Ben Shapiro dissects George Soros’ Davos speech, where he equated Trump to Kim Jong-un, framing it as a push for global conformity over competition. He mocks the 2018 Grammys—Kendrick Lamar’s weak lyrics, Dave Chappelle’s political laziness, and Hillary Clinton’s "M.C. Hillary" bitterness—as proof of culture prioritizing activism over art. Contrasting Trump’s economic focus with Jay-Z’s dismissive lyrics, he argues cultural decline stems from abandoning fusion traditions, not policy. The episode ties media bias (e.g., The Post’s Nixon revisionism) to political outcomes, warning that leftist narratives dominate when free expression weakens. [Automatically generated summary]
The New York Times, a former newspaper, says President Trump once thought of firing special counsel Robert Mueller, but didn't.
Also, Mike Pence once considered looking at a porn site but thought better of it.
And Mitch McConnell had a momentary urge to punch Chuck Schumer in the nose, but then decided that would be wrong.
The Times quoted unnamed sources, invisible friends, and an occasional imaginary playmate to report that Trump imagined firing Mueller when Mueller's investigation into Trump's imaginary collusion with Russia's imaginary hacking of the election came too close to producing an imaginary indictment.
According to Times editor Blithering Prevarication III, quote, sure, things are going well for America in reality, but in our imagination, things are a disaster.
And isn't that what really matters?
Unquote.
The Times report about something that didn't actually happen, but might have happened if the world bore any resemblance to what's written in the New York Times, is pretty much in keeping with the left-wing playbook.
Leftists everywhere are predicting imaginary disasters at every turn.
This is an existential threat to the survival of human civilization.
The United States is set on a course towards nuclear war.
No, it is the end of the world.
This healthcare, the debate on health care is life-death.
This is Armageddon.
So now we understand why they didn't fire the Hawaii guy who sent out a false nuclear missile warning.
Sending out fake warnings of imaginary disaster is standard leftist operating procedure.
The guy will probably be made the head of the DNC.
Some of the left's disaster claims can be disproven by careful fact-checking strategies, like looking out the window, ignoring the warnings and seeing if everything turns out all right, and just assuming anything that George Soros, Al Gore, and Nancy Pelosi say is false, and then going about your business.
But maybe we should ask ourselves, is there a chance that leftists are right?
It's never happened before, and yet leftist panic does make sense.
After all, leftist ideas look great in the imagination, but make real life worse.
So as capitalism and freedom make real life better, the leftist imagination begins to crumble to dust.
And so for leftists, this last year has been an absolute imaginary catastrophe.
Fake Disaster Warnings00:03:23
That's too bad.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is to get.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Shipshape, dipsy-topsy, the round of zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hurrah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, another kingdom heartthrob.
Michael Knowles will be with us.
He's the only person who watched the Grammys last night.
My feeling about the Grammys is they should just give the award best crappy song with degrading lyrics and repetitive music.
The music business is so bad that I don't even know what they're giving awards for anymore.
I should mention, just as I came on the air, there was some breaking news which I thought was really interesting, which was Andrew McCabe is out at the FBI, and he's the guy who was mentioned a couple of times in the text messages between Strzz and Page.
But what's interesting is that happened one day after the head of the FBI, Christopher Wray, the guy that has been appointed by the Trump administration, after he read this secret FISA memo.
So he read the FISA memo, and Andrew McCabe went goodbye.
So that's going to be an interesting story, but it's happening right now, so I can't really comment on it because we don't have any information on it yet.
But we do know, here are some things we know, we know that Valentine's Day is coming.
And if you're like me, Valentine's Day and Halloween are completely indistinguishable because they both are terrifying.
You know, you're walking down a dark hallway and suddenly Valentine's Day jumps up.
You haven't gotten anything right away, but it's too late.
So you want to go to 1-800Flowers to solve the problem and keep the terror at bay.
That's 1-800Flowers.com because right now when you order early, you can get 12 multicolored roses for only $19.99.
That's a good deal.
Double it to 24 multicolored roses and it's only $10 more.
And it's an unbelievable offer from 1-800Flowers.com.
12 multicolored roses for $19.99 or double it for only $10.
Roses from 1-800 Flowers are picked at their peak and shipped overnight to ensure freshman, freshness, and that your wife gets flowers for Valentine's Day, which is really quite important.
To order a dozen multicolored roses for 1999 or to upgrade to 24 multicolored roses for only 10 bucks more, go to 1-800Flowers.com, click the radio icon, the radio icon, or the radii icon, as you wish, and then enter the code Clavin.
And you say to yourself, okay, sure, but how do you spell it?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N at 1-800Flowers.com, code Clavin.
You get a dozen multicolored roses for $19.99 or 24 for just $10 more.
Don't like Valentine's Day become what it is at my house, a source of terror and then regret.
Okay.
Now, you know, so much meaningless stuff is that when meaningless stuff is happening in the news, people start to talk about the meaningless stuff.
And we go over this New York Times story about something that didn't happen.
I want to talk about something that actually matters, which is Trump was a Davos where all the globalists are.
And, you know, Trump and especially Steve Bannon were always talking about globalists as if they were the evil enemy.
Bad Ideas Spread Force00:15:37
And here was Trump out there by the global.
One thing that really, really stunned me was the video they had of Trump arriving.
Because all we hear, all we hear from the press is, oh, our respect for us among, you know, the nations is falling.
Oh, and Obama, Obama had so much respect.
That's why nobody ever did what he said, but he had so much respect for him.
Trump shows up, and it really was like a movie star showing up on the scene.
The entire place stopped.
Journalists, world leaders, everybody taking pictures.
It's just a clip of him arriving.
It's amazing.
So, really, it was stunning, the kind of, you know, what gets respect is winning.
Winning, as Trump himself would say, winning gets respect.
He has won for a solid year.
He has done tremendously well.
The economy is doing well.
And he has pushed aside all these little gnats in his way, like the mainstream media and Hollywood.
They're all screaming and yelling.
He don't care.
So he is the big guy.
And you could just tell.
I mean, look, you can talk and talk and talk, but a reaction like that tells you everything you need to know.
But the thing is, the thing about globalization, sometimes the whole conversation strikes me as ridiculous because there is no argument about whether we're going to become a global society.
We already are a global society.
And some people have said that the history of the entire world, the history of mankind, is the history of mankind slowly coming together.
If you think about it, when we started out, we were a bunch of individual tribes.
Some of these tribes probably didn't know that the other tribes even existed.
Some of them just had, you know, we had completely different cultures.
We had cultures that never interacted.
Now, today, I mean, it's almost a cliché.
I can get on my computer and contact the guy literally on the other side of the world and send him some meaningless emoji and have some stupid conversation.
And we are a global society.
But the question is, and who said that?
Sigmund Freud said that Eros, the life force, which we frequently experience in terms of sex, but Eros is just the life force, brings us together.
And he said it wants us to become one.
We don't know why.
We don't know why that is true.
And as I say, a lot of people have said, this is the history of humankind.
And I'm not the first person to notice this.
But the question that we're asking is not whether we're going to come together into a global society.
It's how we're going to come together.
And I'm not the first person to notice that there are basically three things that unite human beings across cultures.
One is money.
You know, I go and I spend money and we all agree that the money you give me in Russia for oil is going to be able, I'm going to be able to spend that money in Britain for something else.
And we all agree that money brings us together.
And money, that's a good thing.
I mean, markets are good things because they bring people together.
People are less likely to kill each other when they're trading.
But money isn't a moral force, right?
I mean, money, I can buy Russian wheat with American dollars, but I can also pay a hitman to kill you.
And if it's just a question of money, he's making money.
The whole system is working great, except you're dead.
So that's not it.
Money has no values.
It has no values.
Another way that people come together is imperialism.
And people run imperialism down, of course, because people don't like being conquered.
They don't like the British coming in and telling India that they should get rid of their thuggies.
They don't like that so much.
People don't like their culture being overrun.
But at the same time, there is a certain logic to imperialism, especially if it's done without arms, it's done through trade or through culture, that the country that works best tends to get furthest.
There's a reason that Rome becomes an empire.
Greece becomes an empire.
The British became an empire.
There really were good systems that were spreading to other countries.
And as many Indian people said, the British actually did give things to their culture that improved the culture.
So imperialism, of course, it has its bad things.
We don't want to go in conquering people.
It just seems unfair.
It's bloody.
Who wants it?
Who needs it?
It leaves all this bitterness behind.
But the spread of the best culture, of the most powerful culture, of the freest culture, it can be, in fact, a good thing.
And the third thing that brings people together is ideas.
And most of the time, they think of this in terms of religion, but it's all kinds of ideas that bring people together, ideas that work.
And of course, ideas can be a wonderful force for good.
I think they are the most powerful force for good.
Our ideas, good ideas are better than bad ideas and keep us from killing each other.
And so a religion like Christianity, which features love, which says that all people have dignity because they're made in God's image, that in loving God we love our neighbor, good idea, good idea.
There's an idea that spread for the first hundred years, 200 years of its existence.
It spread without arms.
It simply spread because of the dedication of the people preaching it, because of the ideas and the way it made people feel and the way they could see Christian culture was better, more elevated than the Roman and pagan culture around it.
And it spread that way.
But of course, also, there are bad ideas that can spread through the sword, that can spread because people are desperate.
Socialism is a bad idea that spreads because people are immersed in poverty and corruption.
I think Islam is a bad idea that spread because it unified these Arab tribes into one great army at this exact moment when Rome was crumbling.
Bad ideas can spread too.
And the thing about bad ideas, and I'm going to get to the point of this and Trump and Davos, is the thing about bad ideas is they're incredibly persistent.
They continue to exist and they continue to spread just as good ideas prove themselves.
And I'll explain why that happens in just a moment.
But while we are talking about Valentine's Day and giving your wife flowers, you know, it takes two to make a Valentine's Day.
So girls may want to give something to their guy as well.
And that's where man crates come in.
If Man Crates is not one of my favorite sponsors, purely for their antique sense of humor, I think, you know, just the fact that they send you this stuff for guys, you know, it's kind of, what's the word they use where they culture, I can't remember what it's called, where they choose it, they purposely choose the stuff for guys.
There's a whiskey one, there's a cigar one, there's an axe one, but it all comes in this gigantic crate and you have to tear it apart with an iron bar, you know, so you've got to really be manly.
And if you want to wrap it, they wrap it in duct tape and all this stuff.
Mancrates.com, you just find awesome gifts that guys love.
It's not like, you know, a tie or something like this.
Curated, that's the word I'm looking for.
This man crate, it's in the copy itself.
If I had only looked in the man crates copy, man crates offers curated gift collections for every type of guy, the sports fanatic, the home chef, the outdoorsman.
You can get NFL barware crate, the whiskey appreciation crate, which I was just using last night.
That's the one I got.
It really was good.
Jerky Heart or the Salami bouquet.
And you pry the wooden crate open with a crowbar, which is included.
Thousands of five-star reviews.
Every gift comes with complete satisfaction guarantee.
Here's what you do: you go to mancrates.com slash clavin for 5% off.
You say, yes, but because you have a deep voice, because you're getting man crates, you say, yes, but how do you spell clavin?
Well, it's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Man crates.
No ease.
There's no ease in Clavin.
Everybody notices that.
There's no ease, nothing easy about being Clavin.
Go to ManCrates.com slash Clavin for 5% off.
They don't offer a discount anywhere else.
5% off right now at mancrates.com slash Clavin, mancrates.com slash Clavin.
I have really enjoyed the gift.
I actually ordered another one, but I won't talk about it until it arrives.
Maybe we'll do another one of those opening videos.
Why do bad ideas persist?
Bad ideas persist when good ideas succeed.
And I'll show you why.
So Christianity and its resulting theories like capitalism and independence and individualism and free markets and all the freedom that grew up out of the blending of Christianity and classical values, it created so much success that people started to get rich, fat, and lazy, right?
They started to forget that we are in a struggle for survival.
So that when people rushed into our country with their bad ideas, when Syrian refugees and Muslim workers rushed into our country with their bad ideas that they were fond of, they were fond of their bad ideas because that was the culture they knew.
People forgot that you had to stand up for the ideas that had made you rich and fat and lazy.
You forget that you have to stand up for the things, you know, all these ideas are built on a tower, right?
The other thing that happens is when problems are solved, good people go home, right?
So let's take the problem of black oppression in America, which was real.
There was government oppression in America.
There's only one kind of racism that the government can get rid of, government racism.
Governments can get rid of government racism.
They can say, no, you can't put a sign up that doesn't let a black guy use the public toilet.
They can say, no, you can't keep black men and women from voting.
You have to let them vote, because otherwise, if they're not part of the system, why should they be indebted to the system?
Why should they actually be devoted to the system if they can't operate the system?
Government can get rid of government racism, and it did.
And when it does, the people who say, okay, now you're not stopping me.
I'm still going to bump into racist from time to time.
Still going to bump into a jerk who doesn't like me because my skin is a different color.
There's always going to be some idiot quoting some pseudo-scientific genetic stuff.
I can live with that.
The world is filled with different kinds of people.
But as long as the government is not standing in my way, as long as there are no laws that keep me from being who I want to be, I'm going to go out and do my thing.
That guy doesn't complain.
That guy is too busy working, or girl, is too busy working, too busy living his or her life, rising to the top, making a life for himself and his kids and his family.
That guy is not going to complain.
It's only the person who basically was committed to the struggle, but not the result, who still gets self-worth from this struggle, who's going to turn up and say, well, now, now we have to go and we have to snuff out every sign of racism in life, which of course is impossible.
So you always just have these bad ideas getting more and more left-wing.
Same thing is happening to gays right now.
A gay guy who said, look, this is who I am.
None of your business.
Let me get married.
Just leave me alone.
Let me do what I'm going to do.
He's basically one.
He's got nothing to fight about anymore.
The only guy is the guy who wants to hunt down every florist who's a Christian and doesn't want to cater his wedding.
That's the guy who remains.
So the bad ideas, the leftist ideas, the ideas of social, they just keep coming back.
You know, there was this thing on CNN.
A guy, let me see if I've got his name here.
Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor.
He made a slip.
And I always hate to bring people up because we all make slips.
We all make these.
But it really does tell you something.
Just listen to what he says for just a minute.
Ever since the 14th Amendment, all people in the United States have been counted.
Women, children, blacks, non-citizens, et cetera.
But I think the sort of the holy grail of this from a point of view of the Republican redistricters is to try to get these people out because it would radically change lots of districts across the country.
So he said slaves instead of blacks.
And the only reason I bring it up is not, like I said, anybody can make a mistake and he was talking about the past and all this.
But that is the mindset of the left, is that these problems never go away because if they go away, then you have to start talking about a new idea.
You have to start talking about what you're going to create, what you're going to put forward.
And when has the left ever created anything?
Their whole philosophy is to take from creators and spread it around instead of encouraging each person to find his way.
So tension causes life, right?
When the tension is gone, that's when the bad ideas move in.
When everything becomes, you know, they always talk about equality.
I always say dead people are equal.
Slaves are equal.
In a free society, people rise, people fall, generations fall, families fall, generations rise, families rise.
Tension is life.
Life is the tension between ideas, too, between freedom and equality, right?
You can't be equal.
If you're free, you can't be totally free.
If you want people to be equal, you can't be free at all.
If you want people to be equal, you have to force them to be equal.
The tension between those two good things, we want people to be equally treated and we want to be free, that pushes us forward as we make compromises, all kinds of tensions, competition, competition in businesses, right?
If there are two businesses making air conditioners, you're going to get better air conditioners.
If there's one business being Google, you're only going to get Google, and it's going to get worse and worse and worse.
So that is what essentially Trump went to Davos to say, that we defend America because the world works better when America is standing up for itself and you in Italy are standing up for yourself and everybody's standing up.
Then you have competition.
And that is what he went to say.
So listen to him.
This is him talking at Davos, making a speech at Davos about America first.
I guess this is cut number three.
I believe in America.
As President of the United States, I will always put America first, just like the leaders of other countries should put their country first also.
But America first does not mean America alone.
When the United States grows, so does the world.
American prosperity has created countless jobs all around the globe.
And the drive for excellence, creativity, and innovation in the U.S. has led to important discoveries that help people everywhere live more prosperous and far healthier lives.
As the United States pursues domestic reforms to unleash jobs and growth, we are also working to reform the international trading system so that it promotes broadly shared prosperity and rewards to those who play by the rules.
So Trump knows that each person standing up for himself and fighting in a peaceful, market-based way creates more competition.
The right knows, we conservatives know, that when everybody gets to speak and argue and discuss, ideas get better.
Only the left wants competition to end.
Socialism ends competition.
They want to shut down every speaker at a university.
They want to censor us.
They want the news.
The news, when is the last time CNN hired somebody who voted for Trump to work in their place making decisions about what goes on the air or the New York Times or ABC or CBS or NBC?
They only want, they do not want, they want the death, the death of unity, the death of unity, instead of the progress in life of tension.
Let us listen to George Soros at Davos.
His reaction to Trump.
It's like the raving of this guy whose toys have been taken away from him.
Unity vs. Competition00:03:30
George Soros is a guy, by the way, who does everything he can to protect his own money.
He only thinks that you should share your money.
And he does.
So let's listen to his reaction to Donald Trump, cut number six.
I used to define the goals of my foundations as defending open societies from their enemies, making governments accountable, and fostering a critical mode of thinking.
But the situation has deteriorated.
Not only the survival of open society, but the survival of our entire civilization is at stake.
The rise of leaders such as Kim Jong-un in North Korea and Donald Trump in the United States have much to do with this.
Both seem to be willing to risk a nuclear war in order to keep themselves in power.
Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un are the same guy to this guy.
They're the same person.
He said, oh, the rise of Donald Trump.
What about Donald Trump?
It's like Kim Jong-un?
I mean, what about him?
You know, the haircut?
You know, they both have funny haircuts.
Is that it?
I mean, I cannot think of this.
And then he says, he goes on to say that in this really childish way, if you just picture him jumping up and down at his, I know he's like 112 years old, so he can't do that, but if you just picture him jumping up and down, talking about Trump is finished, cut number eight.
Clearly, I consider the Trump administration a danger to the world, but I regard it as a purely temporary phenomenon that will disappear in 2020 or even sooner.
I give President Trump credit for motivating his core supporters brilliantly.
But for every core supporter, he has created a greater number of core opponents who are equally strongly motivated.
That's why I expect a democratic landslide in 2018.
Maybe so, maybe so, but we will see.
And what I really do think is what these guys want is a different kind of unity, a unity of mind, a unity of no competition, of one marketplace where everything is flowing back and forth and nobody has to compete.
Because why would you compete if you didn't believe in your nation?
Why would nations compete if their nations don't exist, if there are no borders?
He's always talking about an open society, really meaning no borders.
If people can flow in, we don't have a country.
Why would we defend our country?
Who would compete with whom?
Tension and competition and free expression and individuality are where the life and progress of the world, of the human world, come from, not from unity, not from conformity, not from silence.
That's all the left ever, that's all they ever promote in every single thing that they do.
And George Soros is one of their chief, the chief proponents of that kind of unity because he thinks he's going to be in charge of it.
Why Borders Matter00:17:03
I think that's why.
Which brings me to dollarshaveclub.com.
Now you may say, what's the connection?
I have no idea.
I just, I have to do the ad.
Plus, I love doing this ad because this is something I have been using for years.
I was using years before they became the sponsor.
I've now developed this complex system.
It's absolutely true.
You know, I really like their executive razor because it has lots and lots of blades on it.
And it really, I mean, it really gives me a good shave.
And I have all this real estate to shave, so it's a big, big deal.
But I also, on the weekends, I don't shave that much.
And I think that's kind of a waste of money to pay for this big shave, you know, more expensive shaver.
So I switch off every month.
You know, all you have to do, it's really easy.
What they do is every month they send you a new set of blades and their other stuff.
They have all this other stuff like hair gel and body cleanser and they have shave butter.
I love the shave butter.
It's like clear shaving cream so you can actually see through it.
That's really good.
They have all kinds of things and they send this to you every month as you tell them what to send.
And what I do is every month I go on and change it.
I say one month I want the executive blades and one month I want the regular double blades and then I use them and I intersperse them.
I have a very complex shaving life.
I have a very deep shaving life.
It's an important part of my life and that's why I use dollarshaveclub.com and this is a great time to start in a dollar shave club or to give it as a gift.
You can get your first month of their best razor, the executive, which you will love, along with travel-sized versions of shave butter, body cleanser, and all their other stuff.
And it's just five bucks.
Just starting out, you can start out with a starter pack of five bucks.
And after that, the replacement cartridges ship for just a few bucks each month.
It's the DSC starter set.
Get yours for just $5 exclusively at dollarshaveclub.com slash Claven.
And I know this is my audience.
Many of them are saying, I forgot that I had to spell Claven because you know my audience.
They will give you for just five bucks their best razor plus all their accessories that are really cool.
I love them.
We are going to break in a moment, but before we do, I should remind you that tomorrow is the State of the Union.
And you know, it's actually the first State of the Union.
I keep saying that his first State of the Union was great, but that wasn't his official State of the Union.
That was just addressing the joint houses of Congress.
But Tuesday, January 30th, our president will speak to the nation in his second State of the Union address.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg will not be there because she falls asleep during these things.
It's embarrassing, but we will.
The Daily Wire will be there, not just for the speech itself, but starting at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific, we will hang out, smoke cigars, drink heavily, and say insulting things about every person who deserves our respect but doesn't get it.
We'll even answer your questions.
Ask away on any of our platforms and our lovely and talented Alicia Krauss will send us your questions and you'll get your answers live on the air.
You can catch the live streams at dailywire.com, DailyWire Facebook, or DailyWire YouTube.
And you'll be spending the evening with Ben Knowles and me and even the God-King of the Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring.
And if you think it was easy to get him, we had to burn incense and incense, let me tell you, was plenty annoyed.
We'll also be joined by a special guest at various points in the evening, so stay tuned to find out who will drop by.
Follow us on Facebook and YouTube and get notified when we go live so we can spend every unforgettable moment and even the forgettable moments together.
It's a party.
You don't want to miss the state of the union.
All right, we got Michael Knowles coming up, but we got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come on over to thedailywire.com.
You can listen to the show, but oh, oh, oh, if you had only subscribed, you could have watched the entire show right there.
It's a lousy 10 bucks a month.
For 10 lousy bucks a year, you get the whole year and you get the leftist tears mug, which continually magically fills up.
Whenever Knowles walks into the building, when he walks into the building, the leftist tears tumbler just fills right up.
Stay with us.
All right.
So the Grammys were last night.
And I have to say, I've never watched the Grammy.
I've talked about the fact that I don't watch the Oscars anymore because the movies don't really mean anything anymore.
But I never watched the Grammys.
Now, I should quote, let me see if I can very quickly find this quote.
And here's why these award ceremonies are so ridiculous.
Plato said in the Republic.
Let me see if I can find it.
Here it is.
He said.
I'm sorry, Plato said in the apology, he had Socrates say, not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration.
They are like diviners or soothsayers who say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of what they say.
The poets appeared to me to be much the same.
I further observed that upon the strength of their poetry, they believed themselves to be the wisest of men in other things in which they were not wise.
So when you turn on the Grammys, you're listening to people who think they're wise because they got to write a song, but they're not.
So that's why it's completely uninteresting to me.
But I forced Knowles to watch it.
And so we'll find out.
And Knowles may have been the only person watching last night.
I hear the ratings were completely in the tank.
Knowles, do we have him?
Is he even there?
Does he exist?
Is Michael Knowles a real person or is he just something that we talk about sometimes?
Is he a concept?
Have we got him?
How could you do that to me?
How could you do that?
I suck, don't I?
I really stink.
Even I felt guilty.
I mean, I kept saying, but it's Knowles.
This is what he's here for.
You are right.
I did constitute half of the audience.
And I only watched some of it, by the way.
I didn't even watch the whole thing.
It was impossible to watch the whole thing.
The ratings are down 33% over last year.
They lost a third of their audience.
And by the way, they're saying that last year the ratings were decent.
That isn't really true.
They had ticked up a little bit from the previous year, but in the crucial demographic 18 to 49, they still performed pretty poorly last year.
They lost a third this year of their total audience.
I know you can't know this, but just on a guess, is that the music or the politics?
Yes.
I believe yes is the answer.
There is, you know, I forget where C.S. Lewis writes this, but he talks about how a culture that is only talking about politics, that is obsessed in every way with politics, is sick.
And you need to talk about politics if you're sick.
Otherwise, it would be like ignoring an illness if you're physically ill.
You have to do it.
But you can't forget that the only reason you're talking about politics is so you can talk about other things.
Cultural things, beautiful things, the reason we get up in the morning and live this world.
And these people have totally lost any sense of that.
And I do think it's a little bit of the chicken and the egg.
The music is so awful and degraded that the awards show becomes awful and degraded.
And then this is about politics.
So this is about politics.
All of these people, the Plato quote was excellent.
They're all so empty-headed.
But even the awards show, I can't emphasize it.
I know that nobody in the audience watched it because I saw the Nielsen ratings.
I can't possibly underscore enough how the entire thing was just politics.
And it wasn't even good political jokes.
At one point, it opened up with Kendrick Lamar, who put some words together in a way that apparently constituted sentences, but I couldn't divine any of that.
And then it was interrupted by Dave Chappelle, who made this lame joke about how it's hard to be black in America.
But it wasn't even a fully formed joke.
It was just that everything about it was so lazy.
And then the most egregious part of it, the laziest part of it, is it culminated in an appearance from Hillary Clinton.
The great rapper Hillary Clinton.
The rapper Hillary, yeah, M.C. Hillary, my cousin.
Let's just, can we just show that clip?
Do we have it?
He had a longtime fear of being poisoned.
One reason why he liked to eat at McDonald's.
That's Hillary reading from Fire and Fury, that tabloid book by Michael Wolfe.
Because, by the way, nothing's going to entertain the audience that's quite like Hillary Clinton, right?
That's what we have to do.
You've got some of the most famous entertainers in the world.
They were cheering for us.
It's so, I mean, also, I don't even think their audiences like Hillary Clinton.
They were all Bernie people in the audiences.
So it was really, really sad and pathetic.
Also, it almost made me feel bad for Hillary because she's just so desperate for attention, desperate for, and she's so bitter.
And the Chardonnay is getting to her.
I mean, I heard her cursing on the air, talking about the witches, as we'll say, here.
She's just hitting the white wine a little hard.
Yeah, when it's not giving her, you know, causing her to fall down into her limousine or whatever.
But then Donald Trump, our president, gets into a scrap with Jay-Z.
Now, I'm not going to say that Trump is like the greatest political genius of all time, but Jay-Z, I mean, his lyrics are just like, they're horrible.
I mean, they just reduce people to dirt, basically.
I mean, they call black people, you know, racial slurs.
They call women everything.
What is he pronouncing on?
Where does he get the authority to pronounce on it?
Well, it's funny because I began complaining about Kendrick Lamar.
But at least he's kind of a, he's a Christian.
He's getting married.
He doesn't do drugs, pulled himself up from Compton.
There is something nice about the idea of him, even if he is awful for music and culture.
Jay-Z is just awful.
He's terrible.
Jay-Z, the nicest thing I think he's ever said about women is that he's got 99 problems, but a witch ain't one.
That's him complimenting women.
He's like, thanks, thanks so much, Jay-Z.
And they're going to get up and give speeches.
I mean, they're going to get up and give speeches about treating women with respect and me too.
I mean, they are me too, basically.
They are me too.
Ironically, they only gave one major Grammy to a woman that was beautiful.
But on the Jay-Z point, this is, it's become cliche to say this is why we elected Trump.
This is why we elected Trump.
But this is why we elected Trump.
We elected him because he's the first Republican in my lifetime who can fight cultural battles and win cultural battles.
So here is just a little bit of Jay-Z talking on the Van Jones CNN program.
Once you do that, all the other closet races just run back in the hole.
You haven't been fixed anything.
What you've done was spray perfume on a trash can.
And what you do when you do that is, you know, the bugs come and you spray something and then they come and then you create a super bug.
Right?
Because you don't take care of the problem.
You don't take the trash out.
You just keep spraying whatever over it to make it acceptable.
And then, you know, as those things grow, then you create a super bug.
And then now we have Donald Trump, the super bug.
Donald Trump the superbug.
So it's so shocking.
A popular entertainer called a Republican a racist.
I know you've never seen that before.
Now, Trump struck back, though.
Trump strikes back, and he did it in the Trumpiest way.
He sent out this tweet.
He said, would somebody please inform Jay-Z that my policies have black unemployment, you know, at the lowest, have just been reported at the lowest level ever recorded.
And it was a rap.
It was clearly intentionally a rap because he, look, I can publish blank books all the good day long.
I will never be half the troll that man is.
He is one of the great trolls of all time.
But I'm very pleased that he is fighting back with these people.
Because Jay-Z, in that interview, he said that money isn't everything.
Black unemployment, that doesn't matter.
Money isn't everything.
Jay-Z, with his wife, my fellow Knowles, Beyoncé, is worth over a billion dollars.
Very easy for him to say, oh, money doesn't matter.
Well, you know, but you know, the thing about it is, is that, like, Trump isn't even talking about that.
He's talking about jobs.
He's talking about the very source of people's dignity and their sense of themselves in the world.
He's not talking about whether black people have a billion dollars.
He's talking about whether they have a job.
How can you say that, you know, Montel Williams, is that the name of the guy in the talk show?
He tweeted out the same thing.
What good is it if Trump doesn't care?
Who cares if he cares?
You know, really, who cares if he cares?
I mean, if a guy has a job that means so much more in his life, and if he's not like on welfare, if he's bringing home money to take care of his kids and all this, and the kids see him work, I mean, that is an amazing thing to say that that doesn't matter, and all that matters is whether Donald Trump speaks the right left-wing words.
It's an amazingly stupid thing to say.
It's really funny because he gets almost at a good point.
But the reason they're saying this now, of course, is because the economy is doing too well.
The public policy is going too well.
If things were in the gutter, they'd be harping all the time on black unemployment or whatever.
But they can't give him any credit for anything good.
So he says, well, not everything is about money.
Culture matters too.
And that's been our point all along.
Yes, that's right.
Not everything is about GDP.
Not everything is about tax rates.
The culture matters.
To have Jay-Z tell us that culture matters with his hoes and his, you know, I mean, it's like, come on.
There was, I don't know if you saw the clip this morning, there was this really sad moment, actually, from the show where Patty Lapone comes out.
Probably the other person watching didn't recognize her.
I was the only person in the audience who recognized her.
And she sang, Don't Cry for Me, Argentina, which is not the most incredible song ever written.
This is not high culture exactly, but it was quite nice, and she did it very well, and it was talented.
She's a good singer.
She's a good singer, and it has lyrics that you can understand.
And it was this really sad moment because I think a lot of times we're like old fogies.
We say, oh, back in the old days, the culture was good.
And you say, okay, grandpa, whatever.
And it gets saccharin and it gets sentimental and nostalgic.
But this was evidence right before us that even just 30 years ago, even in an Andrew Lloyd Weber musical, The Man Who Brought Us Cats, not the great cultural genius, even then the culture was so much stronger and more serious and sophisticated.
And we're watching that die out for the likes of Jay-Z and Kesha and whatever other incoherent nonsense that we could see.
And this coming, by the way, when they talk about blacks who basically are the foundation of American music, everything great that came out of American music has come out of white people and black people sort of melding their sounds together and bringing this incredible sound that never existed before out of American jazz and American swing and all these things.
And you know, there's a prejudice about things that are happening now.
So you say, well, you're getting, you're old-fashioned if you don't like rap.
Rap is what things can get worse.
You know, things don't always get better.
And I think American music has definitely gotten worse.
It's clearly gotten worse.
We saw the evidence before us last night.
And I suppose we should be happy that all they talk about now is politics because it's just proof positive.
If they were producing decent art, something tells me they'd be more excited to talk about their art.
Sorry about that.
But they can't harp on that, so they have to rant about whatever else they think will give them attention and validate their own careers.
Yeah, no questions.
You're going to talk about this more in your show, I take it.
I'm going to analyze song by song, point by point on the show, and basically why Aristotle is absolutely right.
You covered Plato on your show.
I'm covering Aristotle on mine.
We do all the Greeks.
Yeah, we're going to do all the Greeks and try to get the Grammys completely off the air by 2019.
All right.
Well, I owe you for making you watch this.
This was a tough one.
I have to admit.
I'll see you later, Knowles.
Thanks a lot.
I do not understand.
You know, and it is funny that you criticize something, a movement that's going on in the arts, and people say, well, you're old-fashioned.
But sometimes things get worse.
You know, sometimes things get better.
I think television has gotten 10 times better.
You never hear me sitting around saying, ah, back in the old days, we had Andy Griffith.
TV now is better than it used to be.
Movies are worse.
Music is worse.
Rap, I think, is an actual shame.
I think it is an actual degradation of a kind of music that contributed so much to American culture.
Speaking of which, we have our crappy culture.
So Campus Reform does these great videos.
They're an organization.
They go on campuses and they ask people questions.
Here is Campus Reform going on NYU, one of the better schools in the country, theoretically.
And I recognize all these streets.
These are my home streets.
But they're going on NYU and asking students whether or not it was true that the State of the Union speech, Trump's State of the Union speech, was racist.
Now, of course, we know that Trump hasn't made his State of the Union speech yet.
So he's asking them whether the speech that he hasn't made yet was racist.
Some people were saying that it was the most racist State of the Union that's ever happened.
What was your reaction to everything that was said?
Campus Reform Questions00:03:00
I didn't watch it because I couldn't bring myself to watch it.
Quite racist at the very least.
If not, up there with most racist.
Yeah.
Wow.
It's already quickly climbing the scale.
Some of the people said today that they thought his immigration stance that he outlined last night was especially hateful.
Very offensive.
What do you think of that?
It's something that I wouldn't have expected to happen in our lifetime.
It's offensive.
It is crazy.
But I'm not shocked by what he's done in the past.
Pretty ugly.
I believe what I'm hearing about his rough nature and the hate that he probably said.
You know, this is the thing.
We always hear these polls of young people and what do millennials think?
And they always assume basically that they're going to travel in a straight line.
They're not going to change.
They're not going to learn anything.
And right now, millennials hate Donald Trump.
They really think he's terrible because they catch glimpses of him on TV and he's a roughneck and he says all this stuff and they quote it out of context.
But this is the reason why information and art and all, you know, there's a movie out now, The Post, by Steven Spielberg.
And I tell you up front that I have not seen this movie and I'm not criticizing it, but as I understand it, it is the Washington Post's struggle to print the Pentagon papers against the Nixon administration's attempt to stop them and it makes Nixon the evildoer.
And people still think that Nixon was responsible for the Vietnam War.
What the Pentagon Papers showed, what the Pentagon papers showed was that John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had lied to people consistently about how much involvement we had in the Vietnam War.
And it really was JFK and LBJ who got us into the war and Nixon who stopped it.
It was Nixon who stopped the war, who ended the war.
And so when you have John Kerry, you go, oh, this is Nixon's war.
They're just lying.
And they lie in their movies because they know that this kid at NYU is going to sit up one night late at night and is going to see the post and that's all he or she is ever going to know about what happened in history.
And we don't do it.
We think we can come in at the last minute and explain to everybody and point to charts and tell them the facts.
But they've already got Jay-Z's music in their head.
They've already got Steven Spielberg's movie on their screen.
They've already got these leftist professors teaching these kids that a speech has been terrible when a speech hasn't even taken place yet.
You know, it does ultimately, we win these battles, but ultimately the war is fought in the culture.
And I know I say this all the time.
I know I hammer at home, but I hammer it home because it really does matter.
And one day it comes back and it bites you and you wind up with a president like Barack Obama.
And you sit there and say, how do we have a president who hates our country?
Well, because they created Obama in our schools, in our movies, in our news media before he existed as a real human being.
So when people saw him, they didn't really see him.
They saw an image of who he was supposed to be, who he was pretending to be.
State of the Union Discussion00:01:05
All right, well, back tomorrow.
We'll find out maybe more about this FBI thing and talk about that.
Also, the State of the Union is tomorrow.
And Ben and Knowles and I will be, and the God-King of the Daily Wire himself, Jeremy Boring, will descend on a wire that we keep at the Daily Wire for specifically that purpose, so he can descend into our conversations from time to time.
That will be, we'll be here all day tomorrow, starting with Ben, me, Knowles, and then the State of the Union.
I'll talk to you then.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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 their animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.