Ep. 358 skewers climate extremism—mocking $500T carbon-removal schemes while praising Trump’s RAISE Act for replacing low-skilled immigration with a merit-based system, then dismantling Jim Acosta’s biased CNN report on the Statue of Liberty poem. It pivots to Disney’s feminist-edited princess books and Hollywood’s leftist absurdities, like a Game of Thrones prequel glorifying slavery, before defending Dennis Prager’s symphony debut against "woke" backlash. Film critiques slam Spider-Man: Homecoming’s forced diversity, The Mist’s transgender lectures, and War for the Planet of the Apes’ anti-American themes, while praising Wonder Woman and Baby Driver. The episode ends by debunking a NYT op-ed dismissing human purpose as a "construct," arguing Aristotle’s teleology still holds weight against modern materialist dogma. [Automatically generated summary]
And as you rush off to vacation or a day at the beach, I know all of you will want to be careful to keep your environmental impact down to a minimum.
Yeah, I don't give a crap either.
But according to an article by Julie Kelly at National Review, climate scientists are now issuing reports on how to have summer fun without increasing climate change and without having summer fun.
These are real suggestions from actual climate scientists.
A study by researchers at Sweden's Lund University recommends that you cut down on climate change by having one fewer child.
You can accomplish this by putting little Timmy in the back seat of the SUV, wading down the gas pedal with a brick, and then jumping out from behind the wheel just before the car goes over a cliff.
If the police become suspicious, just tell them you did it to cut down on climate change.
And also, little Timmy wouldn't stop listening to the SpongeBob SquarePants theme song at top volume over and over again.
If the police accuse you of being an hysterical sociopath, just tell them you got the idea from climate scientists, and that should explain it.
Other environmentalist suggestions for how to have non-climate-changing summer non-fun include eating a plant-based diet.
You can even grow your own plants, such as grass, then feed the grass to a cow, kill the cow, and have a barbecue.
Hmm, nothing like some plant-based steak to make summer a blast.
Climate scientists also recommend that you refrain from using a car or airplane this summer.
So for good climatey fun, when your summer vacation rolls around, you can just walk to an exciting holiday locale, like the parking lot of the 7-Eleven on the corner.
Or just stay home and maybe make love to the wife, have a child, then put the child in the back of the SUV and drive it off a cliff so you don't affect the climate.
Another study trying to ruin your summer for no reason comes from James Hansen.
Hansen is known as the father of climate change.
I'm sorry, he's known as the father of climate change awareness.
The father of climate change awareness is, of course, married to the mother of alien invasion preparedness, and they have three adorable children of silly panic over nothingness.
All right, I'm making this up now.
Hansen says it's no longer enough to reduce carbon emissions.
We have to actually pull the carbon out of the atmosphere.
This will require an expenditure of around $500 trillion to develop technology that allows us to see carbon molecules and pluck them out of the air.
So if you pass a group of people wearing gigantic electronic glasses, plucking at the air with tweezers and shouting, ooh, I got a molecule, you'll know you're among people with the same scientific credibility of climate scientists.
Now, though I kid around about climate change, I must admit I have noticed that the weather has mysteriously gotten much hotter recently, and I myself am taking important environmental steps to ensure it gets cooler by October.
Like waiting for October.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky, life is tickety room.
Birds are ringing, also singing hunky-dunky.
Shifty tipsy topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hoorah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hurrah!
Climate change.
There was a story yesterday that Al Gore's homes use 34 times as much energy as the average American home.
But it's okay when he does it.
I know.
It's okay when he does it because he's Al Gore.
So he's working to save the climate.
So if he's using, you know, the whole thing about this is I will believe there is a panic when the people who are telling me to panic, panic until they panic.
I'm not panicking.
Anyway, you know, nowadays we go online.
Oh, Christian Toto is going to be here.
We're going to be talking about movies, and we will stay on and let you watch the whole thing wherever you are.
You can see Christian Toto.
He's from Hollywood in Toto, and we'll be talking about movies and Disney princesses and all kinds of things.
Which I know is, I know you love those Disney princesses.
I know.
They say, they told me they called him complained.
They say, he will not leave us alone.
And we're animated, so it's really uncomfortable.
You know, nowadays we shop for everything.
We shop, we go on a trip, we shop to get the best hotel, the cheapest hotel, the cheapest plane, plane ride, everything we do online.
But people don't think about this when it comes to mortgages.
And the reason is they don't really know what a mortgage is.
You know, a mortgage, obviously, you get for your house, but you're basically renting money.
You're renting money because the guy says this house is going to cost a quarter of a million, half a million, million bucks.
Not all of us can go into our wallets and just take out that money.
So we rent the money from the bank.
We pay them in interest.
You can shop around for cheaper mortgages, and you can do it at Lending Tree.
That is the way to do it.
You go to Lending Tree.
Here's the thing.
The average person who goes to Lending Tree, and all it is, is it's a website where you can get people to come and compete to give you a mortgage.
The average Lending Tree customer can save $20,000 over the life of the loan.
That's the average.
So half of those people are saving more than $20,000, which is a lot of dough.
When you're looking for a new mortgage, refinance, or home equity loan, Lending Tree is the only place where you get up to five real offers from America's top lenders and can compare side by side for free.
It takes about three minutes, and probably the bank that you were going to go to is already on there.
A lot of people just go to one bank and don't compare mortgages.
They don't shop like they do for everything else.
It's like shopping for flights online, except you're shopping for the best mortgage offers for you.
Rates always go up and down, but regardless of what's happening with the rates, you can always get the right offer for you with lendingtree.com.
Find out how much you can save today at lendingtree.com slash clavin.
That's lendingtree.com slash clavin.
How does it go?
Oh, you know, I thought you would never ask.
It's K-L-A.
V-A-N lendingtree.com slash Clavin, Lendingtree, L-L-C-N-M-L-S, number 1136, terms and conditions apply, but you got to shop for everything, including a mortgage.
You can save average savings is $20,000.
So yesterday, I got to say, Stephen Miller, Stephen Miller is a star.
You know, people act like Stephen Miller just appeared on the scene yesterday because there was this big dust-up with Jim Acosta, the kind of blowhard, know-nothing showboater from CNN.
But Stephen Miller, I remember talking about him almost a year ago because he went on the Sunday shows and he just ate those people for lunch.
It was like they had released a lion into the thing.
And he is the big speechwriter.
He wrote that Warsaw speech pretty much.
I mean, I think there's a lot of, obviously, these speeches go through a lot of drafts and everything like this.
But Stephen Miller has just been a star.
So yesterday, I just have to, I have to play this because I just think Jim Acosta is the reason we hate the media.
I mean, he's like the poster boy of bad news media.
He is the poster boy.
You know, if you had to say, what is fake news?
It would be Jim Acosta would be the face on that poster.
So yesterday, Donald Trump announces this thing, the RAISE plan, and he is going to rationalize the legal immigration system.
This is the system where you come in and get a green card.
And you probably have met people who get green cards.
It's hard.
I mean, people come in from Canada with real qualifications.
They come in with real qualifications.
It's hard to get a green card, but we kind of give them away to people who don't have any skills and can't speak English.
And, you know, the only thing they can say in English is like, we want to kill everybody here.
And, oh, good, we'll give you a green card.
So Donald Trump made the announcement that he is going to rationalize this plan.
For decades, the United States has operated and has operated a very low-skilled immigration system, issuing record numbers of green cards to low-wage immigrants.
This policy has placed substantial pressure on American workers, taxpayers, and community resources.
Among those hit the hardest in recent years have been immigrants and very importantly, minority workers competing for jobs against brand new arrivals.
And it has not been fair to our people, to our citizens, to our workers.
The RAISE Act ends chain migration and replaces our low-skilled system with a new points-based system for receiving a green card.
This competitive application process will favor applicants who can speak English, financially support themselves and their families, and demonstrate skills that will contribute to our economy.
So here's the thing.
You know, this is from senators.
That was Tom Cotton and David Perdue standing on either side of the president.
And this is just rational.
Everybody wants to come to America.
That means it's a buyer's market.
It's our market.
Everybody wants to come to America.
I lived in England for seven years.
When I came in, they made sure that I could support myself.
I got a fast track because I was doing well and bringing money in and all this stuff.
The country has a right to bring in the best people, the people who will serve the country.
We are, they want to come here.
So it's not a charity.
It's a country.
And it's not compassionate.
It is not compassionate.
They want to come here because we are the light of the world politically.
And if you want to keep the light of the world burning, you got to treat it well.
You can't just bring in everybody and give, you know, nowadays, you know, the other thing about this is this is what Canada does.
This is basically Canada's policy.
Rolling Stone had this cover.
Do we have a picture of this cover with Justin Bieber, their prime minister, Justin Trudeau or Justin Bieber?
I always get the two of them confused.
I think Bieber is the one who has some kind of political common sense.
But Justin Trudeau is the one.
Justin Trudeau has got this dreamy picture of him like he's like a teen rock star or something like this.
He says, why can't he be our president?
Well, guess what?
Now he is.
Donald Trump is doing what Canada does.
And so, of course, this is awful.
It's bigotry.
It's awful that people should say.
So Acosta, now you remember, Jim Acosta is this loudmouth, this blowhard who went off on the fact that they stopped, the Sean Spicer stopped for a while having cameras at the White House press briefings.
Why?
Because Sean Acosta, when you put a camera on him, suddenly becomes the Sean Acosta show.
The Sean Acosta, the Jim Acosta, the Jim Acosta show.
You know, suddenly it's the Jim Acosta show.
And he asked what had to be one of the stupidest questions I have ever seen anybody ask in a White House briefing.
And that's saying something.
This is cut number three.
What's the problem with this rational immigration program?
First of all, right now, it's a requirement that it be naturalized, you had to speak English.
So the notion that speaking English wouldn't be a part of our immigration systems would be actually very ahistorical.
Secondly, I don't want to get off into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty enlightening the world.
It's a symbol of American liberty lighting the world.
The poem that you're referring to that was added later is not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty, but more fundamentally, the history.
I'm saying that that does not represent what the country has always thought of.
I'm saying the notion that the, I'm saying the notion, Stephen, I'm sorry.
No, sounds like that sounds like a lot of people.
Jim, let me ask you a question.
That sounds like some national park revisionism.
No, the National Library.
The Statue of Liberty has always been hope to the world for people to send people to this country.
And they're not always going to speak English, Stephen.
Oh, we played that out of order, but what he starts out by doing, and I won't go back and play it, what he starts out by doing is he starts out by reading the Emma Lazarus poem, Give Me Your Poor, Your Tie, you know, your seething mess, right?
So, and Miller schools him on the fact.
Look, it's a nice poem.
It really is.
It's a nice poem.
And Miller schools him on the fact that it was put on afterwards.
The poem was written to raise money, I think, for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
The Statue of Liberty was originally created as a sign of the Enlightenment that linked France and America.
The ideas of liberty, that's why it's called the Statue of Liberty, the idea of liberty that links France and America and that was one of the reasons we supported each other in our revolutions and all this stuff.
So he is quoting it as if it's the Constitution.
And Miller proceeds, first he tells him the truth that it was put on afterwards.
But the point about it is, is we don't set our, it's a nice poem.
We don't set our laws by poems.
So now Miller says, well, what would be the right Emma Lazarus poem law to have?
This is cut number four.
In 1970, when we let in 300,000 people a year, was that violating or not violating the Statue of Liberty Law of the Land?
In the 1990s, when it was half a million a year, was it violating or not violating the Statue of Liberty Law of the Land?
Was it violating a year after year?
Tell me what years and the future.
Tell me what years.
Tell me what years meet.
Tell me what years meet Jim Acosta's definition of the Statue of Liberty poem, Law of the Land.
What do you have the poem?
So Acosta now looks like an idiot.
And even on left-wing media, like even on the Scarborough show, they're saying that Acosta made a fool of himself, but they're saying, well, Miller was rude.
Miller, to me, just did what he had to do.
I mean, this is absurd that this guy comes in and he's going to make this a debate.
And you can hear he won't even let Miller finish a sentence.
How can you learn anything if you don't listen, right?
If you're a reporter, you're trying to get information.
You're not schooling anybody.
Miller knows more in that little finger of his about immigration than Acosta will ever know.
He knows more about the policies of immigration.
So this, I mean, this goes on and it gets worse and worse and worse.
And Acosta starts to complain about the fact that they want English speakers.
And he says, well, you can hear me.
He says, well, if you have English speakers, you'll only have people from Australia and Canada.
And Miller just rips him to pieces.
Listen to this.
This whole notion of, well, they could learn, you know, they have to learn English before they get to the United States.
Are we just going to bring in people from Great Britain and Australia?
Jim, actually, honestly, I am shocked at your statement that you think that only people from Great Britain and Australia would know English.
It's actually, it reveals your cosmopolitan bias to a shocking degree that in your mind, no, this is an amazing, this is an amazing moment.
This is an amazing moment that you think only people from Great Britain or Australia would speak English is so insulting to millions of hardworking immigrants who do speak English from all over the world.
Jim, have you honestly, Jim, have you honestly never met an immigrant from another country who speaks English outside of Great Britain and Australia?
Is that your personal experience?
And just so you know, though, that, I mean, Acosta goes on afterwards, after he's just destroyed, and he goes on, and this is the report he files.
Solemn Words Matter00:03:28
I mean, this is cut number seven.
So just so, you know, this is basically, he is representing CNN.
This blowhard, this guy who thinks the Emma Lazarus poem is something, it's a sentimental poem, is going to set our immigration policy and that we don't have a right to have the same kinds of protections for our country that Canada and Australia does.
This is the way he goes on and reports this on CNN.
This is, remember, a theoretically objective news guy on CNN, which keeps telling us it's not fake news.
Here's Jim Acosta's report on this.
I think at times this White House has an unhealthy fixation on what I call the three M's, the Mexicans, the Muslims, and the media.
Their policies tend to be crafted around bashing one of those three groups, and we just see it time and again.
And today on immigration, what the White House is essentially saying in a wink and a dog whistle to some of these battleground states that they won is that immigrants coming in from Latin America are taking your jobs.
Wolf immigration is not the reason why the factory closed in Pittsburgh or the coal mine was shut down in West Virginia.
And just, I'm going to finish this because I'm not going to talk about this all day, but I just want to finish this thing by just to prove to you that this is not just one rogue guy who should be fired, which he should.
I mean, if you want to be the most respected name in news, you don't have a guy like that filing reports like this and shouting at people in the newsroom when the guy is just announcing a policy.
You know, you oppose the policy.
Too bad.
Too bad.
Nobody cares what you think.
You know, just report the news.
But just so you know that this level of thought is basically endemic to CNN, here is Chris Cuomo, who must be the stupidest man on TV who's not Don Lemon, and Don Lemon is the stupidest man on TV who's not Chris Cuomo.
Here is Chris Cuomo on the Statue of Liberty and what it means for America.
Let me just begin.
Well, let's play it first.
Go ahead.
Theater of the absurd to the side for a moment and get back to the main point.
The words, the poem was added later, Miller said.
The words being the signature promise of this country from the poem New Colossus by Emma Lazarus.
Of course they were added later.
The pedestal on which the words were placed came after the gift of the statue.
But that's not what Miller was really trying to brush aside.
He was trying to brush aside their significance.
This isn't about culling illegal immigration or bad hombres, as the president liked to say.
This is about changing not just how many, but who gets to come in legally.
Restrictions that would brush aside America's greatest strength, the diversity of people who have sacrificed to come here with nothing except the passion of purpose to make better lives and to make this country great.
They're not just words added later.
They are a solemn vow that was supposed to endure forever.
It's a solemn vow that's supposed to endure forever.
It's the signature promise of this country.
By the way, this is the same guy who said that the Constitution doesn't protect speech that he thinks is hateful, okay?
So the Constitution is a living document.
We can interpret that any way we want.
But Emma Lazarus' poem is like written, it's literally written in stone, and we have to obey this poem.
And that's unbelievable.
And they wonder why when Donald Trump blows up at them and is rude and unkind.
They wonder why everybody sits there kind of nodding, going, yup.
Yup.
50 Bucks for 50 Items Deal00:02:33
All right, enough of that.
Think about this.
Summer is, it's already August.
It is already August, and summer is going to come to an end.
I hate to break this to you, but it actually will come to an end.
And you want to get your grilling in, and you want to get the best meats to get your grilling in.
And that's why you got to go to Omaha Steaks.
Man, this thing, I got to tell you, they sent me the package that they will send you.
This is a limited time deal, exclusive savings on a special large combo called the Giants of Grilling Combo.
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Now, they sent it to me.
You know, they sent it to me to try it out.
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What, 50 items for 50 bucks?
Eight boneless pork chops at four ounces, eight four ounce boneless chicken breasts, eight two ounce ground beef sliders, six four ounce burgers, eight three ounce gourmet jumbo francs, eight three ounce Kielbasa sausages, four five and a third ounce Delmonico burgers come free with the purchase.
I mean, this is an unbelievable deal, and the meat is so good.
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And speaking of great deals, you know, we're going to stay on Facebook and YouTube so you can hear Christian Toto talking about the movies and the summer movies and the craziness of leftists in show business.
But normally we would like you to come to thedailywire.com, watch the whole thing by subscribing.
It's a lousy $10 a month for which you get the mailbag.
And if you subscribe for the year, it's just a lousy $100 for the entire year.
And you get the leftist tears mug.
You get the leftist tears mug.
Somebody complained on Twitter that we were making money by making fun of the left and wasn't that despicable.
Princess and the Ego Piece00:15:31
They don't understand.
We're making money and making fun of the left.
So that's actually, it's actually a bonus.
It's a feature, not a bug.
So come on over to describe.
But enough talking about CNN stupidity.
Let's hear from Snow White.
Sunday my Christ will come.
Sunday will meet my guy.
And the way to this castle will be happy forever.
I know.
So yesterday, there was this incredible piece at PJMedia.com, their parenting page, by Faith Moore.
Now, we kind of stole it on the Daily Wire.
We did link to it.
We linked to the original piece, but the original piece was by Faith Moore on the parenting page of PJ Media.
And I know that because Faith Moore happens to be my daughter.
And it was, it's a great piece.
That's not why I'm talking about it.
Faith writes there all the time, and I don't talk about her pieces.
I'm not always promoting my kids' stuff.
But we're about to bring on Christian Toto from Hollywood and Toto to talk about movies.
And this piece is unbelievable.
It's called Mom Edits Daughter's Disney Princess Book to make it more feminist.
Okay.
So this is about a professor, sociologist named Daniel Lindemann, who is the mother of a three-year-old girl and Danielle Lindemann.
And she studies, she's a professor of gender roles, of course.
And she decided to edit her daughter's Disney princess book, her three-year-old daughter, because she thought she was sending a powerful feminist message, okay?
And Faith writes that her misguided post is a perfect example of the flaw in the whole Disney princesses or anti-feminist narrative.
According to Lindemann, I'm reading this now, the books are basically teaching these little girls that their worth lies in looking nice and hooking up with the right guy.
So she took a pen and added some edits to her daughter's book.
I mean, this is unbelievable.
This little three-year-old girl loves this book about Disney princesses.
And the book is very simple and it tells you what a Disney princess does.
It's illustrated with Disney pictures, right?
And so it says, A princess is kind.
And the professor took a pen and wrote in her three-year-old daughter's book, kind of a badass, okay?
I swear, a princess is brave, another picture, right?
And the professor, right, the sociologist writes in a speech balloon for, I think it was Jasmine, one of the princesses, saying, my body, my choice.
That's bravery.
You're fighting for abortion.
A princess likes to dress up.
And she writes in, in her medical scrubs when she goes to work as a neurosurgeon.
Okay.
And the worst of them, the worst of them is a picture of Jasmine and Aladdin on their flying carpet.
And Aladdin has his arm around.
They're kind of holding on to each other.
And she writes in that Jasmine is holding on to Aladdin because he's scared.
So now the professor says, I'm quoting from Faith's article.
This is over PJ Media, the parenting page.
It's weird, says Lindemann, because I expected my daughter to react to the edits, but she should have just rolled with them.
Maybe the new narratives seemed natural to her.
Why wouldn't Cinderella have sparkly shoes and also be a neurosurgeon?
And Faith writes, well, right, nothing in the original book was at odds with the feminist agenda.
So her additions were necessary and went unnoticed by her daughter.
She says, I believe there are differences between genders and Disney.
This is faith writing.
I believe that there are differences between genders and that Disney princesses really are positive examples of femininity in a modern world.
The fact that so many little girls gravitate toward these characters says something about their impact and importance as role models.
The stigma around Disney princesses, the idea that their message is no longer relevant to today's women and girls, or worse, that it's actually antithetical to it, is in error.
It just isn't true.
Little girls, even girls like Lindemann's daughter, who were raised to believe that gender is a social construct, love Disney princesses.
Why?
Because Disney princesses are brave, because they are kind, because they are beautiful and magical and smart, because they are women.
No editing required.
Faith knows about this because she is a Disney fanatic and she has a page called Disney Princess Attic on Facebook.
So you can find her on Facebook or you can find her on Twitter at Faith Kmoore.
But let's bring on Christian Toto.
Sorry about the glitch before Christian, you're there.
There you are.
Okay.
You look good.
Christian Toto.
He's an award-winning journalist, film critic, and podcaster.
He's the founder of Hollywoodintoto.com.
And you can find him on Twitter at HollywoodIntoto.
T.O., one of the very, very few conservatives covering the movies who actually knows what he's talking about.
They always just give the movie beat at all these think tanks.
They just give them to some guy who's doing something else and say, well, you know, everybody knows about movies, but you actually, you know, I read your stuff because you actually know about movies.
Did you see this piece?
I mean, did you see this Disney princess thing?
You know, what's amazing about this particular piece is the projection that's going on.
And I think projection is exactly what you see across the liberal landscape.
It is them projecting these ideas, these fears, this pretend, you know, boldness.
And it's absurd.
You know, in a way, it reminds me of the Lady Ghostbuster situation where we couldn't have young women become scientists until we had a lady ghostbuster.
And until that point, they were helpless.
They just sat there in school thinking, oh, if I only had a lady ghostbuster to look up to, I could be a scientist too.
And that's what this reminds me of in an odd way.
There's a connective tissue there that's both scary and all too real.
It's really, it really is.
They go after everyone, even their own daughter.
She can't even let her daughter be herself.
I mean, her daughter loves this little book, and everything has to be made, turned into the image of their politics.
And eventually they devour their own.
I mean, they have this thing, the creators of Game of Thrones, right?
I mean, it's got to be one of the most talked about television shows ever written.
And they come out and they have a new idea.
And you were writing about this in Hollywood and Toto.
Their brilliant new idea for their new show.
Yeah, it's going to be the Confederacy is back.
The Civil War ended.
The South seceded, and slavery never went away.
Now, I think it's absurd on its face because, you know, civilization matures and evolves and grows, and slavery would have went away anyway.
But listen, even given that construct, they're allowed to make this show because those are the two of the showrunners from Game of Thrones.
It's the most popular show in the world.
It's like the next Sopranos.
And if they aren't allowed to kind of follow their vision, then who is?
But the funny thing about this is they come out with the show, which is, it's kind of like that, the man in the high castle, if Hitler won the war.
But if Hitler won the war, you'd have had this oppressive regime forcing his ugly, stupid ideas on the world.
And that kind of made some sense.
But if the Confederacy won the war, just as you say, slavery would have passed away.
I mean, there's just simply no way slavery would have endured, except in Muslim countries, of course.
But I mean, here in the West, it would have been destroyed.
But the thing was, right-wingers immediately reacted to this, rolling their eyes.
We immediately said, oh, God, you know, we have to listen to this garbage and we have to listen to how wonderful Hollywood is because they oppose slavery as if everybody doesn't.
But what got me is they were attacked from the left.
They were attacked by their own people.
Yeah, it's amazing.
You know, and I have yet to hear one either HBO star or even just like celebrities say, hey, let these artists have their voice, share their story, and we can go from there.
What was their, you know, what's amazing?
What's amazing is that the conservatives right now are on the forefront of the free speech movement.
And it's liberals who are way in the back.
Like, you know, when I was a kid playing dodgeball, I couldn't face the heavy altar.
I hung in the back.
That's what the liberals are these days.
They're either deathly quiet or they're just even defending it or making excuses for it.
It's a very sad state of affairs.
It is.
What was their beef with the Confederacy?
I mean, what was their problem with the story?
The problem is that it will show modern slavery, black people in 2017, being enslaved in some capacity.
And that image is inappropriate.
And also, those particular showrunners, the show's creators, are white.
So they wouldn't be able to grasp that slavery is dehumanizing and awful.
I mean, that's insulting on its face.
They are so racist.
I mean, they boil down everything to race.
And then, and they did that, but it's all about what's allowed.
Nothing is allowed.
We basically say everything's allowed, but we're going to criticize it.
But they say, they did this to our panel, Dennis Prager, right?
He was going to, what was this?
He was going to conduct an orchestra or he is going to?
He's going to later this month.
He's going to be at the Santa Monica Symphony, I believe, is the full title.
It's a one-day gig.
You know, listen, he's not a master musician, but obviously he knows his stuff.
They invited him to be a conductor.
And now there's a movement by some in the orchestra and some in the community to get him out because he's a bigot and a hate monger.
Now, of all the voices on conservative talk radio across the country, he's often the most genteel.
Yeah, I would think.
Yeah, no, he is.
And he's obviously a deeply, deeply religious guy with a lot of his basis of thought is based in the Old Testament.
And the last thing he is is a bigot or a hate monger of any kind.
So let's talk about the summer pictures.
talk about the summer line first first of all their big film the al gore film the al gore sequel to an inconvenient truth that didn't that didn't actually tear the there wasn't a lot of like uh warming at the box office for that was there It kind of died.
You know, it did.
Actually, it did okay.
I have to say, you know, though I don't agree with a lot of it, I think it really did affect the conversation on climate change.
And from that perspective, there have been worse reasons to make a sequel.
Having said that, even some liberal critics are saying, oh, this is just a love letter to Al Gore.
His ego is so big he can barely fit on the screen.
So while the reviews are mostly phoning like you'd expect and hyper uncritical and not skeptical, at least some of them are saying, you know what, this is really kind of an ego piece, and that's kind of embarrassing.
That is embarrassing.
Did anything that he said in that first film, did any of his predictions come true?
I mean, I remember he said that New York was going to be underwater, and then he points out that during the storm, Sandy, there was some water downtown.
But that's not the same as New York being underwater because of the storm.
Not even close.
What amazes me about the film is that if they came out and said, you know what, some of our predictions have been wrong, but we still feel based on the science, based on the data, that this is important information.
They can't do that.
They can't admit anything.
And they can't stop calling deniers deniers and making them actually worse comparisons.
There's a moment in the film late in the movie where they talk about there was a terrorist attack in Paris.
And basically they weaponized that particular attack to talk about climate change.
It's the most tone-deaf moment of any film I've seen in quite some time.
What's the connection?
I mean, between the terrorists.
Well, I've seen the movie and I still can't tell you.
But they do segue a bit awkwardly from climate change to terrorism back to climate change.
And it's about how we need to fight back against terrorism with our values.
That was part of the conversation.
I thought it was maybe that the Middle East is so hot now they're just getting cranky.
Well, they talk about how climate change caused part of the Syrian crisis, by the way.
Oh, I heard him talk about this.
Yes, the migration and all that stuff.
So what about the rest?
I have actually seen a pretty good, I'm not a big summer picture guy, but I've seen a fairly good amount.
What's the worst, worst social justice, aside from the Al Gore film, what is the worst left-wing big picture of the summer, do you think?
You know, I don't know this has been a preponderance of SJW movies, but Spider-Man Homecoming stopped cold multiple times to have some sort of woke moments.
And I thought that was really ill-advised, to say the very least.
But the movie itself was kind of charming and light and breezy.
So you can kind of accept it.
I have to say, just from a moviegoer point of view, if I ever have to watch Transformers The Last Night again, I need to have some sort of like cyanide pill like clenched between my teeth just to make sure I don't watch the whole thing.
It was beyond awful.
You know, I turned on Stephen King's The Mist, a novella that I liked very much, and I like Stephen King very much.
And it starts out in the first two scenes, or the first, the second and third scene.
There's an opening violent scene.
But it starts out lecturing us on transgenderism and gay rights and how everybody's, and I'm very easygoing about people's sex lives.
I don't care.
But I don't want to be lectured out when I'm turning on to watch monsters rip people apart.
And I turned it off.
I just found it offensive that they were in my face like that.
It's bad storytelling 101.
And even if you agree with it, it's bad storytelling 101.
But that's where we are.
And you know what?
I think it's often more in television shows these days where the lecturing is really in your face.
I think movies, the budgets are bigger and they know they can't anger people as aggressively as TV often does.
Interesting.
So I think that they kind of smooth out some of the edges at terms.
You know, I saw the war for the planet of the apes, which I thought was unbelievable in terms of its technology.
But was me, I mean, I found that kind of offensive, like the scene where they played the national anthem while they're torturing the apes and all this stuff.
And I know Alpha and Omega is the name of a bomb, but it also, of course, is from the Gospels from the Bible.
You know, it just seemed aggressively anti-American.
Well, wasn't the burning American flag kind of a subtle metaphor for things?
Yeah, maybe that's what it was.
Maybe that's what came in the way.
And also, the other thing I got to say, Christian, this is Christian Toto from HollywoodintToto.com, which you really should go to if you want to see intelligent conversation about show business and movies from the right.
The other thing is, every movie has a wall in it, and the wall is bad.
So, I mean, in Planet of the Apes, it was like, oh, it's crazy.
He's building a wall.
I thought an army is coming, bearing down on their position.
Build a wall, right?
And then the Blade Runner, the new Blade Runner thing looks like it's got a wall.
People build walls and all this.
You know, I think maybe in two years, when all the films in production now come to fruition, it could be wall sequels, wall franchises, wall movies.
I mean, new walls, old walls.
Everything we do.
This is just warming up.
So what's the best movie you've seen this summer?
You know, I liked Wonder Woman a lot.
I think it captures something that the original Superman did.
It had a sense of humor and joy that I loved, even though the sort of last third gets a little bit weak.
I also like Baby Driver a lot.
I think that was fun.
It had a good use of music.
And it had a sweet love story kind of mixed in with all the action and mayhem.
And I think that's pretty rare these days.
The rom-com is essentially dead.
Hollywood has left it behind.
They can't even crack the code about how to show people falling in love in movies anymore.
So I think the fact that this had a sweet little love story mixed in was actually kind of refreshing.
Yeah, yeah, no question about it.
I mean, I saw the Beauty and the Beast live-action film, which I thought was actually pretty good.
Why Purpose Matters00:08:09
But one of the worst things about it is I just thought Emma Watson, right?
That's who's the, she's the star.
I just thought she couldn't let go enough to play a woman falling in love.
You know, she couldn't look soft enough and kind of swept away enough.
And it just kind of was a sore point in the middle of the picture.
What about Dunkirk?
Did you like that?
You know, I didn't like it as much as my fellow critics.
I feel like it was more technique and style than substance.
And I never connected with these characters.
Even Mark Rylands, who has the most emotional arcs in the story, it just didn't work.
And I have to say, I don't know whether I'm just getting old, but I couldn't hear half the dialogue between the sounds of war and the accents.
I'm looking forward to actually watching it again on the small screen and putting on the closed captioning because I missed a lot of it.
You know, I had the same feeling.
I liked the movie.
I, of course, admired the technique, but I had the same, there were no relationships in it.
How can there be an emotional arc when nobody has a relationship with anything but with the battle?
There are no people, only the two kids have a relationship.
And I thought that was a real problem with it.
And I had a problem hearing the pilots over the engines.
I mean, that was very tough.
Yeah.
And, you know, in 10 years, we're going to be talking about Hackstar Rage, I think, a lot more than Dunkirk.
Wow.
That's what I think.
Interesting.
So what are you looking forward to?
Anything good upcoming?
Oh, gosh.
You know, this time of year is really rough.
But, you know, I think things turn around in September, October.
It's some of the Oscar Bait movies coming soon.
So we shall see.
You know, it's Lucky Logan is coming out in a few weeks.
It's a new Steven Soderbergh film, which is he's always got interesting things to say.
And I just saw the trailer for the new Death Wish, which is angering the social justice warriors in record form.
Oh, no.
Poor socialist.
You know, Bruce Willis, classic story.
We'll see what they do with it.
All right.
Well, we'll have you back when the new movies come out.
Christian Toto from Hollywood in Toto.
It's always good to talk to you.
Thanks so much.
I noticed I shout at people when they're on Skype, like the microphone won't carry my voice.
All right, I want to deal.
You know, last week it was, we were talking about this whole idea of purpose, and we were talking about natural law and the whole idea of humans having a purpose and the world having a purpose and life having a purpose.
And I found this, it's time, we have to take a trip to really see why I talk about this and why I feel that it's something we need to address and it's at the core of a lot of our disagreements.
have to take a trip to knucklehead row knucklehead row of course is the op-ed pages of the new york times where knuckleheads gather with their harvard and oxford and you know yale degrees to show that no matter how good your education is you can still be a knucklehead And so they have this thing called, I think it's called the Stone.
It's their philosophy section.
And this was written by Joseph Carter, Joseph P. Carter, who is a philosophy student and post-grad student.
And he talks about how purpose makes life meaningful and makes people happy.
He says, purpose is a universal human need.
Without it, we feel bereft of meaning and happiness.
A recent ethnographic study draws a strong correlation between purposefulness and happiness.
Purpose seems beneficial to overcoming substance abuse, healing from tragedy and loss, and achieving economic success.
But where does purpose come from?
What is it?
For over two millenniums, discerning our purpose in the universe has been a primary task of philosophers.
Aristotle believed that the universe is saturated with it, that everything has an intrinsic drive.
Now, I want to explain that, stop and explain that, because this is what we're talking about.
We're talking about our friend Aristotle, who's over here on the fireplace.
You can see him.
And Aristotle thought that everything had, that things had purpose, but that doesn't mean that they had intention, okay?
So the purpose of your heart is to pump blood, but the heart doesn't wake up in the morning and says, ha, you know, I got to get to pumping blood.
It's just what it does.
It is the purpose of what it does.
Now, at our level of consciousness, where you have an actual soul, which is your form, this is what makes you human.
It is the humanness of you.
It is not a ghost.
It's not Casper the ghost inside your machine.
It is the fact of your humanness.
Because you have a form.
Your consciousness is something, your purpose is something that you do through choice and will, and you have to find it, and you have a relationship to your purpose.
All right, now, I just want to get to this thing that Joseph P. Carter writing about.
He says, I'm certainly no Aristotelian, not because I reject happiness.
Rather, as a materialist, a guy who only believes there's material, there's no such thing as spirituality, I think there's nothing intrinsic about the goals and purposes we seek to achieve it.
Modern science explicitly jettisons this sort of teleological thinking from our knowledge of the universe.
Teleological means with a purpose, you know, with an end.
That's the end of something.
Modern science explicitly jettisons this sort of teleological thinking from our knowledge of the universe.
From particle physics to cosmology, we see that the universe operates well without purpose.
Now, this is the thing.
This is what everybody knows.
Everybody knows that what he just said is true.
Okay, and the reason everybody knows that what he just said is true is it's because it's the intellectual atmosphere in which we live.
About a month and a half ago, I read a book called The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science by E.A. Burt.
Now, I can't recommend this book because I didn't think it was that well written, but it's considered a classic.
And what he does is he takes the first real scientists, guys like Galileo and Kepler and Copernicus, all these people, and he talks about how they jettisoned the idea of purpose from science because they needed not to be restrained by it in doing science, but that they didn't jettison it through logic.
They simply got rid of it so they could do the work they wanted to do, which was measure stuff.
They just wanted to measure stuff and they didn't want to talk about its purpose.
And that became a byword in philosophy.
You know, guys like David Hume would say, you can't know anything because we only know things by induction.
Well, yes, we know the sun rose yesterday and it rose today, but we don't know it'll rise tomorrow.
And it was nuts, and it totally skewed the trajectory of our philosophy until now we take it as given what this guy is saying.
But it was simply a fun, it was just a functional thing to do.
It was a thing they did not through logic, but they did it because it helped them with their work.
And the thing is, yes, you know, measuring the universe, you don't necessarily have to know about purpose.
Although, when you listen to the way people talk, scientists talk, and they talk about genes having information.
Well, having information is a purpose.
You know, that's the purpose of genes, is to transmit information.
You can't talk without purpose.
Listen to a mother with her child, and she'll say, Oh, you know, don't throw that.
That's not for throwing.
You know, the shoe is not for throwing.
You know, we don't throw things because we know things have a purpose.
And all I'm saying is, this guy, who's obviously a very bright guy, and I don't mean to call him a knucklehead, but he's a very bright guy and a student in philosophy.
He just assumes it.
He hasn't thought this through for himself.
And he ends up basically saying that our purpose is just kind of a myth that we make up.
And because of that, he is selling this idea of a purposeless universe without having thought it through himself.
And that's what I'm talking about.
We're going to say goodbye.
The Clavenless weekend is upon us.
I know.
I know who will be fired from the Trump administration this Clavenless weekend.
We do not know, but survivors will gather here on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We will end with stuff I like.
Aladdin is not afraid to take his girl on a magic carpet ride.
Crystal Clear World00:01:00
I can open your eyes.
Take you wander by wander over sideways and undergo or save your own daydream.
But now, from a way up here, it's crystal clear that now I'm in a whole new world with you unbelievable sight.