Ep. 378 – Freedom’s Greatest Enemy pits Andrew Clavin and Michael Knowles against what they call a "war on truth"—mocking Colin Kaepernick’s protests as flag disrespect, blaming Hollywood elites like Clooney for alienating Trump voters, and dismissing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 excuses as delusional. They frame 9/11 as an unapologetic "atrocity" crushed by modern PC lies, praising Trump’s defiance of media and DeVos’ rollback of campus activism policies while attacking "virtue-signaling" over free speech. The episode boils down to a clash: freedom demands raw honesty, not performative outrage or establishment complicity. [Automatically generated summary]
Today is the anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center, the murder of 3,000 people in the name of Islam.
16 years later, we'll be talking about what is the greatest threat to liberty today.
Also, we'll talk about that wild Steve Bannon interview and how much do Hollywood stars hate you?
A lot.
Michael Knowles, the king of trolls, will tell us all about it.
But first, NFL football is back.
And many football players are protesting something or other by showing disrespect for the American flag.
Colin Flapperjack, or whatever his name used to be, is still refusing to stand up for the national anthem, though he can now refuse in the comfort of his own sofa since no one will hire him to play since he refuses to stand up for the national anthem.
Also, it may have something to do with the fact that his girlfriend issued some loony manifesto demanding that white people give all their property to black people.
Maybe someone should explain to her that whether you're white or black, people only give you stuff when you do a little something called work, which by the way, doesn't include issuing loony manifestos.
Anyway, despite the fact that football players are paid millions of dollars to throw a ball around and knock each other down, which, let's face it, is what most guys wish they were doing most of the time, many players still feel the need to dishonor the flag by refusing to stand up during the national anthem.
This is a protest against something, but I don't care what, because they're dishonoring the flag by refusing to stand up during the national anthem.
Now, don't get me wrong.
Each and every one of these millionaire men has the right to dishonor the flag for the simple reason that other men who mostly weren't millionaires fought and died to protect the flag.
Call me a crazy jingoist hyperpatriot, but that right there seems like a good reason to honor the flag, since it seems possible to me that each of the men who fought and died protecting the flag might have preferred to not die, but instead to be a millionaire throwing a ball around, or even a thousandaire taking a quiet walk with his wife from time to time.
But instead they died, trying to make sure that that flag would still be there so millionaire football players would have the right to dishonor it by not standing up for the national anthem to protest something, but who cares what?
The National Football League is not entirely happy that some of the young men they've turned into millionaires are dishonoring the flag by refusing to stand for the national anthem.
Because oddly enough, some of the people who used to enjoy watching football and going to football games don't enjoy it so much when it dishonors a flag for which their sons or the sons of people they know or the sons of people they've never met have fought and died.
Now, me personally, I love football.
And I know our country is not perfect because it has people in it.
And whenever you let those idiots in, perfection goes out the window.
And I recognize a millionaire's right to protest something or other, who cares what.
But here's a pro tip for football players.
Stand up for your flag because you have the right not to.
And it was bought at a price.
Knuckleheads.
Obamacare and Outsiders00:15:06
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hip-sy-topsy, the world is zippity zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, I'll fix it.
A likely, a likely story.
See, this is because we didn't use ZipRecruiter, guys.
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Everything would just be going great.
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It's because they don't want their place to look like this.
Oh, it's on fire.
Right now, my listeners can post jobs on ZipRecruiter for free.
That's right, free.
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That's ziprecruiter.com/slash daily wire, all one word, daily wire.
One more time to try it for free.
Go to ziprecruiter.com/slash daily wire.
Don't let this happen to you.
All right.
All right.
The great troll of trolls, Michael Knowles, is going to be here to discuss Hollywood stars.
They just hate us.
They hate us so much.
We should begin with a quick shout out to Florida, the people in Florida and Houston, I know, still suffering.
The big storm hit.
You know, and the storm, by the time it reached the Florida coast, it was downgraded to a tropical storm.
And people are picking on Rush Limbaugh because Rush Limbaugh said, you know, basically the deep state and the media and the left use these storms to promote their climate agenda.
And they made it sound as if Limbaugh, who is in Florida, he knows what a hurricane looks like.
They made it sound as if he was saying that this hurricane was a conspiracy of the left, which is not at all.
I happened to be listening when he went into this thing.
It's not at all what he was saying.
All he was saying was that they use this weather.
You know, there haven't been hurricanes.
There really hasn't been a bad hurricane for 10 years or so.
So all this stuff that Al Gore is a prophet, it's like you have to wait around a long time before these prophecies come true.
And I have worked in the news business when a hurricane was coming.
This is a true story.
I worked at a radio station, WOR.
A hurricane was on the way to hit New York City.
They were telling us, scare people, scare people.
It makes people listen.
Scare them, scare them, scare them.
And so I started to scare them.
I got scared.
I was calling my wife saying, tape up the windows, tape up the windows.
And of course, we got a little rain and it passed on.
So there is economic reasons and political reasons why they promote these hurricanes beyond what they are.
And of course, you do want people to be safe.
You don't want them to take chances.
Steve Bannon, that was like, I found that a really fascinating interview at 60 Minutes yesterday.
And the most interesting thing about it to me was not the information, but it was the dynamic because Bannon sort of represents the MAGA Trump that Sebastian Gorka.
Yeah, sorry, Sebastian Gorka was talking about on the show a couple of days ago.
This Trump who comes in with this economic nationalist agenda, who is against all flags, who doesn't represent the mainstream Republicans, doesn't represent the mainstream Democrats, and never, ever, ever apologizes to the press.
And the thing that got me so much was he was interviewed on 60 Minutes by Charlie Rose, who I just think is an overrated nothing, basically.
I mean, the guy is a nothing burger, and he has gotten away with this kind of intellectual patina that is just not deserved.
You know, he doesn't deserve it.
Let me just play one clip of Rose asking Bannon about DACA, okay?
This thing with the illegal immigrants.
And just listen to the question.
This is cut five.
America was in the eyes of so many people, and it's what people respect America for.
You've been able to come here, find a place, contribute to the economy.
That's what immigration has been in America, and you seem to want to turn it around and stop it.
You could be more dead wrong.
America was built on her citizens.
We're all immigrants.
America was built on her citizens.
Don't give me.
This is the thing of the leftist, Charlie.
That's beneath you.
The thing is, it's not beneath him, it's his entire career.
You know, every word that Charlie Rose just said is untrue.
This is why people respect us.
That's not why people respect us.
They respect us because we come over to their country when Nazis attack them and kill the Nazis.
That's why they respect us.
They respect us because we're free and big and rich and it works.
The freedom works, you know.
And these are not immigrants, these are illegals.
These people came in illegally.
It's about the rule of law and, by the way, a photographer on twitter pointed out today that if you look at the the drapes behind each of these principles, they're they're the same color in real life, but they're different colors as they put them out there and the way they colorized the Bannon section of the interview made Bannon look terrible.
Now, Bannon's not.
You know he looks a little dissipated, but he look, has these red eyes and he looks like his skin is falling off.
And then, when they go over to Rose, suddenly everything is softened and everything is much different.
So the whole thing was, was that kind of press and Charlie Rose the, the look of sorrow on his?
You know that look of?
You know we're a nation of immigrants.
What you know?
What is he talking about?
You're talking about laws that are being passed and that an unconstitutional executive order in this case.
Why are they not asking those questions?
This is the kind of thing.
This is the kind of thing that makes Trump and guys like Bannon look so good Bannon.
He asked Bannon about Uh, Trump's twitter feed.
This is cut one.
Listen to Bannon's answer.
Listen to the way he treats Rose and the media.
I think what he does on twitter is extraordinary.
He disintermediates the media.
He goes above their head and talks directly to the American people.
It's not a question of going over the head of the America, over the head of the media.
It's what he says.
It's what he says.
No, it's what he says that you deem that, that the mainstream media, the pro-clutching, the pro-clutching mainstream media.
Yeah, the pro-clutching mainstream media.
What they deem is not correct, what they deem is not right.
No, it's not a question of being right, it's not right.
It's what's appropriate, what it's a question.
It's what you deem.
It's a question of whether it's in his interest.
That's the point.
I think, not the appropriateness of it.
Okay, I don't think he needs.
I don't think he needs the Washington POST and the NEW YORK Times and CBS NEWS, and I don't believe he thinks that they're looking out for what's in his best interest.
Okay, he's not going to believe that.
I don't believe that and you don't believe that?
Okay, this is another standard and judgment that you reign upon him in the effort to destroy Donald Trump.
He knows he's speaking directly to the people who put him in office when he He uses Twitter.
And if sometimes it's not in the custom and tradition of what the opposition party deems is appropriate, you're absolutely correct.
It's not.
And he's not going to stop.
So it was, you know, it's amazing to me that Charlie Rose can sit there with his face hanging out and say, you know, oh, it's not in the president's best interest.
And Bannon is exactly right.
Charlie Rose doesn't care about the president's best interest.
He doesn't care.
Every question that Charlie Rose asked was a setup.
He douged around.
He asked him when Bannon said that the Russia investigation was total nonsense.
Rose kept saying, but did the Russians try to affect the election?
The Russians try to affect every election.
And guess what?
We try to affect all of their elections.
What does that got to do with Donald Trump?
And, you know, the entire investigation has been run that way.
Whenever Trump says, Trump says, I didn't have anything to do with this.
Trump says he had nothing to do with Russia, but he had a business deal going on with Russia.
What's that got to do with anything?
He's a businessman.
Of course he had business deals going on in Russia and every place else.
Everything about this interview was a setup, including the color changes.
And Bannon, I have to say, Bannon's basic, his saying about himself is from that YouTube video about the Honey Badger, Honey Badger Don't Care.
I think they say it a little more impolitely than that, but it's Honey Badger Don't Care, and it was a viral video, and it's very funny.
And that's what's being communicated here.
And that's why even in this, which is edited by 60 Minutes, edited by CBS News, Bannon rips these guys apart because we all feel this way.
We're all just waiting for someone to play Honey Badger to the media.
Now, in terms of the meat of the interview, it was kind of interesting because he goes after the GOP pretty, pretty hard.
And he has this thing where he talks about them trying to nullify.
I'm not sure what number cut this is.
He tries to get them to seven.
Yes.
Go to seven.
The Republican establishment is trying to nullify the results of this election.
The Republican establishment is trying to nullify the 2016 election.
That's a brutal fact we have to face.
The Republican establishment.
The Republican establishment wants to nullify the 2016 election.
Trying to nullify the 2016 election.
Absolutely.
Who?
I think Mitch McConnell, to a degree, Paul Ryan.
They do not want Donald Trump's populist economic nationalist agenda to be implemented.
It's very obvious.
It's obvious as night follows day.
Give me a story that illustrates that.
Well, Mitch McConnell, when we first met him, I mean, he said, I think in one of the first meetings in Trump Tower with the president as we're wrapping up, he basically says, I don't want to hear any more of this grain the swamp talk.
Flat out.
He goes, a guy up on Capitol Hill can't buy a Coke unless it's got to be reported.
He says, I can't hire any smart people because everybody's all over him for reporting requirements and the pay, et cetera, in the scrutiny.
You know, you got to back off that.
So he puts the establishment GOP as the enemy here, and he then blames them.
He blames them for the failure to repeal Obamacare.
He basically says they came in and made all these promises that even they didn't know they couldn't keep.
So this is cut number six.
And just he really goes after them, and it's a really interesting moment because of what he then says after this.
So listen to the way he blames the Republican establishment for dropping the ball on Obamacare.
The very first meetings we had with the Republican establishment, here was the plan that was laid out.
The plan was to do Obamacare because remember, Paul Ryan and these guys come in and said, we've done this for seven years.
We've voted on this 50 times.
We understand this issue better than anybody.
We know how to repeal and we know how to replace.
And this is ours.
That's where we're going to start with day one.
And we will have something on your desk by Easter.
By the Easter break, we'll do repeal and replace.
Come back from Easter and all the way up to the August break, taxes.
Come back from the summer break on Labor Day, and we drive home to the end of the year on infrastructure.
We accomplish all three big legislative goals in the first year.
They would take.
This is what the leadership in the House and Senate told you.
And we agreed to that was the deal.
So you're now blaming them for all of this.
I'm not blaming this for us.
What I'm saying is that when left to even repeal it in June in the Senate, they put up for a vote.
They only had 41 votes.
There is wide discrepancy in the Republican Party as we know today, now that we're in it.
But I will tell you, leadership didn't know that at the time.
They didn't know it to the very end.
And let me tell you about Obamacare.
There is something that's being worked on right now to fix Obamacare.
Fix Obamacare.
It does not totally repeal.
Hang on.
It does not totally repeal it.
We come to that where the choice is simply to fix Obamacare.
I think their choice is going to be you're not going to be able to totally repeal it.
Do you accept no responsibility for the failures of this administration?
When you say failures, it's eight months in.
Give me a failure.
But Obama didn't have Obamacare for the first 18 months.
I mean, that is a totally rational response.
I mean, there is something about this administration that's actually illustrated by what he was saying, that the whole idea of putting an outsider in there means that he's going to get rolled by the people who are there.
And Bannon makes the point that Trump went in thinking this is about people, but it's really about institutions.
It's really about the Senate and the Congress and all this and everybody protecting his power and that Trump didn't understand that and he thinks it's about who's your friends and nobody's your friend.
Now, this argument that they're making that the Republicans are the bad guys here is an argument that the right wing is very, very sympathetic to.
We on the right, and I'm one of the people on the right, we love to attack our guys.
We love to attack Paul Ryan.
He's wrangling cats in the House.
He's not doing a good job.
And I have problems with him, but that's not the thing.
We love to attack Mitch McConnell.
Where was he?
Why didn't he do this stuff?
But a lot of commentators, when Trump made this, when Trump made this deal with who I guess we have to now call them Chuck and Nancy, right?
Schumer and Pelosi, now they're our friends.
They're Trump's friends, Chuck and Nancy.
When he made this deal for the debt ceiling and the hurricane funding with them, a lot of people said, yeah, that's showing Ryan because Ryan's a rhino.
That's showing McConnell because McConnell's a rhino.
But of course, that doesn't make any sense because Chuck and Nancy aren't even rhinos.
They aren't Republicans, even in name only.
They are far, far left-wing Democrats.
And they are going to play Trump.
You know, they can make deals.
Look, Chuck Schumer is just as good a deal maker, if not better, than Donald Trump ever was.
He can write the art of the deal all he wants.
This is what Chuck Schumer does.
It's what Donald Trump does.
There's going to be tangling together, and Trump is not going to always win.
And he certainly doesn't look like he won in that deal.
But the one thing about this, and this idea that the always Trump people have that Trump is playing six-dimension chess, it's very hard for me to buy into.
But sometimes he does have this instinct.
He does have incredible instincts.
And making this deal with the Democrats did threaten to make the Republicans irrelevant.
And I think if they haven't panicked, there is a story.
Nasty Deals Gone Wrong00:03:55
It was on Politico.
Paul Ryan, GOP, will replace Obamacare, cut taxes, and fund wall by August.
Okay?
So House Speaker Paul Ryan on Wednesday outlined a packed legislative agenda for this year in which Republicans would repeal and replace Obamacare by April, fund Donald Trump's border wall shortly after that, and approve a sweeping tax reform package by August.
So they're sending a message back to Trump.
You know, we will do it.
We'll be there.
We'll be there for you.
And, you know, I was pretty hard on the conservatives in Congress last week, but it is true that in the end, they did vote.
They did get in the way a lot, and they did sort of say they were going to back things and then pull off.
But in the end, it was John McCain who blew the deal.
It was not the conservatives who blew the deal.
Anyway, my point about it is this, that Bannon's contribution to the Trump administration has been the lack of apology to a corrupt media.
It has been, you know, he says at one point, I don't care.
Bannon says at one point, I don't care what the media says.
They can call me racist.
They can call me sexist.
They can call me anything they want.
They can call me a nativist.
I don't care.
And that has been his contribution.
And I'm sorry to see it go because I think on the one hand, it may make Trump a nasty person sometimes, but sometimes it takes a nasty person to fight against a system in which non-nastiness is defined as leftism.
That is what the left and its media have accomplished.
They have accomplished niceness, kindness, decency to define it as leftism.
Don't use this word, use that word.
Don't support that policy, support this policy.
If you don't, you're hateful.
And that is something I'm going to talk about at the end of the show again because it is genuinely one of the key dangers against liberty.
And that has been the use of Bannon.
No matter what you think of him, and I have problems with him and things that I respect about him, but no matter what you think of him, his use has been to not apologize to the press and to encourage that in Trump, which I think is one of Trump's main assets, one of the things he really brings to the table that people love way beyond his policies, whatever they may be.
All right.
We're going to have Michael Knowles in a moment, but first, we have to talk about stamps.com.
And the reason we talk about stamps.com is it is the reason that I'm sitting here and not waiting online somewhere.
Because the post office does a good job, but it's ridiculous in this day and age, in this new century, to stop everything you're doing, get in your car, drive to the post office, hope that it's open, wait online, you know, get your services done when you can get it all done through your computer with stamps.com.
It's so convenient, so easy, and it's reliable.
You just put your envelope in the printer and it comes out with a stamp printed right on it.
Stamps.com brings all the services of the U.S. Postal Service right to your fingertips.
You can buy and print official U.S. postage for any letter, any package, any class of mail using your own computer and printer and stamps.com will even send you a digital scale that automatically calculates exact postage.
Right now, you can enjoy the stamps.com service with a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale without long-term commitments.
Go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in Clavin.
How do you spell that, Austin?
I don't.
What is he doing here?
See, we should.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N stamps.com.
Enter Clavin.
You will get a four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale without long-term commitments.
Stamps.com and enter Clavin.
You never have to go to the post office again.
Michael Knowles is coming on in just a moment, so we have to say, but we have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
And you may say to yourself, wait, wait, don't go.
Well, you can come over to thedailywire.com and listen to the rest of the show.
But if you would only subscribed, if you had only subscribed for a lousy 10 bucks a month, you could have watched the whole show on the site and see Michael Knowles' face.
I'm not sure if that's, is that an advertisement for subscribing?
Actors Preaching Politics00:15:45
No, it's kind of a bad, it's a drawback.
All right, well, how about this?
If you subscribe for a year, it's only 100 lousy bucks, and you get the leftist tears tumbler complete with leftist tears.
It automatically refills every time Donald Trump makes a speech.
Come on over to TheDailyWire.com.
Listen to the rest of the show.
All right, Michael Knowles, the host of The Michael Knowles Show, former cultural correspondent and current king of trolls.
How you doing?
I'm doing very well.
And I, you know, thank you for bringing him up my old title, Cultural Correspondent, because you got to tune into my show.
We have this great new cultural correspondent, anti-millennial.
We're going to bring him back.
You got to check him out.
He's a breath of fresh air with a light, you know, only youth, only the power of youth.
It's true.
These things that you and I don't understand, you know, like Canasta and polka dancing, you know, all the things that the young people are doing these days.
It's true.
Young folks these days.
So I've been watching Hollywood just had one of the worst summers ever.
And the worst Labor Day, I think, ever.
They didn't even release a new movie for Labor Day, but I have been sitting watching, as a guy who has actually worked quite a lot in Hollywood.
I have been sitting and watching the stuff that is coming out of movie stars' faces with absolute shock and disbelief.
So I just wanted to do a roundup of what these guys are saying about the rest of us, the people of us who aren't glamorous and don't make a gazillion dollars for 20 minutes of work.
First of all, what happened this summer?
It was a disaster, right?
It was an absolute disaster.
And Drew, as a guy who's worked very little in Hollywood, I must say I've watched it with pure delight and joy.
It has been, it is awful.
This summer has been the worst box office in a decade.
Wow.
Summer box office is down.
It's $3.8 billion just this summer.
It's a 14.5% drop since last summer.
And year over year, it's a 6.5% drop.
Because there were a lot of big movies that came out in the winter and in the spring.
You had Beauty and the Beast, Fate of the Furious, Get Out, which is probably the only original movie that's come out all year.
It was actually one of the best.
It was a great movie.
But otherwise, the summer has been absolutely awful.
And I really wonder why.
I wonder what's keeping regular Americans away from the movies.
So I thought that we would turn to Jennifer Lawrence for comment.
It's also scary to know it's been proven through science that human activity, that climate change is due to human activity.
And we continue to ignore it.
And the only voice that we really have is through voting.
And you have those.
And we voted, and it was really startling.
You know, you're watching these hurricanes now, and it's really, it's hard, especially while promoting this movie, not to feel Mother Nature's rage.
Scientists like Professor Lawrence to tell us how global warming Man May Global Warming has been proven by, you know, science.
And the sheer mockery that she's made.
The vitriol she has for her own audience who are swimming down the street in Houston right now.
It makes one wonder why they haven't been able to make it to the box office to see Mother yet.
It's quite amazing.
And by the way, Christian Toto, our friend, the critic at Hollywood and Toto, he tells me that Mother actually has an eco message that they're not promoting in the trailers.
They're hiding it, but it has this eco-message, you know, slap in the face for everybody.
So I'm glad that she's telling us it's our fault that there are hurricanes.
And it is frustrating, too, because there's a great cast in that movie.
All of them are very talented actors.
And I don't want to go see it now.
I'm glad Christian told us about the eco-message because I don't want to pay $15 to nap.
But also, I don't want to support this nonsense.
So we know that Hollywood holds us in contempt, these actors, because you got to remember, actors are weird people.
They're marginalized people.
They were weirdos in high school.
They were weirdos after high school in conservatory or college.
They feel persecuted, even though the ones who make it are the most glamorous, wealthy people on planet Earth.
So we know they hold us in contempt.
But the other thing we learned this summer is that they lie right to our faces.
Here is Kathy Griffin.
You remember Kathy Griffin held up that severed head of Donald Trump, and then she apologized and there were the tears.
Here's the latest from Kathy Griffin.
You were very sorry at the time.
You apologized.
You were very upset.
Are you no longer sorry for it?
Correct.
I'm no longer sorry.
The whole outrage was a BS.
The whole thing got so blown out of proportion.
And I lost everybody.
Like, I had Chelsea Clinton tweeting against me.
I had friends.
Deborah Messing from Will and Grace tweeting against me.
I mean, I lost everybody.
It was Deborah Messing and Chelsea Clinton.
You have lost the world.
But I love dude.
She's like, she's protesting.
But I gave my fake apology.
I ginned up my fake tears.
And you monsters wouldn't accept them.
So we know they hold us in contempt.
We know that they lied to us.
And we know that there's a wonderful double standard.
Here is Stephen Colbert, ladies and gentlemen.
He's definitely taking it to a higher level.
I'd say his support is about up there, right around here.
For those who don't subscribe, he's making a high litter.
He's doing the Nazi salute.
And he's making a joke.
I get it.
What's the big deal?
Except that only recently, Donald Trump supporter Jeffrey Lord was fired from CNN for making a similar joke on Twitter about the Nazism of his opponents.
It was the exact same joke.
Someone tweeted some fascistic thing at him, and he said, Zig Heil, he lost his job for it, but Stephen Colbert gets to go out.
And the Pies de la Resistance, the creme de la creme, the top of the heap, here is George Clooney laying out the whole Hollywood case against regular Americans.
You guys are pretty interesting, though.
They've actually figured out the laws that dictate everything: history, sociology, politics, morality, everything.
It's all in a book called Capital with a K. All right.
You're not going to believe this.
These guys even figured out what's going on here at the studio because the studio is nothing more than an instrument of capitalism.
It's actually a little too real.
I was going to say, the scene where that guy slaps George Clooney may be one of my favorite scenes in recent movies.
I don't know how the Cohen brothers got George Clooney to play George Clooney, but this is exactly him.
It was really good.
And he went on, he just recently said of Steve Bannon: he said, quote, Steve Bannon's a little wannabe writer who would do anything in the world to have had a script made in Hollywood.
He wrote one of the worst scripts I've ever read, and I've read it.
His fake Shakespeare rapped script about the LA riots.
Oh, you got to read it.
And he's making fun.
I don't know.
Steve Bannon might be a failed writer for all I know.
But he's not speaking to Steve Bannon.
He's speaking through Steve Bannon to the American people.
And he's telling them, You little people, you disgust me.
You're nothing.
Look at me.
We are the kings of the world.
We are Hollywood, and you wish that you could be us.
The two things that shock me about this, there are two things that shock me about it.
One is, you know, these guys live like kings on our favor, on our favor.
You know, the club, the Garrett Club in London, is the club for actors.
And its slogan is an old quote that we, what is it, we who live to please must please to live, right?
So these guys, every time they open their mouths, are telling 40 million people, don't come to our movies, we hate you.
Don't, you know, everything you do, it discusses we hate you.
And the other thing is that it never occurs.
And George Clooney's not a stupid man.
I mean, he is, you know, some of these actors I know are dopes.
I mean, you know, I deal with you.
I know what actors are.
But no, Clooney is not a stupid man.
But it never occurs to him that a factory worker in Michigan may know more about what he needs politically and may know more about what's wrong with his life than a movie actor in Los Angeles who hasn't done anything real for 20 years.
I mean, it doesn't occur to him to have any respect for the people who voted for Donald Trump saying, yeah, I can see.
It's not as if Donald Trump was running against Abraham Lincoln.
Donald Trump was running against the guy Kurt Schlichter calls Felonia Pantsuit.
You know, I mean, he was running against a criminal.
So, you know, it's just, it's just an incredible amount of disrespect for the audience.
And there are two sides of this.
There's the celebrity side.
Obviously, we worship celebrities, and I gave us Barack Obama and also Donald Trump.
And so there's this outsider's role that people who, like actors, were once lumped in with prostitutes for all of history are now preaching our geopolitics and political philosophy.
But then on the other side, there's been a flattening of celebrity because of new media, because of social media.
We see their private lives.
We see what scum they are, basically.
We see how tawdry their own lives are.
And so I think people are turning off and staying home and watching television, which is where a lot of the great art is right now, anyway.
I mean, that show you that clip you showed from Hale Caesar is all about the way they tried to protect these guys' reputation, but that's all over.
And when you see that a guy has gotten divorced three times or that his children are alcoholic or that everything in his life, you know, why should you take his advice?
Why should you take his advice?
Because he's handsome and, you know, can stand in front of a camera reading somebody else's lines.
It doesn't make any sense at all.
Absolutely right.
Michael Knowles, the Michael Knoll show comes on after this, so cling to your computer or whatever the hell you're looking at.
All right, thanks a lot, Michael.
We'll talk to you again.
Cedric.
Speaking of Felonia Pan Suit, I just have to play this clip.
It's a long clip.
It's a two-minute clip of Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton is beginning her book tour for her new book, What Happened?
Oh My Lord, What Happened, I think it's called that.
That was the original title was Please God, What Happened.
It's just been cut.
What happened?
Here's a, she begins it.
She goes on, what is this?
I can't remember.
Good Morning America, one of the morning shows.
So she goes on two minutes, two minutes of blaming every other person in America for her loss.
It's worth listening to just for the laughs.
I went from, I think, 26 points ahead to 13 points ahead.
And I needed about 18 points in order to be sure I could win Pennsylvania.
I watched how analysts who I have a great deal of respect for, like Nate Silver, burrowed into all the data and said, but for that Comey letter, she would have won.
So it was very personal to me.
I think my general election prospects were so badly damaged because of that, that even though I was starting to come back, it was not enough time to overcome it.
But even though that was the primary blow to my campaign at the very end, it has to be looked at in context with the Russians weaponizing information, negative stories about me, this whole WikiLeaks beginning to leak in early October of John Podesta's emails, which, if you've read them all, they're pretty anodyne, but they were taken out of context.
Stories were made up about them.
We now know Facebook was taking money from Russian companies to run negative stories about me.
All of this.
Yes, it affected me and my campaign.
But I am more concerned now going forward that we haven't come to grips with what it means for future elections.
I would also add that the voter suppression that we now know had been in the works and really put into effect in a lot of states like Wisconsin, North Carolina, et cetera, played a role.
And then let's not forget sexism and misogyny, which are endemic to our society and certainly as I write in my chapter called On Being a Woman in Politics, have to be factored in.
I ran out of gas.
I had a flat clear.
I didn't have enough money for cab fare.
My trust didn't come back for the cleaners.
An old friend came in from out of town.
Someone stole my car.
There was an earthquake.
A terrible flood!
Marcus!
It wasn't my fault!
I swear to God!
It's indistinguishable.
John Belushi and Hillary Clinton have now become indistinguishable.
I think, you know, I don't like to try to look into the mind of God.
I'm no better at doing that than anybody else on earth.
But it does sometimes seem to me that it may be that Hillary Clinton was sent to Earth to punish Bill Clinton for being Bill Clinton.
Like now, Bill Clinton is probably sitting, and all he hears is like, it was misogyny, it was the Russians, it was Comey.
It's like, shut up, Hillary.
No, no, listen, listen, I've really figured it out.
Please, please, stop.
All right, it's time for our crappy culture.
So 16 years ago, today, there was one of the most terrible moments of my life, certainly, when 3,000 people on American soil were murdered in the name of Islam, in the name of Allah.
That is, I hate when they refer to these things as a tragedy.
It was not a tragedy.
It was an atrocity.
A tragedy is when a young person dies of an illness.
An atrocity is when somebody kills, murders, slaughters innocent people for no other reason than his bad idea.
And the Islam as practiced by the people who flew those planes is one of the worst ideas anyone has ever had.
Nothing, you know, you can never say good things come out of tragedy because they don't come out of good things don't happen to the people who die.
So there's no getting those unique souls back on earth to make good.
I mean, any good that comes out of tragedy will have to be done in eternity, where there's souls we trust can still be found.
But even horror can provide for us a moment of clarity.
And one of the things, as someone who remembers that day all too well, one of the things that happened in that moment was all the lies that infect and infest our culture were for a moment swept away.
And the thing about it is, those lies have developed in a country that has become so rich, so powerful, so abundant, that we have lost touch with what Rudyard Kipling called the gods of the copybook headings, the rules of life that are necessary for survival.
We can talk about laying down our arms because our arms are so powerful that no one can kill us.
We can talk about giving people a guaranteed income whether they work or not because we have so much money we have forgotten that if you don't work, you starve.
If you don't make stuff and create things, you lose your purpose.
We can talk about men being useless and men being toxic and masculinity being toxic because our men and our weapons are so powerful that we don't need men.
It doesn't seem that we need men.
Why We Don't Need Men00:08:27
And when men have lose leave a culture, as to a large degree they have left impoverished black culture and some impoverished white culture, when they lose their roles as men, we see the disaster that happens, but we're protected from that disaster because we're so rich.
In the moment of that atrocity, all that wealth and all that abundance and all that safety disappeared.
And for a few moments, there was no talk of toxic masculinity because we saw men, police men, and fire men running into these burning buildings to rescue whoever they could and dying as often as not, dying as those buildings came tumbling down.
There was no talk of multiculturalism suddenly.
There was no talk of relative morality when it became quite obvious that there was nothing relative about morality.
This was the face of evil.
It was the face of evil.
And we shouldn't have to see the face of evil to know it's there, but sometimes we have to be reminded, and it is always, always a terrible reminder and at a terrible price.
But suddenly the nonsense, the blithering, stupid nonsense of relativism, which you can go into any university in this country and hear preached, was blown away by the presence of evil.
Suddenly, there was no talk of American racism, of how racist America is.
Sometimes, you know, Racism is everywhere.
People are naturally racist.
People are naturally primal.
But I just can't stand it when you put the word American in front of something as if it makes it more important.
It's American racism, racism in America today.
The people who died in that building were every color, every religion.
They came from different countries.
And when I traveled around the country, as I was doing then in that time, and would go into airports and see the, you know, couples who were of different colors, the families of different colors, the different religions, the different, that's why they attacked us.
They attacked us because we're not racist.
Look at the streets of Beijing.
Everybody's the same color.
Look at the streets in Nairobi.
Everybody's of the same colors.
Only in America and maybe London, only in New York and LA and London where you see the West's acceptance of this multiculturalism, our faith that our ideas overcome everything else.
And suddenly all those things were washed away.
And for a moment, we had clarity and for a moment we had truth.
And somebody said it was the end of the age of irony because suddenly we realized that not everything is a joke, that not everything is a joke.
Our principles matter.
Our principles are what make us what we are.
Almost immediately, almost immediately, as the left recovered its stride, they went on the attack to bring back this cloud of dishonesty, this cloud of lies, which they sometimes and we sometimes call political correctness, this idea that there is virtue in lying.
I remember, I don't know what it was, a week after 9-11, David Letterman took some time off because he said he really had to get his head around this, and he came back and he said, I need to find out why they hate us.
And I thought, hate it, why they hate it.
I don't care why they hate us.
They can kiss my ass and call me sweetheart.
You know, it doesn't matter why they hate us.
They're evil.
They should hate us.
They should hate us because they're evil.
That is what we want them.
We want the evil to hate us.
We want them to hate us and we want them to fear us.
And over the years, it's been 16 years now, there's a generation that doesn't even remember 9-11, sad to say.
And over the years, these lies have come back.
And I listen sometimes to the things that people say that just don't make any sense.
And they say, you know, I've made this joke before, but it's worth repeating, you know, that they say there's no difference between men and women.
And then they say, oh, and this person is a woman in a man's body.
And I think, well, how does he know?
If there's no difference between men and women, how does he know he's a woman in a man's body?
Because there's no difference.
I mean, it would just be the same, the same thing.
They talk about, they'll tell us that we have no soul, but he's a woman in a man's body.
And you think, well, what part of him is a woman then if he has no soul and it's just his body?
Why isn't his body dispositive?
They'll tell us that there are problems in the black community and the problems are all racism.
But the important point is they defend these lies.
And this is why I go after the media so often.
They defend these lies by telling you there are only these lies and hatefulness.
There's only the virtue of telling these lies and hatefulness.
There's no two sides of any story.
And the funny thing is, a lot of times, I would have sympathy with some of the ideas on the left if they wouldn't tell me that everything else is hateful.
You know, there's a lot of good stuff that's going on behind the scenes kind of.
The New York Times actually noticed it today.
It's going on behind the scenes in the Trump administration.
Betsy DeVos, you know, got rid of that dear colleague letter with which the Obama administration was pressuring colleges to basically hold kangaroo courts and put men on trial if they were accused of sexual harassment or rape.
Well, rape is a serious crime.
It should be in the courts.
It shouldn't be handled by universities, and Betsy DeVos rolled that back.
Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General of the Justice Department, is backing the defense of a Colorado baker who has not refused to serve gay people, but as a Christian, finds that he cannot, in good conscience, cater gay weddings.
He doesn't believe in this, and they're prosecuting him for this.
And it's just, it's heartbreaking.
They're comparing him to the Nazis when his father fought the Nazis and is breaking his heart.
Now, here's the thing: in all of these cases, including the cases of black people complaining about the police, you know, I have sympathy for this.
I have sympathy for gay people.
I want them to live happy lives.
I don't really feel that it's my job to go and preach to them or preach against them.
I think they can, I hope they pray to God, and each one of them prays to God and finds his way forward on his own.
It's not for me to judge.
It's really not for me to pass judgment.
Their freedom should not impinge on this man's freedom, right?
It shouldn't impinge on the Colorado Bakers' freedom.
There's a video that's going viral.
I don't have time to play it now, but there's a video going viral of a black man stopped by a black cop who draws his gun on the guy because he's stopping him for not turning on his turn signal.
And the guy in the car is like, You point a gun at me because I didn't turn on my turn signal.
I have sympathy for that.
That shouldn't happen.
But I also have sympathy for this cop who wants to go home.
This is not a question of hate versus goodness.
It's a question of a difficult situation, and we want everybody to come out of it the best way we possibly can.
It is this empire of lies that threatens our liberty more than any other thing.
And at the center of this lie is the lie that we can live in a utopia.
This is always the lie of systems, whether it's Islamism, whether it is communism, or whether it's fascism.
It is always the lie that we can live in a utopia, a perfect world, if we only all get together and are forced into being one thing, whether it's one thing in our skin color, whether it's one thing in our ideas, whether it's one thing in how much money we make, whether it's one thing in the God we worship.
We are sold this lie that we can live in a perfect world and anybody who opposes that world is hateful.
The truth is the exact opposite.
The truth is, each one of us is a universe unto itself, a universe in relationship to God, in relationship to the truth.
The truth doesn't change for each one of us, but each one of us are in a relationship with the truth, which is sacred.
It is sacred from the moment you're conceived, not when you're born.
It's sacred from the moment you're conceived, that path that you are to God, that you may follow and you may not follow.
Each one of us, in order to, for each one of us to live out that truth and to live out that path, we have to be free.
We have to be free.
And if we're going to be free, we're going to disagree.
It's going to be messy.
It's going to be ugly.
But, but it is going to be free, and that value stands above every other.
It's always lies that threaten freedom because it's the truth that makes us free.
When you know the truth, the truth makes us free.
And the truth is, the world is a fallen, difficult, sinful place where people do terrible things, but, but everyone who leaves everyone else alone, who keeps his hand to himself, deserves to speak and deserves to live his life and to find his way to God.
You know, on 9-11, we saw for one moment that we are men and we are women, we are good and we are evil.
But, but if we are going to be free, we are going to have to learn to live in truth and to tell the truth to one another and to not shut people up when we don't like what they're saying.
Tomorrow's Truth Talk00:00:25
I'm going to end today.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Tomorrow, I think we have my friend Paul Beston who's going to talk about his new book on boxing, which is just terrific.
And it's really a book in a lot of ways about manhood.
So we'll be going to be talking about that.
They are holding the memorial to the 9-11 victims.
The President and his wife were out there today for the moment of silence.
We'll end with that, and I'll see you again tomorrow.