Ben Shapiro dissects the FISA memo scandal, exposing how the FBI used a DNC-funded, unverified dossier to surveil Trump associate Carter Page while hiding its partisan origins from judges, calling it a "scandal within a scandal" tied to Obama-era abuses like Benghazi and Clinton’s emails. He mocks media dismissal of the memo as a "nothing burger," contrasting it with past scrutiny of Republican administrations, and argues left-wing bias shields deep-state malfeasance while weaponizing guilt over historical racism to silence criticism. The episode ties this to cultural shifts—like Super Bowl ads pivoting from anti-Trump messaging to pro-American themes—and predicts Trump’s influence is pushing back against "woke" activism, from millennials’ performative brand loyalty to the moral rationalization behind pro-abortion rhetoric. [Automatically generated summary]
So, scandal is not an exact science, but on a scale of nothing burger to worse than Watergate, the information in the House Intelligence Committee FISA memo comes in at about a seven.
We'll talk about that later.
But for now, suffice it to say, if this sort of thing had gone on under President Trump or even under President George W. Bush, the New York Times, a former newspaper, would have announced the news in front-page headlines so large it would have taken two strong men just to carry the letters to the press room.
An enormous collection of Times reportage on the subject with a black cover and some title like The Path to Tyranny would have been on the bookstore shelves within the month.
Instead, America's news centers from 42nd Street in Manhattan all the way to 57th Street in Manhattan did everything within their power to suppress, taint, and minimize the impact of the memo even before they knew what was in it.
Some of us who still go to the movies just sat through Steven Spielberg's The Post, a two-hour left-wing talking point about how brave the Washington Post was when it defied President Nixon's concerns over national security in order to expose government malfeasance by publishing the Pentagon Papers.
Yet now, news outlets plead to keep secrets, to keep secrets in the name of national security and warn us, in the satirical words of a headline in The Onion, that the memo could undermine our faith in massive, unaccountable government secret agencies.
And after decades of listening to leftists scree about J. Edgar Hoover's unjustified wiretapping, the leftist media is now telling us that a little unjustified FBI wiretapping now and again is a nothing burger.
In short, a press that should on principle be hungry for every piece of information that might be damning to the powerful of every stripe has made it clear that they do not want you to know what they do not want to know themselves.
The truth is, both the memo itself and the press's unforgivable lack of curiosity about the memo are part of a much bigger scandal within a scandal.
The memo represents just one more jigsaw piece in a picture of the Obama administration as a Chicago-style Democratic machine rife with cronyism and abuse of power, a machine to which the media closed its eyes.
We know this.
It's not conjecture.
We know that Obama's IRS made successful efforts to silence conservative voices during the president's reelection campaign.
We know that the IRS also targeted Jewish groups that supported Israel.
We know that Obama's Secretary of State lied to cover up the disaster in Benghazi.
His attorney general held a secret powwow with Bill Clinton while his wife was under investigation.
And now we begin to learn that the Obama Justice Department may have colluded with a Democrats' campaign in order to spy on a Republican's.
And all this went on while journalists kow-towed to, flattered, and ultimately raved about the administration being scandal-free.
Life Insurance's Secretariat00:03:21
For eight years, those of us who asked with the ancient Roman poet Juvenal, who will guard the Guardians, were answered by the self-styled heroes of journalistic truth telling, not us.
That's the real scandal here, and it's finally beginning to come out.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-ship-shaped topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Did anybody?
No, people did watch the Super Bowl.
I mean, that was a great, it was a wonderful, wonderful game.
Everybody stood for the national anthem, Pink singing the national anthem.
And, you know, Rob was pointing out to me that the Philadelphia Phillies were the only team, the Philadelphia Eagles were the only team that didn't ever protest the flag, didn't ever kneel for the national anthem, and they, of course, won.
And then we had Nick Foles coming on afterwards, and he is a guy who wants to be a pastor after he's finished being a quarterback and the winning quarterback for the Eagles.
And he came on and started singing the praises of Jesus.
Apparently, I mean, Foles was on the brink of quitting.
He was really just a replacement quarterback.
And instead, now he's got a Super Bowl ring.
Amazing.
The last guy who did that was Tim Thibault, right?
The last guy who came back from nowhere to win the Super Bowl is Tim Thibault.
Something, a little magic in this Jesus juice.
What's that?
Tebow didn't win the Super Bowl.
Didn't Thiebaud win that first, the Super Bowl he was in?
He won a playoff game.
He was never in the Super Bowl.
Did Tebow not make it into the bowl?
Are you sure?
He was in the national championship in college.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
I will like, I just want to check this.
Did Tim Thibault never won the Super Bowl?
I'm just misremembering that.
That's awful.
Not as the starting quarterback, at least.
Yeah, that's awful that I misremember that.
It's terrible.
Maybe not easy.
I just had that memory of him winning a Super Bowl.
He won, I think, two college championships.
Ah, never mind.
Never mind.
Now it ruins my entire point.
But the thing that's true.
You know, it's terrible when your memory conflates stuff like that.
But the thing is, the whole point that I was trying to make was that the entire tenor of the Super Bowl was patriotic, full of religion.
And it's like, if you don't think that Donald Trump is changing our culture and chasing these guys back into the corners and the rat holes where they belong, he is.
It is really a big difference.
You may have noticed also that it's February, which is the shortest month of the year, which means you haven't got a lot of time if you want to get life insurance in February or something.
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Why This Memo Is a Dud00:06:20
And again, nobody will bug you.
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So there's no sales pressure, zero hassle.
You can get quotes in five minutes.
Policygenius.com, because if you need life insurance, it shouldn't take a lifetime to get it, which of course would get rid of the entire reason for having it.
So am I now, do we have no sound?
That clips are back.
Thank heavens.
I thought I was going to have to talk through this entire show.
So let's talk about this FISA memo.
We never got a chance after its release, what it tells us, what it doesn't tell us.
So many people hyping it on the right, but also these people running it down on the left, the press running it down on the left, which is unbelievable.
What's in it?
It says the FBI and the Justice Department, if the memo is true, they use this steel dossier, this OPO research that was paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton.
And this talking point again, that was originally paid for by the Free Beacon is not true.
The Free Beacon hired Fusion GPS, but they had nothing to do with the Steel dossier, which only came in after the Democrats hired these people.
So they used this to get a FISA warrant to spy on an American citizen, Carter Page.
Now, Carter Page is a Russian sympathizer.
He got into trouble with the feds before because he was hanging out in Russia with a guy who later became a spy.
He was investigated.
He was never charged with anything.
And so we don't know whether he's a dirty guy or not, but they were spying on him.
And he had just left about a month before.
He had just left his volunteer role in the Trump campaign.
Okay, so they wanted to spy on this guy.
And he had recently left the Trump campaign.
And they did not tell the FISA court, according to the memo, they did not tell the FISA court that this dossier was paid for by the DNC, and they didn't tell them that it was, using the words of James Comey, salacious and unverified.
And this is a violation.
It's a violation, according to Cheryl Atkison, the investigative reporter, is a violation of the FBI's own procedures.
The FBI has something called the Woods Procedures, which are strict rules requiring that each and every fact presented in an FBI request to electronically spy on a U.S. citizen be extreme vetted for accuracy and presented to the court only if verified.
And for obvious reasons, right?
The FISA courts don't turn down that many applications for warrants.
So we have to trust our government, we have to trust our government to only ask to spy on Americans when they might be dangerous agents of a foreign government.
That's the only time.
The thing is, now this memo doesn't necessarily taint Robert Mueller's investigation into the Russian collusion idea, although why there's a special counsel doing investigation into something that's not a crime, I don't know.
But it doesn't necessarily taint that.
In the memo, it does say that this guy, Papadopoulos, was the thing that jump-started the memo.
He was in Australia.
He got drunk.
He told some people that the Russians had emails damaging to the Hillary Clinton campaign.
That, of course, turned out to be partially true because they had, because Podesta had given them, they fished him for his password, so they'd gotten in.
And that's what jump-started the campaign.
But, but, now, this is not in the memo, but it's very hard to believe that they went after Carter Page as their main target here.
The guy is a nobody.
He's not some big guy that they were going to have some big investigation of.
It really does seem, it's a fair conjecture, let's put it this way, that they went after Carter Page to tap into the Trump campaign.
If that turns out to be true, and we don't know that yet, if that turns out to be true, then the scandal meter goes into the red zone.
So that's what we have, right?
In any world, in any world, every journalist would be on top of this, right?
Every one of them would be salivating, let's get the more information, let's find out where this goes, how far did this go?
Did the Democrats use the federal government?
Oh my goodness, they would be saying in this make-believe world, did the Democrats use the federal government to bug a Republican presidential campaign?
That would almost be like colluding with the Russians.
That would be worse than colluding with the Russians.
That would truly be a scandal.
So every red-blooded reporter is out there trying to get the, let's just have a montage.
We have a montage here that comes from Grabian of the press.
I mean, these are just Democrat talking points coming out of the faces of the press about after this memo is released.
This is cut five.
I could tell you from reading this memo and consulting with a wide range of experts, it's a dud.
This memo is a dud.
Nothing.
A dud.
But it is nothing.
A nothing burger.
And less interesting about this memo is what, what is in it.
The only thing I fear from this memo, because I think it's really been a huge dud.
Some of the GOP Tea Party members were out there saying that this is the most vile thing they'd ever seen.
And it's a big dud.
It's a dud.
Unfortunately, it fell flat yesterday, much, I think, to the chagrin of the president.
This memo was a complete dud.
Talk about collusion as a Democrat Party colluding with the press.
Here's one I just love.
I mean, what I wonder when I watch this is, did they hear themselves?
Do they think we don't hear them?
Do they think we're stupid?
Yes, they do.
They must think we're stupid.
Here's George Snuffalopagus, the Clinton hack, I love you, Hillary Clinton Act, running this panel.
Listen to the logic of this panel, that basically by releasing this memo, by giving the people information, we're all now working for Putin.
Listen to this.
When you think about the investment that Vladimir Putin made in interfering in our elections, it is paying off every day in spades.
He won the Super Bowl.
He really, Putin has won the Super Bowl here.
Exactly what he wanted to happen in this country.
This discord, this mistrust of institutions is exactly why they operate.
So for a year, a year, they do nothing but report on this story and bring, and they know the people don't care.
The people don't care.
The people who are at home going, hey, there's more money in my paycheck.
Adam Schiff Discusses00:09:56
Hey, I have a job.
Hey, this is kind of good.
Things are going well.
They know the people don't care.
They pull them.
Nobody is talking about this Russian investigation.
These guys do it.
They serve Vladimir Putin every day by doing this.
And then when somebody says, oh, and by the way, the collusion was between the Democrats and the Russians.
It's like, you're working for Putin.
And they think, but what I love about them is I always compare them to the last scene in Singing in the Rain, the old musical, where the woman is singing and to get she's a nasty woman and she's actually dubbing the woman who's singing behind the curtain and they open the curtain so the audience can see that this woman is a total fake.
The press, this has happened to the press.
The curtain is open.
We can all see it.
They just haven't looked behind them yet to realize that we see the Democrat Party standing behind them while they mouth the words.
All right, but before we go, I love them.
I love them.
They're providing the comedy.
You know, when you think about this in the right way, what is happening is the boil of the corrupt Obama administration is being lanced and it's all coming out.
So it has this feeling of like, yuck, there's all this stuff coming out, but it's actually a good thing.
It's a positive thing for the Republic.
Valentine's Day is coming.
And again, this is a short month, so it comes very quickly.
I don't even know what I'm talking about.
Valentine's Day will come very quickly.
And it comes on Ash Wednesday.
So you're going to be in church because that's an obligatory church visit you have to make.
So you're not going to have time at the last minute to get your girlfriend or wife flowers.
You know, so you've got to use 1-800 flowers.
You do not want, you do not want Valentine's Day to pass and come home and say, look, honey, I have an ash cross on my head.
And she's like, yeah, because you're still going to hell because you didn't get me flowers.
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And you may say, well, how do I spell Valentine's Day?
It's K-L-A-V, as in Victor, A-N.
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My favorite of all these commentators trying to play down this memo, trying to pull us off the memo, were two of my favorites.
One of them is this clown, Phil Mudd, who's a former CIA guy, is now a CNN operative.
And his argument, his argument why we should not do this, we shouldn't expose the deep state because the deep state will kill us.
So he comes on.
This is Phil Mudd threatening the elected president of the United States with the deep state and saying, and we shouldn't reveal this information because they're going to hate, come after the president.
So the FBI people, I'm going to tell you, are ticked.
And they're going to be saying, I guarantee it, you think you can push us off this because you can try to intimidate the director?
You better think again, Mr. President.
You've been around for 13 months.
We've been around since 1908.
I know how this game is going to be played.
We're going to win.
So maybe if you don't want us to feel there's a conspiracy, you shouldn't threaten elected officials with unelected deep state secret guys.
Maybe that would make us all feel better.
And Adam Schiff, the reliable McCarthyite Adam Schiff, boy, he is like a clock.
He just goes off.
He just keeps the time perfectly.
You just know he's going to go off with this stuff.
And Democrats are so invested in this panic mongering.
Again, again, I know that the people who believe them, the people who are in their camp, their base, I guess they're nodding and saying yes, yes, yes.
But the rest of us, the people who can think, I'm not just talking about the base, the Trump base, I'm talking about the people in the middle on whom elections depend.
I have to believe that they are listening to this and going, rolling their eyes.
Give me a break.
Here is Adam Schiff telling us if we publish information that lets us know about our government, the terrorists win.
And sources of information are going to dry up.
If you have a neighbor next door who's buying a lot of fertilizer and it seems odd to you because they don't have a yard, are you going to think twice before calling the FBI?
Because if they get a search warrant for your neighbor and something is politicized, the political wins change and there's an investigation, your identity is going to be revealed because you really can't trust that this is going to be kept confidential anymore.
There's a reason why this process has never been used before.
But even so, the process presumed that the president of the United States, who has a veto over this, would be a responsible person who would have the interests of the nation at heart.
Why would anybody need to buy fertilizer when we have Adam Schiff?
You've got Adam Schiff talking.
You've got plenty of fertilizer.
Adam Schiff telling us, if we find out what the deep state is doing, if we find out that there was malfeasance at the top of the Obama administration's Justice Department, which there was, we already know there was.
We know he corrupted the IRS.
We know he corrupted state by making Hillary lie about Benghazi.
We know he corrupted the Justice Department by getting Hillary off the hook and he lied to us about whether he knew about her email.
We know this stuff.
I mean, this is not me.
This is not like me just going off on Democrats.
We know that this guy, I believe that Barack Obama slowly began to understand that the press would not touch him no matter what he did.
If he had strangled Michelle in the Rose Garden, the press would have said a new trend, killing your wife.
Isn't that one?
I mean, really, the press was so in the tank for him.
And as he realized that, he just continually corrupted the government, turned it into the Chicago-style machine.
And as I always say, he didn't corrupt it for himself.
He corrupted it for his ideology.
He was not money corrupt.
He was ideologically corrupt, and so is the press.
The press is exactly the same.
You know, campus reform, I love these guys.
They go out and they do these funny interviews to show us how skewed campus people's minds are at colleges.
They went out and did this video where they told people lines from Obama's State of the Union and then told them it was Trump's State of the Union.
And this is not off the topic.
I play this to make a point, but let's just listen for a minute.
First, talking about ISIS saying, quote, we need to call them what they are, killers and fanatics who have to be hunted down and destroyed.
What's your thought on that?
Well, first of all, ISIS is fake.
It's something the government made up so they can continue doing what they want to do, which is world domination.
Donald Trump should like, you know, mind his own business and like just focus on America because he's the president of the United States, not of the whole world.
I feel like that's a very strong statement.
And when you say something like that, it kind of makes you like a target.
Or if you're a threat to this country, we're going to get you for that.
It's just ridiculous.
Next up, talking about the general world stage saying, quote, when you come after Americans, we come after you.
It may take time, but we have long memories and our reach has no limit.
What's your thought on that?
Well, I don't think that's a good way of handling something.
It's like he doesn't think before speaking and how it's going to offend a lot of people.
He should be careful because there's other countries out in the world that has like, you know, like automatic buttons and, you know, nuclear bombs.
So when they think it's Trump speaking, they hate it, but it's actually Obama speaking.
So with college kids, we can forgive this because, you know, they're worried about important things like taking drugs and having sex.
But you know, this is the press.
This is the press.
This is what they've been reduced to.
And they were reduced to it when they were in college.
You know, it's a chain of cause and effect that these colleges have been taken over by leftists.
They teach them leftism.
They then go out into the world and become reporters.
And every time they hear something that comes out of Trump's mouth, it's bad.
Every time they hear something that comes out of Obama's mouth, it's good.
Plus, with the press, and especially with the generation, I hope it'll be different.
It's very hard to imagine it will be, but I hope it'll be different with the generation coming up.
But there is a racial pathology with these people.
The Democrats, I think I've quoted this before.
Andrew Breitbart used to say that the Democrat Party was like a Malamar.
It was a thin brown crust protecting this massive white center.
And the way they keep that brown crust, meaning African Americans, the way they keep the black people so protective is by manipulating our legitimate guilt over our historical sins against black people, and those are real.
And they manipulate our legitimate guilt to make us feel that anytime we criticize black people or a black person, we're doing something racist or wrong.
So Trump goes out and he says you should stand up for the flag.
They say, well, those players are black and they're complaining about some black.
So that's racist.
That's nonsense.
If you're not racist, if you're not racist, you judge people strictly on the content of their character and on their actions.
And if the actions are wrong, they're wrong.
And if they're right, they're right.
And certainly the press should just be eager for the truth.
Being a reporter is what I call a meta-profession.
Being an artist is a meta-profession.
Sure, you have politics.
Sure, you have opinions, but you leave them behind.
Your purpose is to get the truth.
And to have an entire industry whose purpose, they've been telling us what heroes they are, how they're speaking truth to power, to have an entire industry essentially protecting power from the truth is a shame.
Mobile Ads for Millennials00:14:26
It really is.
It's a scandal.
You know, I didn't mention this.
We had a little mess up at the beginning with the sound, so I got a little fuzzed and I forgot to mention that Michael Knowles is here to talk about the ads in the Super Bowl, and he will be coming up in just a moment.
But first, first, if you are a lady and you want to get something for your husband or boyfriend on Valentine's Day, and you want it to be, you know, if you get him something nice and romantic, he will tell you he likes it because that's how we roll.
We lie to you, so you leave us alone.
But if you want to get him something that he'll really like, and I know if you're a great wife or girlfriend, you will, you will try man crates.
I love man crates.
I was using man crates last night as I was drinking my way through the Super Bowl.
I got the Scotch appreciation box.
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It's stuff for men.
Doesn't matter what kind of man, if it's a sports fanatic or a home chef or an outdoorsman, they have a different thing for each one and it's curated for that guy.
Like the one I got, which is Scotch, has a little, what do they call this little glass bottle and two glasses and wonderful coasters and everything.
It's really fun.
It's really a fun way to drink scotch, which just makes it a little bit more fun.
And most importantly, it comes in a big crate that you have to pry open with a crowbar.
That's the whole point.
And if you get it wrapped for him, they wrap it in duct tape.
So he's not only got to pry it open, he's got to rip off the duct tape.
By the time he gets it, he won't care what's inside it.
I've had so much fun.
It's got thousands of five-star reviews, as you can imagine.
There's like an NFL barware crate, a whiskey appreciation crate.
That's the one I got.
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Of course you do.
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And of course, this brings up the question: how do you spell Clavin?
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No, there's no Ease in Clavin, my friend.
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It will be a great gift for your boyfriend or husband.
Michael Knowles is coming up, but we have to say goodbye to YouTube and Facebook.
So you can listen to the great man on, or Knowles, on DailyWire.com.
But if you want to watch the show, you've got to subscribe.
So if you subscribe to the show, you just stay on DailyWire.com.
You can watch the whole show.
You can be in the mailbag.
We have a strange, I'm going to the prayer breakfast in Washington this week.
So we have a strange week.
Are we going to push the mailbag to Friday?
Is that what we're going to do?
If that's what you want.
We can do that or we can do it on Wednesday.
Maybe we'll do it on Wednesday.
We'll stick with Wednesday.
I'm going to be doing it from Washington, D.C.
So get your questions in, but you got to be a subscriber.
It's $10 a month or $100 lousy bucks for the entire year.
Plus, you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Michael Knowles is coming up right after this.
All right.
Have we got Knowles?
Is he there?
Bringing him in by satellite.
You are in Kentucky.
No, you're in the next one.
Right over in that broom closet.
That's where I am.
Coming in hot from a lot of Super Bowl barbecues.
In Shapiro's broom closet.
So you actually watched all the ads.
Actually, I watched the ads this year.
I don't always, but I watched them advance.
This was one.
You know, I don't really care for sports that much.
I like baseball, but I don't really care for the Super Bowl.
I was waiting, though.
I was salivating for all the absurd, crazy, leftist, stupid ads, just like we got last year.
And I knew it was going to make a great fodder for this segment.
And then do you know what happened?
Then Donald Trump won the culture.
He did.
Donald Trump won.
It was pretty good.
The ads were pretty good.
The game was pretty good.
Yep.
The game was very good.
This is the first assignment you've given me in years, I think, that wasn't just misery-inducing and suicide.
It was a complete mistake on my part.
If I had known, believe me, I would have had you watch the puppy, the puppy Super Bowl, you know?
I think there were three kinds of ads.
Last year, there was just one kind of ad, and it was the anti-Trump ads on every single one of them.
That's right, that's right.
You know, last year, I don't know if you remember this.
I wrote out a little list of them.
Last year, Budweiser ran an ad about how great immigrants are.
Coca-Cola did one of singing America the Beautiful in different languages, you know, to really stick it to Trump.
Audi made one about women driving race cars for sexism or whatever.
Handmaid's Tale ran a commercial about Handmaid's Tale.
You know what I'm saying?
Airbnb made one about the travel ban.
A shampoo company made one about how terrible Trump's hair is.
On and on and on.
This year, there were three kinds of ads.
Political ads, slacktivist hashtag couch surfing activist ads, and genuinely funny, normal ads about the product.
And the great irony here is the most political ad of the night was pro-Trump.
Which one noise?
It was pro-America.
It was an ad by WeatherTech, and the WeatherTech ad, it actually ran a line.
It said, just right on the screen, at WeatherTech, we built our new factory right here in America.
Isn't that the way it's supposed to be?
Yes, and it looked like they were building a wall.
That's right.
It kind of looked like the wall going up.
And there was one where Ronald Reagan was the last voice you heard on it.
I can't remember which one that was.
That's right.
Yeah, that was a good idea.
So it was a very pro-American thing.
Very pro-American ads.
And then there were a couple.
Coca-Cola assaulted the English language.
They used the gender neutral they.
Do we have a cut of that?
There's a Coke for he and she.
And her.
And me.
And then there's a different Coke for all of us.
No Coke for them, just me and her.
No them.
But anyway, whatever.
That's fine.
It wasn't terribly anti-Trump.
T-Mobile did one with a bunch of babies.
That was one of my least favorite ads.
I mean, the Keanu Reeves ad was the stupidest ad, but that was my least favorite ad, that T-Mobile ad.
It was so lazy.
It was just a bunch of babies whining about equal pay or something.
But even on that ad, CBS Money Watch gave it an F.
The consensus among the ad buyers and the ad makers was that it was a terrible ad.
That basically was all of the political ads.
The anti-Trump thing, they clearly learned something from last year.
There was another class that seems political, but they're different, and those are the slacktivist ads.
That was Matt Damon telling you to buy a Stella Artois mug so that you can, I don't know, give water to a billion people in India or something.
It's because, though, I've been reading a number of studies about this.
Millennials love vague humanitarian activism.
So they don't really, they don't like doing anything.
No, you don't want to go out to those African places because they don't have no fresh water.
They have all these poor people.
Yeah, you buy the Stella Artois, and that's, I don't, I don't get them some water, whoever they are, somewhere there'll be water.
It's like, could you pass me the bottle, please?
Exactly, while you're on your couch.
But this study shows half of millennials think CEOs have a responsibility to talk about social issues.
Half of them are more likely to buy from activist CEOs.
See, this explains something and actually makes me feel a little bit better about that T-Mobile ad because I sit and watch that T-Mobile ad.
You know what I'm thinking?
The whole ad was babies of different colors, and we're all together and equal pay, and everybody, some people may not like you.
And I was sitting there thinking, who the hell are you talking to?
You know, you calling me a bigot, you little piece of garbage.
Like, take your T-Mobile and eat it.
That's the way I'm feeling.
But I guess millennials are sitting there going, yeah, now I'll buy that phone because we're all one.
Well, the other thing T-Mobile could have said is, do you want to not have service in 80% of the country?
That ad didn't test as well in the focus group.
No matter who you are, no matter who you are, you will not get service.
We treat everybody the same.
I think that's it, though.
I don't think that they were sitting saying, yes, we need to fight the social issue.
I think they were talking to the ad makers who say, you know, 68% of millennials say a company's social and environmental commitment is extremely important when deciding which products to buy.
I wonder they say that.
I wonder how true that is when they actually go out and buy.
I wonder, but you do see all of these ads doing it.
So Tom's Shoes is the great example.
This company that gives shoes to poor people or something.
And they make terrible shoes.
The quality is awful.
But people buy them because they feel like they're doing something activist.
The crazy one, did you see the Dodge Ram commercial?
Oh, my.
That was embarrassing.
I was embarrassed for that one.
I mean, isn't there like a series of people who can stop that ad?
I always wonder this one.
I've been in the movie development process with scripts.
And there's all these people saying to you, oh, well, this doesn't make sense.
And why is the gun over here when he left it in the kitchen and all this stuff?
And then you actually go to the movies and the movies, their plots.
You could drive a Dodge truck through their plots.
Right.
And you think, where were those people?
When I saw that ram truck ad, I just thought, why didn't anybody stop this thing?
Why didn't anybody read the speech that they had?
I'll tell them what it is, yeah.
They had Martin Luther King speaking and giving this speech about service and greatness over the truck ad and said, 50 years ago to the day, Martin Luther King gave this speech.
In the speech, I decided, just a quick little Google search of the speech.
He said, quote, we are so often taken by advertisers.
You know, those gentlemen of massive verbal persuasion.
And they have a way of saying things to you that kind of gets you into buying.
In order to be a man of distinction, you must drink this whiskey.
In order to make the neighbors envious, you must drive this type of car.
They left that part out.
He probably goes on to talk about Dodge itself.
But it's kind of like, you know, it's Martin Luther King.
He's a serious, important guy.
You know, it's like it's just a truck.
And then did you see the Jeep truck ad?
I mean, that is the kind of answer.
If I'm stepping on your material, go ahead, you do it.
No, no.
There were answers to these ads.
I mean, some of them absolutely nailed it.
And some of them were just Martin Luther King.
They were trying a little too hard.
We're, you know, Jeep climbing up rocks or something.
You clearly understand what this product is.
And I think it's because, I think the takeaway here is that the people who are creating the culture, the ad makers in Hollywood and in New York, they're still lagging behind the American people.
They still don't quite get it.
They're very blunt instruments.
It still vaguely smacks of, hey, fellow kids, what are y'all doing?
You know, trying to be part of them.
But it's much better than it was last year.
They are catching up.
Because we're just talking about these slacktivist or political ads.
The majority of them were just kind of funny.
They were just regular ads with actors making funny faces and Morgan Freeman rapping or whatever.
And that is a vast, vast improvement.
And you'll be shocked to hear me say this.
We do have to give credit to Donald Trump for this phenomenon.
There's just no question.
I mean, first of all, there was a lot of postmodern ads in the Tide ad, which was my favorite ad of the thing.
I really like that where they would just have a different, they would pretend it was a different ad, and then they would say, oh, but look how clean everybody's shirt is.
It's a tide ad, really.
And that was very postmodern.
The Jeep thing was very postmodern because they talked about manifesto ads, which the Dodge truck ad was.
And they said, this is our manifesto.
Just drive that climbing up the rocks.
That will do it.
But yes, even the movies with The Rock, obviously he's playing a veteran.
He's missing a leg and he's going out to save his family.
What would you die for?
I'd die for my family.
And the Mission Impossible one was unpolitical, looked like a really fun action movie.
But it's just as if somebody, you know, my friend Glenn Reynolds, who's the Instapundit, or as we call him, the blog father, because he was the great leading blogger of his day.
And he always says, go woke, go broke.
And I think that somewhere along the line, some of these guys started to scratch their head and say, oh, they don't like us when we hate their God and their country.
Maybe if we want to sell them beer, we should be nice to them.
I mean, because that's it, you know.
We've been standing them up, and I think we should keep doing it.
And I think Trump has been a cheerleader for that.
And I think they're learning their lesson.
Keep the pressure on.
Could you imagine if we had been talking a year ago and all the main stories that dominate are the players kneeling for the national anthem and Colin Kaepernick and this and that and we have to change team names and anti-Trump and all of that.
And then what happened?
People stopped watching and the ratings plummeted and people are cutting their cords to basic cable and ESPN has totally lost its mind.
Sports Illustrated, people are canceling their subscriptions and believe it or not, we were able to get something out of it.
The culture is swinging a little bit back toward reason and not hating the country and not hating our fellow countrymen.
And this is not the time to go weak.
This is not the time to say how wonderful.
We have to stand up.
We have to support the cultural agenda that the wrecking ball of a cultural warrior, Donald Trump, is leading the charge to fight.
It really is amazing.
It is like the people, you know, it's like with the immigration thing.
The people aren't saying no immigration.
They're saying, you know, if you bring 15,000 people into my town with 3,000 people, we can't assimilate them.
The people know this stuff.
They have a complete, accurate sense of it.
They know when there's been too much.
And it's just these guys, they will not listen.
But hopefully, the thing that would make them listen more than anything, I was thinking this as I'm watching this, is if Trump actually wins the midterm or he doesn't lose the house in the midterms, I think that that would wake these clowns up.
I think finally they would start to say, oh, oh, I get it.
You know, the people don't want this.
We're not serving.
We're not doing our jobs.
All of historical precedent would suggest that Trump is going to lose the midterm and will lose the house or something like that.
And yet, those models only work in normal years, and this is not a normal year.
It's true.
If the Republicans held the House in the midterm, that is the mandate.
That is the mandate that we've rightly been claiming since November 2016.
But that is a clear mandate that the American people are, they're concerned about basic things, about the economy, about tax reform, about deregulation.
But all of that is just accounting because politics is downstream of culture.
And Americans have had enough with a decayed culture that hates them.
And they're finally fighting back.
Inspiration Behind The Scene00:07:28
It's great.
It is great to see.
What's on The Michael Knowles Show?
Today we are talking about, we don't want to get too controversial today.
No, no.
So we're just talking to a Catholic priest about gay marriage.
We're just talking.
Oh, that's interesting.
That'll be really interesting.
He is holding the Catholic line.
He is.
He hasn't become a heretic yet.
He hasn't been excommunicated yet.
Wait until he's on my show, though.
But it is a question that for some reason, this is the question that preoccupies everybody's mind for the last 10 years, even though it affects a relatively small number of people.
And we will debate whether or not conservatives should get on the gay marriage train or whether there is some other path that we can follow in our culture.
That sounds great.
Even I might watch.
Matt, no, All right, thanks a lot, I appreciate it.
Hey, you know, speaking of Knowles, I have to talk about this story from Manchester, England, where some clown in the Manchester Art Museum there wanted to take this painting down and they actually got it taken down.
Do we have the image of this painting?
This is Hylas and the Nymphs.
It's one of my favorite paintings.
It's from the pre-Raphaelites.
I think his name was John Watterson.
Is it Waterstone?
Is that his name?
And Waterhouse.
Sorry, John Waterhouse.
The Pre-Raphaelites are some of my favorite painters because what they did was they saw abstraction and impressionism coming and they said, no, no, let's go back to Raphael.
Let's go back to pre-Raphael.
And they started to paint these very, very beautiful, very lush images of mythology and religion.
And they were just, they're really just spectacular.
And this one is Hylas and the Nymphs.
Hylas was actually Hercules' toy boy.
He was supposed to be this very beautiful youth, and you know what the Greeks are like.
And so they were together, and he went into the woods, and the nymphs, beautiful nymphs, you see them coming out of the water, they drew him into the water and he drowned.
And a lot of people, not a lot of people, several people have asked me whether this was the inspiration for the scene in Another Kingdom starring Michael Knowles, where Austin is, in fact, led off by nymphs and he has a much different experience with the nymphs.
And the answer is yes, it is.
This is what inspired that scene.
It is a beautiful painting that's in my head a lot, like all of the pre-Raphaelites.
And I did want to capture some of that pre-Raphaelite beauty of mythology and everything.
So if you are listening to Another Kingdom and you haven't come up to that scene yet, or you remember the scene where Austin meets the nymphs in the wood, this is, in fact, the inspiration for it.
say it was what was in my mind as I was describing the scene.
Didn't work out so well for Hylas, works out great for Austin, so you can listen to another kingdom.
right, it is time for our crappy culture.
So a while back, I was talking about the devil.
It wasn't that long ago.
I did an opening about the devil and I talked about the fact that I've come to believe that I didn't always believe in the devil, even after I had become baptized.
But slowly over time, I began to see that it just made a lot of sense that there was in fact a conscious force in the world that tries to draw you away from God.
It tries to draw you into that emptiness that is away from God.
And once you start to notice it, you can notice thoughts in your head that are just like against everything that's good for you, everything that you are, everything that you believe in, everything that you want.
And these thoughts come in that sort of entice you away.
And one of the main ways this happens, I've always noticed, is through rationalization.
If you do something wrong and you say, oh man, I just made a moral error.
I did something bad.
I'm a human being.
I hope God will forgive me.
I'm going to go talk to the people I did it to and I hope they forgive me.
You're free and clear.
I mean, assuming you didn't kill anybody, assuming you didn't do anything that can never be reworked, God may forgive you for those things, but sometimes people won't.
But if you just made an error, you're not going to go down to the next error if you experience the pain and humiliation of admitting your guilt because you're going to say, I don't want that to happen again.
And you become a better person.
If, if you cannot admit for various reasons, whether it's political reasons, whether it's because you support Donald Trump or you support Barack Obama, whatever it is, if you make a mistake, a moral mistake, and you cannot admit it, you begin to rationalize.
And the process of rationalization is saying, it wasn't that bad.
In fact, it was good.
It was a good thing.
In fact, I'd do it again.
In fact, I will do it again.
And that is when the devil gets you.
He gets you.
Because once you start doing that rationalization thing, you start going down this road where the good becomes evil and the evil becomes good, and it goes on and on forever.
There is a clip that was put out of comedians at a pro-abortion fundraising rally.
And this is Sarah Silverman and some other comedians.
And turn this off if you're going to be upset by ugliness because it is truly ugly.
I don't think we've left any obscenities in it, but the whole thing is an obscenity.
The comedians, they're all female comedians, trying to get donations for pro-abortion rally, including Sarah Silverman, and they're pretending to play charades.
And then Sarah Silverman steps in with her comment.
Here it is.
eat your fetus fetuses as ingredients in the manufacture of food products no you think that eating fetuses is a thing And if anything has ever made me want to eat an aborted fetus, it's this law.
So Shapiro always gives me a hard time because I feel sorry when I see this happen to people.
I look at these people and I think, oh my God, you know, they have really, truly degraded themselves by following this path of rationalization, by saying, like, look, you know, I can understand why women want abortions.
I can understand they get into terrible, terrible situations.
I can understand how a small thing becomes such a huge thing as a human being.
A small thing is a knight of unprotected sex that went by in whatever in a half an hour.
And now you've got something for life.
I understand it's a very terrible thing.
But once you start to really think about it, once you start to really think that this is a human being, that this is a unique piece of DNA, it's not your DNA.
It's a whole new blueprint for a human being and very, very quickly becomes a human being.
Once you start to say that, you have to say you know this is just not the solution, this is not the solution.
But if you don't do that, you become what those people are.
You just become a degraded human being.
You're, you know, if you're sitting out there making jokes about eating unborn babies, you know you have become degraded.
It's not that funny, it's not funny at all really, but it's so ugly and that to see that coming out.
I, I feel for people like that because you know I, I have true uh, faith that every one of those babies who doesn't make it to birth is going to be taken care of and come before go to come before god, and I don't want to be there.
All right.
Tomorrow we have Howard Kurtz.
He's a guy I really admire.
He was one of the first people to come out with a book about the bias in the press.
It cost him.
He's now a commentator on FOX NEWS and he has a new book called media madness and we will talk to him about that.
And then I take off for the Prayer Breakfast in Washington Dc.
Executive Producer Jeremy Boring00:00:40
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin show.
with us again tomorrow.
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.