Ep. 367 dissects Boston’s chaotic protest—where Nazis, anti-fascists, and free-beer seekers clashed amid Trump’s botched "heal" tweet—while praising police for separating factions, unlike Charlottesville or Berkeley. Steve Bannon declares Trump’s presidency "over," launching a conservative resistance via Breitbart, but the host argues Trump’s "both sides" remark was accurate despite media outrage. Michael Knowles counters leftist comedy’s virtue-signaling with conservative humor’s self-deprecation, citing Seinfeld and Macdonald, while Andrew Clavin blames cultural division on materialism and smartphone isolation, not race. The episode ends by framing today’s conflicts as a collapse of post-war consensus, demanding a spiritual reboot. [Automatically generated summary]
Thousands gathered in Boston over the weekend for the most confusing protest ever held.
In what seemed to be a microcosm of the nation as a whole, no one at the protest knew what anyone believed.
They just knew that they themselves were paragons of virtue and hated everyone else.
There were Nazis supporting free speech, anti-fascists supporting fascism, and seven guys who were trying to get to the Red Sox game but stopped off at the protest to see if there was any free beer.
President Trump added to the confusion by tweeting that the country needed to heal, but he spelled heal H-E-E-L.
So no one knows what that was about.
Maybe something having to do with feet.
Your guess is as good as mine.
CNN's Jim Acosta tried to clear things up with a report from the scene saying, quote, look at me, I'm Jim Acosta.
I can stand on my head and wiggle my toes.
Look at me, look at me, look at me right now, unquote.
Acosta then played a video of himself shouting rude and ignorant questions at people without listening to their answers and offered to sell passers-by a home video entitled the Acosta Family Picnic starring Jim Acosta.
In one touching moment during the protest, white supremacists and anti-fascists joined together for the annual Worst People in the Country sing-along, singing, quote, we are the worst people in the country.
We wish we could write a song with clever lyrics or even words that rhyme, but we can't because we are the worst people in the country, unquote.
The nation's politics have become so confusing of late because unemployment, racism, and crime are at such low levels that no one knows what to complain about.
So they're just complaining about the first thing that comes to mind.
Statues, internet memes, and every blessed word out of Donald Trump's mouth.
As one protester put it, quote, personally, I don't have any real problems that couldn't be fixed by a good psychiatrist, but if I scream loudly enough, maybe I can make everyone hysterical about something, unquote.
Boston police, meanwhile, seem to have done a good job minimizing the violence at the rally, spreading out over the city in what they called Operation Keep These Knuckleheads from Hurting One Another.
As one officer put it, quote, I have never seen so many idiots gathered together in one place for no earthly reason.
It's like they held an aimless idiot convention in Philadelphia, and the people who were too stupid to find their way there came to Boston instead, unquote.
Not all of the protesters were terrible people, however.
One woman held up a sign saying we all have to love one another.
But then someone explained to her that that was never going to happen, so she went home and watched TV.
As CNN's Jim Acosta reported at the end of the day, quote, look at me, I'm Jim Acosta.
I can pat my head and rub my tummy at the same time.
I'm Jim Acosta.
Look at me, unquote.
Actually, everyone at the protest seems to have been saying pretty much the same thing.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Hunky-donkey, life is tickety-boo Birds are winging, also singing Hunky-donkey-dee-doo Ship-shaped, ipsy-topsy The world is a-biddy-zing It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, CNN just reported that Donald Trump is devouring the sun.
I didn't know that.
I just thought it was an eclipse, but apparently it's all Donald Trump's fault, and so is everything else.
They just reported that we'll now live in eternal darkness until Donald Trump resigns.
That's news from CNN.
Michael Knowles is with us today to talk about comedy.
He actually wrote an article with words in it.
He wrote an article with words in it.
I know, and they were the best words.
He knows all the best words.
So he wrote an article about comedy and why conservatives are funnier than leftists, which is certainly true here.
I know that.
But he's going to come on after the break, so you've got to subscribe if you want to see him, or you can come over to thedailywire.com and you can listen to him.
If you subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month, you can watch the whole show right on the site and be in the mailbag on Wednesday, have all your questions answered.
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You get it.
It's yours.
And it has leftist tears on it and in it.
Mine has leftist tears actually in it.
You know, the thing I get asked most about Michael Knowles, because he now has this great new show, The Michael Knowles Show, is how did Michael Knowles get a show?
And the answer is, we didn't use ziprecruiter.com, you know, because the way we hire people here is we kind of walk out in the street and say, does anybody want a show?
That's how I got my show, certainly.
And Knowles was the first guy to say yes.
But with ZipRecruiter, you can post your job to 100-plus job sites with just one click, and then their powerful technology efficiently matches the right people to your job better than anyone else.
That's why ZipRecruiter is different.
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It finds them.
In fact, over 80% of jobs posted on ZipRecruiter get a qualified candidate in just 24 hours.
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Go to ziprecruiter.com/slash daily wire.
Don't let Michael Knowles happen to you.
That would be terrible thing.
All right.
So the Clavin this weekend.
Oh, first, you know, I really have to add, just from that opening, we really have to give kudos to the Boston police because, you know, they separated the protesters.
Who knows what everybody believed?
They said it was a free speech rally, and then those people didn't show up, and then all the people who were said they were anti-fascist, but are they also anti-free speech?
I don't know.
They're all marching everywhere.
And they just kept people apart, and they had a big show of manpower.
So good for them, you know.
I mean, it's a little harder for people for police in places like Charlottesville, smaller towns, to marshal that kind of show of force.
But it's not so hard to keep these people apart.
And the reports from places like Charlottesville and Berkeley, California that the cops kind of stand down when the people they like are getting, the people they dislike are getting punched.
So I think that the good for the Boston cops for doing it right.
Steve Bannon did not make it through the Clavinless weekend.
So that is a genuinely interesting development.
I mean, Steve Bannon, you know, there are all these reports.
Steve Bannon, obviously, the guy who sort of informed Trump's view with that nationalism, that America first, build the wall.
You know, they say he's the guy who like pushed for things like the regulations cutbacks and the Gorsuch nomination.
And there's a real concern now that he's gone that Trump is basically surrounded by Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Gary Cohn, the senior economic advisor who was a Democrat, a Goldman Sachs kind of guy, Dina Powell, another senior advisor and another New York liberal, all these people, you know, these liberals who surround them, because Donald Trump has a lot of Democrat instincts.
He is basically a Democrat with a few conservative ideas.
And Bannon sort of informed him, informed his ideas with that populism, that loudmouth, you know, national economic populism.
So I was thinking, you know, is this a good thing for us or a bad thing?
Because the way the press always covers these things is, is it a good thing for Steve Bannon?
Is it a good thing for Donald Trump?
Who cares?
I just care about us.
I care about conservatives and conservatism.
And there is this worry with Trump.
The worry with Trump is that Trump sounds like a conservative, but he's not.
Same worry that I always say.
He sounds like a tough guy, but he's not really.
You know, he's just as prone to panic as anybody else in the country, the way the press, you know, the strength of the media in this country, the strength of the news media, the left-wing news media in this country, is making people in power panic.
Because the people don't always panic.
But it's getting people like after Charlottesville, oh my God, you know, he's a Nazi.
Trump is a Nazi supporting Nazis.
Bannon has to go.
They've been pounding.
Bannon has to go.
Bannon has to go forever because Bannon represents everything they dislike, even though Bannon's not that conservative either.
He's kind of a classical liberal.
He wants to tax the rich.
And, you know, his anti-free trade thing, I don't think anybody on the right, the real right, is actually against that.
Bannon is saying, well, now I'm going to war.
He said, first of all, he said, the Donald Trump presidency that we fought for and won is over.
So basically, he is saying that now Donald Trump, he says some good things still may come out of it, but Donald Trump is now just going to be at the hands of all the Democrats and liberals surrounding him and all the globalists.
That's their big thing, the globalists.
And Breitbart, he went back to the Breitbart site to lead the Breitbart site, and there's some talk of him trying to construct a conservative news network.
Immediately says, this is war.
This is war.
And what do they mean by that?
Are they going to war with Trump or are they going to war with all the people they think are telling Trump the wrong thing to do?
I mean, my experience of life, two things that I can tell you from my experience of life.
One, if you leave a power center, you've lost your power.
Like people always think, I'm going to leave and fight this from the outside.
That never works because once you're out of the power thing, nobody remembers you were even there.
In this case, it's a little different because Bannon's power was the Breitbart site once he got into the, and then his power was Trump in the race, in the campaign.
Once he got into the White House, he was just the guy at the end of the hall that nobody was listening to.
And with the good things that he did, the pushing for to make sure they really got conservative judges, pushing against the regulations, which after all are Trump's major accomplishments so far, with that came the Bannon of it all.
I mean, as I've always said, Bannon has never been anything but gracious and polite to me.
But everyone I know who knows him or has worked with him says that he goes off on them, that he's bullying, that he has a bad temper, that he is always at war doing battle with people.
I have seen a little bit of that.
And you can't have that in the White House all the time.
You know, you have to have, you can't have that chaos.
And what has happened, my view of the Trump presidency so far is that Trump is a guy, I keep saying this, nobody listens to this, but it is true.
Trump is a guy with deep, deep personality flaws.
Okay, yeah, I know.
Who knew, right?
But he is a guy who learns stuff.
And he started to learn how to wrangle the cats in the Congress.
And then his personality flaws took over.
And everybody, you know, the firing and the kind of chaos coming out of the White House generated by the White House, the big mouthism that scares all the little Republicans away because they're scared of the press and they go running for help.
That doesn't help get your agenda through the legislature, right?
It doesn't help get the Senate and the House to pass the bills you want them to pass.
So all the things that Trump can do, appointing judges, taking care of foreign policy, cutting back regulations, all those things that he can do, he can do, but he can't get any laws passed unless these people are with him.
And if he wants them to take risks, like Obama got the Democrats to take risks for his health care bill, he's got to have some personal power with the people or else they're just not going to listen to him.
And all this firing stuff, if he thinks firing people is going to get him any leeway with the Democrats, it's just not going to happen.
I mean, this is the one thing protecting us from a full Democrat Trump presidency is the Democrats hate him, and he hates people who hate him.
Adam Schiff, you know, he's the guy who's been hounding Trump over the Russian thing.
He's on the head on the House Intelligence Committee.
He's on Jake Tapper.
And listen, listen to whether he's going to be satisfied.
Tapper asks him, are there more people who need to be fired?
Yeah, basically everybody, including Trump.
You know, there's certainly a lot of people on the White House staff and NSC staff that shouldn't be there, people like Miller and Gorka and others, who not only, I think, represent the same thing that Steve Bannon did, but aren't capable of doing the job well.
So yes, I think there's more cleaning house that ought to take place.
But as I mentioned in that tweet, Jake, the more fundamental problem is at the very top.
I think what the president had to say about the demonstrations in Boston and elsewhere was perfectly fine, perfectly unobjectionable, but also perfectly inadequate after that debacle of a press conference he had supposedly on infrastructure.
You know, the real, I think, challenge and job for the chief executive in a country where race has always been such a difficult conversation is to do everything possible to bring our country together to help make us a more perfect union.
And what the president did this week was as if he stood on a line dividing the country and pushed to separate one American from another with all his might.
So was it Trump doing that or was it somebody else doing that?
You know, I mean, was it Trump really dividing the country?
Listen, I think I truly believe that Donald Trump blew, is blowing one of the great opportunities.
I said this during the primaries when I was saying that you shouldn't nominate Trump.
The reason I said you shouldn't nominate Trump, one of the many reasons, was that the press has spent its credibility.
CNN, the New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, they now, because of the way they covered Obama or failed to cover Obama, they now have no credibility.
The problem with Trump is he keeps walking into the punch.
So it's fun to watch him take the press on because the press is corrupt and weak and dishonest.
It's fun, but he doesn't do it as well as he needs to do it.
He doesn't do it with the kind of wit and witticism and wisdom that is required to do it.
But if you don't think, you know, there's a YouTube video going kind of viral.
It's getting a lot of press from a very beautiful young girl named Candace Owen, who has a YouTube series called The Myth of the Coon.
And she's, if you can't watch because for some reason you're not a subscriber or something like that, she's an absolutely gorgeous girl.
And she comes on and basically says, you expect me to panic.
Where's the panic really coming from?
National Underwear Traditions00:04:28
Just listen to a little bit of this.
I mean, there are, what, 6,000 Klansmen left in our nation.
You want me to actually process that as a legitimate fear every day when I wake up?
It's Donald Trump's fault that they're feeling energized.
It's Obama's fault that Black Lives Matter is violent.
Both of you children, to your room.
It's obviously the media's fault.
I mean, the media is creating this entire narrative, and it is crazy, absolutely crazy to me that people have not figured this out yet.
I mean, why do you think we didn't hear a single thing about David Duke, white supremacy, and the KKK the entire time Obama was in office?
Do you think that they were all hiding underground, waiting for the next white president, meeting by the light of the moon?
Do you really actually believe that they weren't still meeting, holding protests, having rallies and marches?
Maybe the media wasn't covering it.
Use your brain.
I mean, the media is literally simulating a reality right now, and it is fascinating to watch people fall for it over and over again.
Am I the only person in the world that relies on her own experiences to dictate what's going on in the world?
Maybe it's me.
Maybe I live in a bubble where black people and white people actually get along every day.
I mean, that's exactly right.
I mean, that is exactly right.
And I will prove it to you.
I will prove to you that it is the source of all the panic, the source of all the tension, the source of everything that's going on.
I mean, it is the media.
I will prove it to you in just a minute.
But first, first, we must talk about the fact.
We mustn't forget.
You know, everybody's talking about the eclipse.
Everybody's talking about all these events that are going on.
People forget to talk about the fact that it's National Underwear Month.
I mean, come on.
You know, these are our national traditions.
These are things that people have passed down from generation to generation and have looked at each other and said, why are you giving me this underwear?
And, you know, father has explained to son, mother has explained to daughter, because it is National Underwear Month.
This is the time when we should all gather together as one, no matter what color we are, no matter what religion are, and buy some underwear from me undies.
Me Undies are the best underwear.
They are such, they are so incredibly comfortable and they come in a zillion different colors and designs.
Always, when you go on their website, they always have new designs, funny designs, regular designs, all kinds of things for both men and women, specially designed.
Each pair is specially designed for both men and women.
I'm not going to go into too much detail about that.
I think that's just too much information.
But trust me, they are incredibly comfortable.
They are made from lensing micro-modal, a sustainably sourced, naturally soft fabric that's proven to be three times softer than cotton.
I have worn them.
I'm telling you, this is true.
Where did they get this?
They had some tree.
Where was it?
In Bavaria, Austria, some incredible new material.
And it actually naturally contains odor.
What was it?
Australia.
Was it Australia?
No, it was Austria.
Oh, well, who can tell that that?
They all look alike, those Austrians and Australians.
Anyway, they really feel good.
They're silky smooth.
A downright dreamy embrace of meundies.
And guess what?
All through National Underwear Month, you can try them risk-free.
You can go on until August 31st.
You can get 20% off your first pair plus free shipping at meundies.com.
M-E-U-N-D-I-E-S dot com slash Clavin.
Captain Clavin, how do you feel?
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm glad you asked me that question.
It's Clavin, K-L-A-V-A-N, meundies.com slash clavin, 20% off your first pair, meundies.com slash clavin.
And if you don't like them, they're free.
So all through August, National Underwear Month, while you're sitting around the National Underwear Tree singing underwear carols, you can get your meundies and try them for free.
We should probably break from Facebook and YouTube, which means if you want to hear the rest of the show, come on over to thedailywire.com.
But to see it, you have got to subscribe for your lousy 10 bucks a month.
Look at that.
What are you doing with it?
You're not doing anything with it.
It's sitting in your wallet.
it to us and we will entertain you and inform you as only we can.
Let me prove to you that this is pure, everything that has happened over the last week is pure media entirely.
Fractured History and Blame00:06:50
And this is granting that Donald Trump says things that sometimes go up my spine.
It's granting that he shouldn't have said, oh, they're wonderfully fine people on both sides, even though I know what he meant was on both sides of the issue of statues.
He doesn't have a feel for the fact that race has been a thorn in America's side.
Okay, all that is fine.
Here is the former president.
What was his name?
I can't remember his name because his legacy is now just a steaming pile of nothingness.
O'Bramy or something.
Brami.
O'Bramy, I think, O'Brami, yeah, something, Jack O'Brami, I think it was.
President Jack O'Brami.
The 2015 prayer breakfast.
I was at the prayer breakfast this year.
I talked about it on the show afterwards.
And it's this gathering together, this wonderful feeling, mostly Christian.
There are obviously rabbis there, and there are a couple of Muslims and all this, but it's mostly a Christian feel.
This is mostly still a Christian country.
And so Obama gets up, and this is after his policies have led to the rise of ISIS.
Now, ISIS is going nuts, and they were just slaughtering people, right?
Just atrocities like we haven't seen in a generation.
Truly, truly terrible, terrible things these terrible, terrible people are doing.
This is Obama's speech about this, okay?
Here's just some excerpts: We see ISIS, a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism, terrorizing religious minorities like the Yazidis, subjecting women to rape as a weapon of war, and claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions.
Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ in our home country.
Slavery.
And Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
This is not unique to one group or one religion.
There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency, that can pervert and distort our faith.
Now, let's compare this to what Donald Trump said at his press conference when he said they're nice people on both sides, blah, First of all, Trump was correct.
Okay?
He was correct in saying that both sides are to blame.
The Antifa people are violent thugs.
If you include Black Lives Matter, if you include the false narrative that Michael Brown was killed unjustly, all the cops were killed in Dallas, all the violent protests in Ferguson that burned the city to the ground, set that city back, all of these can be ascribed to left-wing violence.
And also, of course, now they call them Antifa.
They put the accent on the wrong syllable.
It's Antifa now beating up people in Berkeley when they come to speak, attacking people.
Even at this Boston rally, which, like I said, was really well handled by the cops.
The violence was left-wing violence.
It was people tearing down flags, people attacking people if they had short haircuts.
All right, what Obama said was wholly false, obviously.
I mean, yes, there were atrocities committed by Western Christians during the Crusades and by Muslims during the Crusades, but the Crusades were largely a defensive war against the onslaught of Islam, which was trying to wipe Europe off the face of the map as it had wiped Byzantine Rome off the face of the map, as it had been enslaving people for decades and centuries, coming in and raiding villages and taking people away to be slaves.
So that was nonsense.
Slavery, there were people who justified slavery in the name of the Bible.
There were also people, all the people, all the people who shut slavery down were religious people, Christian religious people.
So it's just like fractured history that Obama is spewing up there at a moment when ISIS, not 150 years ago, not 1,000 years ago, then, right then, was slaughtering and raping people, as I say, like we haven't seen since the Nazis.
Just absolute, absolutely an incredible statement.
Okay, now, here's my point.
Conservatives said everything about Obama after that event that liberals are saying about Trump now.
Okay, so there's no difference there.
The things that were going on in conservative circles were exactly the same.
We were just as outraged.
It was outrageous.
But the press, this enormous, enormous echo chamber, it was nothing to them.
Here's just an example from the Washington Post.
President Obama has never been one to go easy on America.
As a new president, he dismissed the idea of American exceptionalism.
America, he has suggested, has much to answer given its history in Latin America and the Middle East.
His latest challenge came Thursday at the national prayer breakfast at a time of global anxiety over Islamist terrorism.
Obama noted pointedly that his fellow Christians who make up a vast majority of Americans should perhaps not be the ones to cast the first stone.
Some Republicans were outraged.
And that's the difference right there.
It is not that we're facing a national crisis.
This is some Republicans were outraged.
And if CNN, if ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times said some Democrats were outraged by Donald Trump, then we could be having a conversation.
But we're not having a conversation.
We're having a panic.
And I'm going to get back to this at the end of the show.
When you think about what's happening in this country, the employment, unemployment is virtually gone.
Crime is still very low.
Some of Obama's policies worsened it.
And some of the left-wing policies in cities like Chicago and Baltimore have worsened it.
But it's still really low from its height in the 70s and 80s and 90s and part of the 90s.
It's really come down.
Racism, I'm sorry, but except in random instances in a country of so many hundreds of millions of people, racism is not a problem in this country.
Racism is not a problem.
If anything, it's white people who suffer from it because of affirmative action type things.
But I don't even believe that's a terrible, terrible problem.
You know, a real problem, the kind of problems that you have if you're in Sierra Leone at this moment or something like that.
This country is so much angrier than the level of its dysfunction that the anger is a dysfunction in and of itself, some of which, some of which is, I have to put, at the door of the press, but some of which, of course, they couldn't get away with what they're getting away with if it weren't being generated from within us as well.
Jerry Lewis: Comedy Giant00:05:28
So we're going to have Michael Knowles on talk about comedy, but since we're going to talk about comedy, we cannot ignore the fact that Jerry Lewis died.
And this is an amazing thing.
He died at 91.
Amazing thing.
I was talking to my son about it yesterday, and he was like, who's Jerry Lewis?
And that is how fleeting fame is.
I mean, what would that be like to most of the people listening to that show?
It would be like somebody saying, who was Madonna, who were the Beatles, something like that.
I mean, Jerry Lewis was immense, immense.
And if you don't, I mean, he came after the war, he was this antic Jewish comedian who played like basically a retard.
I mean, that's all, you know, all he could say, talking in his funny voice, and he did that, you know, would flail around.
And he linked up with Dean Martin, who was this kind of crooner of the Italian variety, you know, very much the sort of second generation of crooners, of American crooners, and with the sleek kind of lover boy Dean Martin and this.
What did Jerry Lewis describe their act?
He described it as a handsome guy and an ape or a handsome guy and a gorilla, something like that.
And they would do this lounge act, this act in nightclubs, where at the end of it, they would just start ad-libbing.
And it was like, people had never seen anything like it before.
And you can't find it.
There are no tapes of it because it was all live.
And once they got on TV, of course, it started to get curtailed, you know, because they couldn't curse and they couldn't do all the blue material they were doing.
But here is just, just to give you a flavor of it, because this is now we're talking like 1947 to 1957.
This is when the Martin and Lewis guys were huge.
But just to give you a flavor of it, here they are on a Bing Crosby Bob Hope television show.
Okay, so now that's the old generation.
And Crosby and Hope, who were themselves a comedy team in film, introduce the two of them, and Lewis and Martin come on.
And this is just a sliver of it.
A thing!
A Bing Crowdby!
Bing Red Me!
Here, fellow!
Boy!
Young man!
Here, innkeeper, find that boy!
Barbara!
Robert!
Here, fine lad, up there, walk him around for an hour.
Here, boy!
Come on!
Where did they come?
Where did they cut the strings off?
Hey, I'm being!
He's hiding, and I don't blame him.
Hell thank you right now.
Say that here.
What?
No, hell thank you.
He thought he was dirty.
Most of you are wondering why we masked you here tonight.
Well, let's get me out of this.
Well, rehearse your tune, and I'll tell the folks how happy we ought to be here.
I'd like to say that it certainly is a thrill being on this show, especially with cameras on.
Do you want to write a ton of them?
You know, Bing Crosby, obviously, who was at that spot an American icon, maybe one of the biggest.
He's like, boy, boy, come back on.
So it was this very antic stuff.
You cannot capture it.
After they had a massive acrimonious breakup, Martin and Lewis, I think it was around 57, 58.
And Lewis, they both went on and had these tremendous careers.
The idea was that Lewis, I can't remember whether it was Lewis was the talented one and Martin was not supposed to not be, but they both went on and had tremendous careers.
Lewis started to direct, not only make movies, but direct movies.
And he's an acquired taste.
It's like, I personally, like, I've never really gotten into him, but he made this one film called The Nutty Professor, which Eddie Murphy remade later with Lewis producing it.
But he directed this film in which he played this kind of shambolic, shambling, retarded-looking professor who does a Jekyll and Hyde thing, and he takes a drink and he turns into Dean Martin.
He turns into this buddy love, this lounge singer.
And it sort of worked out this thing, which was obviously a big deal in his head, where Martin had become his idol, you know, this sort of smooth, easygoing, non-Jewish guy who just fit in and all the women loved him.
The joke, of course, was that Dean Martin was a very strange guy and a kind of a misanthrope who ended up his life almost as a hermit, whereas Lewis was sleeping with every woman who came anywhere near him.
I mean, Lewis was actually the lover boy of the two of them.
So if you don't think he's had an effect, just take a look at Jim Carrey, Robin Williams.
Who else?
I mean, just about every Woody Allen directed his first film only when Lewis said he wouldn't do it.
They've all been affected.
He was at the heart of American comedy.
Again, an acquired taste, but truly, truly a giant in the field in terms of his effect.
And people have just completely forgotten him.
I got to say also a goodbye to Dick Gregory before we go to Knowles.
Dick Gregory, who was also a tremendous comic and one of the people in the 60s who came along and transformed comedy into comedy as we know it today.
You got to turn up the sound on this.
It's a little dim, but just take a listen to this.
Jimmy's Impact on Comedy00:15:00
This was shocking stuff in its time.
And Dick Gregory went on to become a civil rights activist from this podium.
I see any baseball player having troubles.
But that's a great sport for my people.
That is the only sport in the world where a Negro can shake a stick at a white man and won't start no riot.
Of course, now, don't get me wrong now.
We're doing all right.
Well, at the rate we're going ten years from now, you might have to be my colour to get a job.
See, let's face it, they're not making man pan for nothing.
Me right, I'll get in there and raise taxes on you.
I mean, now don't get me wrong.
I wouldn't mind paying my income tax if I knew it was going to a friendly country.
And we have a lot of racial prejudice up north, but we're so clever with it.
Take my hometown, Chicago.
I mean, you can't see it just going in there.
When Negroes in Chicago move into one large area and it looked like we might control the votes, they don't say anything to us.
They have a slum clearance.
He was the first guy you saw in the audience who were white people.
He was the first black comedian who really appealed to white people with that kind of humor, making fun, because that was when white people were starting to take on board.
Have we got Knowles?
Knowles, you irrepressible rascal.
How you doing?
I'm doing well.
So you wrote an article with actual words in it.
I'm as shocked as any of you.
It was actually, it was quite good.
If I had known that you could write like that, I'd have read your first book.
It is amazing because I got the show because I published a blank book.
And then I also was asked to write this article by The Point Magazine because of my blank book, which there does not seem to be any correlation between those two things, but in any case, glad I could write it.
Yeah, no, and it actually was gracefully written and almost intelligent.
I was shocked.
I thought this is just different Michael Knowles.
But your basic premise is that most great comedy now is actually on the right.
And I know, of course, I knew you were referring to me.
You didn't mention me.
I don't think I was heard.
Oh, they must have left it out or something.
I'll call the editor and I'll give him a call.
Yeah, please.
But do you think that's true?
Do you think that the right is actually the funnier side at this point?
Yeah, that is certainly true.
And I think if you look at popular comedy now, you'd have to conclude that.
You could even ask Jerry Seinfeld, no strong right-winger, no conservative himself.
He won't play college campuses because the kids are too PC there.
But there's also a distinction to be made.
I think conservatives are funnier.
It's hard to identify conservative comedians because they want to work.
They need to keep their heads down.
There's no question about it.
Exactly.
You can at least identify non-leftist comedians, comedians, like I think of Norm McDonald as an example of this.
I don't know that he's conservative.
I don't know that he's a Buckleyite, but he's certainly not a leftist.
And he's the best comedian around.
Dennis Miller is another example of that.
Jim Norton.
Other guys who just aren't.
And Louis C.K., his latest Netflix thing, has some stuff about abortion that really blew my socks off.
And by the way, just to mention that Jerry Lewis was also, he was a Trump supporter and a Reagan supporter as well.
Now I might finally like him.
I'm with you.
He never appealed to me.
So I think that that is true.
I think they are funnier.
But more importantly, I think that the sense of humor in the country resides entirely on the right.
I remember one time you had said that you were asked why conservatives aren't funny, and you said it's because leftists don't have a sense of humor.
Yeah, that's why we're not funny is because they won't laugh at themselves.
Exactly.
And that, I think, is it.
I think that comedy essentially requires truth and hope.
I think that there has to be those two elements.
I think it's evident from Henny Youngman's one-liners, Take My Wife Please, all the way up to Dante's comedy where you begin in the pit of hell and you ascend all the way up to heaven.
And I think you need truth and hope.
And I, you know, nobody ever says he's expressing what we're all feeling.
People say he's saying what we're all thinking because it's funny because it's true, right?
And on the left these days, not only do they despair, not only do they not have hope because of their materialist worldview, but they deny truth altogether.
Well, but I think you make a point that is if what you are saying is not true, but simply virtue signaling, then somebody who makes fun of it is not just attacking your ideas, he's attacking your very self.
You know, he's attacking who you, your virtue, basically.
That's exactly right.
And so you can't, there's nothing outside of you.
There's nothing that you can stare at and laugh at as an absurdity.
Rather, it is attacking you.
And also, if you're simply virtue signaling, if you're constructing these fantasies, if you refuse to acknowledge the tragic fact of life, the fallen nature of the world, then you can't tell a joke about it because people aren't seeing what you're pretending to see.
We all have eyes, we can all see the world, and you can only pretend for so long.
But you also mentioned, I mean, in my memoir, which does have words in it, I just want to say, you know, I'm not comparing, not competing, but I just want to say.
I'm trying to work my way up.
You've written all these books with words.
I've written like four pages.
So I'm going to try to slowly but surely work up to that.
But in my book about my conversion, The Great Good Thing, I talk about the fact one of the things I talk about was that the comedy at the heart of the tragic world convinced me that we were fallen, that we were in a fallen state, that there was something better that we knew we could be that makes it funny when we suck.
It's like when we are evil, when we sin, we're like a guy in a tuxedo who's slipped on a banana peel and fallen into a puddle because we know we're meant to be closer to the angels.
And Ronald Reagan echoed this exact point.
It's in a poem that he wrote when he was 17.
I saw a copy of it up at the Reagan Library.
But the poem's called Life, and it says, I wonder what it's all about and why we suffer so when little things go wrong.
We make our life a struggle when life should be a song.
And it goes on and echoes a point that you've made before, which is that suffering and sin would be funny if not for the pain of it, if not for the suffering.
Because it is an absurdity.
And even I think Shakespeare gets to this as well.
When Hamlet is feigning madness, he says that he's lost all of his mirth.
I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth.
And it appears to, he's feigning madness here.
It appears to me what Shakespeare is saying, no less a comedian than Shakespeare, is that hope inheres in truth.
The sign of sanity is not despair and anger, but it's delight, it's joy.
And we see that in people who don't have this left-wing, materialist, reductive worldview.
I think it's easier to laugh at the world even when you're looking at painful things.
You know, it really is.
You know, before you came on doing some show prep, I was looking at all the comedians out there.
And of course, one of the things that I'm really, it really bothers me is that we have all these late-night comedians, and every single one of them is an anti-Trump left-winger, every single one.
And when Jimmy, was it Jimmy Kim?
No, not Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, right, who was nice to Donald Trump, they basically browbeat him into apologizing for it.
And when you look at them and you see what they do, Stephen Colbert, who can be, used to be pretty funny, just making fun of us, making fun of right-wingers, but he was funny.
He does this thing now where it's basically it's all F you Donald Trump.
It's just that's over and over and over again.
And then the crowd goes wild.
What a radical thing you've said.
What an amazing breakthrough in comedy styling that you would tell the president of the United States, F you, like such creativity and language.
Such creativity, the use of language.
And you just think, like, really?
You know, how do you sleep at night doing that kind of stuff?
It's not even good blue material.
You know, it's just bad stuff.
And I think now he used to be funny during the Obama years because he had his old show where he was playing a character and because we could laugh at him and therefore laugh at ourselves.
But there's something when, because politics takes on such a religious fervor, for I suppose some people on the right, but I think predominantly for the left, they just can't laugh.
So everything is amped up.
We saw this under Bush, too.
Everything becomes mean and hysterical and unfunny.
Whereas when they have their president and they can basically take a breather, they have the time and the brain space to make a joke and laugh at themselves.
Yeah, well, as long as they're not laughing too much at their own ideas.
Exactly.
All right, Michael Knowles, the host of the Michael Knoll show, because, as I explained, we didn't use ziprecruiter.com.
So I was wondering, I was just so happy you were walking around outside that lunatic asylum, because otherwise, I don't know where someone would have found it.
The show is great, and I'll talk to you later.
Thanks, Cuigamio.
It's time for our crappy culture.
Yeah.
So, you know, here's the thing that I wanted to get back to about where we're at.
And it's actually what Knowles was talking about, too.
The incredible amount of anger in our culture and the incredible division comes at the same time as the economy is doing well.
People are not racist like they used to be.
There's always going to be racism in the world.
People are people, and there's always going to be that stuff around.
And I'm sorry for it.
It makes my heart hurt to see it sometimes, especially when it hurts little people.
It is always the worst thing when it hurts kids and all this stuff.
But it's always going to be around.
The country is actually, you know, we're not at war.
We're not, the crime rate is down.
Whence comes this incredible rage that everybody seems to be feeling and that the press is ginning up.
And what that YouTube lady was talking about is when you live your ordinary life, I mean, I live in LA.
Everybody is every different color here.
I'm always everywhere that I go out.
You know, I don't see, I never walk into a room that's all black people or all white people or all anybody.
We're all here together.
People are gracious.
People are kind to one another.
People talk to one another.
You know, that is the real life of America.
And yet, in the press and in our politics, this rage that has just been brewing and brewing, not just for four, seven months, but for eight years, for 15 years at least.
Recently, very recently, it has come out that the second leading cause of death in young adults is suicide.
That is an incredible statistic.
Most young people, if they die, die by accident.
I mean, car crashes, things like that.
But suicide is not the second leading cause of death.
So you're a young person.
You've got everything to look forward to.
You've got the whole world in front of you.
And you're killing yourself.
You're off in yourself.
And sometimes as people look at it, with no particular reason, it's not that they're bullied.
It's not that they're transgender.
It's not that it's any of the things that the press likes to bring forward.
And of course, when there's an epidemic like this, an epidemic of suicide, everybody likes to blame what they don't like.
Oh, it's all because of television shows that I dislike.
It's all because of this.
It's all because we're at war with Islam or something like this.
Here's a woman named Jean Twinge, a psychology professor at San Diego State, who wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, I've been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology.
Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually and along a continuum.
Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so.
But she says, around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states.
The gentle slopes of the line grass became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the millennial generation began to disappear.
I had never seen anything like it.
And she talks about what happened then.
Well, of course, 2012 was part of, was after the Great Recession, which lasted officially from 2007, 2009.
But she said the one thing that happened at that time was the proportion of Americans who used a smartphone surpassed 50%.
And she says that young people now are so isolated by their smartphones that they are now living in a world of loneliness.
And it's a world that has benefits for parents too, because if you're not outside, you're not going to get attacked.
You're not going to fall off your bike and kill yourself.
You're not going to get hit by a car.
If you're inside looking at your screen, you are physically safe, but you're not spiritually safe because even your relationships with other people have ceased to be relationships one-on-one.
And I think this goes hand in hand myself.
I wrote a piece this week.
When I finished it, I thought there's a piece that everyone is going to ignore, you know, because it was a piece.
I really reject racism as a philosophy.
I mean, forget about all the hate and all this stuff.
As a philosophy, I really don't believe that race divides us.
I don't believe that there are serious differences in race.
I believe there are no moral differences in the races.
I don't believe that the genetics over time has real effect.
I believe everything is ideas.
I don't believe that we're physical creatures.
I believe what's important about us is our minds.
I mean, the idea that, you know, we try so hard to make everything materialistic.
We say the problem with Islam is that the young men don't have jobs.
The problem with Islam is the ideas in Islam.
It's what the ideas do to the human soul.
And if you don't have the idea that another person is a soul, another person that you're talking to somebody eternal who really exists in ways that you can't see, then their opinions just become things to you.
They don't become expressions of that soul.
They just become things that get in your way.
And when you're talking to people through a screen all the time and never looking into somebody else's eyes, it becomes easy.
You know, one of the reasons I don't go on Twitter, I'm on Twitter a lot, but I don't go on Twitter and yell at people.
I don't call people names.
I mean, the harshest thing I ever say is that somebody is a knucklehead.
And when I say that, I'm talking to somebody with power.
I'll say that to Rolling Stone magazine or something like that, but I won't say it to an ordinary person who disagrees with me.
I never do it, is because I remember that on the other side of the screen there is another human being, another soul, who may have problems that I don't think about at all.
I think this division, this isolation, this idea that we are bags of chemicals sparked with electricity instead of spiritual beings, eternal spiritual beings, has really broken us.
It has really broken us.
And we're screaming at one another over statues.
Screaming at Statues00:00:59
Because why not?
If all we are is material, we're all statues.
We're screaming at each other over statues.
We're screaming at each other over, you know, whether Donald Trump condemned something enough, whether he said the exact right words.
This is what we're screaming about.
And yes, the press is to blame.
Yes, CNN is to blame.
The media is to blame.
But there's something in us that has lost the plot of what it means to be a human being.
And I think these kids killing themselves are part of that.
That is our crappy culture.
And it certainly is crappy.
But we are here to fix it.
That is why each one of us has come and each one of us will do our part and we will turn it around.
We really will.
I don't think this is the end at all.
I think this is the end of something.
I really do think it is the end of the post-war consensus.