Andrew Clavin exposes Hollywood’s hypocrisy: while pedophilia jokes by Patton Oswalt, Sarah Silverman, and Michael Ian Black go viral, convicted abusers like Brian Singer and Bob Villard return to work, mirroring the Catholic Church’s cover-ups. Films like The Reader glorify predators, yet Corey Feldman’s abuse claims are dismissed as "conspiracy." Meanwhile, CNN’s Chris Cuomo and George Stephanopoulos weaponize bias—Cuomo’s off-camera meltdown, Stephanopoulos’ resignation over "objectivity"—while John Brennan’s "treason" tweets against Trump reveal the media’s double standards. Clavin argues character assassination fuels leftist agendas, from abortion to open borders, while Hollywood’s systemic abuse remains unchecked, proving outrage is performative unless it targets the right enemies. [Automatically generated summary]
Journalists and other Democrats are furious with President Trump for disrespecting the American intelligence community simply because of its corrupt attempts to destroy him.
On CNN, Chris Cuomo stared into the camera with an expression he hoped was soulful instead of just sort of blank and idiotic.
And he declared, quote, normally I'm willing to twist any set of circumstances to put the president in a bad light.
But this time, I'm doing exactly the same thing.
It is simply rude for the president of the United States to interrupt our intelligence officers while they're right in the middle of lying about him, unquote.
Cuomo then attempted to storm off camera, but walked into the corner of the room and could not find his way out again.
Fortunately, Don Lemon rushed into the corner to help Cuomo, and both men were finally rescued by the fire department.
At ABC, George Stephanopoulos said, quote, speaking as a wholly fair and objective servile toady of the Clinton family, I say that it is our job as journalists to rush to the defense of unelected public officials who seek to undermine our democracy through covert conspiracies.
We in the press must speak power to truth, unquote.
When Stephanopoulos was told he'd gotten the journalist role exactly backwards, he resigned from ABC in disgrace and was promptly hired by the New York Times.
Very angry former communist CIA mole John Very Angry Brennan sent out a very angry tweet saying, quote, when I think of President Trump's actions, I use words like treason, opprobrium, and contumly to distract people from the fact that I'm a corrupt gas bag who used my post to manipulate the FBI into violating every norm of decency in order to oust a duly elected president, unquote.
President Trump admitted he actually did feel bad about disrespecting the intelligence community, but said he would make it up to them by pardoning them after they were sent to prison where they belong.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky, life is tickety boo.
Birds are wingy, also sing hunky-dunky-dee-dee.
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It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, another summer clavenless weekend comes to an end in mid-July.
You know, there's not much going on.
So the clavenless weekend, it's just all you see is just journalists' heads exploding and politician, Democrat politicians going insane and saying nonsense.
That's how they spend their clavenless weekends.
Michael Knowles is going to come on today and talk about Hollywood pedophilia.
And I'll explain why.
That's not just for fun.
We're not doing this just for fun, but it is an actually interesting topic.
And we will talk about it and you will find out why it is relevant.
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Exploring Ideas Despite Disagreement00:04:17
So, one of the things that's really important to remember as you watch all the craziness that goes on in the press, especially in the summer when they haven't got a lot of news, so they're just actually feeding off their own rage and stupidity.
One of the things you have to remember is the same machinery that attacks President Trump, the same machinery that sells socialism, the same machinery that sells abortion, the same machinery also makes people famous and successful.
It's the same machinery, right?
You know, when you hear me go off on the New York Times and call them a former newspaper and make fun of them all the time, you're looking at a novelist who knows that he will never get a review in the New York Times again, let alone I'll probably never even get a bad review because they wouldn't go out of their way to give me that much attention.
So you don't meet that many people.
That doesn't make me a hero.
That just means I have a different set of priorities than a lot of people have, and I'm a different age than a lot of people have.
And I don't really care what the New York Times thinks about me.
I don't think it's going to matter to me in the long run.
But most people, especially young people, if they're up and coming and they're working in the business and they're working, even if they're writing nonfiction, if they're writing fiction, if they want to be in the movies, if they want to do all kinds of things, the same machinery, the same machinery that is selling you socialism, selling you abortion, selling you all the things that the Democrats want to sell you, selling you open borders, that same machinery is the machinery they need to become famous.
So you have to understand that.
When you're seeing these character assassination wars that are going on right now, what you're seeing is this weapon that has been unleashed on us in a celebrity society, a society where any publicity is good publicity.
You're seeing that machinery kind of going out of control.
I mean, this happened with Ben last week.
It was just appalling.
This actor, what was his name?
Mark Duplas, I think.
Yeah, he tweeted about Ben.
He said, I don't agree with Ben.
He was talking to his fellow liberals.
He said, if you want to follow somebody on the other side, you might want to think about following Ben Shapiro.
He said, I don't agree with him on much, but he's a genuine person who once helped me for no other reason than to be nice.
He doesn't bend the truth.
His intentions are good.
All of which, by the way, is true about Shapiro.
I don't like to blow his cover because I know he's got this big thing about what a bad guy he is, but it's true.
He will go out of his way for you.
He's incredibly generous.
He's even been generous to Knowles.
You know, he only backed over him twice, I think, the last time.
So, of course, they unleash on Duplas.
And Duplas not only pulls down the tweet because he's protecting his profession, because the same machinery that he needs, right, to make him famous is the machinery that is selling all this socialist stuff.
But not only does he pull the tweet recommending Ben, he then gets out and he says, basically, he says that Ben is hateful.
He says he's racist.
You know all the stuff, the sexist, racist, homophobic, all this stuff that Ben actually isn't.
So he now throws Ben under the bus.
Shapiro didn't call up Duplas and say, hey, could you recommend following me?
And this assassination stuff is what goes on.
You know, it happened to a judge, one of President Trump's nominees, a guy named Ryan Bounds, Tim Scott, who is a senator that I really respect.
He's the only black Republican senator, and he seems like a good guy, a straight arrow guy, but he basically nixed an appeals court nominee, Ryan Bounds, because of stuff that Bounds wrote in college, where he said he thought it was wrong.
He was complaining about multicultural organizations that divide up by race for their feel-good ethnic ho-downs.
And he said, well, white students don't seem to need an Aryan student union.
Why should there be a black student union?
And Scott nixed him for that, which I think is wrong.
Now, maybe, look, Scott is a good guy.
Maybe he knew more than I know.
This is, I'm just telling you what I read in the papers and read in anti-Trump papers to make sure I was getting at all the worst stuff.
But you should be able to say things in college and write things in college that maybe later on you change your mind about.
And I don't personally think that's so bad, what he said, but even so, even if he didn't agree with it anymore, you've got to be able to explore ideas.
You've got to be able to be wrong sometimes.
Ben answered Duplas by putting out a thing on all the things that he had said that he regretted and all the things that he was attacked for that he didn't regret saying, because Ben knows too, you know, Ben knows too that this machinery is very, very destructive.
But the thing is, the thing is, it's a way of arguing that we have all gotten used to.
Arguments Over Rights00:08:37
And this is really important.
When somebody says something to me that I disagree with, I say, here's why I disagree with that.
I don't say, oh yeah, well, I researched you and back in college, you know, you slept with a girl who'd had five drinks.
That's not an argument.
That is not an argument.
When somebody says we should have socialism, it's not an argument to say, well, you slept with a drunk girl in college.
When somebody says we should ban abortions, it's not an argument to say, oh, well, you once stole some money from a store.
That's not an argument.
And so the problem that the left has is they have this huge machinery and everything they think is untrue.
Socialism destroys the economy.
Abortion really is killing.
I mean, you can make arguments for abortion, but you have got to accept the fact that you are killing what will be a full human being in time.
This woke stuff is pure racism.
Even so-called corrective racism is racism.
And because all this stuff is true and open borders do increase crime and they're just insane because you need borders to have a country, all these things, their arguments are bad.
So character assassination is what they've got, right?
And so they've built this big machine, this big machine that not only sells democracy, socialism, not only sells anti-democratic means, not only sells abortion, not only sells open borders, it also sells publicity.
It also sells favor.
You know, let me show you a hilarious.
It's almost hilarious.
It would be hilarious if it weren't so awful.
Brian Stelter is plugging the handmaid's tale.
Now, you all know the handmaid's tale is this dystopian thing.
It's based on a novel.
I read the novel.
I haven't seen the show.
I will tell you that the show is made in part by people I know and people I have worked with who I think are as talented as anybody in Hollywood, as talented and intelligent.
I'm sure the show is good.
I just didn't happen to like the novel, so I didn't watch the show.
But they're selling this, a dystopian show in which women have lost all their rights and they're forced to go around dressed like the flying nun in those big hats.
I don't know what the point of those big hats are.
Sally Field at least could fly around wherever the hell she lived as a nun, but I don't know why they're wearing these in this thing.
But anyway, they wear these hats and they're forced to have babies, blah, Brian Stelter is promoting this as, in fact, the Handsmaid's Tale people have promoted it as being an actual commentary on Trump's America.
Just listen to a minute of this.
It's unbelievable.
In the world of Trump, plotlines that were once thought to be too outlandish are no longer.
I would be very happy if my show became irrelevant as quickly as possible.
Bruce Miller is the creator of Hulu's breakout Emmy winning series, The Handmaid's Tale.
Conceived before the election, the chilling show went on to capture the lightning of the current political environment.
Our writers' room is very news-aware.
Trump pushing out all these hot-button issues brings them to the fore and they become conversations in the writer's show.
Hard to fathom, since The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopian show set in a made-up place called Gilead, where women's rights have been stripped under a twisted totalitarian regime.
We don't do anything on the show that hasn't happened, isn't happening to women somewhere in the world.
It feels like a cautionary tale more than ever.
What does it mean for this program to be on now in the Trump age?
It has far more meaning and urgency as we see women's rights, particularly women's reproductive rights, under attack yet again.
Unbelievable.
Now, when he says that we don't do anything on the show that isn't happening to women somewhere in the world, I agree, but it's happening in the Muslim world, not this world, not the world that we live in, the lovely Western world that we live in, where women have any right you can imagine.
There is an argument to be had about abortion that we were not allowed to have because the Supreme Court shut the political process down with Roe v. Wade.
There's an argument to be had about abortion.
It is not just about a woman's right.
It is also about the baby's right.
There's another person involved.
That's not the handmaid's tale that people want to debate abortion.
It's insane.
But let me just tell you how this works, all right?
The people who make this show, they want the show to succeed.
They want people to watch it.
They want to garner an audience.
Of course they do.
I want audiences for the things I do.
We all do.
They can go on Brian Stelter.
Brian Stelter focuses on the news if they have a news hook.
Back in the 80s, I wrote what I think is a really good crime story called A Shock to the System, sorry, Michael Caine.
It was based on the excellent, excellent novel by Simon Brett.
And I used it in part, not as an attack on Ronald Reagan, but as a commentary on the Reagan age of people where they said greed is good.
And the only point of the show is basically capitalism needs moral limits.
That was kind of the point of the thing.
But that was the theme.
It's really just a murder story, right?
The theme was that like this guy just takes success.
Even the desire for success needs moral limits.
So that was kind of the theme.
But the story is a murder story.
The New York Times called me up.
And at the same time, there was a show, a movie called, oh gosh, I cannot remember.
It was teenagers in a high school who start killing people.
And it was coming out at almost exactly the same time.
It had a one-word title.
I can't remember.
A guy from the New York Times calls me up and he says, what is the meaning of this trend where movies are about murder?
And I'm a very, I'm still, to this day, a very naive teller of truth.
When you ask me a question, I tend to tell you the truth, right?
And so I said, I don't think it's a trend.
That's ridiculous.
So they didn't quote me and they didn't promote the movie, right?
And of course, I learned from that today, I would have said something to try and get the movie promoted because that was my job.
I didn't understand.
I thought when people asked you something, you told the truth.
I still feel that way.
It's still the first thing that comes out of my mouth when people ask me a question is what I think is the truth.
But still, that was not playing to the machine.
All right.
So now we're in the position.
So now we have this guy, James Gunn.
And James Gunn is at the top of the Hollywood food chain.
He's directing The Guardian of the Galaxy.
I think he wrote and directed the first one, and now he was directing number three.
So this alt-right guy, what's his name?
Michael Cernovich, right?
And he is a real, he's the real, they call everybody alt-right.
They probably call me alt-right at this point.
But Michael Cernovich is a really alt-right guy.
And he goes after him and he digs up all these tweets that Gunn made about rape and pedophilia and Disney dumps him, okay?
So, and by the way, Gunn had called for boycotts of Laura Ingram, so he was being hoisted on his own protard.
The machine that the left created was turned against him.
And a lot of right-wingers said, well, good, you know, turnabout is fair play.
And some right-wingers who were more thoughtful kind of wrung their hands about it and said, do we want to get in this game where we stop arguing?
See, we have good arguments.
We have arguments for freedom.
We have arguments for prosperity.
The stuff we do works.
The stuff we believe in dignifies people and uplifts people.
And yeah, there are all kinds of arguments within the conservative community and arguments between conservatives and reasonable liberals that can be had, all kinds.
But still, our arguments tend to make life better, as we see under Trump, where the economy is soaring.
So we tend not to try to character assassinate people.
But the problem I have with Gunn, and I'm holding fire on Gunn.
If all he did was make jokes, I don't think he should be fired.
I don't think anybody should be fired for making jokes.
I make all kinds of jokes.
Know you have heard me preach it about racism, how I think it is an absolute attack on God.
I think racism is an attack on God.
I also believe in making racial jokes.
I believe you should joke about everything.
That's part of how you expel some of the hostility, natural craziness that people have.
I think it's a great thing.
All right.
But I'm holding fire on Gunn because Hollywood has a pedophilia problem.
And that is what we're bringing on, Knowles, to talk about after the break.
I want to talk about the fact that this is a problem in Hollywood.
Every time it comes up, it gets squelched and it gets squelched fast, and that is because powerful, powerful people are involved.
So I'm holding fire judgment on Gunn, what Disney knew about him, what they didn't know.
His tweets were really ugly, not funny.
You know, I don't know why there are so many jokes about pedophilia, but we'll talk to Knowles about that when he comes on.
But the thing I want to emphasize is this, the idea that this is new under Trump is ridiculous.
And the idea that the left cares about character is absurd.
Over the weekend, I watched Chappaquittic.
I finally got to see Chappaquitik, which was good.
And I think it's made by lefties who are attacking Teddy Kennedy from the left.
But it's pretty journalistic, right?
Teddy Kennedy's Secrets00:04:31
They don't say what they don't know.
They don't say that Teddy Kennedy was having an affair with Mary Joe Copecany.
They make it just a little bit blurry.
You just don't know.
But he obviously knew her.
He was obviously a heavy drinker.
He was obviously a guy who cheated on his wife a lot, drove off the cleft, left her there.
She might have survived if he had reported it.
His friends told him to report it.
He said he would report it, and he didn't.
And they follow that.
And they also follow how the Kennedy machine gathers around him to help basically squelch this thing in the hope that one day Teddy Kennedy can still run for office.
Here's a brief scene.
It's cut number nine, where all these famous guys from the John F. Kennedy administration get together to help Teddy strategize how to cover up the clearly illegal manslaughter of this woman.
This country has a deep connection to the Kennedy name, and that is a valuable thing, gentlemen.
We can't just let that go to waste.
We need to remind the American people what this family has been through and how much more we have left to achieve.
And how are you planning on doing that, Ted?
We tell the truth, or at least our version of it.
And it ends with an appeal to the voters, to the people that elected me.
We need to remind them that this family perseveres, that we don't back down from a fight, that we don't get backed into a corner.
We have a true compass and we follow it.
Now, I followed mine the best I could that night.
And me and Paul and Joe, we did everything we could to save that poor girl.
You got a winner there, son.
So they basically engineer, he never made it to the presidency, but he did get re-elected forever to Congress, to the Senate in Massachusetts, where he used his position to assassinate the character of Robert Bork.
Robert Bork was an originalist constitutional judge whom Ronald Reagan appointed as justice to be nominated to be a justice of the Supreme Court.
And Teddy Kennedy led the assassination of this character to the point where it became known as Borking.
It was called Borking.
Here is a moment of Teddy Kennedy borking Robert Bork.
In Robert Bork's America, there is no room at the end for blacks and no place in the Constitution for women.
And in our America, there should be no seat on the Supreme Court for Robert Bork.
Mr. Bork has been equally extreme in his opposition to the right to privacy.
In an article in 1971, he said, in effect, that a husband and wife have no greater right to privacy under the Constitution than a smokestack has to pollute the air.
What I hear you're saying here now is that the test that was used about 90 years ago and which was the basis for discrimination against women is the standard that you would use.
You may be able to elaborate on it, but that's at least what I'm hearing.
It was appalling.
I mean, by the end of it, they were saying, well, Bork had tried Pot in college.
How could you serve on the Supreme Court when you had violated the law?
You know, that was the kind of thing they did.
This was a really fine justice, and he was destroyed by these guys.
It was appalling.
And here is a guy who drove this woman off a bridge, left her there, went home to establish an alibi.
There's no question that he did this, that Teddy Kennedy did this.
And it looks like the people who found her said it looked like she did not drown in the car.
She suffocated as the air ran out of the air bubble in the car, and it may have taken her as long as 25 minutes, which meant that if he had gotten out, run to the nearest house, called the police, she might have been saved.
I mean, it's an appalling, appalling story.
Here is just some clips from our friends at Newsbusters of how the news handled the death of Teddy Kennedy.
Listen to this.
We are going to begin something.
Can you see this going by?
It is a scroll, and it's going to continue.
We will not finish it before we take a break, because it's Senator Kennedy's legacy.
46 years of service, 300 bills passed.
If you're in a wheelchair, that ramp is thanks to Ted Kennedy.
If you earn the minimum wage, you make more because of Ted Kennedy.
The heavens were weeping for Teddy Kennedy today.
They forgot to mention if you find yourself suffocating in a car, you can thank Ted Kennedy as well.
Brian Singer's Compromised Past00:14:32
My point is this, right?
The character assassination machinery and the machinery that sells Democrats' version of America, the socialism, the America is always wrong, the open border, the abortion.
This is the same machine.
It is the same machine, and it has zero moral authority.
And if people cannot stand up to that machine, if people are so ambitious, if they're so eager for good publicity, if they just are so desperate to have an acting career or a directing career, they can't stand up to that machine, then you have a machine for the destruction of conservatives, the destruction of conservatism, and the destruction of anyone who stands up against the Democrat deep state.
I mean, that is what you have.
And that's what we're seeing, and that is why it's kind of, that's why it's really hard for me to attack Trump, even when he does things I don't like, because I understand that Trump, as a celebrity, understands the machine and is using his celebrity to fight back against it.
He's using essentially the same methods that they use on everybody else.
And so like over, you know, over the weekend, they released, or it was Friday, they have these Friday news dumps.
They finally released this FISA warrant that they've been trying to pry out of the FBI, and they redacted almost everything.
But the fact was, it showed that when they asked for the ability to spy on Carter Page, a guy who had not been with the Trump campaign for months by the time they started spying on him, they said, oh, we have evidence that he was, you know, that he was colluding with the Russians, and they used this steel dossier, this stuff that was Russian propaganda bought and paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton.
And they didn't say, they said, well, it may have been collected in a footnote, they say it may have been collected by people trying to get, you know, opo research on Donald Trump.
But that could have been anybody, right?
That could have been one of his fellows.
It could have been Ted Cruz.
It could have been anybody.
They did not say it's Providence.
And they just, they basically lied.
It was just a mistake.
And this actually does justify what Devin Nunez said was happening when he and his committee released that report saying this was unfair.
So now they're seizing on the fact that there was this footnote to say, oh, this disproves everything the Republicans say.
One of the most dishonest news pieces I have ever seen, and that is saying a lot, it was in the front page of the New York Times.
They call it news analysis.
Now, everybody who reads the New York Times with open eyes knows that news analysis means an editorial that we're putting on the front page.
Even by that standard, this was incredibly dishonest.
This is Charlie Savage writing this piece about this FISA warrant.
And I don't want to get into the deep weeds about it, but he says, when President Trump declassified a memo by House Republicans in February that portrayed the surveillance of a former campaign advisor as scandalous, his motivation was clear.
It was to give congressional allies and conservative commentators another avenue to paint the Justice Department's investigation into Russian election interference as tainted from the start.
But this past weekend, Mr. Trump's unprecedented decision, which he made over the objections of law enforcement and intelligence officials, had a consequence that revealed his gambit's shaky foundation.
The government released the court documents in which the FBI made its case for conducting the surveillance records that plainly demonstrated that key elements of Republicans' claims about the Bureau's actions were misleading or false.
You have to get like 12 paragraphs down.
I lost count of how many paragraphs get down before you find out that everything in the Republican memo was true.
You have everything.
And it just, he goes on and on and on before you get down to the bottom thing.
And Adam Schiff, who, as I say, is playing by the Joe McCarthy Handbook, no question about it.
Adam Schiff is still just throwing these charges out at Trump.
Play the Adam Schiff clutch, just to show, this is embarrassing.
If this isn't what Putin wants people doing, I don't know what it is.
Well, I certainly think he's acting like someone who's compromised.
And it may very well be that he is compromised, or it may very well be that he believes that he's compromised, that the Russians have information on him.
We were not permitted to look into one of the allegations that was most serious to me, and that is, were the Russians laundering money through the Trump organization, the Republicans wouldn't allow us to go near that.
I hope that Bob Mueller's investigating it, because again, if that's the leverage the Russians are using, it would not only explain the president's behavior, but it would help protect the country by knowing that in fact our president was compromised.
You got to play Trey Gowdy's response about Russian collusion.
This is hilarious.
Gowdy said there's no evidence of Russian collusion.
Listen to this.
I have not seen one centilla of evidence that this president colluded, conspired, confederated with Russia.
And neither has anyone else, or you may rest assured Adam Schiff would have leaked it.
So that's why they've moved off of collusion onto obstruction of justice, which is now their current preoccupation.
So if he had the evidence, Schiff would have leaked it.
I mean, that's pretty good.
So the point I make is just always remember, if you make the handmaid's tale, and I'm not saying the show's no good.
Like I said, it's made by some of the most talented people I've met out here.
If you make the handmaid's tale, you go on Brian Stelter and say it's about Trump, you get the publicity you need, you get the audience you want.
If you're Ben Shapiro and you get slimed, you're pretty much on your own.
I mean, we will stand up for Ben because we know who he is, but Brian Stelter ain't going to do it.
The New York Times is not going to do it.
ABC, NBC, CBS are not going to do it because the machine is all on one side.
And it's the same machine that both slanders and creates the success that a lot of people are looking for.
All right.
I'm going to talk about why.
We're going to talk about why I'm holding fire and judging whether James Gunn was just making jokes or not with Michael Knowles as we talk about a little tiny problem that Hollywood has with little tiny people.
Well, that is coming up.
But first I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come to thedailywire.com and you could watch the whole show if you would just subscribe for 10 lousy bucks.
You know, they're giving us hell on YouTube.
They were making it so hard for us to promote our stuff on YouTube.
So if you come on over to thedailywire.com for a lousy hundred bucks a year, you can watch me, you can watch Ben.
You can even watch Knowles if you had a few.
And you also will get the Leftist Tears Tumblr in which you can drink your Leftist Tears hot or cold.
All right, Mr. Knowles, nice shirt.
Oh, this whole thing?
Oh, thanks.
The merch store is finally open, right?
It's so, you know, we've been promising that the merch store is going to roll out every five minutes for the past three years.
But I don't know.
I've been wearing some shirts on the shows.
Some people have been getting emails.
You know, you see what you get.
I like it.
I like it.
The fact that you're wearing a Shapiro shirt shows you're a very forgiving individual.
Well, really, it's self-preservation.
At this point, Ben is ready to bulldoze my entire studio.
So I think, you know, every once in a while, I've got to get a Shapiro shirt on.
I agree with Mark Dupless.
He's a wonderful guy.
He only has tortured you to death by 500 cuts.
It could have been by 1,000 cuts.
And it's a sanctifying experience.
Look, I'm a Catholic.
We're all about mortification.
This really is helping me out.
That's right.
That's right.
It's good for you.
It's good for you.
So here's the thing.
You know, I don't know anything about James Gunn, and I'm not accusing him of anything.
I just know that there are an awful lot of jokes about pedophilia flying around Hollywood and an awful lot of accusations that pedophilia is something, kind of a going thing, am I right?
This is the weird thing.
I mean, the question of whether James Gunn made jokes, why people went out to get him, whatever, you know, that is sort of a separate cultural issue.
Nevertheless, and totally regardless of that issue, pedophilia is a huge problem in Hollywood.
There is a conspiracy.
The witches are real, and it's being covered up.
And it's been covered up for decades.
And this is a little weird thing.
I guess the jokes are kind of a way into this.
After this all came out, now it's a tit for tat of you told worst jokes 15 years ago or this or that.
Patton Oswalt, the alleged comedian, came out and he tweeted 10 years ago.
This was just dug up again.
My dong is super friendly and loves getting rubbed by children.
Hashtag career-ending Twitter typos.
Okay, it's a typo.
You meant dog or drug.
Okay, that's kind of funny, right?
Then we found another one that came up.
Sarah Silverman, hey, is it considered molestation if the child makes the first move?
I'm going to need a quick answer on this.
Okay, it's a little less, a little more on the nose, whatever.
Then Michael Ian Black, the guy, that crazy anti-Trump comedian, he's so angry all the time.
He says, he tweeted out, this is years ago, I don't like watching iCarly, that's a children's show, with my daughter because there's nobody on that show I want to molest.
Okay.
Well, okay, they seem to be getting a little stranger.
The other thing is we talk about everything, we joke about everything and joke all the time, but these guys in Hollywood seem to be joking about pedophilia a disproportionate amount.
It's a little weird.
It's also interesting how unfunny those tweets are.
The first one, the Patton Oswalt thing, borderline funny.
Yeah, yeah.
At least it's sort of recognizably a joke.
The others, though, you really wonder.
And there is this trend that has gone on in Hollywood, a twofold.
One, of molesting children and covering it up, and then making art, producing movies that seem to normalize sexual relations with minors.
This is John Nolte over at Breitbart has been screaming about this for years.
Yeah.
So when you look at those movies, they really all seem to take place in a certain period of time.
I actually think Nolte might have had something to do with them stopping this, because this period between 2001, 2006, 2007, you had all of these movies.
This is from Nolte's just one article about it.
Notes on a Scandal, Birth, Towelhead, The Woodsman, Little Children, Lie.
They all made these sympathetic pedophile characters.
And then he wrote a long piece in 2008 about The Reader.
Do you remember that movie?
Yeah, oh yeah, do I ever?
Yes.
That movie drove me crazy because the woman who's supposed to be the heroine of the movie is A, sleeping with a 15-year-old boy, B, a Nazi.
And then, you know, when she, I'm going to give the end of the movie away, but when she kills herself, you're supposed to kind of shed a tear.
And I was like, my God, she's a child molester.
Oh, no, she's a Nazi.
Oh, thank heaven she's dead.
That to me was the plot of the movie.
It's a comedy.
That's a comedy.
Exactly.
All's well that ends well.
So there's that aspect of it.
And then what's really weird, there have been a ton of pedophiles in Hollywood, charged, convicted, and they start working again.
What's really weird is they get brought back into it.
People all the time, they focus on the Catholic Church.
Hollywood focuses on the Catholic Church.
They say the Catholic Church was abusing children.
The percentage of Catholic priests who were abusing children is lower than school teachers in the public school system.
It was very low, and usually they were dealt with.
Not so in Hollywood.
Here are just a few examples.
You can pull this, just Google it.
I mean, you'll get dozens and dozens of examples.
Bob Villard, that was the manager of Leonardo DiCaprio and Toby McGuire when they were children.
In 1987, before Leonardo DiCaprio ever started acting, before he became this big manager, Villard was charged with possession of child pornography.
The prosecution couldn't prove it, so he went off and got scot-free.
In 2001, he was caught with a collection of sexually explicit photos of young boys.
Wow.
He went to jail, served his time, got out, went right back to managing kids.
Hollywood embraced him again.
In 2005, he molested a 13-year-old boy who he was courting as a client.
The DA in that case said, quote, that's just what's done.
This is all normal in the industry.
That was the defense of the prosecution said that.
No, I'm sorry.
That was the prosecution.
That was the DA.
Then there's the case of Brian Singer.
You might have heard this one.
This started to make the papers a little.
The director of X-Men of the Usual Suspects.
He was accused of assaulting sexually three teen boys, a 15-year-old and a 14-year-old, and like pretty violent assaults, giving them drugs, giving them booze, holding them down, forcing them against their will.
Other children, too.
This is all sort of unproven, but there's a lot of clouds around him.
He's still successful.
And a lot of his friends have been accused by other people of hosting these parties.
Hollywood parties with Brian Singer.
There's this guy, Mark Collins Rector.
He owns a media company.
He was accused of raping a young actor while holding a gun to his head.
He also raped another actor, is accused of raping another actor, who was then given a role in Brian Singer's film.
He fled the country.
The boys were awarded over $4 million by the court.
On and on, another friend of Brian Singer, Brian Peck, he also went to jail for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old in between working on two X-Men movies.
So he actually got a part in a movie after he went to jail for sexually assaulting this kid.
And then after that, he was hired back by Disney, by the company that fired James Gunn, with his old job as a dialogue coach on a children's program.
More and more.
You remember seeing the Corey's, Corey Hayme and Corey Feldman.
They talked about their sexual abuse.
Corey Feldman mentioned this, and Barbara Walters basically told him to shut up.
How dare you make this happen?
She did.
I mean, you know, this is the woman who also normalized Fidel Castro.
She did tell him to be quiet.
He keeps saying, I mean, Feldman keeps saying that there's some very big guy who he's afraid to name.
I was told once, I was told once when I asked around about this to shut up or somebody would, I would end up in a ditch.
I mean, I'm told by a friend, not by an enemy.
It just said, you know, you don't want to, you will disappear if you actually go after this guy when I mentioned his name.
And I don't have the proof, so I can't, I'm not going to slander the guy.
But still, this is like an open secret.
And when Corey Feldman came out with that stuff, people got nervous.
They were scared.
Brian Singer, I have heard, openly jokes about dating underage guys.
I mean, I've heard that secondhand.
But still, all these jokes, you think like, well, okay, you know, jokes are jokes, but this permeates the industry.
Yeah, this is a real problem.
It's another sort of thing.
If you were saying earlier, it's perfectly fine to make racial jokes as long as you're not a racist.
As long as you're not a racist, right?
There's a difference between making an Italian joke or a black joke or an Irish joke today rather than making a black joke in the antebellum South.
When there's a central problem in society, perhaps people should address that.
I mean, even the, what's so crazy, because you've had all of these kids allege these things.
Elijah Wood talked about this.
Corey Feldman, obviously.
But we haven't even brought up Michael Jackson yet.
Double Standards Exposed00:09:25
We know Michael Jackson gave Coke cans full of wine that he called Jesus juice to children.
He regularly slept with multiple children in his bed who he was not related to.
We know because investigators found it, he kept a huge stash of porn as well as a sexual imagery featuring children, SNM, sadomasochism, animal torture, and sacrifice.
This is all according to that 2003 investigation.
Images of children being tortured, nude children, all of this.
He kept photos of Macaulay Culkin, stuffed animals, really crazy stuff.
He was accused multiple times of child molestation.
What happened?
He got off.
He was acquitted.
And so many other people.
There was another guy who was accused of Martin Weiss.
He was a manager used by Nickelodeon and Disney as a talent scout.
He was accused of sexually assaulting a kid between the ages of 11 and 14.
He pled no contest.
He was released the day he was sentenced.
They said, oh, time served.
You're out.
And they get to go right back to Hollywood.
I was talking about the fact that I finally watched the movie Chappaquitic, and they depict Mary Joe Kopeckni's parents as kind of thankful to Teddy Kennedy because they're so in awe of him.
He's so powerful.
He was such an important person in their daughter's life.
And the press trying to basically clean up Kennedy's act were constantly quoting the parents saying, you know, we're past it.
We want to let it go.
Same thing with Michael Jackson.
The parents came in and said, oh, no, you know, we had no problem with this.
But because people are so enamored of celebrities, because they really don't understand the level of evil that famous people can commit while still looking great on television, because they don't understand this, it really is up to law enforcement and people in the know to condemn these people.
And that is why I simply do not think a guy who goes to prison for molesting children should be welcomed into any community after that.
I think that, you know, these people don't change.
You don't grow out of that stuff.
You may stop doing it and good, that you should be able to get a job, but not necessarily at the top of Hollywood and not necessarily in an industry that really is suspect of having a mafia of people doing this.
And by the way, there is example after example of these people who go to jail for molesting children in Hollywood.
They get out, they go right back to the industry, they go right back to molesting them again.
It's on and on.
And by the way, the problem is pretty deep.
It's pretty disgusting because when Corey Feldman went out, I believe in 1993, he named the people who abused him.
He accused people outright before the statute of limitations ran out.
Nothing happened.
Nothing was done about it, which means that the problem runs a lot deeper.
This is not just a matter of jokes.
Perhaps people telling jokes get swept up in it, or perhaps there's something deeper.
There is a question with James Gunn that he may have corresponded and publicly corresponded with a person who was convicted of possessing child pornography about that kind of material.
That's a question that's left for James Gunn.
Is it just jokes or is it more than just jokes?
I mean, you know, if we're going to fire people over Me Too, which I, by the way, some of this Me Too stuff, I'm kind of against.
You know, when they throw a guy out who's been misbehaving and everybody knew it, my feeling is, well, if everybody knew it, everybody should be thrown out.
Or nobody should.
Like, let him stay and change the rules.
But if adult women, if adult women are going to say, well, I said yes, but I meant no, and I didn't object, well, who's going to defend children?
I mean, if we're going to stand up for women, which is fine with me, aren't we going to stand up for children too?
It is just absurd.
It really is.
It's an unpleasant topic.
I'm sorry you had to deal with it, but I think it is really important that people understand that something is genuinely rotten on this subject in the state of Hollywood.
Well, I have to tell you, it is a thoroughly and profoundly unpleasant topic, but you also made me watch Southside with you and Barry that time was.
All right.
I'm just cruel.
I'm a sadist.
That's a good idea.
You're a sadistist.
That's my sex.
I must be a masochist, and you're clearly a sadist.
Exactly.
What are you talking about on your show today?
Today, I'm going to be talking about the double standards.
It'll open with James Gunn, but I want to talk about how Donald Trump is basically, like Samuel L. Jackson in pulp fiction, he is the vengeance of the Lord upon hypocrites out here, and we'll analyze why that's a very good thing and pretty ugly too.
You're going to get invited to the White House one of these days, which will never happen to me.
All right.
I'll see you later, Noel.
Thanks.
Andrew.
Really, really interesting.
All right, let's do our crappy culture.
So over the weekend, at the suggestion of My Beloved Wife, I watched or started to watch a comedy show by a Tasmanian woman, which is, you know, I guess off the coast of Australia or something, named Hannah Gadsby.
And she is a lesbian.
And she has a show on Netflix called Nanette.
And it's called Nanette for weird reasons.
It has nothing to do with Nanette.
But the show starts off with her making mildly funny jokes.
And she's kind of charming.
She's got a charming presence, making mildly funny jokes about being a lesbian, la la la la.
Then about 15 to 20 minutes in, she changes the tone and says basically she's retiring from comedy because she feels that she's using humor to hide her pain.
And then she starts talking about the fact that she was molested, she was abused, and it's really angry, especially angry against men and white men.
It's too bad for them.
You know, their time is over and you stink and all this stuff.
And well, here she talks, I couldn't put any of it on because she's so foulmouthed.
So here's an interview she gave talking about why she wants to retire from comedy.
Well, I think this, in real life, there's real power in the humor, you know, to do it with humor.
And, you know, because that, you know, when you talk about things with such weight, it doesn't do anything.
In fact, it weighs you down more.
You know, to do it, just talk about those things with a friend with lightheartedness or the attempt at humor is an attempt to connect.
But we're living in a very uneven world at the moment.
So when I stand on stage, I'm a second-class citizen trying to make, you know, there's, you know, straight people laugh.
I'm not interested in making them feel better anymore.
She's not interested in straight people anymore.
So like she's at war.
You know, now she just wants the anger.
She just wants the pain.
At Ricochet, my pal John Gabriel wrote a spectacular piece, really great read.
You should look at it, called The Left Gives Up on Comedy.
And he talks about how this basically deconstruction of her own show was praised.
And he says the New York Times acclaims the set as comedy arguing against comedy.
According to The Atlantic, the most radical thing Hannah Gatsby does in Nanette is simple.
She stops being funny.
Cosmopolitan raves.
I cry just thinking about Hannah Gatsby's new stand-up set in Annette.
Those definitely aren't tears of joy.
Perhaps Gatsby is dropping stand-up comedy for stand-up tragedy.
Halfway through her set, the Australian Comic Officially announces that she's retiring.
It's probably not the form to make such an announcement, she adds.
Anyway, he goes on to say that Gatsby is just the latest progressive giving up jokes.
Comedians mostly celebrated moments these days are laughter-free.
Jimmy Kimmel was praised for weeping through a monologue about healthcare policy.
Kathy Griffin fainted during her stand-up set about blowback from her faux Trump beheading.
Saturday Night Live highlighted a somber musical elegy to Hillary Clinton.
In a 2017 wrap-up, the New York Times enthused that the most memorable moments of the year in comedy were not funny.
And John Gabriel ends at Ricochet.
He ends this age of political buffoonery, media panic, and perpetual outrage is a comedy gold mine right when many comedians are losing their sense of humor.
The thing is, of course comedy comes from pain, and of course comedy comes from anger.
We all have pain.
We all have anger.
Comedians are people who can translate that into something golden.
How would it be if I started telling a story?
If I wrote the next season of Another Kingdom and I put it up and halfway through, I said, you know, the only reason I can tell these stories is because I've been through an emotional, a painful emotional journey myself.
That is what informs my knowledge of mankind.
And now I'm going to stop the story.
I'm tired of telling the story.
I'm just going to tell you about my emotional pain.
You know, it's cheating.
It's not what I'm there to do.
It's not doing your job.
I'm sorry she's in pain.
And by the way, I think she's right that comedy can reopen the wounds.
I know that writing fiction does.
I know that one of the things I really dislike about writing fiction is that I have to leave pathways open to pain that I would have long been over.
Childhood things that I would long have been over if I weren't constantly reopening the wounds to get at the source of feeling that I put into stories.
That's part of my job.
If I don't want to do that job anymore, I can stop.
But it's none of your business.
I don't have to bother you about it.
You're not paying for that.
You're paying for the story.
You're paying for the comedy.
This is deconstructing something to the point where there's no longer the thing that you are paying to get.
And as Gabriel points out in his excellent piece, The Left Gives Up on Comedy, she's there to entertain.
We're here to be entertained.
We have our own pain.
We have our own anger.
We want some comedy to get us away from that.
And if she is so angry, so angry that she can no longer laugh, maybe she's right.
She should retire, but she should also get a psychiatrist.
Daniel Silva Tomorrow00:00:48
All right.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We will be back again tomorrow.
We have got Daniel Silva tomorrow.
Excellent interview with the great thriller writer Daniel Silva.
He was just terrific, and it was a really good interview.
Be there then.
We will be there as well.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Emily Jai.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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