Andrew Clavin and Michael Knowles dissect the 2018 Oscars as a "moribund" spectacle, mocking its intersectional narratives—like Get Out’s white liberal villainy or The Shape of Water’s empty virtue signaling—while contrasting it with Hollywood’s golden-age classics. They blame cultural decline on leftist silencing tactics, citing David Brooks’ op-ed and Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards’ speech as proof of progressive tyranny, arguing conservatives’ civility (e.g., CPAC) proves their openness. The episode frames modern entertainment as self-loathing, disconnected from mainstream tastes, and warns that art’s lifecycle—peaking then decaying—mirrors Hollywood’s current collapse into performative outrage over substance. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm talking, of course, about that night when I sit by the fire drinking whiskey and reading 12th century Arthurian romances while Michael Knowles is forced to watch whatever unseemly crap is on TV.
Last night, of course, was extra special because while I was studying a medieval legend in which the knightly dedication to the protection of femininity conferred tremendous power on queens, wives, and maidens, Knowles was stuck watching a bunch of molesters pretend to celebrate the women who kept silent when they were molested so they could get to the Oscars and be celebrated by the men who molested them and are now pretending to celebrate them.
What an evening it was.
Who could forget Jimmy Kimmel abandoning comedy completely to make this touching speech about the plight of women in Hollywood?
Any woman who wanted to could get on our trampoline and give it a bounce.
We had a lot of girls show up.
We had about 10 times as many guys show up, but this is how it turned out.
Well, you guys are excited about seeing a few girls jump on trampolines?
One jump on our trampoline.
All right.
Well, who are we to stand in your way then?
Summarize this way.
Serve us up a nice steaming plate of panty.
Oh, wait, sorry.
That was from The Man Show where they gave the award to big-breasted women.
The award was called the Juggies.
That was before Jimmy Kimmel had his penis removed to keep his career going as a weepy old woman.
But the real question is this: Does Hollywood reflect the future of the culture, or is it just a moribund, increasingly irrelevant backwater of self-congratulatory virtue signaling catering to a dwindling elite who are no longer respected or listened to in a meaningless circle of self-congratulatory virtue signaling catering to a dwindling elite?
Let's find out.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world into zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, hooray, hurrah.
Assimilation Scene from Othello00:11:24
Listen, we got a lot of letters from you in answer to my question on Thursday, I guess it was, when I asked what it would take for you to dump Trump.
We couldn't get them until this morning for technical reasons, so I will deal with them tomorrow if there's not some crashingly huge news incident we have to cover.
Meanwhile, let us talk about Skillshare because you want to do new things in your job or as a hobby.
And Skillshare is an online learning platform with over 18,000 classes in things like design, business, technology, and more.
You can take classes in whatever you want, social media marketing, illustration, mobile photography, anything you want.
They've got it.
And whether you're trying to deepen your professional skill set, start a side hustle, or just explore a new passion, Skillshare is there to keep you learning and thriving.
I've used them.
I did the ones as a test on writing, and they were excellent.
There were things I wish I had known when I was starting out.
I did one on podcasting so we could get another kingdom going with Michael Knowles.
The first lesson was do not hire Michael Knowles, but I ignored that one and just went on to some of the better advice.
It's really fun.
It's not expensive.
And once you pay for it, you can get all the classes.
You don't stop in the middle.
It's not like in-app, buy a new class.
You get the whole thing.
And you can just join millions of students who have already used Skillshare.
And you can get a special offer from me with two months of Skillshare for just 99 cents, which is not a lot of money.
It's even less than a dollar.
For just 99 cents, you get two months, two months of unlimited access to all the 18,000 classes.
You sign up, go to skillshare.com slash Andrew, skillshare.com slash Andrew, to start your two months now for just 99 cents skillshare.com slash Andrew.
Learn something new.
Come on, get out there.
So we're going to be talking about the culture today and through the Oscars a little bit, but also through some other stuff.
And one of the things I would really appreciate it, if you're interested at all in high culture, I have a piece on Shakespeare and race that is up on City Journal.
So just type in Google City Journal.
And right now it's the top piece in there well, but you can find it.
It's called A Nation of Iagos.
And it is about what Shakespeare had to say about race.
And it actually applies to some of the things that happened at the Oscars.
I'm going to be talking about that.
Knowles will come on in a little while, and he'll talk about actually watching the show because I just couldn't bear it.
I actually tried and I kept turning it on for like a few seconds, a few minutes.
I think like, this is unbearable.
But I will let Knowles, who I forced to watch it, you know, do that.
The end results, though, were interesting.
And I will give you two of them that I found particularly interesting.
One is the shape of water, which I just thought the shape of water is the perfect expression of Hollywood today.
I mean, I've talked a lot about how when an art form becomes moribund, when it starts to get old, everything that human beings create takes the shape of human life.
It has its youth, it has its middle age, it has its old age.
As an art form moves from its middle age into old age, it starts to divide into elite forms that are just for a small number of intellectuals who think they're wonderful and popular forms that either don't have a lot of quality to them but appeal to the masses or do have quality but are not recognized.
Things like Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan, things that are actually really wonderful, but critics would sniff at them at the time.
And then only later do you realize how much quality they had.
But this is where Hollywood is now at.
And because they now pride themselves on their elite product, they despise the people.
They love the elites and they're only playing to the elite.
The shape of water is a perfect example of this.
The director won an Oscar, won the Oscar for Best Picture, and he won for Best Director, I think, as well.
And he stands up and he says, I'm an immigrant.
Well, you know, did you come here illegally?
Did you creep over a fence?
Nobody cares if you're an immigrant.
This is a country full of immigrants.
We welcome immigrants.
That's a virtue signaling nonsense.
It's only people who break the law that we have a problem with.
That's the only thing anybody is discussing is that.
And then he says, in the arts, you know, we erase lines when other ones want to draw them.
Also a lie.
All they do is move the lines to where they want them to go.
The shape of water is a beautiful, it's beautiful but empty, like the movie industry.
It's virtue signaling by attacking white men for something that happened, hasn't happened since the 1960s, like the movie industry.
And it sleeps with the fishes like the movie industry.
It's finished.
It's just an empty thing.
And when you look at the villain in the piece, it's played by the excellent, excellent Michael Shannon.
He's just a cartoon.
He's a cartoon of a white male, you know, hating blacks and everything.
It's just the total intersectional movie.
All the good people are black and deaf and handicapped and gay.
And it's like the bad guy.
Let's just take a quick look at the line that is drawn here.
My Brewster, no one's ever called him a great man, but even he manages to hit the can 70% of the time.
Excuse us, sir.
That's all right.
Go ahead.
You ladies seem to be chatting enjoyably.
Girl God, no doubt.
Don't mind me and then he goes to the bathroom right in front of them and talks and he just Just demeans them constantly.
And, you know, it's like they just, all they want to do is they want the lines to be drawn where they want them to be, not where the people want them to be.
But the more important picture, I think, that one best screenplay was Get Out.
And Get Out is a Twilight Zone episode.
It's not a big movie.
It's not an Oscar-worthy movie.
It could have been done in half an hour.
But it is an interesting statement about one of the most important subjects in all the West, but certainly in America, which is assimilation.
This is kind of what one of the things that my Shakespeare Piece at City Journal, A Nation of Iagos, is about.
I talk about how Othello the Moor is basically probably was a Muslim who converted to Christianity, is now fighting Muslims.
And when he kills himself at the end of the tragedy, he says, he remembers how he killed a Muslim and he says, and I smote him thus, and he stabs himself.
In other words, stabbing the evil, dark-skinned Muslim within himself because he has not managed to successfully assimilate.
This is the thing that Get Out is about.
And here's what I want to point out.
This is one of the great subjects of American literature and American movie making, assimilation.
It has been with us for a long, long time.
There is something shocking and violent about becoming an American and leaving behind or making some kind of accommodation with your original culture, whether it's Irish, whether it's Italian, whether it's Jewish, whether it's black, whatever it is, there is something violently dissociative about becoming an American.
We think it's a good thing.
We all think it's a positive thing, this assimilation.
And that's why you had, let's look at what I consider to be the last actually great American movie, which is The Godfather.
Let's look at this famous scene.
Remember, Michael is the son and the godfather who wants to get out.
He wants to become an American.
He marries the blonde Diane Keaton.
He's going to be, you know, he's not going to enter the family business, which is crime, but he gets sucked in.
Just as they try to get, you try to get out, they suck you back in.
And at the end, Marlon Brando, the godfather, has this very touching exchange with him.
I never wanted this for you.
I work my whole life.
I don't apologize to take care of my family.
And I refused to be a fool.
Dancing on a string, held by all those big shots.
I don't apologize.
That's my life.
But I thought that when it was your time, that you would be the one to hold the strings.
Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone, something.
I'm not a person who want to.
Oh, this was enough time, Michael.
Wasn't enough time.
We'll get there, Pop.
We'll get there.
It's a very, it's a classic scene.
And the scene is that Michael wanted to be an American, but that leap into assimilation failed.
Just like in Othello, it failed.
He didn't make it.
He goes back into the old culture, the criminal Sicilian culture from which his father was basically trying to escape.
The idea was, yes, we'll be criminals, but then we'll gain wealth, then you'll gain position, then you'll leave behind this criminal life, and you'll become a senator, a governor, you'll be, you know, something like that.
And he says, we'll get there, Pop, we'll get there.
But the point is, the good thing, the thing, the difficult but good thing is the assimilation.
In Get Out, it's exactly the opposite.
The story of Get Out is a black guy who is basically assimilated as an American.
He's about to marry a very beautiful white girl, and yet he finds out that this assimilation comes at a terrible cost, the cost of his inner self, which is his black identity.
Here's the scene where one of the people who has assimilated, in effect, in the horror world, in the horror language of the film, tells him that he's now been erased, essentially, and warns him to get out.
I've just had no interest.
the chores have become my sanctuary get out sorry man get out yo yo yo Get out of the kill.
Now, the reason the film is a good film, even though it is a tiny little film, the reason it's a good film is there's something legitimate about this fear for black people that wouldn't be legitimate for Jews, Italians, Irish.
The rest of them were, all the other people who come and assimilate it came of their own free will.
The blacks have this slave heritage and this heritage of Jim Crow that has created a great deal of bitterness.
I talk about this in the Shakespeare article.
I don't think they should languish in that bitterness, but still, still, it is a legitimate vision of something that is happening in black people's minds that they feel that they are being, even when they assimilate, even when they are allowed in, now that the bars have been taken away, now that the doors have been opened, they feel that they're leaving something behind that is of essential value and essential identity to themselves.
However, however, a mainstream culture that accepts that hates itself, right?
Because if the mainstream culture doesn't say, yes, it's tough for all of us to assimilate, maybe it's even tougher for you as a black person who was brought here in chains, whose ancestors were brought here in chains, maybe it's tougher for you to assimilate, but it's worth it because America is a great country.
But instead, the left has said, the culture of the left has said, is you're right, we suck, we stink, you know, you don't want to come here, get out, get out, do not assimilate, stay in your black culture, which, you know, actually, as a black culture, is not that healthy.
I mean, the overall culture is far more healthy than the black culture specifically.
Why Indochino Suits Matter00:02:24
So we have a movie industry that hates itself.
And because they're actors and Hollywood people, they'll never actually hate themselves.
They hate you as the image of themselves.
And that is what's happening to the movie industry.
That's why we're all so alienated from it.
So the question is, who's winning?
Who's winning is the idea of, yes, we welcome you, we get it.
You know, we mistreated black people in this country.
Now we've stopped.
Come on in, assimilate, become part of this country.
If you're going to immigrate, immigrate according to our laws, come in, become part of this country, add your wealth to our country.
Great.
Or is it going to be, we hate you, we're going to live in shame.
You get to be bitter.
You get to insult us.
You get to hate white men forever.
Which is going to win?
We're going to talk about that in a minute.
As soon as we fix the problem, that you look awful.
Why?
Because you're not wearing an Indochino suit.
You're wearing one of those suits.
You know, you go into, I don't want to name the stores.
You know, the crummy stores you go into, and you pull something off the rack and you put it in and you say, yeah, that looks okay.
And then you walk out.
I mean, look, if you were smarter than that, you'd be listening to something else.
But with Indochino, you can get a made-to-measure suit that you can afford.
That's the thing, because made-to-measure looks great, but it's frequently expensive.
Indochino is the world's largest made-to-measure menswear company and has been featured in all the major publications, including GQ, Forbes, and Fast Company.
What they do, I did this.
They have, in certain places, certain cities, they have places where you can go and be measured, and they will take all your measurements, or you can do it online, take your measurements at home, and send them in, and then they have your measurements online, and then you can start to custom build the suit and the shirt that you want.
You know, I did this.
I got a shirt.
It is absolutely beautiful.
It fits like a glove.
It really does.
And it just looks different than wearing off-the-rack stuff.
So you can pick a pocket on your shirt or no pocket.
You can pick those white collars that I kind of like, but I don't know if they're still in style, but I've always liked those white collars or just regular collars, all kinds of different things.
You construct the suit.
They make sure the suit fits like a glove.
Visit a showroom or shop online at indochino.com.
You pick your fabric, you choose your customizations, submit your measurements, wait for your custom suit to arrive in just a few weeks.
And this week, my listeners can get any premium Indochino suit for just $379 at Indochino.com when entering Klavin at checkout.
That's 50% off the regular price for a made-to-measure premium suit if only, if only you knew how to spell Clavin.
The Future of America Is Shutting People Up00:15:28
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
The shipping is free, it's half the cost.
Indochino.com, promo code Clavin for any premium suit for just $379 and free shipping.
Indochino.com.
Do not continue another day looking like you do at this moment.
I guess it was Friday.
There were two columns in two different papers that spoke directly into the way the different cultures work in America, left and right, left culture and right culture.
Amazing, an amazing contrast.
The first, do we have Knucklehead Row?
I forgot to set that up.
Maybe we can still have it because the first is on at the New York Times, a former newspaper, which has now become the Pravda of the left.
And it sounds kind of like a mixture of Pravda and an eight-year-old girl's birthday party after a mouse gets in.
It's just all these people screaming about how terrible Trump is.
But their op-ed page, which I call Knucklehead Row, is filled with elitists.
And you know, I think they have turned the Kool-Aid into an atmosphere there.
You don't have to drink the Kool-Aid anymore.
You just breathe it in.
Brett Stevens, you know, Ross Duthot, they used to be good thinkers.
Now suddenly they're just mouthing this incredible garbage.
But this is not one of them.
This is one of the central knuckleheads of Knucklehead Row.
take a trip over to Knucklehead Row.
So here is David Brooks, How Progressives Win the Culture War.
Okay.
He says, progressives could be on the verge of delegitimizing their foes on guns, but also much else, rendering them untouchable for anybody who wants to stay in polite society.
That would produce social changes far vaster than limiting assault rifles.
Two things, says Brooks, have fundamentally changed the landscape.
First, over the past two years, conservatives have self-marginalized.
In supporting Donald Trump, they have tied themselves to a man whose racial prejudices, sexual behavior, and personal morality put him beyond the pale of decent society.
While becoming the movement of Dinesh D'Souza, Sean Hannity, and Franklin Graham, they have essentially expelled the leaders and thinkers who have purchase in mainstream culture.
Second, progressives are getting better and more aggressive at silencing dissenting behavior.
All sorts of formerly legitimate opinions have now been deemed beyond the pale on elite campuses.
Speakers have been disinvited and careers destroyed.
The boundaries are being redrawn across society.
As Andrew Sullivan noted recently, workplace codes today read like campus speech codes of a few years ago.
David Brooks goes on: There are a number of formerly popular ideas that can now end your career.
The belief that men and women have inherent psychological differences, the belief that marriage is between a man and a woman, opposition to affirmative action.
What's happening today is that certain ideas about gun rights and maybe gun ownership itself are being cast in the realm of morally illegitimate and socially unacceptable.
Now, let me just pick this apart a little bit.
First of all, I want you to notice where he thinks the battlefield of the culture war is.
Polite society, right?
You're beyond the pale, you deplorables, you're beyond the pale of decent society.
elite universities, the decent, the polite, the elite.
This is where David Brooks of the New York Times thinks the culture wars are being fought.
In other words, he thinks if he don't believe it, it don't matter, right?
And what he doesn't understand is the entire question of what is decent, what is polite, and what is elite are under question.
That's the culture war we're fighting.
We suddenly have realized that the elites are not very elite, except in their imaginations.
We've suddenly realized their politeness is actually oppression, and we've suddenly realized that their decency is a complete fraud, as we saw with Barack Obama silencing opinions with the IRS and investigating his opposition with the Justice Department.
You know, we finally found that their decency is a charade.
It's a complete charade.
As I say about drawing the lines, when Guillermo del Toro says, we don't believe in drawing the lines, that's a lie.
They're just drawing the line in a different place to exclude you.
And that's the second thing.
The second thing is notice how they achieve, they're going to achieve their cultural victory.
It's by shutting you up by brute force.
That's how it's going to be done.
They're going to fire you.
They're going to hunt you down.
We're seeing this on YouTube as they demonetize conservative opinion.
Who was it?
Was it Facebook the other day that they knocked down the Babylon B?
Because Babylon Bee is a very funny Christian satirical site.
It's really as funny as the onion at its best.
And they knocked it down.
What did they say?
That CNN is putting their news in the spin cycle or something like this.
And they said, that's not true.
Snokes is fact.
Snopes, this liberal left-wing hit job of a fact-checker, fact-checked this satire and found it wasn't true.
It's nuts, but they have to shut you up because they can't win an argument.
That's the whole point.
Now, so that is how they're going to win.
He thinks they're going to win by shutting you up, shutting you down, taking your career away if you say, for instance, that women and men have inherent psychological differences, which is true.
So if you speak the truth, they're going to end your career, and that's how they're going to win the culture war, according to David Brooks, okay, in their elite universities and their polite society and their decent society.
Now, here over across the aisle at the Wall Street Journal, or as we call it, the grown-up stable, on the same day, there is an op-ed called A Hillary Staffer Goes to CPAC by Anafi Wahed.
She starts this out by describing her liberal friends talking to her as she heads off to CPAC, where the base of the conservative base is.
And she says, what are they saying to her?
Be safe.
Keep calling us.
If you get murdered, don't get murdered.
She's going off to CPAC, where, of course, we murder liberals.
You know, this is what they do.
They eat them, too, I think.
She says, to be sure, I'm a tiny, talkative South Asian woman who spent four months on Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign staff.
I wasn't exactly in my element surrounded by people in Make America Great Again hats chanting, lock her up, lock her up.
But there was more to CPAC than that.
In four days, I spoke with more than 100 conservatives, most of whom greeted me with open arms and thanks me for being there and having an open mind.
They happily engaged me in meaningful political conversation and invited me for drinks and after parties.
In retrospect, I'm embarrassed at how nervous I was when I arrived.
I found myself singing along to God Bless the USA with a hilariously rowdy group of college Republicans, having nuanced discussions about gun control and education policy with people from all walks of life, nodding my head in agreement with parts of Ben Shapiro's speech, so she really went off the deep end, and coming away with a greater determination to burst ideological media bubbles.
Among liberals, conservatives have a reputation for being closed-minded, even deplorable.
But in the Washington Republicans I encountered at CPAC, I found a group of people who acknowledged their party's shortcomings, genuinely wondered why I left my corporate job to join Mrs. Clinton's campaign, and listened to my arguments before defending their own positions.
So those are the two sides.
It's not just what the culture war is, it's how the culture war is being fought.
And by the way, this is in keeping with my experience.
When I deal with leftists, they shout names at me.
They want to shut me down.
They think they're going to get me fired.
They think they're going to make me run away because they call me racist.
All that.
They're grim.
They're angry.
They're like really unhappy.
Like the Oscars, like the Oscars.
I mean, who did this stuff?
They're yelling about it.
The Oscars.
They did.
Who molested the women?
They did.
Who kept black people out of positions of power in Hollywood?
Not me.
They did.
So they're really, when they're yelling at you, they're yelling at themselves.
You haven't done anything, but they're still yelling at you because they can't bear the fact of what they see when they look in the mirror.
When I deal with conservatives, we have a wide, wide range of differences.
I mean, we've obviously we argue about gays.
We argue about religion.
We let Knowles in here, and he's a Catholic.
I mean, for crying out loud.
You know, how big a tent do you expect us to pitch?
But, you know, I mean, obviously we have devout Christians, we have a devout Jew, we have all these different points of view that fall within this big tent of conservatism.
And we're desperate to argue with left-wingers.
They won't come on the show.
We ask them all the time, right?
They will not come on the show because they don't want to be embarrassed.
They don't want to be tainted by being seen with somebody as evil as myself, which, okay, my wife's like that too.
But I mean, you know, in general, you know, who is shouting people down?
Who is silencing people?
So my question is this.
Which is a more stable form of advance to force people, to shut people up, to force them not to speak, A, the truth, and B, what they think, right?
Because there are two things, their opinions, which they have the right to speak, and the truth, which they also have a divine right to speak.
You're going to shut them down when they say those things.
You're going to fire them.
You're going to end their careers.
You think that that's going to win?
Or freedom.
Arguing, laughing.
A lot of laughing goes on around here when we're arguing and all this.
You know, freedom, the old American way.
I do not think, maybe I'm too optimistic.
I do not think you can win a culture war by brute force.
Even the Soviet Union fell.
Now, listen, I know millions died before that happened.
And we don't want to see that happen here.
But even the Soviet Union fell.
The thousand-year Nazi Reich, gone.
I know these tyrannies, they do a lot of damage.
And the people who are lost are lost forever.
And they were unique.
And there's nothing that can bring them back.
It doesn't stop it from being a tragedy.
I'm just saying that if David Brooks thinks the future of America is shutting people up.
You know, the other thing that David Brooks doesn't realize is that's how we got Donald Trump in the first place.
You kept shutting us up for eight years.
Barack Obama shut us up.
For eight years, he ignored us.
For eight years, he trolled us.
And then America answered with a two-word answer, which I will say was Donald Trump, though I don't think that was exactly what it is.
All right, let's talk more about the Oscars with Michael Knowles.
But first, I got to say goodbye to Facebook and to YouTube.
Come on over to thedailywire.com and subscribe.
It's a lousy hundred bucks for the entire year.
You get the leftist tears tumbler, which as I speak, Michael Knowles will sneak into your house and fill it with leftist steers that he has been collecting over the city of LA.
So come on over to TheDailyWire.com and listen to the rest of the show.
So have you forgiven me for making you watch this garbage?
No.
No, I haven't.
No, I won't.
I plan on doing it.
And it is going to take a lot of Christian patience and reconciliation and humility to ever forgive you.
This was the worst Oscars ever.
It seemed intolerable.
I mean, I kept going in and turning it on just so I could feel your pain because your pain makes me happy.
That's right.
It was a little treat for you.
get to go in there.
And it was appalling.
It was the most boring Oscars ever.
Jimmy Kimmel made history in that his opening monologue had basically no jokes at all.
Do you remember the old days Billy Crystal would do a whole montage and he would make jokes about the movies and he would insert himself into the movies and it was about the movies, right?
This was not, we knew going in this was all about politics.
So Jimmy Kimmel, he said, he actually admitted in the opening, he said, look, these speeches are for changing the world.
They're a great platform for pushing leftist politics, basically.
We need to keep them a little shorter because it's a four-hour telecast, but you've got to say what you've got to say.
And you know, Marlon Brando, who first was one of the first people, used to be considered rude.
I mean, the New York Times would just say it's rude to go up while people are celebrating and put forward your controversial opinion, which offends the audience that you're trying to please.
It's just so ungrateful.
But they knew this going in.
And it does say something about the culture.
The culture is obsessed with politics now.
And I don't know if that's symptom or if that's cause, but everything was about politics.
So even the jokes, they weren't even clever.
They were just this low-hanging fruit.
So Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about how Trump is a racist.
Tee-hee-hee, right?
We've never heard that one before.
Wow, great.
And he made a joke about how Mike Pence was made uncomfortable by that movie about pederasty, as though we shouldn't be uncomfortable in those movies.
And like Mike Pence could give a rat's whether they make that movie or not.
Right, of course.
He, like America, certainly didn't see it.
He didn't see it.
You know, I have to just say one thing.
I was talking about the difference between right-wing culture, which is open-minded, hilarious, we're always laughing and arguing and all this stuff, and left-wing culture, which is furious.
The funny thing was that Donald Trump went to that press dinner the other night.
He was funnier than Kimmel.
He was making jokes.
He made a joke where he said, he said to the New York Times, I'm glad you're here.
You're a New York icon.
I'm a New York icon too.
And the only difference is I still own my building.
I mean, that's pretty good.
That's pretty good material.
And Kimmel is sitting there doing garbage, basically.
It's a low bar.
Kimmel hasn't been funny since the 90s.
I think there was a joke on Family Guy about how they were going to tune in every night and watch Jimmy Kimmel try.
He isn't a great talent.
But he's a really just debased.
He made a couple of pot jokes, right?
Those were the funniest jokes he made all night were about Steven Spielberg having pot on him.
And it's just that is the highest form of humor that this guy is capable of.
And it's really sad because there were a couple decent speeches.
Sam Rockwell, who deserved his award in a category of great performances, he gave a nice speech.
It was fun.
It was modern.
It wasn't some great eloquent thing, but it was just gracious and he said thank you.
Gary Oldman comes out and thanks America for giving him opportunities, Winston Churchill for his greatness, and his mother and the Academy and he left.
Now, mercifully, though, because we had to reverse it.
So it used to be best actor was the last, it came after best actress.
Now they flipped it because me too, hashtag me too.
And so then Frances McDorman came out and shrieked about feminism and how actresses who make millions of dollars should make even more money.
No gratitude whatsoever.
Have they looked outside that theater at the homeless tents that are like, you know, that our own Emily was like involved in a murder.
Not she wasn't involved in it, but she was close to a murder.
She was skating on the blood as she was going to get a morning call.
Come on.
And the problem in Hollywood is that million-dollar actresses are not being paid $2 million.
That's what they think victimhood looks like.
They have no sense.
They've lost the sense of what the movies are for, what the art form is.
It's because it's dead.
It is just a totally dead art form.
And we see it.
You know, this was the intersectional Oscars, I think.
The Best Picture Award, as you said, went to the intersectional movie where the disabled woman, the black woman, the gay guy, the fish, South American fish man, those were all the people.
South American fishmen have it tough.
Now, let's not be actual bigots here.
We have to be polite to South American fish people.
They're just dreamers, really.
They're just little dreaming fishes.
And they're all the bad guys.
And they're all the good guys.
And the only bad guys are the straight white male Americans who like their country.
Those are all the bad guys, played beautifully by Nick Searcy.
Of course, the great Nick Searcy, who's in like every Oscar-nominated film.
Divide In Culture00:14:04
That's right.
So it was so intersectional in that way.
And that's why you had this person common who went up and did, he did the death of art.
He did slam poetry.
And it didn't make any sense.
It said, we talked about feminism.
Then it said the NRA is not God's way.
And then he had all of these activists, one of whom was Cecile Richards, who's killed 3.8 million babies in just 12 years.
And then next to her was the founder of Black Lives Matter.
Even though Cecile Richards has killed, what, like 2.5 million black babies in 12 years?
Yeah, but she didn't use a gun.
Let's begin.
That's true.
At least she didn't use a gun.
She tortures them first.
It was pure intersectionality.
And it's why it was so boring, is because you can't make jokes anymore.
Everything is so self-flagellating and timid and sad.
Jimmy Kimmel, the most honest line of the night, he said, I wish I were a woman.
I'm sure you do, Jimmy.
I know you can be.
He's almost there.
That's right.
Yeah.
It was really just very sad.
And it showed us that this is the logical conclusion of PC.
This is the logical conclusion of intersectionality is this hateful, angry, tedious, boring ranting rather than some light entertainment, rather than what the Oscars were even 10 years ago.
Well, intersectionality, I mean, I was talking about that, the difference between Get Out and The Godfather, in which assimilation is the goal in The Godfather, where assimilation is the evil in get out.
And intersectionality is the opposite of the melting pot.
It is the opposite of the assimilation-ish dream, which comes, you know, it comes along with problems.
You know, it comes along, you know, Michael Corleone has problems.
He doesn't get to assimilate.
But that's the tragedy, where in get out, the tragedy, the horror, is if you do assimilate, you lose your, somehow you lose your essential blackness.
And I think that intersectionality is in fact the anti-melting pot, anti-epluribus unum, anti-American.
They finally have perfected the anti-American philosophy.
And of course it makes you angry.
Of course.
And these films, the films that they honored last night, the ones that really won, they did present a vision of the world as the left sees it.
I really liked Three Billboards.
I thought it was pretty, the acting was spectacular.
But just as with all of McDonough's work, it has good internal logic and internal consistency, but it presents the world as lefties see it, which isn't true.
It isn't the world that we really live in.
And the one film that I think did sort of get to it a little bit was Ladybird, and they got nothing.
They walked away with that.
They walked away.
I know, ultimately.
I was glad they gave it to Gary Oldman.
He's one of the few, you know, I don't think he likes to talk about it, but I think he is a little bit closer to our side than.
It sure looks like it.
Yeah, he is, I'm sure.
But like, I do think that they are completely divorced now from the public they came to serve.
And again, a lot of this has to do with, you know, the Jews who built, the Jewish men, Jewish white men who built Hollywood, were desperate to become part of America.
You know, all they wanted was to please Americans with their product, but also they, you know, they preach, you go back and look, they preach a little bit, you know, like, oh, yes, accept people.
You know, after the war, certainly they started talking about, you know, the anti-Semitism in America.
You know, they were, all they wanted, though, was to be part of America.
America was the good.
Whereas now they're telling us that America is the bad.
And, you know, the other thing about this is I really believe, and, you know, actually, most women that I know agree with me.
I mean, they're not, most women I know are not feminists because the feminists won't talk to me.
But I believe that young men are always where the future is.
So if young men are killing themselves or playing video games 12 hours a day, that's where the future is going to go.
But where do you think?
I mean, are young men going to sit around and be kicked in the crotch forever?
Are they going to sit around and be hated for being men forever?
Are they going to sit around and be hated for being white?
I mean, after all, women should be welcome in Hollywood, but they didn't build Hollywood.
Women should be welcome in Silicon Valley, but they didn't build Silicon Valley.
And whatever is being built now that we can't see, that is in the future, is probably going to be built by a bunch of guys who are being derided by Jimmy Kimmel.
That's right.
That's right.
It is just a sign of the death of Hollywood, that self-flagellation.
And nobody's going to watch it.
You know, I got the movie card, so I now go see 700 movies a day because I like a good deal.
But I think I'm the only person in America who saw Phantom Thread.
Nobody saw that at all.
And that divorce of the popular culture from what Hollywood is churning out just shows it is the death of it.
And we're not going to watch.
I think I'm the only young man in the country who watched the Oscars last night.
I think that's almost without question.
And you only did it under duress.
And I only did it under absolute duress.
But it's so sad.
It's so sickly.
Why do we have to watch Jimmy Kimmel say, oh, I wish I were a woman?
Ooh, we're so bad.
Aren't we?
Ouch.
Yeah, hit me.
Hit me, mama.
Yeah, yeah.
There's something very perverse about that.
There is something perverse.
And when you think back, you know, I always talk about the fact that art forms and civilizations and everything follow the pattern of a human life.
You know, you have this youth where you do these spectacular things and then you have the wisdom of middle age and then you kind of decline.
And I think that that is what we're looking at.
We're looking at this art form in decline.
And it's just, you know, why, you know, in 1939, which was the peak of the movie industry, the golden age of Hollywood, the films that were nominated, The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, were not only classics, they were the top box office films.
Even if these films are good, and some of them are good.
I mean, I did like Get Out.
It was a tiny little film, but I like it.
So did I, yeah.
Yeah.
But, you know, even if they're good, like, people are not seeing these movies.
They're not speaking to America.
They have lost their grip on America.
So they think they're winning the culture war because they agree with themselves.
And they're small and they're thin.
I agree entirely.
I really liked Get Out.
It was at least original.
It was at least fun and did something.
And it just kind of made us some interesting points.
The one point being that white liberals are the most racist people on earth, a point I've long advocated.
But it was a small movie.
Shape of Water was a thin movie.
It was a shallow movie.
I thought it was totally empty.
You know, at least Dunkirk, for all of its flaws, it was a movie.
It did present something closer to what a movie is.
But what was the last big movie?
What was the last major movie?
It seems to me they've been shrinking ever since 1939, and certainly since the 70s.
It really is true.
The last big one that mattered that I could think of is the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
And I thought Logan was a really good movie, but I didn't think it was a great movie.
I just thought it was a really interesting, different take on superheroes.
At least it had stakes.
Unlike every other superhero movie, it had something.
And it's funny because now I'll come in.
I said, oh, gosh, Ladybird was great.
Oh, gosh, Logan was great.
But really, they weren't great.
Compared to the other movies this year, they were great.
But really, in the grand scheme of things, they were good.
They were quite good.
Exactly.
All right.
Well, you're going to talk about this more in your show?
No, not at all.
No more Oscars, man.
You can't do this to me anymore, all right?
No more.
Today on the show, we're going to be talking about this vote in South Africa to steal all the white people's farmland.
Yeah, I heard about this.
Nobody's covering it because it's a little touchy.
It's a little racy.
We can't go there.
So, of course, we're going to bring Lauren Southern on.
She's done a documentary about farmlands in Africa.
And we're going to talk to her about what this means for the future, if South Africa is going the way of Zimbabwe, and if Nelson Mandela's dream is finally dead as the left hollows out every other good thing that we have in the world.
Well, I'm glad you're moving on because the Oscars are kind of the peak of my year.
Because to sit there watching them, knowing you're watching them.
I hope you enjoyed that, Martini.
I hope you seasoned it with both a nice olive and a couple of my tears.
In your tears.
All right.
Good.
Michael Knowles show come out.
Thanks a lot, Knowles.
That was cruel.
I probably shouldn't.
All right, let's talk about our crappy culture.
So I just want to continue this thought into the news business with a word of wisdom from Bill Maher.
Bill Maher, you know, I always have a kind of respect for Bill Maher, even though I hate the whole sneering things.
If the audience applauds, it's true.
And if they don't applaud, it's not true.
You know, the whole thing of attitude as a moral guide, I think, is ridiculous.
But the one thing I've always liked about Maher is he's not afraid to let people disagree and to bring on people who don't always agree with his opinion.
He used to have Ann Coulter on.
I think he still has Sam Harris on.
You know, he talks about, he has a range of opinions that he will allow on, which I appreciate.
The divide in our culture is being played out in the news.
Donald Trump's poll numbers are going up.
I think they're at 49 or 50%.
They are, you know, this is after the press has piled on him, hammered him, hammered him, hammered him.
And he has made some mistakes himself.
You know, some of his tweets have blown up in his face.
Some of his talk about guns was ridiculous.
I think this tariff thing is ridiculous, but that's for another time.
But the left-wing press is peddling this hysteria.
And you know who it's affecting?
The left-wing press.
This is the thing.
This is the David Brooks thing.
He thinks the culture war is being fought in his office.
He thinks if the New York Times disapproves, everybody disapproves.
Brian Stelter went into this hysterical rant about there's too much news.
We're being overwhelmed by news.
Listen to this.
We wanted to take a look at what all these explosive headlines added up to and how we can all, as consumers, make sense of it.
We went ahead and looked at the Chirons.
That's a term for the cable news banners on the bottom of the screen.
And we picked out just some of the banners that appeared on CNN this week.
It's going to take more than three minutes to go through all these.
We'll slow it down for you in a minute.
But I just want you to think about how fast they're going by, how much news is piling up on the screen.
I mean, we're barely to the middle of the week at this point.
It's Wednesday now, and I'm exhausted.
I'm overwhelmed.
Just taking a look at the list.
Doesn't it feel like we're drowning in news?
Doesn't it feel like the number of scandals, the number of allegations of corruption, the number of new developments about the Mueller probes, the number of stories about White House infighting, that it's all just too much to keep up with?
And if so, what should journalists do to help?
What can viewers and news consumers do to keep up?
I think that's the conversation that we need to have at a moment like this where it really does feel like the White House is in a rolling, ongoing crisis.
Stelter making himself hysterical by reporting on stuff that doesn't matter.
It actually doesn't really matter what's happening at the White House and whether Trump likes chaos or not.
I mean, you know, Trump, one of his lines at this press gathering was: we don't know who's going to leave next, Stephen Miller or Melania, which was pretty funny.
Here's Bill Maher talking about the way the news works today.
And he says, I used to think that if a journalist reports it, it's news, but not anymore.
Listen to this.
How about some rules for identifying actual news?
For example, when an internet headline reads, you won't believe, yes, you will, and no, it's not news.
When anyone is demanding an apology, unless they have hostages, that's not news.
And when the offended group are identified as the internet, Twitter, or people, it's nobody.
This is not an outlier.
This is a constant and prominent part of today's journalism.
Creating some bull non-issue that a few trolls will predictably go ape over, and then reporting on those unrepresentative tweets like all of America is talking about nothing else.
Justin Timberlake used a projection of Prince for his Super Bowl halftime show, and people are furious.
No, nobody cared.
People are really mad that Sean White dragged the American flag after he won the gold.
No, not even a little, you f ⁇ ing liars.
Weight Watchers is targeting teens, and Twitter is outraged.
No, it isn't.
It's the same three people.
And it's not hard to find three people who are mad at anything.
I could say good morning on Twitter, and three people would object.
Good in your privileged world, Bill Maher.
It's good funny stuff, but what he doesn't realize, I think, Maher, is this also applies to three sources who are close to the Mueller investigation say this, or two sources who are close to the White House say that he yelled, Trump yelled at Hope Hicks before she quit.
None of which we know is true at all and isn't really news.
I mean, the stuff that's going on at the FDA that is making your life healthier, that's news.
The stuff that's going on at the EPA, which is making your life freer, that's news.
They're not reporting any of that because all that redounds to Trump's leadership and the fact that he's doing still, so far, a good job as president of the United States.
This whole thing about outrage that he's pointing out has to do with something very deep.
Obviously, the show is over.
We're not going to talk about it today, but it has to do with something very deep that's happening in our civilization, which is both the right and the left no longer know why exactly they're saying what they're saying.
They no longer know why things are good or why things are bad.
And so they're just fighting for control.
They're just, if they're outraged, then they can win your emotions.
If you say, yes, that does feel outrageous.
It does.
They're no longer making actual arguments.
And when they start to know, when we start to remember and go back and realize what we're talking about, we can start making arguments.
And then the only people who will matter will be the people on the right because they're the only people who still know how to argue in a friendly way.
All right.
Do we know who we have on tomorrow yet?
Michael Baron or Mona Sharon.
Either Michael Baron or Mona Sharon, pretty good choice.
So that will be tomorrow.
Come on over.
Meanwhile, go over to City Journal and read A Nation of Iagos about Shakespeare.
I think it's one of the best pieces I've ever written.
That's why I'm plugging it so much.
Either Michael Or Mona00:00:39
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
see you tomorrow.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And their animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.