Ep. 637 skewers the NY Times for framing the FBI’s Trump investigation as a "deep state coup," arguing Comey’s firing was legal and no Russia obstruction existed, while mocking its buried lack of evidence. Michael Knowles joins to dissect Green Book, calling its backlash a weaponized Oscar power play, and blames Hollywood’s decline on Me Too cynicism and self-destruction—like Kevin Hart’s ousting—while urging conservatives to seize comedy’s potential. The episode ties media bias to political theater, from Black Klansman’s divisive messaging to CNN’s ignored border reports, framing it all as a coordinated effort to reshape narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
A neuroscientist believes he has found the reason conservative men don't like socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ecasio-Cortez.
I wish I were making this up, but I'm not.
According to the Huffington Post, neuroscientist Bobby Azarian says that his deep and profound studies, completely unaffected by his own prejudices, have revealed an indisputable fact that's all like scientific and stuff, namely that conservative men respond to fear more strongly than liberals do.
And they fear Ocasio-Cortez because, I'm quoting the Huffington Post now, as a young Latino working class woman, she threatens to upend the social order that has kept white men in the ruling class for centuries.
Unquote.
Now, here at the Daily Wire, we also have a team of absurd scientists whose ridiculously biased studies can be taken out of context.
And so I decided to consult with our own Dr. Hapless von Nudnick to see if he had any theories about why conservatives would fear a congresswoman who wants to raise taxes as high as 70% to fund a government takeover of our economic system.
According to Dr. Von Nudnick's research, Miss Acazi-Cortez possesses three qualities that combine to disturb the delicate minds of conservative men.
One, she's stupid.
Two, she's a socialist.
And three, she has a great rack.
In his paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Gibberish, Dr. Von Nudnick writes, quote, for most men, a stupid woman with a really spectacular pair of breasts is exactly what they're looking for.
Evolutionarily speaking, without stupid, shapely women, mankind wouldn't reproduce at all, because if they weren't stupid, they wouldn't sleep with us.
And if they weren't shapely, we couldn't be bothered.
So, when men see a stupid, shapely woman, all their positive lights start flashing.
Then, when they suddenly find out she's a socialist who wants to destroy the country, it ruins everything.
And thus, the conservative men become confused.
Unquote.
So there you have it.
Through the wonder of science, we finally gotten to the bottom of Alexandria Ecasio-Cortez, which is also kind of nice for a socialist.
Wise Food Storage Solutions00:02:47
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, has revealed a scandal of vast corruption at the New York Times, a former newspaper.
Over the weekend, the Times ran a couple of stories trying to whitewash and explain away an FBI conspiracy to avenge the firing of incompetent sanctimony guy James Comey by investigating Donald Trump.
The attempt was, the idea was, to overturn the results of an election the FBI didn't like.
What was presented as a bombshell by the Times was actually a cover-up in plain sight.
It's hard to say which is worse, what the FBI leadership did in the name of political ideology or a press that would cover up their attempt at a Keystone cop coup.
We'll take a look at it in just a minute, but first let us talk about Wise Foods.
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I keep this stuff around.
It is good to have.
And, you know, it's important also that you know how to spell Klavin in an emergency.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So the New York Times publishes this story on Friday, which is news dump time, right?
They had another one on Saturday.
Mueller's Explosive Implications00:15:57
It's a story about why the FBI started investigating Donald Trump.
And what you have to see about this story is it's basically like the craziest conservative right-wing guy in his basement, you know, with a right hiding in his basement with a rifle, could not have come up with more of a deep state conspiracy.
And yet the New York Times portrays it like your FBI.
It's another exciting adventure of the FBI.
The FBI.
Yes, the FBI taking the government of America into its own hands while the New York Times cheers them on.
Here is the story.
And again, remember, these are sources from the FBI and from the Democrats feeding stuff to the New York Times.
Why?
Why are they doing it?
So that the New York Times can spin it to sound like it wasn't what it was, a deep state coup, essentially.
FBI opened inquiry into whether Trump was secretly working on behalf of Russia.
I mean, this is the kind of nonsense they go.
But here it is.
In the days after President Trump fired James Comey as FBI director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president's behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.
So first of all, let's think about this for a minute.
He fired this guy who's now been shown to be dishonest and incompetent, a leaker of material to get he leaked material through a friend of his at Columbia in order to get a special counsel appointed, which worked.
He bobbled the Hillary Clinton investigation, both by covering up for her, by excusing her when he had no business excusing her or not.
He just was supposed to make a recommendation to the sinister, the quietly sinister Attorney General at the time.
And instead he goes on TV.
And then the Hillary Clinton people hated him because he came back and said, we were reopening this investigation.
And she thinks that's one of the many millions of excuses she has for having lost the election.
So the FBI decided that his behavior in firing James Comey, right, in firing James Comey, needed to be looked into.
Okay, let's go back to the New York Times.
The inquiry carried explosive implications.
Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president's own actions constituted a possible threat to national security.
Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence.
The investigation the FBI opened into Mr. Trump also had a criminal aspect, which has long been publicly known whether his firing of Mr. Comey constituted obstruction of justice.
Okay, again, we have to pause and think about this for a minute.
First of all, there are two kinds of investigations the FBI does.
do counterintelligence investigations, which are not necessarily criminal and you don't need proof of a crime, but you need criminal investigations.
You have to have a reason to suspect a crime has been committed.
They did not start a criminal investigation, though they keep throwing this out there, that they were looking into whether he obstructed justice.
Here's the definition of obstructive obstruction of justice.
Obstruction of justice is an act that corruptly or by threats or force or by any threatening letter or communication influences, obstructs or impedes or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede the due administration of justice.
So in other words, you can't just obstruct justice by doing something legal.
You have to be committing a crime in the obstruction of justice.
So for instance, if I take the Fifth Amendment, if they're asking me questions about a crime they think I committed and I plead the fifth because I don't want to incriminate myself, you can't then accuse me of obstructing justice by pleading the fifth because I'm not doing anything illegal.
I have to threaten people.
I have to do something, use force, do something corrupt.
That's what it says in the statute.
Trump fired a guy who served at his pleasure.
James Comey served at his pleasure.
He had not only the absolute right to fire him, there was nothing to stand in his way.
He could have fired him because he didn't like his tie.
You know, you're wearing a blue tie in a red tie administration.
You're out of here, Comey.
Nothing they could do about it.
So there is no criminal investigation.
It has to be illegal.
Okay, back to the cover-up.
I mean, the explosive bombshell report from the New York Times.
If the president had fired Mr. Comey to stop the Russia investigation, the action would have been a national security issue because it naturally would have hurt the Bureau's effort to learn how Moscow interfered in the 2016 election and whether any Americans were involved, according to James A. Baker, who served as FBI general counsel until late 2017.
He privately testified in October before House investigators who were examining the FBI's handling of the full Russia inquiry.
And you'll notice that they have the transcript.
This was a closed-door testimony, but they and CNN have the transcript.
So obviously, the guys in the FBI are leaking this stuff now, before the Mueller report comes out, in order to get the press to sell this to the public, to the gullible public, gullible people who read the New York Times, because only gullible people at this point read the New York Times, and me for the satire.
They're selling this as a heroic thing that they did.
This is a heroic FBI protecting your national security.
Here's what Mr. Baker said.
Not only would it be an issue of obstructing an investigation, but the obstruction itself, so that can't be true because he wasn't doing anything illegal, but the obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security.
I mean, that is really twisted logic.
That is extremely twisted logic, that by firing a guy, he had the absolute right to fire, that hampered the FBI's ability to do its job and find out what the Russians were doing.
I mean, that is really twisted logic, and the New York Times is just selling it.
Now, listen to this.
No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.
Guess what graph, what paragraph that is in the news story?
That is the ninth paragraph.
No evidence has emerged.
And that's part of this story, too.
Why are they leaking it now?
Because the Mueller investigation is probably winding down.
He's probably going to issue a report.
It's probably, it sounds like it's going to say that there was no Russian collusion, which isn't even a crime to begin with.
Here is John Carl from ABC.
This is a, you know, ABC, this is a full-on Democrat institution, right, with George Sokolopakis as their lead news guy, this Clinton hack as a lead news guy, guy who spent the Clinton election silencing women who were saying that Clinton had harassed them.
He is now the lead news guy at ABC interviewing John Carl.
And this is what Carl says his sources are telling him about the Mueller investigation.
What I am getting is that this is all building up to the Mueller report and raising expectations of a bombshell report.
And there have been expectations that have been building, of course, for over a year on this.
But people who are closest to what Mueller has been doing, who have interacted with the special counsel, cautioned me that this report is almost certain to be anticlimactic.
That if you look at what the FBI was investigating in that New York Times report, look at what they were investigating.
Mueller did not go anywhere with that investigation.
He has been writing his report in real time through these indictments, and we have seen nothing from Mueller on the central question of was there any coordination, collusion with the Russians in the effort to meddle in the elections?
Or was there even any knowledge on the part of the president or anybody in his campaign with what the Russians were doing?
They haven't laid that out yet in the indictments.
I was trying to shut him up.
Yeah, oh, wait, wait, they haven't laid it out yet in the indictments.
But what Carl is saying is you can follow what Mueller is doing through his indictments, and none of the indictments implicates Trump in any kind of, I mean, it's absurd that Trump is like a Russian spy.
The whole thing is absurd.
They were getting back at him for his firing of Comey.
And, you know, I said this before, but I really do believe this.
This is me speculating, but it just seems really clear.
James Comey is a sanctimonious prig.
You know, he's a guy who thinks that he is the living avatar of American ethics and values.
And meanwhile, he is clearly a left-wing, Democrat-supporting, you know, deep state guy.
They saw he and Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein, too, who I think was a decent prosecutor at some point.
They saw this guy, Trump, coming down, and they panicked.
They thought, who is this guy?
He's not one of us.
He's not one of the establishment.
We have to protect the public.
And this is in their minds.
They're thinking we are the guardians of the public.
And so we are going to run out there and we're going to get rid of this guy.
I mean, remember when Strzz and Page, the lovers were sending back those texts and they said, we need an insurance policy in case the impossible happens and Trump wins the election.
And he did win the election and they panicked.
They panicked because they were surrounded by people who agreed with them.
They were in an administration that had convinced itself it was God's gift to America.
It was sent from heaven to move this country to the left, to move this country into globalization, to move this country into a place where the elites could run it and the people would just get there kind of every now and again.
We'd sort of hear from them that they wouldn't bother anybody.
They thought they were sent by heaven to guide this country on the Obama path, and suddenly this bowling ball of a Donald Trump comes rolling down the alley at them and they thought, oh my gosh, we have to rush to the barricades to protect America from the voice of the people.
That's basically what it was.
If you want to hear, this is the key paragraph in this New York Times story.
If you want to hear the logic here and why it's so appalling and why it's so appalling that our press, you know, a former newspaper like the New York Times would have so forgotten what it means to be a newspaper that they would let these unelected bureaucrats in power take on an elected official like this without any real motive.
Here's what they say.
Mr. Trump, this is an amazing paragraph.
Mr. Trump had caught the attention of FBI counterintelligence agencies when he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
It's the first part of the paragraph.
Let's stop right there.
First of all, the Trump remark was clearly a Trumpian, you know, what would you call that?
He was trolling them.
He was trolling them.
But there was no possibility of the Russians hacking in to Hillary Clinton's emails because she had already destroyed her server.
Remember the 30,000, 33,000 emails that vanished because she was pouring bleach bed on her server and then hammering the phones with the hammers until, you know, but they were just about yoga.
Those emails were just about yoga.
They're like, this guy's just going to hammer it and pour the bleach, but it's just about yoga.
Just about Dr. Mark Beatler Cameron.
You know, that's what he was talking about.
And what he was saying is, hey, you know, if the Russians got him, great.
Let the Russians bring him forward.
But this was looked upon, you know, it was one of those things where the scandal of what Hillary Clinton had done was so bad and so obvious to everybody that they had to create a scandal by being shocked, oh, so shocked that Donald Trump called upon the Russians to quote unquote hack into Hillary Clinton's emails.
There was nothing to hack into.
It was all destroyed.
She had ditched it all, which Comey helped her cover up, helped her get away with.
Okay, that's the first thing.
Second thing, Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail praising President Vladimir Putin.
Now think about this for a minute.
The FBI was alerted.
This is the first part of this paragraph.
FBI counterintelligence agents, right?
Trump caught the attention of FBI counterintelligence agents when he refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail praising Vladimir Putin.
Think about this for a minute.
Trump, as he repeatedly said, said, it would be a good thing if me and Putin could get along.
That was his repeated line.
He said it over and over again.
That was his foreign policy.
That was what his foreign policy was going to be.
It would be good if we could make amends with Russia.
I didn't agree with that.
I think Putin's a gangster.
I don't think you can get along with him.
But the president has the right to make foreign policy.
This is in Article 2 of the Constitution.
The Supreme Court has again and again called it a plenary.
He has a plenary right, which means a complete right to go and talk to the leaders of other countries and arrange deals and negotiate with them.
He has a complete plenary right to do this.
What business is it of the FBI what his policy is?
How does that come under their power?
How does that come under the FBI's power?
What if, all you have to do is turn it around.
Barack Obama dealt with Iran.
He basically set Iran up to be the powerhouse in the Middle East, the chief sponsor of terror throughout the world, an awful country that has sworn to wipe Israel off the face of the map.
Barack Obama said, hmm, we should stop dealing with Saudi Arabia and deal with Iran.
That'll be a really good idea.
He was a clown.
That was a clownish, stupid, ignorant thing to do based on this kind of pie-in-the-sky professorial academic theory that Obama had that had nothing to do with the real world.
But the FBI didn't say, oh, we've got to investigate him.
He may be dealing with Iran.
He was dropping money into Iran.
The FBI didn't investigate that.
But because on the campaign trail, Donald Trump said, you know, I think we should talk to Putin.
They thought, oh, we have to start a counterintelligence investigation to investigate Russia's ties.
And finally, I mean, this is amazing.
This is an amazing thing.
This is a true scandal at the FBI.
That's why everybody there has been fired.
And the New York Times is covering it up in plain sight by printing the story as if it were a good thing.
They're actually engaging in a cover-up.
Investigators, and finally, investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.
Never happened.
Byron York reported on this at what's his place called The Examiner.
They did, as they always change the platform.
They changed it a little bit.
It only got tougher.
They never took out the original language, which was something like, we will meet the return of Russian belligerents with the same resolve that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
That was the original language.
All that language stayed in.
Then someone else tried to add an amendment, and they did fiddle with the amendment, not to make it less harsh, but simply to make it give Trump more latitude in negotiating.
And in the end, writes Byron York, nothing was taken out of the party's original draft platform at Russia.
And with Trump's approval, the platform was made tougher with language pledging ongoing and possibly increased sanctions.
So that is just not true.
It's just not true.
But of course, if the FBI tells it to the New York Times, they've got to run with it.
This is an amazing piece of journalism as cover-up.
It's a dual scandal.
It's a scandal that the FBI took this power onto itself.
And that scandal has been dealt with by all these people getting fired.
Although Comey, I think, really might well be put in jail.
He should be put in jail.
But I don't think that's going to happen.
But it's also a scandal of journalism.
It is a scandal that the New York Times would turn to this organization, which again and again has been caught abusing its power throughout time and write this as if it were another episode of the FBI.
And then Trump comes out, and Gene Piro, he goes on a friendly show, and Gene Piro asks him if he is a Russian spy.
Here, let's play a little bit of this.
The investigation was whether you were actively working for Russia or unwittingly.
Art vs. Politics00:08:48
So I'm going to ask you, are you now or have you ever worked for Russia, Mr. President?
I think it's the most insulting thing I've ever been asked.
I think it's the most insulting article I've ever had written.
And if you read the article, you'd see that they found absolutely nothing.
So how do you think the press covered that?
Guess.
When he said that's the most insulting thing, Trump refuses to deny he was a Russian agent.
That was the headline.
Not just, I mean, it was all over the place.
That was Trump evading the question.
So if Trump came out today and he put paid to that version of the story, here he is.
I never worked for Russia.
And you know that answer better than anybody.
I never worked for Russia.
Not only did I never work for Russia, I think it's a disgrace that you even asked that question because it's a whole big fat hoax.
It's just a hoax.
So that takes care of that version of the story.
You know, in the midterms, we saw that the rich, the wealthier suburbs and the wealthier cities voted for the Democrats.
Hillary Clinton made that brag when she was in Mumbai.
She said, you know, the places that are economically dynamic voted for me.
It was all those backward places where they're dying of opiate addiction.
That's the red zone where they voted for Donald Trump.
The Democrats have become the party of the elite.
And journalism has become a practice of the elite.
And what we are seeing is the elite working with what they now call the deep state.
And in this case, that term is justified.
We've seen the elite working with the deep state to keep the elite elite.
And for all the stuff they're talking about, oh, we have women now, and we have black people, and we have, oh, we're the party of diversity.
They are the party of the rich.
They are the party of the elite.
It is the Republicans who are now talking about the little guy, about the ordinary American.
They have switched places in this case.
And I think it is pitiful and pathetic that journalism should now become a way.
They always used to say what was journalism was a way of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.
They have now turned that around as a way of comforting The comfortable and afflicting the afflicted.
This story is a shame.
Shame on the New York Times.
All right, I want to move on to something else.
Michael Knowles, whom you may have remembered from our last Monday, is going to come on and talk about politics in the movie.
But over the weekend, I watched Black Klansman, the Spike Lee film, and it was really interesting because it was an actual object lesson on how politics makes us stupid and how art, if we let it, will make us smart.
My feeling about Spike Lee is that he is a talented director.
I never thought he beat Do the Right Thing.
He's a talented director, but his politics, his angry black power politics, and his tendency to lecture us and wag his finger at us and tell us which candidates we're supposed to vote for and which candidates are evil, reduces him to the level of Don Lemon at CNN, where he could use his talent to tell stories and let us draw some conclusions.
And even though he's making overall political points, he gets in his own way a lot.
However, this picture is an entertaining picture.
It's got Denzel Washington's kid, John David Washington, very good actor.
He plays a black cop in Colorado Springs, the first black cop in Colorado Springs, who one day just calls up the FBI and volunteers to be part of him.
Here's just a little clip of him talking to David Duke on the phone.
Hello, this is Ron Stallworth calling.
Who am I speaking with?
This is David Duke, Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
That David Duke?
God, last time I checked, what can I do you for?
Well, since you asked, I hate blacks.
I hate Jews, Mexicans and Irish, Italians and Chinese.
But my mouth to God's ears, I really hate those black brats.
And anyone else, really, that doesn't have pure white Aryan blood running through their veins.
I'm happy to be talking to a true white American.
God bless white America.
If you're just listening, you can't see as he's talking.
The other cops are all white, are turning around just cracking up, and they love leaning over his shoulder as he games these guys.
And what he does is he sends a white cop in to be him, to be Ron Stallworth with the Ku Klux Klan, but he keeps talking to them on the phone, so he becomes the black Klansman.
Now, here's the thing.
There's a lot of Trump hate in this film, which is completely units.
It's absurd.
It's absurd.
He links Trump to David Duke.
He links Trump to the Ku Klux Klan philosophically, which I just think is absurd.
I mean, come on, you know, and it degrades the film.
It degrades the artistry of the film.
If he had just left that out, I'm sure his audience would have come to the conclusions that he wanted him to come to.
He also glamorizes Stokely Carmichael, who changes his name to Kwame Touré, an African name, and the ethos of black power.
And he has several scenes of people espousing black power and the inspired look on black people's faces.
Black is beautiful, black power, and Kwame Touré says, oh, there's a race war coming and arm yourself because we've got to get ready for the race war.
And the climax of the film, the emotional climax, not the plot climax, but the artistic climax clearly comes when two meetings take place simultaneously.
One is the meeting of the Ku Klux Klan, and the other is a meeting at which an older black guy played by Harry Belafonte describes a true lynching of a poor mentally retarded guy.
Just a terrible, disgusting story while his black audience looks on and listens and learns.
And both of these end with the people chanting.
So the Ku Klux Klan, and it's disgusting.
I mean, the Ku Kux Klan people are cheering on that horrible, that film, brilliantly made film, but a horrible film, The Birth of a Nation, which is a silent movie that romanticizes the Ku Klux Klan.
And they mention that Woodrow Wilson loved this movie.
He called it history written with lightning.
What they don't mention is Woodrow Wilson was the first Democrat who won black votes after the Civil War because Lincoln was a Republican and he was a virulent racist and they have been voting for Democrat races ever since.
And Spike Lee should have taken a look at his own, gotten a history lesson from his own film.
But the point is, these two meetings end the same way.
They end with the Klansmen shouting white power and the black people shouting black power.
And the way the film is set up, we clearly know that Spike Lee supports the people shouting black power, but thinks the people shouting white power are reprehensible.
But what I thought, all I could think as I was looking at it, was, you know, the thing about art is that art, politics, you're just talking about stuff you already believe.
You get stuck in your own beliefs.
But art, when you create art, it speaks to you.
It tells you things you didn't know before.
And what I was seeing in this scene was that bigotry turns its victims into itself.
Basically, when you just have somebody saying white power and you have somebody saying black power, who is going to choose, who is going to choose to be on the opposing side?
I mean, all you've got there is the kind of race war that Kwame Tarai was supporting.
In fact, there is a third way.
And as I was watching this, I thought, oh, I get it.
This is why Jesus said, love your enemies.
That's, you know, until I saw that scene, that statement never made sense to me.
How do you love your enemies?
How is that more than rhetoric?
But of course you love your enemies because you don't want to turn into them.
If you hate your enemies, you become them.
And that's what that scene was showing.
If Spike Lee had listened to his own art instead of to his own politics, he would have seen, he would have seen that, yes, of course, the treatment of whites in this, of blacks in this country by some whites was reprehensible.
But at every step of the way, it wasn't the American way.
It was out of keeping with all the philosophy of America.
That is why it finally collapsed.
It didn't collapse because it was wrong.
It collapsed because it was not in keeping with the American philosophy.
If instead of saying, oh, you say white power, I say black power, blacks had said what Martin Luther King said, let us live out the meaning of our creed, things would be a little bit different now, I think, on some of these streets.
Spike Lee let himself get caught in his own politics instead of listening to his art.
And I think, you know, listen, I say this knowing I'm a white guy, so you can say it's easy for me to say forgive, it's easy for me to say love your enemy.
I mean, I've seen some prejudice against Jewish people in my life, but still, it's not the same thing.
I get it, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
It just means that my voice is, it's a little hard for my voice to communicate with people on the other side.
I get that, but it still doesn't mean that I'm wrong.
Obviously, obviously, this film shows a bad philosophy growing out of bad treatment.
That's what happens.
As I've said before, the devil does not care who does the hating as long as the hating gets done.
If Spike Lee would watch his own movie, he might have learned that.
It's an entertaining film.
It's worth watching.
You just got to overlook the Trump hate because it's just childish and silly.
The Internal Politics of the Oscars00:09:07
So speaking of politics, we've got Michael Knowles coming on.
But before, he's going to talk about politics at the movies.
And before that, I've got to say, we've got to leave Facebook and YouTube.
Come over to dailywire.com.
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A chat with Michael Knowles about politics at the movie coming up at dailywire.com.
I should mention that Knowles joins us.
Hey, there you are.
How you doing?
Yeah, exactly.
12 hours.
I know, I know.
He was hanging out in those loosh bars, smoking cigars and drinking.
What's wrong with you?
I know, I know.
Really, ever since I read The Great Good Thing, I thought this is a man who's finally found peace and joy and serenity and morality.
And I want to tear all that down by bringing it all the bars.
It's clear that Knowles was smoking, drinking.
I was saying, go home, go home, Michael Knowles.
Your wife is waiting.
I'm lying.
But most importantly, you finished recording the audiobook of Another Kingdom.
That's right.
And I got to tell you, this is 100% honest.
It's a little embarrassing, actually.
I was doing the audiobook of Another Kingdom.
We were getting toward the end.
There's an emotional moment.
I won't ruin it if you haven't read the book or listened to the show.
And I actually started crying in the booth.
This is very embarrassing.
I hope my wife isn't watching this.
I did.
It was really moving.
It's been over a year since I've read that book, the first season of Another Kingdom.
And I think it's going to be terrific.
The sound quality is really, really good.
So I'm excited.
And you're the only guy who ever casts me in Hollywood anymore.
So that's even better.
I'm going to build up your, I'm going to make you, I'm going to make you stick with me, kid.
I'm going to make a new one.
I'm going to make you a star.
Pre-order Another Kingdom.
Go on now and pre-order the book Another Kingdom on Amazon.
Sorry, I'm losing my voice and you're going to have to talk.
But go on and order it.
It really helps the book.
It helps the book sell to people who don't listen to the show and don't know about it.
If you pre-order it, it will move it up the ranks on Amazon, and that's really helpful.
Please.
Also, it's a great book with a beautiful cover and some material that if you order it now, if you pre-order it, save the receipt and you will get all kinds of gifts, including a prequel that I wrote, which nobody else will see.
So we're talking about politics at the movies.
What is happening behind the scenes at the Oscars, especially with this film, Green Book, which is Green Book, which is a lovely, you know, it's not a great film, but it's a very charming little comedy about a white driver for a black musician in the segregated south.
In the segregated South.
Yeah, and it's very, you know, it's comedy, but it's very, it shows you the bad stuff going on.
What do they, what's their beef?
Well, I will tell you, for that movie, for Bohemian Rhapsody, for other movies, they had no beef at all.
Everything was great.
Green Book got Rotten Tomatoes, 94% audience thumbs up, 81% critics, which is pretty good, actually.
They won at the Toronto Film Festival.
They won the People's Choice Award.
It was just a really great movie.
Vigo Morton's is great.
Marichelle Ali is terrific.
That guy.
He's in everything now, but he's a really good actor.
Yeah, I mean, they're both phenomenal actors.
But then they had the audacity to win three Golden Globes Awards, including Best Picture.
And now all of a sudden, the film is controversial.
And now you're seeing all of these hit pieces coming out accusing it of being racist.
It's a film about racial harmony that is now racist because it portrays the white guy as too good and the black guy as not enough of his own man or something like that.
They're making this up.
They dug up some distant relatives of the singer who's portrayed in the movie to criticize.
That's right.
That's right.
The guy remember that.
I think the main criticism was they weren't paid for the story.
They weren't, you know.
So this crops up.
And the same thing with Bohemian Rhapsody.
No one attacked Bohemian Rhapsody.
It's now made $750 million at the box office, but then it won two Golden Globes.
And now as we look forward to Oscar season, it's being attacked.
What's the problem?
Well, the problem is its original director was Brian Singer.
And then Brian Singer, he was that director who had the sex scandal and he was accused.
So he was fired.
He lost basically his entire career.
Not good enough.
They used it however they could to attack this movie.
This is the internal politics of the Oscars.
We see American national politics in the Oscars all the time, but there's the inner working of politics here.
And they are using, very ironically and really cynically, they're using Me Too and all of the other identity politics that they've come up with to now attack these other movies.
It actually reminds me of a premise in show business called Chekhov's Gun.
And Chekhov's Gun says, if you have a gun in the first act, it absolutely must go off in the second or third act.
That's what Me Too is.
Me too.
You saw the Me Too in the first deck, and now it's slinging around and it's being used to kill off the competition.
They used to blame Harvey Weinstein for this because Weinstein was the super producer of Hollywood.
It ain't Weinstein anymore.
It's all of these cynical, crass people.
And frankly, it's going to kill the Oscars.
Well, what's the point, though?
What film are they trying to get?
What's the film that's supposed to be elevated above all of this?
That's a great question.
It actually isn't very clear.
And the trouble is no one's seen any of these films.
So obviously, you've got major studios sniping each other, trying to do it.
But as a result of all of this ginned-up, totally ridiculous political attack, the Oscars now don't have a host.
It's actually, it's killing the industry, and it's certainly killing the awards show.
So you have, for the first time since 1989, which was a disastrous Oscars, that was the year that Rob Lowe did that awful musical number, and everyone hated it.
It's the first time since 1989 it's slated to go forward without a host because no one will take the job.
Why would you?
Why would you?
And first of all, nobody watches it anymore.
Nobody watches the films.
And what they did to Kevin Hart was a disgrace.
It was a disgrace to show business.
It really was.
I mean, this is the guy.
These are the guys, guys like Kevin Hart, whether you like him or not, right?
This is the American dream, right?
He works his way up.
He goes into show business.
It's always been for Jews, for blacks.
It's always been a way up and out, you know, and all this stuff.
And then you kill him because of some tweet where he said something about.
He made a joke.
And the joke was that as a father, he didn't want his son to be gay.
You know, I mean, come on.
What do you think?
People sit around and go like, ah, one thing I want from my son is that he's gay.
Well, and the other thing about it is he made a gay joke.
He's a comedian who made a gay joke.
Show me one comedian, nay, show me one living human being who has never made or laughed at a gay joke.
There's not a single person.
So obviously no comedian is going to take that job.
It's the same political sniping.
It's the same cynical attacks you're seeing between these movies is going on at the hosts.
And I think it's time to let poor Oscar die.
Nobody watches it.
It's had insanely declining ratings.
It was at a 44-year low last year.
It was down 20% off the year before that.
And the film industry, for all intents and purposes, is now dead.
Yeah, everything is TV.
That's right.
Everyone is watching TV.
I think it's time to let this go.
And it is their fault.
I mean, we should be very clear.
It's not the fault of new technology.
It's not the fault of audiences who don't go to see the movies.
It is their fault.
Nothing better typifies this than this green book sniping, these cheap identity politics, the sniping at Kevin Hart.
They've committed industrial suicide.
Well, they're doing it to comedy, too.
I mean, which is, by the way, I hate to say it, great opportunity for conservatives if we would only take it.
That's right.
If we would stop with it, like everything has to be G-rated.
You know, what I love, I mean, the God-King, Jeremy Boring, always makes this point.
The Daily Wire got canon.
He got Ganyan.
Not the Egyptian God-King, not the Roman.
But he makes the point that a lot of the Christians who complain with Another Kingdom has some cursing in it or something like that, when they take off their Christian hat, they're watching Game of Thrones.
That's right.
You know, so they only want Christianity to be poorly served by the arts.
They know that the entertainment is all on the other side.
Of course.
So they're making all these political films, too.
That's the other side of this.
You actually went and saw Vice, which I admire.
You know that I'm a masochist.
I had to go see Vice for a couple of reasons.
One, I suspected it would be extremely dishonest.
And two, Christian Bale is a terrific actor.
He's a great actor.
Guess what?
I was right about both.
He gives a truly incredible performance.
He's a great actor.
The movie is the most anti-factual movie, I think, that has ever been made.
Really?
I'll just give you an example.
I mean, the movie, it begins, it's so outrageously biased that it actually begins and sort of jokes about that.
It jokes and says, we couldn't find all the information about Cheney, so we think this is true.
We did our effing best because Cheney is one of the most secretive men in history.
Dick Cheney has been in public life for decades and decades.
We know everything about Dick Cheney.
We've seen his tax returns.
He's participated in documentaries about himself.
So even that, it's dishonest from the beginning.
Border Troubles in Texas00:05:56
One example, they show, do you remember the Valerie Plame non-troversy?
Yes, yes.
I mean, one of the truly non-troversies of all time.
So they gin up this completely fake scandal.
We know that this CIA operative, her husband wrote a false, a wrong op-ed in the Washington Post about the relationship between Saddam Hussein seeking uranium.
And then her CIA identity was leaked.
We know who leaked it.
It was leaked out of the State Department.
There was this conspiracy that it was leaked by Dick Cheney.
No evidence of that.
There was another one of these special counsels that were waiting for him to get Cheney making.
That's right.
They couldn't do it.
In the movie, Scooter Libby, or Dick Cheney says, who's Joe Wilson's wife?
What's her name?
And Scooter Libby says, it's Valerie Plame.
He says, leak it.
That's the kind of stuff.
And what's interesting is they're playing this movie at the New, which is the Museum of News in Washington.
And the BDC press turned out in droves to watch this.
What are you talking about on your show today?
So today, we're going to be talking about how the government shutdown is working.
We're going to analyze the polls.
The top-line headlines say that it's really bad for Trump.
But when you dig into those polls, I think it's really working for him and it's actually achieving the strategic objective of getting people to support the wall.
Well, thank you for coming out.
That's great.
Thanks.
It's good to talk to you.
And stop smoking and drinking.
That's from me.
I'll take care of you.
It's done wonders for your voice.
That is why I'm like that.
Shame, shame on us both.
You know, this brings me back to the wall because I didn't cover it today because I just wanted to talk about that time story.
But I have to end with playing this thing.
This brings together the themes that politics makes you stupid and that the press now represents, only one side represents the elite.
First of all, this amazing, amazing video from KUSI, which reports that CNN contacted them to get a story because they're on the border.
Are they in Texas?
Do you remember?
San Diego.
Oh, San Diego?
Okay.
But CNN contacted them because they wanted a local news story about troubles at the border.
Here's what they said.
As a sign of the Times in this debate on the shutdown, CNN asked if KUSI would provide a reporter to offer our local view of the debate, especially to learn if the wall works in San Diego.
KUSI offered our own Dan Plant, who's reported many times that the wall is not an issue here.
In fact, most officials believe it is effective.
The issue we face is the migrants and the debate over their treatments.
Now, knowing this, CNN declined to have us on their programs, which often present the wall as not required in other places, like the stretch of the Texas border the president visited earlier today.
They didn't like what they heard from us.
Just some background for you.
Just some background for you.
CNN, the most busted news, is busted again, but not as badly, not as badly as Jim.
Look at me, I'm Jim Acosta, owned himself, as they now say online, with one of the most hilarious moments in his hilarious career.
He has now become comedy gold, this guy.
He is really something.
He goes down to prove that there is no emergency at the border.
All this talk, remember how Jim Acosta Acosta explained to the President of the United States that the caravan was not an invasion and there's no emergency and all this, and then wrestled the aide, the female aide to the ground, pounding.
Well, okay, I'm exaggerating a little bit.
But now he goes down to the border to prove that there's no emergency there.
And listen to this.
And here are some of the steel slats that the president's been talking about right here.
As you can see, yes, you can see through these slats to the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border.
But as we're walking along here, we're not seeing any kind of imminent danger.
There are no migrants trying to rush toward this fence here in the McAllen, Texas area.
As a matter of fact, there are some other businesses behind me along this highway.
There's a gas station, Burger King, and so on, but no sign of the national emergency that the president has been talking about.
As a matter of fact, it's pretty tranquil down here.
Hmm, there's a wall and there's no emergency.
There's a barrier and things are fine.
I wonder why, Jim.
It's like the guy is not only an incompetent, you know, this really does strike me about some of the folks at CNN, that maybe they're not like the sharpest knives in the news, you know, cabinet or something.
Like, so Trump is tweeting this out with, you know, the now joke on Jim Acosta is Dear Diary, because every time he complains, it sounds like he's writing in his diary.
So Trump actually tweeted this out with Dear Diary at the head of it.
I mean, this is the basically one-sided story that we're getting in this battle between Trump and the Democrats.
And it is amazing.
It is amazing to me that just that no one, no one, except maybe, maybe Chris Cuomo, will stay tuned for this, but none of them ever looks at himself in the mirror and says, you know, I don't like Donald Trump, but maybe he's right about us being biased.
You know, maybe he's right that we should tell both sides of the story.
And the only reason I mentioned Chris Cuomo is Cuomo, this little light seems to have gone on in Cuomo's eyes.
I always linked him to Don Lemon because they link him to Don Lemon on CNN.
But suddenly he's starting to say, you know, like there is some sense to some of this.
I'm not expecting him to be a right-winger.
I don't want right-wing news.
I just want fair news, which would be a start would be to come to your senses and realize you're surrounded by people who agree with you.
You're not listening to the people who disagree with you, and you won't let on any news that gets in the way of the fantasy you're selling to the American people.
All right, the Clavin week begins.
I will be back here tomorrow.
Both Sides Of The Story00:01:03
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2019.
I'm Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles Show.
New polls show public support for the wall growing during this government shutdown.
We will analyze how the shutdown is going surprisingly well for Republicans.
Then, the left media celebrates the child abuse of a new drag kid.
And finally, we ask, do conservatives care too much about the Constitution?