazy stuff.
We want you to invent stuff.
We want you to think on your own.
We want you to say something that everybody thinks is untrue and later prove it to be true.
They want everything to be equal.
Well, who's equal?
The dead.
The dead are equal.
Slaves are equal.
Free men are not equal.
Free people rise to their own levels according to their hard work and their abilities.
Freedom has no equality involved in it.
There is no equality except equality under the law, where we all, you know, we all are playing on the same playing field by the same rules.
The left destroys this.
The left is a form of decay.
And they want to, what happens when you decay?
You come apart, right?
You decompose.
And that is what happens.
We decompose into smaller and smaller parts.
You know, first it's black against white, then it's black against, you know, and women against men.
And then it becomes smaller and smaller bits until finally the president of the United States is making rules about who you have to let into your bathroom because some small, tiny, tiny, tiny number of people, you know, are dissatisfied with the sex they are.
And I have nothing but sympathy for people like that.
I think that must be a terribly, terribly painful thing to have happen.
But why does it give the president power to legislate over what happens in your school in nowhere, Tennessee?
Why does suddenly Washington, D.C. get to reach out its hands because of these two people who may not even exist in your school, reach out its hands and legislate, or at least strongly advise who you can let into which bathroom where?
And so yesterday, Donald Trump rescinded that order.
He took it back, and that's the lead story in the New York Times.
The lead story in the New York Times is about people who think they're the sex they're not.
And I'm sorry, again, I have nothing but sympathy for people like that, but it's a form of decay.
It's a form of decay that we're not worried about.
You know, when they talk about the other day they had that day without immigrants, you know, I thought, well, why isn't it fair to have a day without white men?
You know, what would that be like?
You know, because I didn't even know, I only knew the day without immigrants was over when it was over.
You know, I realized that it happened because somebody told me.
But I mean, what would happen if there were a day without white men?
And why is that unfair?
You know, there's this guy, he calls himself Uncle Chang.
I don't know what his real name is, but he made this computer program called A Racism Aggregator that goes on and transforms the word white to black, black to white, in every web post, like web posts of the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed.
So here's just a sample of Uncle Chang's racism aggregator.
What it sounds like first, what was really written is first, and then when the Super Mario music starts, it's the racial aggregator changing it.
When I say I don't like white women, it's not a reference to any specific white woman aside from maybe Taylor Swift.
It's a declaration that white women pose a very real threat to my existence, and I don't have to embrace that threat with open arms.
What's the matter with white people?
17 foods that white people have ruined.
Stop that.
22 reasons white people shouldn't be allowed to name children.
Stop the madness.
When I say I don't like black women, it's not in reference to any specific black woman aside from maybe Taylor Swift.
It's a declaration that black women pose a very real threat to my existence.
And I don't have to embrace that threat with open arms.
What's the matter with black people?
17 foods that black people have ruined.
Stop that.
22 reasons black people shouldn't be allowed to name children.
Stop the madness.
Okay, so obviously it points out the fact that this is all racism because things, when things get old, they come apart.
And this is why, you know, and when you have this system that doesn't work, you have to divide people in order to keep it going.
Leftism doesn't work.
Leftism leads to decay and death and stagnation because when things are equal, I mean, think what equal quality looks like.
It looks like stillness.
It looks like a flat line.
It looks like death.
And that is why leftism doesn't work and why people get tired of it.
And the only thing you have left is division and hatred, and it has to be spurred on by the narrative.
The narrative has to tell you that you are a bad guy for thinking Moonlight is not a good enough movie to win an Oscar.
Now you're a bad guy.
Media Wars and Repeal Efforts00:15:47
And that is why, that is why I have come down so strongly in the Trump camp in his war against the media, because I just think it's so important.
You know, the other day, Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe, this is a Freudian slip.
I'm not going to hold it to her.
I'm not going to say it's her philosophy, but it is a Freudian slip.
You've got to listen to this.
Can you play Mika?
The dangerous edges here are that he's trying to undermine the media, trying to make up his own facts.
And it could be that while unemployment and the economy worsens, he could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control exactly what people think.
And that is our job.
And you know what?
I think that is a Freudian slip.
I don't think, I think, obviously, if you asked her, she would say I misspoke.
But that's a Freudian slip.
She is saying that Donald Trump is stealing their God-given right to control what you think.
And they do have somewhat, they have somewhat that power.
And that is why I side so strongly with Trump.
Let me just show you the real world implications of this.
You know, Sean Hannity, he is obviously thrown in completely with Donald Trump.
And, you know, a lot of times I really like Sean.
I like him as a person, and I've always enjoyed his show.
But at this point, you know that he's not going to criticize Trump, and it makes his commentary a little less interesting.
So it's a little harder for me to turn him on.
But he had Paul Ryan on a show a few days ago, and Ryan promised that he was going to fulfill the Trump agenda, you know, in 200 days.
So 200 days is, what, like seven months, six, seven months.
Let's just listen to what Ryan says to Hannity.
Are you telling the American people that that agenda, that litany, vetting refugees, building the wall, repeal, replace, education back to the states, tax reform, all of this is going to be done in 200 days.
The education part may be a little later because we're waiting for Betsy DeBos to put together her plan.
So on the education thing and the welfare reform, that's going to be outside of the 200-day window.
Inside the 200-day window is the regulatory reforms we talked about.
It's the repeal and replace Obamacare.
It's the budget.
It's the rebuilding of our military.
It's tax reform.
Those are the things that we're working on.
Any infrastructure.
Those are the things we're working on in this 2008 calendar in the equation because that's in there as well.
I should have said that.
We see that as part of regulatory reform.
By the way, we've already done a lot of energy independence.
The coal regulation that we repealed from the Obama era, that is a huge energy independence move because it's going to bring back thousands of jobs in coal country.
We can unlock Western Europe.
We can compete with OPEC.
And we couldn't get this with Barack Obama.
Now with Donald Trump, we can permit those things.
Okay.
So that's Paul Ryan putting his reputation on the line.
In 200 days, they're going to get all this stuff done.
Yesterday, and props to Hannity for doing this.
I mean, this is like real, this is the real deal.
This is real journalism that he's doing.
Yesterday, Ryan has on two congressmen from the Freedom Alliance, Dave Bratt and Mark Meadows, who I think are Virginia and North Carolina, maybe.
And he asked them about, he says, you heard what Paul Ryan says.
How's it going?
Give me the first cut.
Did you guys watch the interview with Paul Ryan?
Yeah, I saw the full thing.
What do you think, Congressman Mark Meadows?
Well, I think that it's very optimistic to suggest that all those things are going to get done in the first 200 days.
We don't even have a plan yet for replacing Obamacare.
And to say that there's consensus, I can tell you, I've been talking to a number of my colleagues both in the United States.
Wait a minute.
He said there's a plan currently being scored by the CBO that was a consensus plan.
That's what he told me.
Well, I understand that.
And it is not a consensus plan.
I haven't seen it.
Maybe Dave Bratt's seen it, but I haven't seen any plan at this point that has been rolled out.
So are we back?
So yesterday on the Fox News panel, A.B. Stoddard, terrific reporter, says there's no tax reform in the works.
There's no appetite for it.
John Boehner says for what this is worth.
He says they're not going to be able to replace and repeal Obamacare.
You know, here are two congressmen who are saying, I don't know what Paul Ryan is talking about.
And, you know, and Chuck Schumer was on the view sounding very, very confident.
Listen to this.
The Bureaucrats don't really have much power.
Well, we have enough.
If we have enough to block Gorsuch, we have enough.
Really?
Yes, you see, that's, people ask, do Democrats have power?
Are we in charge?
No, which means we can't set the agenda.
McConnell can do that.
But we can block lots of things.
Like, for instance, the Affordable Care Act, which originally everyone said they want to get rid of.
Now when they see what they're getting rid of, 20 million people covered, pre-existing condition.
A mom or dad has a kid with cancer.
The insurance company says, we're not going to cover you because your kid has cancer.
It costs too much.
And they watch their kids suffer.
All these things people want.
And so now people are for it because no Democrat has cooperated with the Republicans, from the most liberal like Bernie Sanders to the most conservative like Joe Manchin.
They're stuck.
They're not going to be able to repeal it, in my opinion.
Wow.
So we do have some power.
We have to use it smartly and wisely.
But we do.
So Schumer is sounding very confident that nothing's going to happen to congressmen saying Paul Ryan can't get it done.
Trump is going to address a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night.
So maybe he's going to present them with some plan that they can put forward because they seem to be waiting for Trump to take the initiative.
Meanwhile, of course, Republicans are going home to their town halls and they're meeting these protests.
And here is the way, here is the way the media is covering these protests.
Now, listen, some of these protests are paid for.
Some of them are organized.
Some of them are not.
But the point is, this is America.
You're allowed to pay for protests.
You're allowed to organize protests.
You know, there's nothing wrong with that.
I just want to talk about how the media covers them.
Listen to this very, very positive coverage of these protests.
Standing off, voters give lawmakers an earful at town hall meetings all across the country.
It feels like we've got a juvenile running our card for caregivers.
President Trump dismissing them in a tweet.
The mood of voters is now on full display at fiery town hall meetings all across the country.
In town hall meetings across the country, Republican lawmakers are feeling the heat with fiery reaction from their constituents on issue after issue.
President Trump insisting the deck is stacked against him without providing any evidence, tweeting the so-called angry crowds in home districts of some Republicans are actually, in numerous cases, planned out by liberal activists.
Sad.
Voters are crowding town hall meetings, shouting down lawmakers and each other.
Organizers call it resistance recess.
Lines run out the door at some of the meetings full of people challenging the Trump administration's agenda.
GOP lawmakers got an earful Tuesday.
A lot of the angst centered around the Republican push to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
So they're fiery, they're challenging, they're giving them an earful, and Donald Trump has no proof when he says, here is the way, this is from Newsbusters, by the way, an absolutely indispensable site.
Here is the way they covered the Tea Party when the Tea Party showed up and did the same thing.
And the Tea Party was a true grassroots movement.
The ABC, CBS, and NBC Evening Newscasts in near unison on Friday night disparaged the anti-Obamacare protests at town meetings held by members of Congress.
They called them unruly, nasty.
They said they were getting ugly.
ABC anchor Charles Gibson saw a pattern of disruption.
Opponents of change shouting at members of Congress so loud that at times police are called in.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said today, we can discuss these issues without being uncivilized.
It's the same thing I tell my six-year-old.
And they went on.
It was ugly.
I remember one reporter, one anchor woman saying to a reporter, stay safe at the Tea Party.
Like he was under fire.
So the media, the media has, they've got nothing left for this basic philosophy of death that the left proposes for America.
They've got nothing left but the lies.
If we can break through those lies, maybe, maybe Congress will start to act.
Speaking of which, let us bring on one of the best, absolutely best observers of the media in the business, our own John Nolte from the Daily Wire, the Noltenator, who has been doing such a fantastic job detailing the lies and the false stories that the press is telling.
Have we got him?
No, Mike, there he is.
You're on.
I'm on.
Sorry to keep you waiting.
How's it going, Bajo?
I'm good.
How are you?
All right.
You are doing a terrific job, my friend.
I mean, your stuff is absolutely indispensable, and it really is very cool.
So I want to ask you, there's a bunch of stuff I want to ask you about.
I mean, I want to get back to the media.
But first, I want to talk to you about Donald Trump for a minute, because here's what I'm finding, okay?
I'm finding this three-level disparity, three things going on at once that are kind of giving me cognitive dissonance.
One is Donald Trump, who keeps saying things that then his own people take back.
We're going to take Iraqi oil.
You know, we're against the EU.
We're, you know, all this stuff.
And then his own people go out and sort of say different stuff.
On the other hand, you got the media, which I think you and I can safely agree has lost its collective mind.
I mean, it is basically just spewing its imaginative conspiracies and all this stuff.
In the middle between these two things, the administration seems to be running quite well.
I mean, things are happening, things that I never thought I'd see, a great Supreme Court pick, you know, all these good executive, good and legal executive orders, things that are going well.
And Congress is frozen.
So it seems to be frozen.
Maybe not.
How do you feel Donald Trump is doing?
And do you have, I know you're a big Trump supporter.
That's one of the reasons I'm kind of between you and Ben because I like what Trump is doing, but I worry.
He gives me anxiety, you know.
Does it bother you when Trump speaks so inexactly when he says I won the biggest electoral win ever and all this stuff?
And when he speaks so inexactly, does that bother you?
No, it doesn't because I know there's he's I don't know why he does it, but I think but I know the effect of why he does it.
And he's just trying to keep people off balance.
He's especially trying to goad and troll the media.
And a lot of people will say that, I know we're going to talk about Milo later, maybe, and that's another example.
People will sometimes say things that in quotes and in headlines, you scratch your head and you say, well, that's not right.
But then when you see the existential goal that they're trying to hit, it makes a little more sense.
And Trump understands better than any Republican ever elected to anything, that the media is the enemy of the American people, that the media creates these phony boundaries where they decide that they are going to decide what's true.
They are going to decide what's moral.
They're going to decide what's racism.
And Republican after Republican has been doomed by playing that game, by going on CNN and agreeing to those parameters.
And look, and now things are so insane that securing the border, this is how far the media has moved the Overton window.
Securing the border is controversial.
It's racism.
It's Nazism.
And what Trump is doing with everything he does to belittle, befuddle, denigrate, demean the media is he is seizing back control of that.
And the media, you see, the media will downplay his election.
They'll lie and they'll say the Russians won the election.
They'll lie and they'll say that Cheating won the election or James Comey won the election.
So they're trying to move the window here.
And then Trump says, I had the greatest election victory in the history of America.
And he's trying to nudge it.
And he's just doing what they're doing.
He's playing their game.
And this isn't, you can keep your doctor if you want to keep your doctor.
This isn't a videotape caused the Benghazi terror attack.
This is Trump trolling.
This is Trump just working them.
And I don't care about these untruths because they're meaningless.
And in the long run, they don't affect my life.
And it's just part of an ongoing war that I think Trump's winning.
You know, let me give two examples, two different things that I think fall into two different categories.
One was his press conference, which I thought was a masterpiece.
I thought the press conference, we went into that press conference and it was Trump is a Russian spy.
That was the narrative.
And we came out of the press conference and he was mean to us.
You know, like they went scattering like little children, you know, being chased by the boogeyman.
And it was brilliant.
I mean, I've never seen somebody, I've never seen a politician seize the narrative back from a hostile force like that.
That's one side.
So there you and I agree, and I don't really care if he gets the electoral votes wrong and I'm with you.
Then when he says, you know, we should take the oil from Iraq, and James Mattis goes over there and says, look, we're not taking the oil from Iraq.
And McMaster says, you know, when you alienate the populace, you are fighting for the enemy, you know?
And I wonder, is that something that maybe is in a different category?
Is that something where we should hope that Trump maybe reins himself in a little bit?
No, I think that when he says to Iraq, I'm going to take your oil, what he's doing is the same thing when he says to us that he's going to make Mexico pay for the wall.
What he's doing to Iraq is he's saying, I'm willing to go this far.
He's negotiating.
This is how far I'm willing to go.
I'm going to take your freaking oil.
And then that way, instead of the negotiation being here, it's like this.
And it's the same thing when he tells us, when he tells the population, I'm going to make Mexico pay for the wall.
Now, I don't know if that's going to happen or not.
It might.
But what I did know when he said that was that we were damn sure going to get a wall.
And that's what he's doing.
And I think that that's what, I forget the woman's name.
I wish I could name her because it was a brilliant quote.
But she said, you have, too many people take, the media takes Trump literally and we don't.
And we understand what he's doing.
And the media is intentionally being hyper-literal in order to continue to try and bedevil him with this phony fact-checking.
And he just won't play the game.
He's not going to let himself be twisted in knots.
He's not going to let himself get wrapped around the axle of being precisely careful about everything he says, about having to worry about a figure of speech like Trump, like Obama-founded ISIS becoming a big problem, because we all know what he means.
Yeah, we do know what he means.
So until he tells me I can keep my insurance, until he tells me a lie like that that's going to affect my life, I don't care what he does because he's got a much bigger strategy in mind and it's working very effectively.
And you think this is conscious?
You don't think that he just has a sort of native feel for the media?
You think he sits down and says, now I'm going to do this and drive him crazy?
I think, listen, I remember it was two years ago, and the rumors had started that Trump might run again.
Richard Pryor's Perspective00:10:26
And people were already laughing at him on Twitter.
And I remember tweeting out very clearly: do not underestimate this guy.
You do not become a pop culture icon in America for 30 years unless you've got some savvy.
You do not become the king of real estate in the world, especially in Manhattan, unless you, this is a very, very, very smart guy.
I mean, he got, forget everything else, forget all the nonsense around it.
He was the only, and this is what I remembered, even though they made fun of him at the correspondence dinner, all the other stuff.
He was the only guy who could get Barack Obama to show his birth certificate.
Now, I was never a birther, but that was something Barack Obama should have showed us because that is, because America, it wasn't just racist using it against him.
People were really concerned about that.
And you cannot underestimate this guy.
He is brilliant, and now he's the president, excuse me, he's the president of the United States.
And what, 45 guys have done that?
I mean, this is a very smart guy.
I agree that he's smart.
I think the narrative that he's some kind of dolt is just insane.
You cannot survive.
He has survived three incredible, not just survived, but he has triumphed in three extremely difficult arenas.
It doesn't happen by accident.
It may happen by accident once, but not three times like that.
That's true.
All right, so let's talk about Milo because I feel differently about Milo.
You wrote a really interesting Facebook post.
You know Milo.
You like him.
I've only had one lengthy conversation with him, and I have a lot of sympathy with him because I know what artists are like.
I know that artists are damaged people.
They're a little crazy.
He's been through a lot of stuff.
But I have problems with Milo that go way, they go back over everything that he's done.
Tell people what your take on this is.
I think of Milo the same way that I think about Trump.
And I think about George Carlin once said something where he said, and I'm going to paraphrase him here, but these are his words.
These are not my words.
I don't anybody think these are my words.
But he was talking about language and he was talking about how it's not the word.
It's the person who uses the word.
And he said, and this is the quote: he said, the reason Richard Pryor can say the word nigger is because Richard Pryor's a nigger.
Unquote.
Now, you could take that quote and you could put it in a headline and it could say, George Carlin called Richard Pryor the N-word.
And that's a fact.
But what was he doing there?
Why was he saying that?
George Carlin's no racist.
Why was he saying that?
He was making a bigger point about that sometimes you have to use words.
Sometimes you have to keep these words alive.
Because if you don't, that thing we keep talking about, that graph, it keeps moving this way and this way and this way and this way.
And it was one of the rare times that Carlin was actually attacking the left.
And that's what, when I hear Milo say these incredible things that I would never say and do things that I would never do, I see what he's doing.
He's a provocateur.
He's saying the left can say anything.
The left can say anything.
They can trash women.
They can trash blacks.
They can trash gays if they're conservative.
There's nothing the left can't say.
And what Milo is saying is that I'm going to go way over here and maybe we can get to here.
And he's protecting free speech.
Now, he does it in ways that I don't think is okay.
He does things I would never do.
I'm a bit provocateur myself.
But you need people like that.
We need people like that.
This is a very repressive society we live in.
The former first lady just a couple of years ago told us we couldn't use the word bossy.
We can't call things that are dumb gay anymore.
You can't, and it just keeps going and going and going.
And I think in that respect, Milo is people like Milo and Milo and people like him are extremely important to our society.
They are the canaries in the coal mine of free speech.
You know, it's funny.
My friend Owen Brennan of Madison McQueen, who is an excellent, excellent communicator and basically makes political videos with Hollywood style, he says that artists, the guys who, the street artists say, the guys who put up posters and signs, they establish the boundaries of what's acceptable to say.
And one of my problems with Milo is he's essentially a performance artist.
And as a performance artist, he has every right to be outrageous and crazy and terrible.
But he seems to have this desire to be a sort of political sage.
And when you accept a speaking post at CPAC, it seems to me that you are saying, oh, yes, I am now a member of respectable society.
And the thing about artists, I am an artist, I know this.
We don't belong in respectable society.
You shouldn't invite me anywhere.
And that to me is the problem.
He's trying to cross that line, I think, out of personal ambition.
And that's one of my problems.
The other problem I have with him is he forgives and gives cover to genuinely cruel and obscene acts, like some of the things that have been tweeted at Ben, some of the things that have been tweeted at David French over at NRO, stuff that it's not okay.
It's not okay to put a guy's kid, a picture of a guy's kid, in a gas chamber.
And when Milo says, oh, they're just being kind of cute, rebellious young people, that really bugs me.
It bugs me a lot more than anything he had to say about little kids because he's obviously so messed up sexually that who knows what he's saying.
But that bugs me.
The one thing I don't think Milo, and I listen, I don't disagree with him.
Again, there's a lot of things he's done that I wouldn't do, and a lot of them are to Ben, our friend.
But I think one of the things that Milo doesn't get enough credit for is that he is, you know, he is gay and Jewish.
And he is just as hard on gays and Jews as he is on anyone else.
And he's often criticized for that.
And I think the complete opposite is true.
I think what you have is a guy who doesn't find himself, or at least his identity, superior because he's willing to attack and savage himself when he calls himself a faggot.
He says it all the time.
I never use that word.
And I think that's something that he deserves credit for.
But one thing I said in the piece is that if we are living in a society where we are not shocked and insulted and offended, we are not living in a free society.
And that you need guys like Milo out there.
And you especially need guys like Milo out there on the right.
And yes, they are outrageous and sometimes they go much further than I would.
I don't know what too far is in a free society.
It's very hard to offend me.
I'm a conservative Christian on Twitter, so it's very hard to offend me.
I've been hit with everything.
I live in a culture that besieges me with insults and questioning my humanity.
And I've been living in that culture my entire life.
Violence offends me.
Promoting violence offend me.
It's very hard to get me offended about words and pictures and things like that.
It's violence that I worry about, especially political violence.
So I have a little more tolerance than I think some other people do.
But overall, I want to live in a society where I am offended, where I am shocked, and where I'm insulted, because that means I'm living in a free society.
You know, I'm with you 100% on this.
I can't remember the last time somebody said something that shocked me.
As you say, violence, cruelty shocks me.
However, however, if I go to a dinner at CPAC, if I go to a dinner at the Heritage Foundation, and this guy who does those things stands up and talks unless he is talking about his art form and why he does what he does, that sort of disturbs me.
It disturbs me because it means that that Overton window that you're saying may have shifted a little too far and taken us with it.
I'm a little bit concerned about that.
I think Milo has made some real errors.
I have a lot of respect for his talent.
I think he is a talented performance artist.
I think that he is doing something.
Listen, I agree.
He reminds me a lot of Andrew Breitbart, but Andrew Breitbart didn't have that mean streak.
That's it.
There is a mean streak in Milo.
Andrew Breitbart didn't have a bigoted bone in his body, and I think that I worry about it.
Yeah, and again, I don't, and that's another thing I was going to say about Richard Pryor and what George Carlin said about Richard Pryor.
Just because George Carlin said that, it doesn't mean he's a racist.
And I'm not sure I'm prepared to ascribe that motive to Milo because I think it's the same thing that George Carlin did, where Milo is using words and he's saying things for a larger purpose, for the larger purpose of moving the Overton window, which does need to be moved.
And so I'm not ready to ascribe that motive to him because in my personal dealings with him, I've never seen anything like that.
And like I said, he is as hard on his own identity as he is on anybody else's, if not harder.
Okay.
All right.
Well, who's going to win the Oscar?
What picture?
Oh, I think what the heck's out there?
Moonlight, De La La Land.
Oh, La La Land's going to win.
A La La Land is really overrated, but it's nice.
It's got a great ending.
Yes, it got hit.
His last five minutes are terrific.
Yeah, the last five minutes are amazing.
But I don't think, I didn't think the movie, and I thought the dancing and singing was like high school play level.
All right, I got to let you go, but it's great to see you.
I only get to see you on these pictures.
I hope your wife is well.
And come back and let's talk some more.
Anytime, my friend.
Thanks.
All right, take care.
The great John Nolte, the mighty Noltinator, always really interesting to talk to him.
And I think he deserves to have his opinion part of the discussion because I think he's been right often.
He's been right when some of us have gotten it wrong.
All right.
The Clavenless weekend is upon us.
What can I say?
I know, I know.
We've been talking all day and with stuff I like.
We've been talking all week about kind of Americana.
And there's no greater piece of Americana than Meet Me in St. Louis and no better song and Meet Me in St. Louis than the wonderful boy next door sung by Judy Garland.
We will end with that.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Survivors Gather Here on Monday.
If you make it through the Clavenless weekend, come back and we'll do the whole thing again.
I'll see you then.
Never Sees Me Glance00:00:52
How can I ignore the boy next door?
I love him more than I can say.
Doesn't try to please me, doesn't even tease me.
And he never sees me glance his way.
And though I'm heart sore the boy next door, affection for me won't dislay.