Ep. 440 dissects Hollywood and media’s self-destructive hypocrisy—ignoring ISIS’s retreat, economic growth, and Trump’s policy wins while obsessing over debunked Wolff claims and Oprah’s performative activism. The host mocks CNN’s "fake news" factory, compares past smears (Reagan called senile, Quayle a "mental midget"), and slams leftist art like The Shape of Water for empty virtue-signaling. Europe’s immigration debate is framed as suppressed dissent, while Yale and NYT face institutional decay from ideological conformity—setting up Molly Hemingway as a counterpoint to the chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
If you take a look at your favorite news source today, you'll notice a very bizarre phenomenon.
There's no bad news in America.
Nobody's oppressed.
The economy is doing well.
ISIS is in retreat.
No one is abusing the organs of government to get at ordinary citizens the way Obama did with the IRS.
Crime is down.
Taxes are down.
So, of course, the media spent the weekend attacking the president of the United States.
Here's what the media knows about Donald Trump so far.
Donald Trump never wanted to be president.
That's why he colluded with Russia to become president because he wanted it so badly, though he didn't want it.
This shows that Donald Trump is mentally unbalanced.
And in support of that, we have the reliable testimony of left-wingers dressed up as vaginas and screaming at the sky.
The press has been totally fair to Donald Trump.
And if anyone says they haven't, they'll be shouted down, cut off, and escorted out of the studio.
And Donald Trump is stupid and stupidly defeated every candidate who opposed him and then stupidly defeated the most qualified person ever to run for president because that's how stupid he was.
He didn't even know that she was smarter than he was and supposed to win.
Now, when it comes to Trump's morals, of course, who better to speak about morality than Hollywood?
Last night at the Golden Globes, all the women who knew that Harvey Weinstein was a sexual predator and continually covered up for him, dressed in black at the Golden Globes to protest the fact that they covered up for Harvey Weinstein.
They now demand that they stop doing that, which is why they're wearing those fetching black gowns.
So the news media that attacks Trump's honesty is talking complete nonsense.
The entertainment industry that attacks Trump's morals has no morals.
And the resistance that attacks Trump's mental stability is dressed up as a vagina.
Like I said, welcome to Monday.
There's no bad news.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky.
Ship shaped topsy, the world is it-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
This weekend was absolutely hilarious.
I mean, I think it is a wonderful thing to watch the left continually firing torpedoes at Donald Trump, and then their ship sinks as they congratulate themselves on what wonderful torpedoes they fired at Donald Trump.
I mean, Trump put out this tweet.
You know, they're attacking because of this stupid book, that Michael Wolf book.
They're attacking Trump's mental stability, even though they admit the book is complete nonsense.
They're attacking Trump's mental stability and talking about the 25th Amendment and should he be removed for office.
So Trump tweets, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being like really smart.
Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and as everyone knows, went down in flames.
I went from very successful businessman to top TV star to president of the United States on my first try.
I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius and a very stable genius at that.
So the press, of course, went nuts, right?
And it's this thing that Trump does to them.
They go, oh my God, Trump is tweeting that he's a stable genius.
By the time you're finished, you think that, oh yeah, what do I know about Donald Trump?
Oh, yeah, he's a stable genius.
I mean, they just keep blowing themselves up.
Anyway, we're going to look at the fact that we are living now in an almost completely imaginary America, or at least half of us are, and that Donald Trump, the guy who's supposed to be the phony and is kind of in some ways, you know, this reality TV star, he is the guy who's actually getting real stuff done.
Bowl and Branch Sheets00:03:07
But that should not stop you from subscribing to the Daily Wire before Tuesday, January 16th, which is next Tuesday, right?
That's next Tuesday, because guess what happens then?
The conversation returns, 5 p.m. Eastern.
Wait, you're rolling it up so fast now.
I have to calculate what 5 p.m. Eastern is.
Is 2 p.m. Pacific?
It's the fifth episode of the conversation.
Who will be there?
Me.
I will be there with Alicia Krauss answering all your questions.
Not only will I answer your questions about life mysteries with 100% accuracy, but you'll also have a special edition of the conversation to cling to during the long, cold, clavenless weekend.
The conversation will stream live on the Daily Wire Facebook page and the Daily Wire YouTube channel and will be free for everyone to watch, but only subscribers get to ask the questions.
So if you don't subscribe, you're going to be sitting there staring at me thinking, oh my God, that man could be answering my questions.
All my problems could be solved, but I didn't spend the lousy 10 bucks a month that it would take to get to ask the questions.
Here's what you do if you are a subscriber.
You log in, log into the website, dailywire.com, watch the live stream, head over to the conversation page, and after that, just start typing into the Daily Wire chat box and we'll pull live questions out as they come in.
Once again, subscribe to get your questions answered by me on Tuesday, January 16th at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific.
Join the conversation with me.
And while you are doing that, you might want to get some bowl and branch sheets.
The reason I say this is because, as you know, I never sleep.
This is just true.
But I don't sleep, but I do go to bed and I go to bed and I read.
And in order to do that, you really have to have comfortable sheets.
You really have to have a comfortable bed if you don't sleep.
If you sleep, it's no problem.
I mean, then you need the comfortable sheets because they help you to fall asleep.
But once you're asleep, you're not enjoying them anymore.
I enjoy my bowl and branch sheets all night long.
These things last all night, brother.
And I know because I am there.
And the reason is that they are made of 100% organic cotton.
And that means bowl and branch sheets not only feel incredible, they look amazing, and they have this weird thing as they get softer and cooler as you wash them.
So as you keep them, they actually become more and more comfortable.
And since Bowl and Branch sells exclusively online, you're not paying the expensive retail market.
So that's half the price for twice the quality.
You will love these sheets.
And if you try them for 30 nights and you don't love them, you can return them for a full refund.
Anyone who sleeps on Bowl and Branch sheets loves them.
And even me, who doesn't sleep on them, just lies on them.
I love them too.
They get thousands of five-star reviews.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal all rave about them.
And even three U.S. presidents have bowl and branch sheets.
Go to bowlandbranch.com today and you'll get $50 off your first set of sheets plus free shipping in the U.S. when you use the promo code Clavin.
That's K-L-A-V-A-N for $50 off plus free U.S. shipping right now at bowlandbranch.com.
If you are like me, you will stay up and you will think, gosh, I'm comfortable all night long.
It's great.
Enduring Real Poverty00:02:40
So, you know, Nick Kristoff, a left-wing columnist on Knucklehead Row at the New York Times, a former newspaper, wrote this column over the weekend where he said he's only going to do this once because he knows people hate it because everything's so terrible.
Everything is awful.
Oh my gosh, Donald Trump, everything's nightmary.
I know you want him to be hysterical.
But he just pointed out, pardon me, that 2017 was the greatest year in human history.
And this is true.
It is absolutely true.
Let me read what Christophe says.
Every day, the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty, which is less than about $2 a day, goes down by 217,000 people, according to calculations by Max Roser, an Oxford University economist who runs a website called Our World in Data.
Every day, 325,000 more people gain access to electricity and 300,000 more people gain access to clean drinking water.
This is going on every single day, right?
And there's a lot of people, and it's important, obviously, if you're living in America, you don't know what it's like to live without electricity, to live without fresh water.
But this is what real poverty looks like in the real world.
In America, we don't actually have poverty like that.
What we have is people who are mentally ill and nobody's taking care of them, and that's a bad thing.
But we don't have poverty like they have.
I mean, you go to the third world and you will see what poverty looks like.
300,000 people every day who get clean water.
This is a big deal.
As recently as the 1960s, Christy Christoph goes on, a majority of humans had always been illiterate and lived in extreme poverty.
Now, fewer than 15% are illiterate.
Fewer than 15% of the people in the world are illiterate.
Fewer than 10% live in extreme poverty.
In another 15 years, illiteracy and extreme poverty will be mostly gone.
This is thousands of generations have gone by and they're disappearing while you and I sit here complaining about Harvey Weinstein.
This is what's happening in the real world.
Just since 1990, the lives of more than 100 million children have been saved by vaccinations, diarrhea treatment, breastfeeding promotions, and other simple steps.
You know, it has become, it has become, the thing that's incredible is it used to be that people got killed by the hordes sweeping through and killing you, and you got killed because you starved to death.
Now, I mean, in America, you're more likely to die from being fat than you are to die from being too thin.
And that's an amazing, amazing thing.
And all of this is because of science, it's because of free market capitalism, it's because of the internet and the communications that are improving.
You know, people can get educations even in places where the Taliban won't let them go to school.
It's an amazing moment that we're living through.
Hear Bannon Speak00:15:48
And so, what is the press covering over the weekend?
What is the press talking about?
Because it raises questions.
If there's actually no bad news in America, and of course, there's always bad news, there's a crime that's taking place, or in JFK and the airport in New York, the bad weather has everybody delayed, and there's always some kind of bad news.
But I'm talking about endemic, institutionalized bad news.
If there's no bad news, if we are actually making America great again, then the question then becomes: what's our greatness for?
You know, that's what we should be talking about.
What do we do now?
What do we do if we're free?
What do we do if we're rich?
What do we do if things are okay?
You know, what do we do?
Well, we watch the Golden Globes and everybody complains.
Or Michael Wolfe, this very, very absurd journalist, writes a book about Donald Trump and we spend the weekend talking about whether Donald Trump is fit for office on the basis of a book that everybody acknowledges is absurd.
So, I mean, this guy, Michael Wolf, he obviously thinks he's a very important guy.
He feels that this is his, he is unleashing this attack on the White House.
And here he is unleashing that attack.
Laser!
Damn it, Rebork!
It's okay.
It's all right.
Well, actually, that was just footage from the movie Independence Day, but the real laser would be a lot like that.
Yeah.
It would be, it looks exactly like Michael Wolfe.
The resemblance between Michael Wolfe and Dr. Evil is bizarre.
You never see the two of them at the same place at the same time.
But let's look at this is this guy.
He hangs out and he gets all this gossip and all this people saying, oh, Trump is stupid, Trump is crazy.
And now he's going on and he is going to tell us that Trump is not fit to be president.
So I guess this is cut number seven, right?
Is Donald Trump fit to be president from everything you've seen?
No.
Why not?
Read the book.
Yeah.
I mean, that's essentially what the story of the book is.
But in brief, because you want to know? because he's only interested in, not only is he only interested in just himself, he's just interested in his immediate gratification in this moment.
So there is nothing beyond that.
Temperamentally aside, is he mentally fit to be president of the United States based on everything that you've heard from people who were in the world?
You know, when you're talking to someone, you're like, I'm concerned about this person.
I think this person is mentally ill.
Do you have concerns?
Every time you speak to him, you think this is a wingnut.
Okay, so is Trump mentally fit to be president?
No.
Here's cut number nine, being asked the same question the next day.
I did not say he's mentally unstable.
I would not be qualified to do this.
I'd say I have merely described and mostly not my impressions, the impressions of other people, of the people he deals with.
But the president denies he ever spoke with you for this book at all.
Well, I think he probably had no idea he was speaking to me for this book.
When I would meet the president in the White House, we would chat as though we were friends.
And that was what I was an interview, to greet someone and say hello.
I mean, that's not a journalistic exercise.
Okay, so that's who this guy is, right?
He's got a bunch of quotes.
Some people say they never said the quotes.
Obviously, a lot of it comes from Steve Bannon, who also was the source on another book called The Devil's Bargain, where it was how dumb Donald Trump is, but Steve Bannon pulled him together.
And now Bannon is kind of in the, you know, in the outhouse.
He's in the doghouse, you know, trying to apologize, but not really apologizing.
He's done.
He's finished.
Not only was the guy silly enough, Bannon, incompetent enough, to lose Alabama by backing a guy who couldn't win a Republican, who couldn't win an all-Republican Alabama, but he was so politically unaware that he thought he could maintain his powerful stance while alienating his one friend, the one thing that gave him power, which was the friendship of Donald Trump.
But that's not the important thing.
The important thing I want to deal with is reality versus fantasy.
The reality of the world we're living in, which is getting continually better.
Things are getting better.
In America particularly, the economy is booming.
You know, we're really doing quite well.
Trump has had a very, very consequential, very successful first year.
He's looking forward to kind of more bipartisan stuff.
He's making some overtures on the DREAMers and saying, yes, if you'll deal with me on the wall, I'll deal with you on the DREAMers.
So he's looking to try and bring the Democrats out from the resistance idea, which I don't think people like.
I mean, their donors like it, but I don't think the ordinary people like it.
And say, come on, let's get some stuff done together.
You like infrastructure.
You're always big on infrastructure.
Let's do some of that.
That's what's really happening.
But now we're talking about this book, and I want to show you Maggie Haberman.
Now, and we'll get to the Jake Tapper disaster of an interview in a minute.
But Maggie Haberman is a woman who we know is a Clinton operative.
The Clinton campaign said in the emails that were exposed by WikiLeaks, they said, anytime we want to place a good story, we know we can go to Maggie Haberman.
I guess she was at Politico at the time.
We know we can go to Maggie Haberman.
She will reliably place our stories for us.
So we know she's a Clinton operative.
So the New York Times, a former newspaper, hired her to cover the White House.
That's who the New York Times is, right?
They relentlessly, they relentlessly search for truth, as they say.
So here is Maggie Haberman's comment on this book.
Listen carefully to what she says.
I believe parts of it, and then there are other parts that are factually wrong.
I mean, the thing about Michael Wolfe and his style, which apparently nobody in the White House appears to have done a cursory Google search on him and what his M.O. is, but he believes he deals in larger truths and narratives.
So he creates a narrative that is notionally true, conceptually true.
The details are often wrong.
And I can see several places in the book that are wrong.
Such as, I mean, do you have any examples?
So for instance, I mean, he inaccurately describes a report in the New York Times.
He inaccurately characterizes a couple of incidents that took place early on in the administration.
He gets basic details wrong.
Correct.
He inaccurate.
He described in the book Rupert Murdoch's quote an expletive idiot about Trump, and then in his own column a day later, it was expletive moron.
See, that's sloppy.
The stuff about the CNN dossier, that is public knowledge.
The CNN didn't publish the dossier.
He says they did.
That's one fact check away from getting it right, but he doesn't do it.
Well, he doesn't do it anymore.
He doesn't care.
I mean, Michael Wolfe and Donald Trump are not dissimilar people, right?
I mean, there is a reason they knew each other before the president became the president.
Wolf privately refers to him as Donald, not Trump or the president and so forth.
And so there is some kind of a similar style there.
So it's Trump's fault that this guy's lying about him.
He's like, this guy's a liar, just like Donald Trump.
This is Maggie Haberman, Clinton operative, working for the New York Times under the guise of being a good reporter.
And she talks to Trump all the time.
He does sit down and talk to her.
He obviously likes her.
So it's notionally true.
It's a larger narrative.
And we've heard this a lot from the press recently, right?
Remember Dan Rather?
It's fake but accurate.
The documents he had on George W. Bush, well, they were fake, but the story was true.
And then we had Newsweek editor Evan Thomas, which was my favorite quote, was the rape case.
What's the name of the college?
Oh, yeah, it just slipped my mind.
But obviously, this is a completely phony rape case.
And Evan Thomas said, well, we got the facts wrong, but we got the narrative right.
Now, this is something I know about because this is called writing fiction.
I mean, I do this all the time.
I write a story.
It's completely untrue.
You guys were good enough to turn up for the, what is it, the 11th episode of Another Kingdom over the weekend.
We brought out the 11th episode on Friday.
We've got two episodes left.
People are really enjoying this.
It's fiction.
It's about dragons and ogres and conspiracies and all this stuff.
But I hope that there is a truth, a greater truth in there.
That's called fiction.
News is where you assemble the facts and you let time develop the narrative.
You let time draw the narrative out of the facts.
That's how news works.
That's how history works.
These guys have got these two confused.
And so you have this episode with Stephen Miller and Jake Tapper.
And Jake Tapper to me is like the saddest man in America at this point.
Jake Tapper actually used to be a decent journalist.
And now he's on CNN, which does nothing all day long but manufacture this narrative.
That's all they do.
They get things wrong, they apologize, but as long as they're wrong against Donald Trump, it's fine.
They get him wrong.
It's constant, constant lack of any journalistic credibility.
And there's poor Jake.
And Jake must, and his ratings are in the toilet.
He must wake up every morning and think, what became of me?
I mean, as he's shaving, like he must look in the mirror and think, what on earth became of Jake Tapper?
I used to be, I used to be somebody, and now I'm sitting here on CNN.
So they bring on Stephen Miller, who is essentially this attack dog for Trump.
He's very good at it.
I always enjoy watching him.
He's eloquent and he's informed and he's aggressive and he goes after these people.
So he goes on and he's basically saying this is a work of fiction.
This has nothing to do with anything.
Steve Bannon never had anything to do with the presidency.
And Tapper is left in the position of defending this completely dishonest network, CNN, which is now just a 24-7 factory of fake news.
So that he's yelling at Stephen Miller, who is obviously a partisan spokesman, right?
I mean, don't bring him on if that's not what you want to hear.
And so they start yelling at each other, and they claim that they escort Miller out afterwards, that he wouldn't leave the studio and the escort.
I don't know if that's true or not.
But the whole thing is that now on CNN, when somebody starts introducing another point of view, this is what happens to him.
They cut him off, they shut down, they go to commercial, they throw him out.
So it's like it's not only, I mean, they might as well, Jake Tapper and Don Lemon might as well just put their fingers in their ears and whistle Dixie.
You know, I'm not going to hear it.
I'm not going to hear it.
And it's embarrassing.
I mean, this is an embarrassing exchange between these two grown men.
Of all these so-called political geniuses in Washington, whether it be at the big lobbying firms or in the last week is the president.
But which happens to be a true statement.
Okay.
A self-made billionaire who revolutionized reality TV and ensures the courts of the people.
He's happy that you said that.
Jake, no, no, you can be condescending.
I'm not being condescending.
I'm trying to get to the point.
Steve Bannon.
You can be condescending.
That was a snide remark.
You're sure he's watching and he's happy.
Let me tell you something.
Your network, look, you can be as condescending as you want.
It's part of your MO.
But listen, you can have 24-7.
I have no idea why you're attacking me.
Well, my point is why I'm attacking.
Steve Bannon, Jake, you can have a 24-hour president's travel ban.
I'm so glad you brought that up.
That's one of the favorite news items in the book.
I would happen to know better than you would, Jake, about how the travel ban was written.
Steve Bannon didn't push the travel ban.
Steve Bennett, if you'll let me ask you, no, because you have president.
24 hours of negative anti-Trump, hysterical coverage on this network that led in recent weeks to some spectacularly embarrassing false reporting.
I think the vunernet now can ascertain.
Viewers are entitled to have my three months of the truth.
Why don't you just give me three minutes to tell you the truth about Donald Trump that I know and all of our campaign style?
Because it's my show, and I don't want to do that.
It's my show, and I don't want to do that.
So there, and you can take your news and get out of my, you know, I mean, this is absurd.
The fact that they are creating a narrative without any regard to facts makes guys like Miller, I mean, look, I'm not, I like Miller because he's entertaining.
I mean, I'm here to be entertained, so I like Stephen Miller.
But it makes him look better in some ways than he is because anybody, he brought up a substantive issue, the travel ban.
What was Bannon's role in it?
He won't let him address it.
He won't let him address anything.
He's the same thing.
If you watch Don Lemon, Don Lemon now just starts shouting no, no, no, whenever anybody points out that Obama was a genuinely bad president, when anybody points it out, Don Lemon just starts shouting and throws you off, you know, throws you off the air.
And this is now Jake Tapper, once a journalist, has become Don Lemon.
I mean, they've all become, I mean, CNN just turns everybody into itself.
So now we go over to the Golden Globe.
We're going to bring Michael Knowles on in a couple of minutes to talk about the Golden Globes and also this thing about Trump being crazy and he's not fit for office and all this.
But I have to address the Golden Globes a little first too, because what happened yesterday at the Golden Globes was a group of women who covered up for Harvey Weinstein showed up dressed in black to demand that people stop covering up for people like Harvey Weinstein.
And it was capped, I mean, so the perpetrators showed up to protest the perpetration.
You know, the criminals showed up to protest the criminality.
And at the end of it all, the candidate for president, the Democrat candidate for president for 2020, Oprah Winfrey, stood up and made this rousing speech about how, you know, it's like watching her win an award today is like watching Sidney Poitier win an award 50 years ago.
How, you know, being a woman being raped today in 1940 or whatever it was is exactly the same as it would be today.
I mean, it's just like she talked about a woman who was raped in 1944 in Alabama, a black woman raped in Alabama in 1944.
It's just like Hollywood today.
And she says, at the conclusion of the speech, she says, I want all the girls watching here now to know that a new day is on the horizon.
And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight.
Now, every word of that is nonsense.
Every word of it is nonsense.
Every single word of it is nonsense.
Women are not oppressed in America.
They're not oppressed at all in America.
And if change comes, which is kind of doubtful in Hollywood, but if it does, it's not going to have anything to do with the women who are in that room.
It's not, because none of them did anything.
They stood by and did nothing.
Let's just hear just a little bit of Oprah's speech.
This is how you know she's running for president on a Democrat ticket, because listen to her speech.
It's a Democrat platform.
You get a car, you get a car, vote for me.
You get a car, you get a turkey in every pot, and vote for me.
Let's hear the real speech.
Stop kidding around back there, Austin, and play the real speech.
The press is under siege these days.
But we also know that it is the insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice.
To tyrants and victims and secrets and lies.
I want to say that I value the press more than ever before as we try to navigate these complicated times, which brings me to this.
What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.
Speak your truth.
And that is what the press is doing.
It is speaking its truth.
Unfortunately, not speaking the truth.
Narrative Over Facts00:15:49
See, the thing is, Donald Trump is, in some sense, himself a product of this culture.
He is a product of the culture in which the narrative matters more than the facts.
That's how he won the presidency.
He didn't go out there like spewing facts and figures and destroy Ted Cruz on the issues.
He went out there and created an impression of strength.
He created an impression of power.
He created an impression of competence and he won.
The only thing that has been a surprise, it's been a surprise to me, is that he has actually delivered.
He has shown strength, competence.
He has actually done a lot of the things that I would have liked to have seen him do, that I never would have expected him to do.
So now, Trump, even though he is himself a product of this fake world and won on these fake terms, he has shown himself to be a competent guy.
What is the press going to do with this?
Oprah Winfrey, she's just an illusion so far.
She's just an illusion.
So the thing about, you know, people say, well, Donald Trump is not Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan had class.
That's true.
But Reagan was created by a culture that had class.
Trump was created by this culture.
It's not his fault that we've sunk this low.
Anyway, my point is simply this.
My point is simply this.
The left, the news media, the entertainment media, which are now one thing, are living in an imaginary universe.
In the real universe, things are going exceptionally well.
That was until now, because now we're about to bring on Michael Knowles.
But before we do, I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Please come over to TheDailyWire.com and subscribe so you can be in the conversation on next Tuesday when I will be answering all your questions.
So we're talking about instability and mental deficits, and I think that's, Knowles is the perfect person.
I am right fit for this.
The star, the heartthrob star of Another Kingdom, which is coming winding up to the end of the show.
That is.
We're almost at the end.
Now I'm certain this is the last role I'll ever get in Hollywood.
I got in some trouble for making fun of the Golden Globes last night.
You were under fire big time.
I was under fire.
This was unbelievable.
A lot of Hollywood stars with the blue check marks, they would begin a conversation by insulting me.
Then I would be respectful and we would talk.
And then they would end the conversation and then block me.
It's kind of like our relationship.
I think that's what Hollywood is doing to all of America.
They just want, like Jake Tapper.
They want to put their fingers in their ears.
That's absolutely what they're doing.
Yeah, so you'll have to tune into Another Kingdom.
Truly, it's the last time I'll ever get to perform.
It is wrapping up.
We're now at the most exciting part.
And it gets pretty gory and a lot of things that even I didn't expect as I was performing this.
You know, I have to take a break and say, oh, wait a minute, I can't believe that just happened.
Yeah, just two episodes left.
Very, very exciting.
It's been really, it's been a delight.
I hope we do another one next year.
Or this, it's now this year.
I hope we do another one this fall because I just had a great time doing it.
Also, if the films and product that were being awarded at the Golden Globes are any indication, well, I think we're putting out the best art in Hollywood of the year.
And not only that, and we do it without abusing any women because we can't get any women come near us.
That's true.
That's true.
So you did watch the Golden Globes.
I mean, give me a quick rundown.
It was truly, I always say that, you know, I'm a martyr.
I'm taking this on so you don't have to watch it.
This was the single most insufferable award show I have ever seen in my life.
Amazing.
During this award show, as Hollywood lays in ruins, as these people's reputations are as ruins, as we have photos of Oprah kissing Harvey Weinstein, Meryl Streep kissing Harvey Weinstein, oh, love you, hugs, hugs and kisses, they're all exposed as assailants and enablers and lecherous monsters.
They get up on stage and lecture us.
They lecture Donald Trump.
They lecture America and regular people, you know, in that little sliver between New York and L.A.
It was, the sanctimony increased.
The smugness somehow increased.
There was only one good line I thought of the night where they asked Denzel Washington on the red carpet, they said, so is this the moment Hollywood's going to change?
And he said, yeah, we'll see about that.
The most down-to-earth guy in town.
I mean, it really, it is absurd.
You know what it kind of is, though?
It's kind of like it's kind of feminizing everything in the worst possible way.
I mean, if you said our culture was becoming feminine and that it was becoming more nurturing or kind or something like that, that would be great.
But what it really is, is the way women, when they get irrational, just think that their feeling state is sacred.
And you say, like, that's not actually happening.
Well, that's the way I feel.
That's what we're dealing with.
We're dealing with an entire culture that thinks the way they feel is the truth.
This was the essence of Oprah's speech.
He said, you have to speak your truth.
Your truth, yeah.
Your truth.
It was really amazing.
Yeah, nasty women cannot be glamorous.
And so they've taken these shows that used to be glitzy and glamorous.
That's the only reason anyone would watch is to see people dripping in diamonds be sort of elegant on a stage.
And they've replaced it with screaming political activists and worked out really well for CNN, or for ESPN rather.
Yes, and the NFL globes.
The NFL worked well too.
So meanwhile, now we're supposed to believe that because this guy wrote a book that everybody acknowledges is untrue, that Donald Trump is nuts.
And one of the things that got me, I talked about this last week, is that he says in the book, or he said in an article, that Donald Trump keeps repeating himself and is kind of demented.
But we see Donald Trump virtually every day.
He talks to the press off the cuff.
He never does that stuff.
Well, you believe you're lying eyes over CNN.
Is that what you're saying?
That's so prejudicial.
Jake Tapper would throw me off his show for that.
He would.
Okay, okay, you made your good point for the only one.
That was that.
Oh my God.
I know.
I'm sorry to meander into the media so much here, but that interview was so glib and so smug and so smarmy.
He might as well have been at the Golden Globes.
Is this a new thing, though?
Is it a new thing for people to say the president is nuts?
This attack comes back time and time again.
People kind of forget this, I think, because we have this hindsight of Ronald Reagan.
Everybody loved Ronald Reagan.
He was this great unifying figure.
Obviously, in retrospect, the last Republican is always a great guy.
It's only the new Republican who's awful.
But it always comes back to Yale, all of this craziness.
And there was that Yale psychiatrist who said that Donald Trump is so crazy, he could lead to the extinction of the human race.
He's a stable guy.
He's a stable guy.
He's dressed a vagina when he's at the stable.
But this harkens back to the Goldwater rule.
So during Barry Goldwater's run for the president, there were over a thousand psychiatrists who signed a little petition saying that he was mentally unstable to run for office.
And this has happened time and time again.
With Ronald Reagan, first of all, his party was against him.
In 1984, the RNC had a little sticker on one of their office doors that said sign up for the 1984 Bush for President campaign.
A survey in 1976 found that 90% of Republican state chairmen judged Reagan to be simple, to be simple-minded.
That he had no experience in foreign affairs, no depth in government administration.
Sound familiar.
There was a study in 1980 of 475 national and state Republican chairmen.
They found they preferred Bush.
One state chairman said that Reagan's intellect was thinner than spit on a slate rock.
That's just the Republicans who said that.
This is the Republicans talking about.
He was mocked repeatedly for being senile out of his mind because he confused Pakistan with Afghanistan.
He once said that trees contributed 93% of the world's nitrous oxide.
He said there was more oil in Alaska than in Saudi Arabia, which we're about to find out now that we're drilling in Anwar, so the jury's still out.
The Evening Independent ran a piece about him in 1984.
It said, who will show up, the Gipper or the geezer?
The same stumbling, often incoherent Reagan seen in the Louisville debate, a geriatric actor.
Even if he finesses Sunday's test, there is a disquieting question.
Have his image makers been hiding the genuine Reagan?
They would play up little jokes.
You know, Michael Deaver, Ronald Reagan himself would make jokes about falling asleep in cabinet meetings.
And they would play this up as gospel truth.
And it's gone on and on and on.
So they said this about Quayle.
Yeah, Quayle, you know, George W., or George H.W. Bush's vice president, who now, everyone says, is a perfectly smart, normal guy.
They said he was a mental midget, incapable of the duties of the office.
During the 2004 race, John Kerry accused George W. Bush of being so stupid that he bogged us down in war.
He said, when you get bad grades, you end up in Iraq.
All of these constant attacks.
Why do they do it?
Why do they, you'll notice when you look in the mainstream media, Trump's an idiot.
Bush is an idiot.
Even Bush won kind of an incompetent.
Reagan's an idiot.
So on and so forth.
They used to say this about Eisenhower, by the way.
They said it about Eisenhower.
Eisenhower, who won World War II.
I mean, what do you have to do before you get your smart card from the Democrats?
But what about all the Democrats?
Obama, genius.
Bill Clinton, a genius.
Even Jimmy Carter, he's not a peanut farmer.
He's a physicist.
He was too smart for the office.
That's why he was so incompetent.
So why do they do it?
It's because they've run out of arguments.
So we've seen them try a few different arguments on Trump.
We've seen him try that he is only in it for the rich.
He's only helping the rich.
That's what this whole tax bill was about.
But turns out that the vast majority of Americans are getting a good tax cut here.
That one didn't work.
He's got a sticky finger.
He's going to attack every people and launch missiles all over the world.
That didn't happen.
He's handled foreign affairs pretty well.
When they can't engage in the debate, when they can't debate politics or political philosophy, they have to turn the conservative point of view from a coherent political philosophy into a weird psychological tick and twitch that has to be corrected through medicine and science rather than engaging with the actual content of that philosophy.
You know, what's shocking too is that you watch, I mean, I was sampling, you know, CNN all through the weekend and the CBS.
I mean, George Stephanopoulos actually said, even if 50% of this book is true, it raises serious questions.
And I thought, actually, if 50% of the book is true, the only question is, why are we talking about it?
Because who knows which 50% it is.
I mean, that's absurd.
If you write a book that's 50% false, you're to be ignored.
I mean, right?
That's not a book that's worth talking about.
Why is it?
I mean, there's nobody on these shows, not one person who said, you say this every time.
They did say Eisenhower was stupid.
I mean, if you're a Republican, you're either stupid or evil.
I mean, that's one of the things.
So like Nixon was evil.
No one called Nixon stupid.
He was evil.
So Eisenhower was stupid.
Truman, you know, they even said this about Truman, and Truman was a Democrat, but he was kind of on the conservative side.
But every single Ford, remember Ford, Chevy Chase, falling down, tripping all over the place on Saturday Night Live?
Why does nobody come out and just say you do this every time?
Well, I think the American people have begun to realize that.
I think that's why people are tuning out.
It's why Stephen Miller was able to kind of make a mockery of Jake Tapper and Jake Tapper.
It became a mean girl.
You know, he said, this is my show.
Whah, wah, wah.
And because you do see it every time you see Dick Cheney.
No one thought he was stupid, so he had to be evil.
George W. Bush wasn't evil, so he had to be stupid.
And it's because if you stand in the way of progress, if you stand in the way of a utopian vision, a progressive vision, there are only two explanations of that.
The future is so clear.
We've seen the future and it works, as communist apologists used to say.
That's right.
The only two reasons that you would impede progress are because you have bad intentions or you are breathtakingly stupid.
And they couldn't consider the possibility on the left that people just disagree with them and there might be other solutions than the ones that they've thought about.
They welcome all diversity of opinion until anybody disagrees with them and then they're shocked and appalled.
What's on the show today?
So today we're going to be giving out a lot of awards.
We're going to be talking about how nasty women can't be glamorous.
We're going to talk about the terrible performances last night all the way from Oprah to Jake Tapper and a new segment.
I just mentioned the title.
I call it Jake Tapper Mean Girl.
All right.
Michael Knoll, Star of Another Kingdom, is good to talk to you.
I'll talk to you later.
Talk to you later.
You know, I was thinking about the death of Europe, you know, the fact that Europe is no longer a culture and it's been swept through by this influx of immigration.
And all the time that this was happening, people were being told that they were insane or bigoted or nasty or cruel if they thought, hey, you know, maybe bringing in a million people such that like the city of London is no longer a majority English city anymore.
Maybe that's something we want to think about.
Maybe we want to talk about it.
Maybe we want to say, hey, these people can come in, but they have to adhere to certain rules or they have to believe in certain things.
All these elites, all these elites told us that we were fools to even think about this.
And now Europe is basically being wiped off the face of the earth simply by simply by immigrants.
Simply by people who don't believe what European people believe.
And it has nothing to do as far as I'm concerned.
It has nothing to do with race.
It has to do with creed.
It has to do with what you believe.
So these guys, these experts, it's like they're not very smart.
These smart people, they're not very smart.
And they basically shut down debate so that by calling you stupid, by calling you evil, they shut down debate so that they never have to make the point.
They never have to make their argument because their argument is so, so bad.
Let's talk about our crappy culture and turn to Steve Crowder.
I always admire Steve Crowder because he moves around so well.
You know, I'm still going through the screeners I get at the end of the year from the Writers Guild, where you get to sort of go through all the movies of the year, especially those movies that maybe you wouldn't go out to the theater to see, the smaller movies.
And I watched one that has gotten so, actually one of the director won the Golden Globe yesterday for Best Drama called The Shape of Water.
And I really thought it was a bad movie.
And I thought it's Guillermo de Toro del Toro.
And Guillermo del Toro has a wonderful eye.
I mean, the movies he makes are absolutely beautiful.
The credits to this film are some of the most beautiful credits I've ever seen.
So I'm not complaining about that.
I'm certainly not complaining about the acting, which is absolutely terrific.
Nick Searcy is in it.
Our friend Nick Searcy, great actor.
He is great always, and he's great in this.
Michael Shannon takes this villainous character and just absolutely invests him with humanity and personality and such good acting.
And the star, a lady named, who is Sally Hawkins, she plays this deaf mute.
Anyway, here's just what I want to talk about, why I want to talk about this being part of our crappy culture.
One of the things that the arts does, when I would go around and complain about the fact that conservatives don't participate in the arts, sometimes people would say to you, say to me, they'd say, well, is there something about being a left-winger that makes you more likely to create good art?
Why Culture Critique Matters00:04:57
And I would say, well, the only thing that I can think of is that art does tend to be culture critical.
Art does tend to look at our culture and find the things that don't work, because every culture has things that don't work.
And so, you know, the suburbs, the suburbs of America during the 1950s were one of the greatest things that ever happened to humankind.
For the first time, you remember like Pete Seeger, the communist spy, was out singing songs about those ticky-tacky houses.
Well, those ticky-tacky houses where working people could finally live with dignity and live with a lawn and have a little piece of America for themselves.
Those were some of the most beautiful things that ever happened, but they all looked alike, so they didn't suit Pete Seeger's artistic sensibility.
But that does capture something about those houses.
There is a conformity to it.
There is a repetitiveness to it.
There is a mass-produced aspect to it.
So art has this culture-critical role that it plays.
So what's the shape of water about?
The shape of water is essentially a remake of Splash.
It's about a deaf mute girl in the 1950s in a scientific facility where they are storing an Aquaman, right?
They're storing a guy who's half fish, half person.
And it really is Splash.
Except Splash is a better movie.
And she starts to fall, she's very frustrated.
She's alone.
She can't speak.
And she starts to fall in love with him.
And the evil Michael Shannon is there just using this thing as a piece of scientific artifact.
And then they're going to kill him.
And so it's all about her sort of finding love with this creature.
So who is this villain, Michael Shannon?
Well, Michael Shannon is a white man who says nasty things about black people.
There's a gay guy in it who is rejected.
And there's black people come in and they can't sit at the counter in the local diner.
And it's, you know, so it's all about accepting the other, accepting the fishman as your lover and not being this horrible Michael Shannon character.
I thought to myself, you know, this guy didn't exist in the 1950s, but if he ever existed, he existed in the 1950s.
If he ever existed where people were absolutely certain that black people were inferior and that gays were evil, you know, that guy might have existed in the 1950s.
Those days are gone, right?
Those days are gone.
It's not culture critical to attack that guy.
It is self-congratulatory.
It is patting yourself on the back and saying, look how wonderful I am.
And anybody who says anything that is redolent at all of this 1950s America that we're going to make fun of is so much, is so beyond me and my progressive self.
I mean, this is a gigantic kiss on the butt of itself.
This is a piece of artwork that basically just kisses itself on the butt for two solid hours for how tolerant it is, how open-minded it is, how wonderful its view of the world is, not like those evildoers in the 1950s who, by the way, created an America that we're still living off, let alone in.
Okay, they created an America of so much wealth, of so much success, of so much power, of so much peace that we are still.
It actually survived eight years of Obama's incompetence because they created such a powerful, powerful force in the world for good.
When we talked at the beginning of the show about how much is going well in the world, how much of that do you think is generated by America?
I would say about 90% of it.
The ideas, the charity, the communications, the reaching out, the goodwill that America has always shown to the rest of the world.
All of that stuff came out of an America that was created by the 1950s.
And I'm not saying that obviously the bigotry in that community in that time was wrong.
It was.
It was wrong.
The way black people were treated, absolutely shameful.
They got a case, no question about it.
But if you, that's all you have to say, is all you have to say is look how great we are when we're not in the 1950s.
You have to address the fact that the 1950s were the people who won the war against Hitler, who built the America that we live in, who built the America of peace and prosperity that we enjoy.
It's not culture critical.
That is not art.
And that is why leftism, leftism has done to the arts, it has done to the artistic imagination the same thing it does to everything else.
It guts them.
Leftism guts our institutions like Yale University used to be a great college.
Now it's just a leftist college sitting around pretending to be Yale.
The New York Times used to be a great newspaper.
Now it's just a leftist newspaper pretending to be the New York Times.
And the shape of water is gutted by leftism, just pretending to be a work of art because it has nothing to say except how wonderful we ourselves are.
It's the opposite of culture critical.
It's culture self-congratulatory.
That's why it won the Golden Globes because the Golden Globes was just one hour of self-congratulation after another.
Voice of Sanity00:00:55
All right, tomorrow we have one of my favorite commentators, Molly Hemingway, is coming on to talk to us.
She has just been so sensible and so sane about what's going on.
She's like this lone voice of sanity floating around in the media and not entirely alone because we too are a voice of sanity and we will be here.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Be here tomorrow.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.