Andrew Klavan and Michael Knowles expose Twitter’s Orwellian double standards, banning conservative voices like Laura Loomer for criticizing Ilhan Omar’s ties to anti-Semitic rhetoric while letting Louis Farrakhan’s "Jews are termites" remarks stand. They link leftist censorship—silencing debates on transgender ideology or immigration—to the rise of extremism, comparing it to Rome’s fall from uncontrolled dissent. Knowles mocks Gary Hart’s biopic The Frontrunner as a miscast, hypocritical defense of a serial adulterer, contrasting it with the Kavanaugh hearings’ fabricated narrative. The duo warns that suppressing truth fuels fringe movements, urging conservatives to build their own cultural counterweight beyond virtue-signaling "art." [Automatically generated summary]
With the midterms behind us, it's time to look ahead to 2020 because God forbid we should pause a moment to attend to the state of our own souls before we distract ourselves with meaningless political speculation that has no bearing on reality.
So, in the spirit of neurotic avoidance and the desire to have our emotions manipulated by the pointless ramblings of some idiot commentator, in this case myself, let's take a look at the possible Democratic candidates who might challenge President Trump in two years' time or might do something else entirely that we can't predict or imagine.
First on the list, of course, is Hillary Clinton.
Sources close to the former Secretary of State, including the hitman who killed Vince Foster and a gigantic imaginary rabbit who only appears when she's really been knocking back the Chardonnay, say Clinton is indeed considering a third try at the White House and is currently trying to choose between two campaign slogans, either, I'm with the felon who keeps falling downstairs, or Hillary 2020, give me the damn presidency already.
Sources say Hillary will make a decision as soon as she regains consciousness.
Next on the list is Michael Avenatti, who's considering running with the slogan, she hit me first.
Sources say Avenatti wants to run on a platform of taking all the due process away from Republicans so Democrats can have twice as much.
Another potential candidate is former Vice President Joe Biden.
Democrat strategists cite Biden's nickname, Lunchbucket Joe, as proof he may be able to appeal to those voters who prefer their candidates to have the IQ of a metal container with a ham sandwich inside.
And finally, there's Elizabeth Warren, who's considering to run for the presidency on a platform of taking back the land the white man stole from her tribe, her tribe being pasty-faced Methodists who manipulate a corrupt affirmative action system.
All in all, the Democrats are fielding a great lineup if you happen to be a Trump supporter.
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-dunky.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, the run to zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we are back.
I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving.
Mine was great, as you can see.
I haven't shaved for days, and I plan to continue this.
I've now reached the, I'm going for the, this, you know, Santa Claus meets Ernest Hemingway look, but so far I've only reached the kind of crotchety old miner from an old Western who says things like, you know, I think, dad gummy, I think they robbed that bank, and then gets killed by Black Bart in the second act.
Another Kingdom is out, the next chapter of Another Kingdom performed by the perfidious Michael Knowles.
Today, subscribers get exclusive access to episode eight titled The Darkest Hour.
That means there's only three episodes left, three episodes left, so get on the train.
If you're not a subscriber, you won't be able to watch these new episodes of season two until Friday.
So what are you waiting for?
Head on over to dailywire.com and subscribe to watch the first and second seasons of Another Kingdom.
Also, by the way, the Leftie's dictionary is now available, and today is Cyber Monday, so there's a real cut in price.
It's just a beautiful, beautiful edition.
It's got all the stuff that was in the videos and much, much more.
And plus a picture of me on the cover, which, you know, that'll take down the price right there.
Man crates, you know, if you have had this conversation over the holidays where you say, maybe you say to your husband, you know, what would you like for Christmas?
And he says, then you're probably my wife.
And this is a hard thing to get guys to tell you what they want because guys don't know what they want until they see it.
So, but with man crates, you get everything.
You get a wonderful wooden crate that you have to pry open with a crowbar.
Personally, that's it for me.
That's all I actually want for Christmas is a crate to pry open with a crowbar.
But inside, they have terrific, terrific things.
They have the knife-making kit or the scotch drinkers kit.
I have that.
I also have the Grillmaster crate.
That was the latest one I got because I just want to get my friend Owen Brennan from Madison McQueen.
He's such a good griller.
I just want to surpass him.
So I got the Grillmaster crate from Man Crates.
It probably won't help, but it might.
At least I can dream.
Listeners to this show, buy one gift and you will get the second gift for 25% off when you go to mancrates.com/slash Clavin.
This offer is only for the holidays.
Buy one gift and get the second 25% off at mancrates.com/slash clavin, mancrates.com/slash clavin.
You can probably open that box and say, How do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Really, these are really fun, good gifts for men.
You know, it is so obvious now, it is so obvious the way that leftism poisons our debates on both sides, because it makes leftism can make right-wingers stupid too.
It is amazing.
It's like this kind of poison gas that makes everybody stupid.
And we're seeing it right now on Twitter, especially.
But the problem is, when you're not talking about the truth, this is the whole problem with leftism.
When you're not talking about the truth, you have to censor and silence the other side.
So when you silence the truth, what's left?
Only the lies.
Only the liars on the left and right are left to debate things.
And that is why the debate becomes poisonous and all of us become stupid.
Over this last holiday, really over the last few weeks, Twitter has now gone full fascist.
It is now basically silencing the account of anyone who says anything they dislike.
And I don't know if it's because, I mean, this is what Dorsey went before Congress, swore to tell the truth, and said he was not going to do.
And they are regulated by a regulation that says they are free of the responsibility of publishers to tell the truth because they are providing a forum for all opinions.
But now they have defined anything they disagree with as hatred.
So here are the things that you can't say now on Twitter.
There was Laura Loomer.
Laura Loomer, if you don't know about her, she's a kind of right-wing provocateur.
She's not, you know, they call her far-right because they call everybody far-right.
But she's certainly disavowed the alt-right.
She's disavowed white supremacy, as have I. She's done some things that I disagree with, like she's the one who disturbed the Julius Caesar performance in Central Park in New York because she didn't like the fact that they were attacking Trump.
I don't agree with that.
I think free speech is for everybody.
But basically, she is a kind of right-wing provocateur.
And she sent out a tweet complaining about the fact that everybody is talking about the diversity of the new Democratic Congresspeople who are going to Congress in January.
And they keep pointing to Ilhan Omar, the Muslim congresswoman-elect, one of two.
And she pointed out, Laura Loomer pointed out that Ilhan Omar is pro-Sharia and Sharia and pro-female genital mutilation.
And Sharia, under Sharia, homosexuals are oppressed and killed, and women are abused and forced to wear the hijab.
And Ilhana, she goes on to say, is anti-Jewish.
All of that is true, by the way.
I mean, that happens to be true.
Her Twitter account was shut down.
But Louis Farrakhan, who says Jews are termites on Twitter, Jews are termites, he's still up there.
So now we know Sharia is okay on Twitter.
Jews are termites.
Who else?
Megan Murphy, a leftist, a founder of the feminist current website.
She's been suspended for Twitter.
She says she's a socialist.
She's a radical feminist.
But she points out that men aren't women, right?
That transgenderism may be a phenomenon, but that doesn't mean that just because you feel man, I feel like a woman doesn't mean, man, you are a woman.
It just means you're a man who feels like a woman, or possibly you're Shania Twain.
But the thing is, the thing is, Murphy was settled for that.
So now we know men are women and Jews are termites.
That's the world of Twitter.
That is the poisonous world these guys are creating with their random censorship of things they happen to disagree with.
Jesse Kelly, an Iraq war veteran, a former GOP congressional candidate.
Also, he's a guy who like, you know, he plays a part, kind of like me.
He says funny things and he tweets, twits, he twits on Twitter, or vice versa.
He tweets on Twitter.
He tweaks the left by saying funny things.
And if you're a real right-winger, you think he's funny.
And if you're a left-winger, you don't.
They just took him off.
He shut down.
No reason given at all.
So all of these things, we now know men are women, Sharia is great, Jews are termites on Twitter.
That is what Twitter believes because those are, we can tell, because they're shutting down anything that they don't believe.
Now, what does that do?
I mean, what does it do to all of us?
You know, it's interesting.
A lot of people are saying that now social media should be regulated more strongly because, of course, if they're not going to adhere to the rules where they are a platform for everybody, if they're not going to adhere to those rules, then they can be sued by anybody who has been lied about on Twitter.
If somebody said something about you on Twitter, you know, like that you don't like, like you're a fascist or something, you should now be able to sue Twitter just as you would sue a publisher if they publish things like that.
The only reason Twitter cannot be sued is because they're a platform, which means they let everybody speak like the phone company.
So some people are saying this.
Other people are saying, hey, you know what?
These sites are now collapsing.
Their stocks are collapsing.
People are going off them.
They're looking for sites where they won't be censored.
And so why don't we just let them die?
If we start to regulate them, we'll give them new life.
So that's another way of looking at it too.
But I want to just talk about, I want to pause for a minute.
I want to talk specifically about transgenderism, not because I care so much about transgenderism, but because I want to use it as an example of what happens to a debate when only lies are allowed, okay?
Because this is what's happening on Twitter, and it also happens on the mainstream media, and it's how we all become stupid.
But let's first, let us talk about Blue Apron.
Children At The Border00:15:56
Blue Apron, Blue Apron is great.
Blue Apron, the thing is they deliver farm fresh ingredients and step-by-step recipes to your door.
So every week, at least three recipes are built with your busy schedule in mind, and you go on and you pick which of the recipes you like.
So right now this week, they have smoky chicken and sweet potato bake.
They have hot Italian sausage pizza, beef and broccoli and cumin spice sauce.
All of these basically are restaurant level meals, but you can cook them yourself.
They send you the measured portions and the instructions and it takes about 20 minutes for you to cook or in my case for me to watch my wife cook while I drink a glass of wine and make sardonic remarks.
Blue Apron offers a range of recipes.
They're all bursting with flavors and the chef design recipes are restaurant quality.
They take, like I said, about 20 minutes to prepare.
Check out this week's menu and get your first three meals free at blueapron.com slash Andrew.
That's blueapron.com slash Andrew.
Make sure to tell them we sent you so they continue to keep our lights on and sponsor our show.
Also, so you will get your first three meals free.
That is pretty inexpensive.
What else can I do besides offer you free food?
Blue Apron is a better way to cook.
Let's talk about transgenderism for a minute.
There is no question that there is such a thing as people who feel uncomfortable in their skin, in the gender they were born.
Men are born and women are people are born either male or female.
It's the first thing every mom wants to know.
Is it a boy or is it a girl?
Dads too.
That's the first thing we want to know because it's a different life.
Men and women have different kinds of lives.
Human lives, lives in the image of God, but different.
Now, traits are spread out.
Like, think of them like little dots spread out on a spectrum.
Most of the male traits fall with men.
Most of the female traits fall with women.
But, you know, there's a range.
And all men have some female traits, unless they're just absolute psychopaths.
Same thing with women.
Women have traits that are mostly associated with men.
But sometimes things get mixed up.
It's nature.
It's not perfect.
And somebody gets so many female traits.
A guy gets so many female traits that he feels that he's a woman inside.
Listen, we admire manly men and we admire womanly women for obvious reasons, right?
The world depends on them.
The world depends on men who can protect women, men who can support women, men who can support and protect their children, and women who care for and nurture their children.
So we like tenderness and nurturance in women, and we admire strength and responsibility in men.
Those are things that we admire because they make the world go round.
They are central to human life.
Those traits, manly men and womenly women, are central to human life, and that's why we admire them.
But just because something is not central doesn't mean we have to condemn it.
Some things outside of the center are good, like a genius musician is not a normal person, right?
But we love that.
Some things outside the center are bad, like a serial killer.
Most people are not serial killers, but that's bad.
We have to make judgments in each case.
And obviously, if somebody is not hurting anybody, but he's out of keeping with his sexual orientation or his body, it's none of our business.
It's nobody's business.
The world is filled with tragedy, filled with pain, filled with hatred and meanness.
The least we can do is extend our love to people who might be in some kind of discomfort or psychological pain.
It is not a lot to ask that we can be kind about this.
You can have and express, or should be able to have and express, any opinion you want.
If you're a small-minded person and you think, ah, you know, he thinks he's a girl, so he's going to hell, that's fine.
That's not what Jesus says, by the way.
Just saying, just pointed it out.
But the thing is, I think for most of us, we just want to be tolerant of people with their problems.
We all have problems.
We all have dysfunctions.
There's nothing mentally ill or sick about saying, I have this issue.
You know, about a guy saying, hey, you know, I really don't feel like a man.
I really feel uncomfortable.
He's going to try and solve that any way he can.
I think we should be very careful not to impose this stuff on children who have not defined themselves yet.
We shouldn't impose anything.
We shouldn't impose, just because a child, a young boy, walks in with a doll, that doesn't mean you zip him off to a doctor and pump them full of chemicals.
That is child abuse.
But we don't have to hate on people.
If a guy is a little bit effeminate, it may make us uncomfortable.
We don't have to hate on people.
All this stuff is obvious.
I'm sure we all agree.
Nothing mentally ill about it.
There is something nuts about a guy coming and saying that he's a woman.
Even after he's had an operation, he's still not a woman.
Every cell in his body is a man's cell.
He is whatever he is.
And because he knows that that's not true, because he knows that he is telling a lie, because he knows it's not right for him, for instance, to compete in a sporting event against girls who have worked hard to become excellent at their sport, but can be overcome in an instant by somebody who's really a man dressed up as a woman or having turned his body into a woman costume.
You know, obviously, that's nuts.
So when you have people on TV who say what's nuts, you have to define anybody who disagrees with them as hateful.
You have to silence those people because the truth wipes lies away.
That's why.
That is why.
We can't, if we sit around and say the emperor is wearing clothes when he's stark naked, it only takes one person to say, guess what?
The emperor is naked.
And by the way, he's a guy.
He's not a girl, even though he thinks he's the empress.
It doesn't matter, right?
So you have to silence those.
So what do you got?
You've got lies on both sides.
You have only the people who are saying, you only can allow the people who are saying, I'm a woman because I feel like a woman.
And then on the right, you can only allow the people who are angry enough and mean enough to say, ah, you're lying.
You're a liar, right?
Because the person who says what I just said is going to be silenced.
That's the person who goes on Twitter and says, look, you know, I feel for you, but a man is not a woman.
Silenced.
He's gone.
All you've got now is hate on the left and nonsense on the left and nonsense on the right.
This works for the left.
The left likes this because it makes right-wingers look intolerant when in fact they're not.
Anybody who's ever hung out with right-wingers know that they say all kinds of nonsense about their theories about this and their theories about that, but they welcome people in all the time because they take each person as an individual.
Individualism is at the heart of conservatism, so they're not intolerant, but you can make them look intolerant by saying something stupid, censoring them, and then leaving only the hateful people left to speak.
It also works for the media because outrage gets clicks and ratings.
But it makes all of us, it makes all of us stupid, and it makes our debate stupid and it makes our debate angry.
And this is the work of leftism.
Rightism has not done this.
At least it hasn't done it since I was a little kid.
It doesn't silence the people on the other side.
It loves for leftists to come out and make these stupid statements because it's easy to tear them to shreds.
But I think it's bad for all of us.
I think it makes all of us a little sick, a little stupid, a little more angry, a little bit more intolerant.
You know, there's a thing called transgenderism.
It affects almost no one.
It affects, I mean, the numbers are so tiny.
In a country this big, it's going to work up to over a million people.
And you go, wow, a million people, that's a lot of people.
But why are we even talking about it?
We're talking about it because Obama used it to distract from the failure of his presidency, the failure of his actual policies.
He brought it up, just like he brought up cops killing people.
It was all to distract from the absolute failure of the Obama policies.
That's what it was for.
And so now we're stuck in this debate because the left is always protecting the Democrats.
You know, and this works on everything.
Let's take a look at the border, what was happening on the border.
Over the weekend, there was an incident at the border.
I'll read you from the paper.
A group of about 100 people trying to illegally cross the border Sunday, this is November 25th, threw rocks and bottles at U.S. Border Patrol agents who responded by using pepper spray and other means to force the crowd back into Mexico.
Oh, wait, oh, wait, I'm sorry.
I take it back.
That's not from this year.
That's from the Obama administration.
I believe that's 2013, November 25th.
And so let's pause for a moment and hear the mainstream media and their outrage against Obama.
Right, nothing, not a thing.
But now it has happened again.
It has happened again.
This caravan that Jim, look at me, I'm Jim Acosta, told us was not an invasion and it was far away, suddenly is at the border in Tijuana, is not far away, and they charged over.
And U.S. Border Patrol agents use tear gas to disperse hundreds.
These guys are from Honduras originally, hundreds of Central American migrants at the Mexican city of Tijuana who made a rush for the border fence as tensions build over the diminishing prospects for asylum seekers trying to enter the country.
I'm reading from the Wall Street Journal, which remembers very pro-illegal immigration.
They don't care about the rule of law.
They just want those cheap workers for their businesses and their lawns and stuff.
That's why the Wall Street Journal, with their kind of business-centered agenda, is so in favor of illegal immigration.
It's just wrong.
It is just wrong because the rule of law is important.
You want to make good laws, laws that let us control the border.
So they put in a picture, which I think will probably win the Pulitzer Prize.
Can you put up this picture?
Yes.
It's a woman carrying her children away from the tear gas.
You see the tear gas.
We see this poor woman with her poor children running away from the tear gas.
It would take a heart of stone not to break.
It is terrible.
I'm telling you, if this picture doesn't win the Pulitzer Prize, I'll be shocked.
If you look in the background, all the rest of the guys are there.
They're all men.
They're all men.
So the whole thing is an illusion.
And this photographer is falling for the illusion because he's an artist.
That's why, and he likes the emotions that are called up by this picture.
So let's go to Rodney Scott.
Rodney Scott is the chief patrol agent, the Border Patrol in San Diego, and he's on CNN, and he's describing what it was really like for his guys as this invasion took place.
I kind of challenged that this was a peaceful protest or that the majority of these people were claiming asylum.
We ended up making about 42 arrests.
Only eight of those were females, and there were only a few children involved.
The vast majority of the people were dealing with are adult males.
Similar to what we saw the first wave of the caravan that came up about a week or so ago, the group immediately started throwing rocks and debris at our agents, taunting the agents.
Once our agents were assaulted and the numbers started growing, we had two or three agents at a time initially facing hundreds of people at a time.
They deployed tear gas to protect themselves and to protect the border.
So Ana Navarro, who is always, I think she always says she's a Republican.
She's obviously a leftist.
She's on CNN and they ask her about what this guy just said.
I mean, this is a law enforcement officer who's telling he was attacked with rocks.
They were mostly men.
The families were put out there for the purposes of creating images.
And they ask Ana Navarro what she thinks of his response.
I find that to be a compelling answer from Chief Scott about the use of tear gas, which was essentially, look, our job is to protect the border.
By the time they're here or through the fence, what are we supposed to do?
And his claim was that most of the people storming the fence were men, not the women and children that we've seen in the pictures.
Look, there are no easy answers here.
And it's a very difficult situation, a very complicated situation.
I don't find that a compelling answer.
We have seen the images of the children and the women.
And there has got to be a pragmatic and compassionate answer here that does not involve tear gassing children.
That is not who America is.
That is not what we do.
The eyes of the world are watching us.
And if we are going to be the beacon of human rights for the world, we can't have these images coming out from our country.
So it's a complicated problem.
But the images, and this is not who we are.
I mean, in other words, we are supposed to be governed by the people who create the images because the people who create the images are in league with, are in line with Ana Navarro's policy.
So that's how we're supposed to, I mean, they are making us stupid.
They're making us stupid because it puts you in this position where you just want to say like, oh, you know, shut up.
This is ridiculous.
And it makes you more prone to fall for the narrative that all these people are bad people.
I don't think all these people are bad people.
I think that illegal immigration and mass shiftings of people are a big, big deal.
You know, when you look back, you know, just a quick history lesson, when you look back at the fall of the Roman Republic, I'm not talking about the fall of the Roman Empire.
That was much, much later.
I'm talking about the fall of the Roman Republic.
The illegal immigration had a lot to do with it.
The German tribes came down from the north and they kept sending legions out and the tribes kept killing the legions because there were so many of them moving down hundreds of thousands of people illegally coming down.
And I'm sure some of you have heard of Julius Caesar's famous book, The Gallic Wars, where he talks about the wars in Gaul.
It's the one that begins with the famous line, all Gaul is divided into three parts.
And Julius Caesar went up there and finally, finally broke the back of the northern tribes up there.
They installed him as governor.
And what happened?
He was then so popular that when he marched down with his armies, people shouted for him to be emperor.
That was the end of the Roman Republic.
You've heard the phrase crossing the Rubicon.
That was because it was illegal to bring soldiers across the Rubicon into Rome proper.
When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he said another famous line, he said, the die is cast because now he has broken the law and he is coming into Rome.
And that was the end of the Roman Republic.
It had a lot to do with the fighting against and the fear of these invaders from the north.
So look, you can overreact to this, but you've got to deal with it.
You've got to say, hey, the borders belong to us.
The country belongs to us.
We've got to make the rules.
And I'm someone who doesn't really care how many people come across, as long as we get to choose how many and who they are and when they come.
That seems to me, it seems to me the rule of law is the important thing here.
And the funny thing is, is the left is now admitting this as they see Angela Merkel's career coming to an end because she was gulled into feeling that her display of compassion for the Islamic asylum seekers coming into Germany and therefore into the EU, because once you were in, you were in.
They see that bringing her career to an end.
And John Kerry, he's talking about, oh, what's going to come next with climate migration accidentally spills the beans.
Here he is.
Look at Europe.
Europe's already crushed under this transformation that's taken place because of immigration.
Germany, Angela Merkel, weakened because of it.
And other places impacted.
Italy, significantly impacted its politics by immigration.
It's significantly impacted its politics.
How?
Well, let's go to Hillary Clinton in The Guardian.
Hillary Clinton regained consciousness long enough to say this in the left-wing British paper The Guardian.
I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame.
And she's talking about the flame of right-wing nationalism, which remember is different in Europe than it is here.
It is not here we are loyal to the nation we are loyal to is a free nation with a constitution meant to guarantee that freedom.
There, there's a lot of racial politics underneath it.
What they accuse us of here is often true over there in Europe.
So she goes on to say, I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken by leaders like Angela Merkel of Germany, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part and must send a very clear message.
We are not going to be able to continue providing refuge and support because if we don't deal with the migration issue, it will continue to roil the body politic.
Damaging Voices in the Body Politic00:02:52
How does it do that?
Okay.
Remember how we talked about just now, we talked about when leftism silences the simple truth, men are not women, but it lets hate thrive, Jews or termites, all you get is hate.
And you get it on the left and you get it on the right.
When you silence people, all you get are the angriest people because only the people who are angry enough to break the silence will speak on the right and only the people who are willing to tell the lies that the left likes and that support leftist ideology will speak on the left.
So when you have people saying, oh, we must open our borders and be kind and gentle without saying, you know what, too many Islamic people is going to destroy the governance of our country.
Too many Islamic people who have a philosophy, a religion that is antithetical to Western values, too many people coming in at once like that who can't be assimilated and can't be convinced of joining the party here in the West, that is going to be damaging.
So you're not allowed to say that.
That's silenced.
So who then says it?
Who then says it?
The far right in Europe, who are actual white supremacists and actual racists, many of them, who then stand up and say that.
And so now, I'm an honest guy.
I don't have any animus toward Muslim people, but I think there's a problem with so many coming in.
Where do I stand?
I stand with the guys on the right.
I stand with the white supremacists who at least are speaking up.
And that's why Hillary is now worried, because when good people can only stand with bad people, right, then the bad people get stronger.
When there's a problem, but only the bad people will say it, and only the bad people are brave enough to say it, and only the bad people are not being silenced on Twitter and elsewhere, then the bad people become legitimate.
They become legitimized by the fact that they are speaking the truth.
Truth is a tremendously, tremendously powerful thing.
It can snap lies in half in an absolute second.
And if the only people speaking it the truth are speaking it without love, if they're speaking it without Christianity, without Christian tolerance, Judeo-Christian tolerance, then those people are going to have the power of the truth in their hands.
Silence the truth, and the people who have the power of truth are not going to be the people you think.
They're going to be some very, very bad people.
This should be a lesson to Twitter.
Jack Torsey should wake up.
He's doing exactly the wrong thing.
What he's doing is fascist and Orwellian, and it is absolutely damaging to the body politic.
I know he thinks he's doing a good thing, but he's actually doing something really, really evil and really, really destructive.
We have, talking about evil and destructive, we have Michael Knowles coming up, coming up in just a minute.
Let me remind you that the new Another Kingdom is now available for subscribers.
The Darkest Hour, which is number eight, so there's only eight, nine, and 10 are left.
So you want to see it.
And it's just, if you're a subscriber, it is just so beautiful.
The stuff that they've done visually, it is just great.
And speaking of beauty as well, Michael Knowles is in it.
And also the Lefty's Dictionary, which is on Amazon at a cut rate price for Cyber Monday.
Gary Hart's Character00:11:38
I don't know how long that discount will last, but right now you can get it.
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All right, we've got Michael Knowles coming up.
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Knowles!
Can I see it?
I can.
I finally see you from across the country.
I'm out of that office so much now.
We have to Skype in via all the satellites.
I feel like we're three years ago again.
What is going on?
Why are you traveling around so much?
Well, because Ben won't let me back into the office.
That's the main.
That's the proximate cause.
I knew there was something I liked about that guy.
Yeah.
I'm giving a couple speeches down in Florida at FSU and at Embry.
So if you're in the Florida area, come by and check it out.
And you know what I did this morning, because it's been kind of a wild ride.
I've been doing all these things, is I woke up early and I went and saw the frontrunner this very morning.
I was just about the only person in the movie theater.
And thanks a lot.
I have a lot to do.
I have to write all these speeches and you've wasted my entire morning on this.
It was bad?
Was it bad?
No, you know, it's a movie that never had to be made.
You have to tell people what it's about first because not everybody remembers this.
Nobody remembers this.
If there is anybody less deserving of a movie about him than Gary Hart, I'd like you to point him out for me.
Gary Hart was the frontrunner in the 1988 Democrat primary before it began.
He was a senator from Colorado.
He first ran for president in 1984.
He got beaten by Walter Mondale.
That's about all that you need to know.
Very famously in 1984, Walter Mondale, the man who Reagan beat by all of the states.
He was such a dynamic character.
In 84, Mondale turns to Gary Hart, and he was echoing the Wendy's campaign ad.
And he said, Mr. Hart, where's the beef?
Because Gary Hart was basically a hairdo and a bunch of teeth and didn't have a whole lot of substance to him.
So he becomes the frontrunner.
He loses in 84.
He becomes the frontrunner in 88.
The trouble with this movie is that it never had to be made.
You know, most books could be essays.
Most essays could never be written.
This movie could have been 15 minutes long.
But that said, also, Hugh Jackman was miscast because he wasn't nearly glib enough to be Gary Hart.
Yeah, he got a lot of presence, Hugh Jackman.
It's hard to make him seem trouble.
Yeah.
Hugh Jackman is far too substantial a person to play Gary Hart.
Yeah, yeah.
But there is a lot to enjoy here.
The movie is essentially about how awful Democrat politicians and the media are, how just destructive and corrupt and undignified they are.
So that's pretty enjoyable.
You sort of think, what's not to like?
I really enjoyed every moment that I was in watching the movie.
The other trouble with it is that it takes Gary Hart's side a little bit too much.
He tries to make him out to be a serious person, a thoughtful candidate, someone who was trying to preserve the dignity of never having his sex scandals exposed.
Because this guy was a CAD.
He got caught famously on a yacht with a blonde lady sitting on his lap.
And the name of the yacht was Monkey Business.
He was planning Senator Hart.
I mean, one of the things about him is he was Bill Clinton before there was Bill Clinton.
Everybody knew what he was doing.
The press covered up.
And it was only because he dared the press to come after him that they finally came after him.
Well, that's right.
This is a pivotal moment is they finally, they start asking a couple questions.
Everyone knows that he's sleeping around.
And he says, follow me around.
Follow me around with a camera.
You're going to be very bored.
So they follow him around and they catch his mistress walking out of his house.
That part, I think, is pretty good.
The film, the reason why it doesn't succeed, even though there's so much promise there, it's only got about 50% Rotten Tomatoes, critics, and audience.
And it just about deserves that.
I'd give it a C, probably, maybe a C plus.
But the interesting thing about the movie is it delves into these central conflicts within the left.
What do they do?
I mean, we've been dealing with this between Bill Clinton and the Me Too movement.
We've been looking at that major conflict.
But the major question of the movie is, did the press go too far?
Are politicians entitled, like LBJ, like JFK, like FDR, like every other Democrat politician who slept around, are they entitled to not have their mistresses in the press?
And the film seems to side with Gary Hart on privacy, but it was the left that decided in the 60s and 70s, the personal is the political.
We're going to go against everybody personally.
We're going to bring this up.
It gets the history wrong a little bit too, because we've had sex scandals in this country since Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.
There's nothing new there.
And the same question about the media.
What is the role of the media?
Are the media going to speak truth to power, go after these guys, root around in their back alleyways, or are they going to pall around with them and hang out at the White House correspondents dinner and go to parties with them and just be their buddies and cover up?
The film is so confused on these questions, but the left isn't any less confused.
So the fact that a movie with a left-wing slant was able to explore those questions, I think that's basically a win for conservatives.
It's just too bad nobody's going to watch it.
You know, I was there.
I was in the news business when this happened and when this story broke, I was in the news business.
And this is one of the last times in my life I ever got into shouting matches with people because the bosses were coming in.
I worked at a radio station that was known then as the New York Times of Radio, which I have to translate because the New York Times is now such trash.
But in those days, it was actually a decent newspaper.
So we were considered the serious newsroom of radio.
And we wrote very long stories, you know, a 45-second story, which in radio is an eternity, that would describe the federal budget.
And they brought in new bosses who said to us, no, no, no, it's got to be relatable.
That was the big word, relatable.
Everything had to be relatable.
And that was kind of coming out of relevance of the 60s.
And they said, look, nobody cares about the federal budget.
What they care about is sex.
What they care about is AIDS.
They care about, we want to talk about condoms.
We want to talk about the first time on earth that people were talking about anal sex on the air.
And everybody was just so thrilled and delighted that this could finally be, you know, this taboo had been broken.
We could finally be discussing this all-important issue.
And in the middle of this, in the middle of this, Gary Hart dares them to find his mistress who was buying in plain sight.
And the funny thing about this was the argument, they called it at the time the character issue.
I don't know if they still use that phrase, but it's a character.
And I would like scream, just scream at people.
I haven't done this since this.
This is how long it's been since I actually lost my temper, where I would scream at people and say, look, our job is to tell people about the federal budget so they know who to vote for.
That's our job.
That's our actual job.
But no, no, no, now it was going to be a money-making operation.
Of course, I was just a pebble washed away on the tide of this cultural movement.
But the thing is, Gary Hart really stood for something.
He stood for that moment when the press decided, oh, we can sell sex if we call it the character issue.
We can sell sex as an aspect of a person's character, that if you cheat on your wife, you have a bad character.
Now, the only reason the press liked this, and I can tell you this because I was in the meetings where the bosses would tell us it's the only reason they liked it is because people like sex and they want to hear about it.
So it was really not about character.
It was not about politics.
It was just about sex.
But now it has devolved to the point where that's all we talk about, basically.
That's right.
And they almost popped to this in the movie.
They're batting this around the Washington Post, Miami Herald.
You know, a reporter needs a story.
He needs to get something to keep his job, basically.
And they say, well, if he's cheating on his wife, that really matters.
And they say, well, if he's cheating on his wife and that really matters, we're going to have to throw out half of the Senate and more of the Congress.
Which is, you know, one thing I like about the movie, too, is that two things can be true at once.
This guy, these Democrat politicians can be cad, dirty, rotten, empty-suited nobodies, and the media can be hacks.
It's not an either or.
It can be both of those.
And it does explore that moment because as far as I can tell, the left does not have an answer about this.
And whenever they're complaining about the degradation of the media, the degradation of our politics, maybe we can agree.
But don't forget, they started it.
That's right.
That's right.
And it does, you know, it puts them in a bind, which if they dealt with it honestly, it would mean reforming their business.
But they're not going to do that.
If they said, well, wait, you know, if we do this, we have to do it to everybody.
But now, I mean, you know, the Brett Kavanaugh thing was actually in some way Gary Hart's bastard child.
If you can just, once you can just accuse somebody of something that happened allegedly 35 years ago without any proof, then you've gone way, way beyond the character issue into just pure human destruction.
And at least with Gary Hart, they followed him and got pictures of his mistress on his lap.
They never did anything like that.
If you're a conservative, they don't do anything like that.
They just accuse you and you're done.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
There's also a lesson here, I think, from Gary Hart and from Kavanaugh.
They always focus with Gary Hart on how he never let anyone into his personal life.
Obviously not.
He'd separated from his wife at times.
He had these mistresses.
He didn't want people to come in.
He was a little bit more old school senator.
He just wanted to smile and be a hairdo and spout his talking points.
But when you see someone like Kavanaugh or Gary Hart, someone the public doesn't really know very well, then the media can spin the narrative.
And maybe it's a true narrative.
Maybe it's a completely fabricated narrative, but it's in their hands.
Whereas someone like Donald Trump, who says, I love cheating on my wife, I love sleeping with my friends' wives.
It's one of the joys of life.
It might be ugly, but it put him in control of that narrative.
And in many ways, it's a product of this moment in the 1980s.
It is funny, too, how Trump, in some ways, though Trump himself can be childish, he's really treating us like adults by telling us everything.
You know, he says the quiet part out loud, and we just have to either take it or not take it.
Hey, another kingdom we should mention out today, the eighth.
You know, this is coming to an end.
This ends before Christmas, I guess.
That's right.
I got a lot of hate mail because of the break.
We always take a break when it comes to do a little interview.
But we've got another episode out today.
It's doing shockingly well.
Oh, yeah.
I can't believe it.
It's doing a lot better than this movie that I just saw, The Frontrunner.
I think we've got way more than you, Jackman, guys.
So that's a big win.
It's a better story.
It's been a lot of fun.
I go to these speeches and then people come up to me.
They say, Michael, Michael, I love the show.
I say, oh, thank you so much.
Did you see last Thursday's episode?
They say, no, not your show, stupid.
Another kingdom.
You're much better as Austin Riley than as yourself.
Austin Lively, I'm sorry, I got my own character's name wrong.
Do you have a show today?
I do have a show today.
Museum Heist and Widows00:08:13
What are you talking about?
We are going to be talking about the two Americas that Brian Stelter is so upset about.
Oh, nobody's talking about global warming just because illegal aliens are killing Americans.
Can you imagine?
Two Americas.
All right.
Well, travel safe, buddy.
It's good to see you.
And I'll see you when you get back.
See ya.
our crappy culture.
So I have to tell you two funny cultural experiences I had over the weekend because they actually speak to something that's going on that is really sad and hilarious at the same time, which is right in my sweet spot.
Yeah.
Yesterday, Saturday, Saturday night, my wife and I went to the Getty Museum, which is a beautiful, beautiful museum.
And it's open late at night on Saturdays, which is just great because the crowds are a little less and you can go and see their exhibits and have a nice dinner.
And it really is a lovely, lovely place.
And nothing I say about it I don't want to take away from that.
But they are having this exhibit called the Renaissance Nude, which is, you know, the discovery of how you make, the rediscovery, I should say, of how you portray a human body in art, right?
The Greeks did it so beautifully in their statues.
The Romans conquered, copied the Greeks.
And then as Rome collapsed, you can watch, you can watch the depictions of the body decay, and you can see their skill disappears.
And the terrible thing about a civilization in decay is it doesn't know it's in decay.
It doesn't even say the people like, you know, who say, well, you know, they used to be able to make a better statue than that are just the old coots who aren't in with the modern crummy statuary.
And so with the Renaissance, they rediscovered these statues, they rediscovered the human body, and they started to portray the nudes.
And a lot of these nudes, they started out because it was a Christian culture.
They started out with men doing Jesus with his drapery over his midsection and of his loins, as they would say.
But also they started doing women, and those got kind of sexy.
And some of those were made for rich male patrons who wanted a picture of a sexy girl.
And so they would take a biblical story about Bathsheba and her bath.
And they would do this kind of very sexy nude portrait of a beautiful woman.
And as these became better and better, they became more and more attractive.
So I was, I put on those head, that headset thing where you can go on tour, and they had people from the museum talking in the headset about the different artwork.
You would go to the artwork and press the button, and it would describe the artwork.
So the guy, whoever, I don't know who he was, he was one of the museum people, is saying, this is a tremendously erotic painting.
I very much enjoy it.
The smooth lines of a soft flesh and the whiteness of her breasts.
And you're like, dude, and then you get the woman and she comes on and she says, we have to remember that it's problematical, that these were men made by men for men.
And the power dynamic is problematic.
You know, this feminist garbage.
And all I was thinking was, In other words, the fact that men like to look at naked dames created some of the greatest work that humankind has ever produced, but feminism has created the ability to complain about it.
So that's what you get.
A little bit of erotic desire in men creates great art, and then the women complain, and that becomes like an artistic movement.
And I bring this up because it is so much of the critical facility, so much of the critical speech.
I've always talked to the right about the fact that we not only need to make movies and write books and start magazines and get involved in the culture, we also need to create the infrastructure for culture that brings praise to people who do things that are good, who do things that not just are beautiful, but also are beautiful and elevate humankind.
It can be even something that looks degrading like the Sopranos, which actually does elevate humankind by its wisdom and insight into the human condition.
Or it can be something that's just immediately beautiful, like Bach, the music of Bach.
But the point is, we have no infrastructure to do that.
They can praise and damn.
So this movie came out.
This movie came out called Widows.
And I went out to see it immediately because it was co-written.
The screenplay was co-written by Gillian Flynn, who I like.
She wrote Gone Girl, and I've read all of her books, and I think she is a really interesting satirist.
I don't think she's as good a crime writer as everybody thinks she is.
I think her plots can be a little silly, but she's a really good satirist and picks on funny things in her time.
Gone Girl, if you read it right, I think, is a satire of marriage.
So I went out to see Widows, which is about a bunch of women whose husbands are criminals, and they all get killed in a bank heist.
This is the opening scene.
And so the women decide that they are going to pull off the final heist so they have something, money, because they're left without any money.
So the movie is not good.
I mean, it has wonderful actors in it.
Liam Neeson is in it, and all these, all the women, every single woman who's in it is a woman that I've seen on TV or something and said, oh my gosh, she's good.
Viola Davis, who was such a wonderful actress.
And they were all great actresses.
But it's a completely humorless, thick, heavy look at what is essentially a heist movie.
You know, it's supposed to be about a, it's a bank heist movie with twists and turns.
And instead of doing it for adventure and excitement and fun, it is just this heavy social justice nonsense without a single laugh in the entire movie.
By the end of it, I was just, I was sitting there and I wanted to love it.
You know, I like Gillian Flynn and I like crime movies.
I was sitting there going like, are you kidding me?
So let me read to you something from the Huffington Post.
Widows, and also this thing got 90% on Rotten Tomatoes from the critics.
Widows isn't making much money at the box office.
What's wrong with you, America?
That's the thing.
So these two women, two HuffPost writers, Ziba Blais and Matthew Jacobs.
I assume Ziba is a woman, Matthew is a man.
They have this thing about it where they say, we're discussing this film.
It sort of petered out in its opening weekend because people went to see it, but then they stopped because they saw it was no good.
So he says, what the hell?
And Ziba Blais says, what the hell?
I'm so confused because this film has generally received amazing reviews and it stars Viola Davis and Liam Neeson.
What more could you want?
Part of me feels that what went wrong was besides the fact that the fantastic Beast sequel hit theaters that maybe people don't know what to do with a female-led, black woman-led genre film.
Huh?
What do you think?
Oh yes, says Matthew, somehow people would rather see a bad Freddie Mercury IOPIC and a Mark Wahlberg comedy over a star-studded heist thriller that deserves a best picture nomination.
If there's one thing Widows teaches us that you can't trust it.
I mean, This is the problem with an artistic and cultural infrastructure run by the left.
It is all this complaining about the fact that the audience doesn't like a film because the film is not any good.
The film is a failure.
It's too bad.
A lot of talent.
Steve McQueen's a talented director.
Viola Davis is a wonderful, wonderful actress.
Liam Neeson is terrific.
And all the women in it, I don't have the cast list in front of me, but all the women in it are just great.
It's a bad movie.
It's a lot of dynamite that doesn't explode.
And so, but because the left owns the infrastructure, it's all our fault.
It's America's fault.
And because feminists are at the Getty Museum, they're making us feel guilty about the fact that men's erotic desires were repressed into making some of the greatest art of all time.
It is an amazing thing.
It is just another reminder.
It is another reminder that we on the right need to pay attention and need to celebrate something besides G-rated Christian Pablum in order to support the arts that tell the real story, that tell the story of life as it's really lived.
We should really do it because it's so boring listening to these people who get much better art because of it.
All right, that's it for me.
I got to say goodbye, but I will be back tomorrow.
Welcome back from the Clavenless Thanksgiving.
Celebrating Art Beyond G-Rated Pablum00:00:39
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