Ep. 641 skewers media hypocrisy by mocking Nancy Pelosi’s fictional "children of God" speech and Trump’s retaliatory jet denial, then pivots to BuzzFeed’s debunked Russia report and Covington Catholic’s smeared students. It slams left-wing bias in journalism—from Covington’s false narratives to MeToo’s comedy censorship—while blaming millennial fragility on social justice movements and suicide spikes tied to election PTSD. The episode frames conservative hires as the only fix for media fairness, then shifts to 12 Strong, praising its action but criticizing its Taliban portrayal, before teasing Alicia Krauss. [Automatically generated summary]
President Trump has made a compromise offer to Democrats in an effort to end the border security impasse and reopen the government.
Trump offered a three-year extension of the DREAMer Act plus protection for some illegals in return for funding for his border wall.
The Democrats immediately countered Trump's offer with a proposal to key his car, crap in the rose garden, and set one of his hotels on fire.
Then they abraded the president for being unreasonable.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi made a case for her approach in a speech to a gathering of dead Civil War soldiers in the Great Hall of Her Imagination, saying, quote, President Trump has demonized everyone from MS-13 gang members to Islamic terrorists.
But these are children of God, and they must be allowed into our country so they can teach Americans to be children of God by sending them to meet God by murdering them, unquote.
Mrs. Pelosi then stepped down from the imaginary podium and crawled under the imaginary dais, searching for a purse she left there in 1962.
The border security battle has turned ugly of late, with Mrs. Pelosi revoking her invitation to the president to deliver the State of the Union address and the president responding by denying Pelosi the use of a government jet to fly to Afghanistan, causing her to plunge 35,000 feet into the Atlantic Ocean.
Democrat spokesman and ABC anchorman George Sokolopikas was outraged by the president's actions saying, quote, I am shocked that the president will respond with such childish pettiness to the childish pettiness of Nancy Pelosi, which was a courageous act of defiance in the face of the president's childish reaction to her childishness, unquote.
Sokolopikis then leaned so far to the left he fell off his chair and lay on the floor insisting he was not biased and was still sitting upright.
Finally, the night cleaning staff came and carried him out to the street.
Negotiations continue.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Why Native Voices Matter00:15:19
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
So over the last few days, American mainstream journalists have disgraced themselves to a degree that has not been seen since the last few days before that.
In fact, American mainstream journalism has become a disgrace in every regard, with teams of reporters, editors, middle managers, and corporate leaders who all share the same opinion, there's no way for them to know that their biases are biases and not a simple objective look at reality.
It's the school of, we're not biased, it's just that Republicans are Satan.
There is no sin in making mistakes, especially in the 24-7 news cycle, but the intellectual corruption in the journalistic profession is now so deep that newsmen are incapable of seeing that their mistakes are not individual distinct incidents, but organic outgrowths of their overall dishonesty.
They can do all the apologies, think pieces, and make-believe self-examination they want, but nothing will change until they do the one thing that's necessary.
Hire conservatives.
Not one or two sort of conservatives to serve as representatives of what those strange conservative people think, but enough genuine right-wingers to fill enough repertorial, editorial, and middle management seats to let all the Democrats who now fill those seats know when they are straying from fair play.
Until they do that, they will remain what they have made themselves, enemies of fairness and truth, and therefore enemies of what's best for the American people.
We're going to talk about that a lot, but first let us talk about stamps.com, which we love.
You know, yesterday I was talking to my wife about whether we missed the old days before technology.
And I said, no, I love technology.
And one of the things I love is how much time you can save by not traveling to the post office.
The post office has so many great services, but I want those services in my computer, and that's what you get with stamps.com.
It's the faster and more convenient way to get postage.
You can use your computer to print official U.S. postage for any letter, any package, any class of mail, anywhere you want to send.
And the mail carrier picks it up.
No more lugging mail to the post office, no more hassles.
It really suits my life because I just don't have time, especially in LA traffic, to get where the post office is.
I want the post office to come to me.
With stamps.com, you get discounted postage rates that you can't even get at the post office, and there's no equipment to lease and no long-term commitments.
Right now, you too can enjoy the stamps.com service with a special offer that includes a four-week trial, plus postage, and a digital scale.
So start the new year off right.
Go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, and type in Clavin.
That's stamps.com and enter Clavin, and you will be able to send letters right from your computer asking, how do you spell Clavin?
K-L-A-V-A-N.
So NBC's Chuck Todd, who has now become just another one of these Democrat spokesmen pretending to be a journalist, he tweets after all the mistakes that they made over the last few days.
He tweets, he was talking about the story that came out from BuzzFeed saying that Donald Trump had tried to suborn perjury by getting Michael Cohen to lie about some deal he was doing in Russia.
Chuck Todd's tweets, those trying to tar all media today aren't interested in improving journalism, but protecting themselves.
There's a lot more accountability in media these days than in our politics.
We know we live in a glass house.
We hope the folks we cover are as self-aware.
This is total garbage.
First of all, you have different jobs than the people you cover.
Your job, politicians are fighting their corner.
They're not supposed to be fair.
They're supposed to fight for what they believe.
You're supposed to be reporting fairly so Americans can make up their own minds.
That is your role in a Democrat society is to give information.
You might say, you report, Chuck.
We decide.
And that is not what's happening.
We talked about this BuzzFeed story last week that Trump suborned perjury.
And I said, you know, I didn't know whether it was true.
How would I know?
But I pointed out what made me suspicious about the story.
But that didn't stop the mainstream media from taking this story from a very dubious source, BuzzFeed, and running with it.
Well, let's play this montage, cut three.
If this BuzzFeed news report is true, then we are likely on our way to possible impeachment proceedings.
If it were to be true, it means the president told someone to lie under oath, which very simply is a crime and is impeachable.
If this story is true, we must begin impeachment proceedings.
If you can prove that the president ordered it, that to certainly rise to the level of, rises to the level of impeachable offense.
We're going to know if the president of the United States committed a federal felony, and at that point we are in high crimes and misdemeanor and we are an impeachment terrorist.
Is that an impeachable offense?
This is suborning perjury.
I mean, there's no question it's an impeachable offense.
That is considered an impeachable offense.
Absolutely.
These are impeachable offenses.
Inside that answer, I did hear the I word impeachable.
Impeachment is a very fine, alternative way to deal with this.
Democrats will move maybe faster, maybe more aggressively toward impeachment.
So the House majority whip, James Clyburn, the Democrat, said, as long as you say if this is true, you're covered.
You're covered.
Well, you know, if it's true that James Clyburn is a child molester, that would be evil.
You know, if it's true that he cheats on his wife, that would be just a terrible thing.
Of course, that doesn't give you cover to say if it's true, if the story is unreliable.
But this is not the problem.
The problem is not that the story is unreliable.
I understand it's a 24-7 news cycle.
To add to this, of course, Robert Mueller, in an extraordinary moment, which he has not done anything like this before, he came out and said, this story is not true.
So now the thing goes down the drain.
Now the ship sinks, and they're stuck with all these if-true stories, right?
And Brian Stelter has the reporter who covered it, Anthony Cormier, on, with Ben Smith, the guy who runs BuzzFeed.
And listen to this interview.
He asked them all these questions, and they just dodge him.
I have further confirmation that this is right.
We're being told to stand our ground.
Our reporting is going to be borne out to be accurate, and we're 100% behind it.
Who is telling you that?
Oh, I'm not going to talk about my sources.
I got to be honest.
Sometimes I write stories, and I say I have a number of sources.
I actually have more than that, but I can't reveal how many I have.
Is that what you're saying happened in this case?
You have more than two times, but I think that you say what you say in the story, and you stand by what you say in the story.
I would say that something reporters sometimes do is they describe someone as a senior law enforcement official, and they fudge that, and these senior administration official characterizations can be shady, and then sometimes that identity is revealed, and you say, come on.
And I just do want to say that in this story, in this case, these are very narrow, very strong descriptors.
Let me just ask about documents like the dossier.
Anthony, you said on CNN on Friday that you had not seen the documents you described in the story.
Jason Leopold said on MSNBC, we've seen documents.
Can you explain that to us?
Yeah, I can't really get into the details there.
So these guys got nothing.
So Brian Stelter, before they come on, he announces that he's going to have them on.
He tweets he's going to have them on in a show, which is called Reliable Sources.
So I tweeted, that's great.
Shouldn't you change the name of your show for this episode?
And Stelter tweets back, well, shouldn't you watch the show first?
The answer is no, because the problem is not the mistake.
The problem is not that they ran with a false story.
The problem is the bias.
When I talked about this on this show, what I said was, you know, one of the things that bothers me about this story, and obviously I'm not a newsman, I'm a commentator, I'm giving you my opinion, but I said, what bothers me is the FBI clearly overstepped its brief in their investigation of Donald Trump, and these leaks are obviously intended to cover that up, to reframe an unconstitutional breach by our intelligence services and spying, amazingly spying on a presidential campaign, which is absurd.
And the press, the problem is the press is not covering that story, and didn't even occur to them to wonder whether that was going on because that story doesn't exist in their minds because they're all Democrats and there's no one there to say to them, hey, what maybe this is a setup by an FBI that is trying to cover up.
It's overstepping the Constitution.
There's nobody there to say it, so they don't cover it.
That's the problem.
The problem is not that they talked about the BuzzFeed story.
The problem is they had no context because they only see everything from one side.
And it's the same thing with this absolutely shameful attack on these Catholic high school boys, Covington Catholic School in Kentucky, right?
They're waiting, they're at the March for Life, and they're waiting for a bus.
And a video comes out that seems to show this Native American guy is being harassed by these Catholic schoolboys, okay?
It seems to show them, you know, making fun of him, and he's banging on his drum, and it seemed to be a, oh, just a display of, you know, Native American culture or whatever.
And these boys are being, you know, boys will be boys, teenagers, and all this stuff.
So I'm playing the one from NBC, but all through social media, and including conservatives who have not yet learned, conservatives have not yet learned they should be listening to the show to learn just how dishonest and how biased the press is.
I mean, one of the problems we have here is that everybody wants to be in the press, right?
Everybody knows the New York Times is a left-wing piece of trash at this point.
The New York Times is left-wing garbage, but everybody wants that good review for his new novel or his new show.
Everybody wants an interview in the New York Times so he can spread out his audience and nobody is going to say, you know, oh, these guys lie all the time.
And again, it is not lying because, oh, we're sinister, terrible people.
It becomes sinister.
It becomes terrible, but it's lying because they are surrounded by people who agree with them.
And when that happens, there is no one to question their assumptions.
So here's NBC going after these poor kids with an incredibly biased story, which when I put this up this morning, when I was covering this this morning, they had not yet retracted.
Troubling scene many are calling racist played out in Washington yesterday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Some students harassing an older Native American man, a Vietnam vet, in the midst of a special ceremony.
Tommy Leitner has more.
It was meant to be a time for Indigenous people to be seen and heard.
But this viral video taken during Friday's rally in Washington has sparked outrage and confusion.
The video appears to show dozens of youths wearing Make America Great Again hats, mocking Native American elder and Vietnam veteran Nathan Phillips.
many jeering and others looking on i was there singing and i heard i heard them saying build that wall build that walls you know this is indigenous lands We're not supposed to have laws here.
We never did.
Millennium.
Once again, the story blows up in the faces of the media when you see the larger video and especially a larger video from a different angle.
You see that the kids are just standing around.
They're waiting for a bus.
There's a group, a kind of radical group of people shouting horrible things at them, shouting, calling them names, using gay slurs to shout at them.
And then this guy, the Native American guy, gets in their face, banging their drum in the face.
Clear provocation.
They did not approach him.
And the kids, as they later said themselves, were just confused.
They thought, oh, it must be some kind of indigenous display of culture.
And they started chanting along and playing along.
And then in the end, the kid just did, when he realized he was being harassed, he just sat there with a pleasant, what he felt was a pleasant smile on his face.
And so they got ripped for being these smug, white guys with that face.
What did Riza Aslan, the Iranian writer, said, serious question, have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid?
He's talking about a teenager.
He's talking about punching a teenager.
A lot of people have apologized and a lot of people have pulled their tweets down and stuff like that.
But a lot of people haven't and have still tried to make some kind of moral equivalence.
This guy, this Native American guy, it was a con job from the start.
He called them beasts.
He said all kinds of terrible things about them.
But again, again, it is not the mistake.
Think about the last clip you saw in that NBC thing where the guy says, this is Indigenous land.
He's standing in Washington, D.C.
It hasn't been Indigenous land for hundreds of years.
This is a nation called the United States of America.
It is not Native American land.
He's got the tears in the way they're going.
You know, that old act, that old environmental ad, the chief with a single tear running down his face.
This is not supposed to be walls and indigenous land.
What the hell is he talking about?
This is a major, major industrialized nation.
Of course there should be walls and protection on its borders.
We're not living.
It's like we're living in dances with wolves like hundreds of years ago.
It is not that country anymore.
But the bias, because that kind of virtue signaling works with left-wingers and because every single person is a left-winger, it didn't occur to anybody to turn to the other and say, this guy's full of crap.
That statement he made is full of crap.
We shouldn't include this.
We should look more closely at this.
They ran with it because of the bias.
My point is not to pick on them for mistakes.
That's what everybody's talking about.
My point is to say that these mistakes grow organically out of the fact that they are all of one party.
They think they're not.
They think even though we're Democrats, we can be fair.
They can't.
Because when you only associate with people who agree with you, you basically become more radicalized.
You become more certain of your opinions because there's no one there.
I mean, I was in journalism.
I remember people saying, checking on you because they disagreed with you, saying, that's not fair, what you said there.
And you had to answer to them.
That is gone.
Journalism is so corrupt because it is all one-sided.
And if you want to see proof that it's not about these mistakes, these mistakes are embarrassing, and I love watching these guys embarrass themselves.
But if you want to see proof, look at the way they just covered real stories.
Look at the march for life, okay?
Hundreds of thousands of people show up in Washington, D.C. Hundreds of thousands of people marching for this.
That, in normal journalism, would be an occasion to discuss the ins and outs and rights and wrongs of abortion.
Both sides coming on debating that issue.
When you've got hundreds of thousands of people every year, that's a huge, huge number of people to show up for an issue.
That means it is a controversial issue that you should say, oh, well, here's, let's talk about abortion.
When somebody gets shot, they talk about guns, right?
It's the gun issue.
If there's a woman's march, oh, it's the women's issue.
Manufactured Crisis Debate00:11:26
We have to talk about women.
Instead, what are they talking about?
Our friend Ben Shapiro goes out and he does his podcast before the march, and then he made a speech at the march.
Now, I just want to say one thing.
Ben is a friend, and I don't go on the show and attack friends.
I just don't.
It just seems disloyal.
But I never hesitate to tell Ben when I think he's wrong.
If I thought he was wrong in this case, I probably wouldn't mention it.
I probably wouldn't have it on the show.
But nothing, nothing on earth would get me to say that Ben was right when I thought he was wrong, even to keep my job, no matter what.
This is what he said.
He was responding to a mailbag question about whether you would kill somebody, abort somebody, if you knew he was going to be evil.
And this was his response.
The argument, I guess, here is that, would you kill Baby Hitler?
And the truth is that no pro-life person on earth would kill Baby Hitler, right?
Because Baby Hitler wasn't Hitler.
Adult Hitler was Hitler.
Baby Hitler was a baby.
What you presumably want to do with Baby Hitler was take Baby Hitler out of Baby Hitler's house and move Baby Hitler into a better house where he would not grow up to be Hitler.
That's the idea.
That is a witty, humane, and true statement that a liberal would agree with this.
You don't kill somebody for a crime you think they may commit.
I mean, we're not living in minority report, right?
If a baby is born, the baby is innocent.
And Ben said, well, you would try and change.
You know, there's all this fiction about this.
Remember the boys for the band, in the band where they clone Hitler and they hunt down, they go around trying to make sure his father dies at the right time and the famous Nazi hunter goes after these kids.
But in the end, he burns the list of the kids because you don't go around killing children for things, crimes they haven't committed.
There's not one thing controversial, not even a little bit controversial about what Ben said.
So why are they talking about that?
They're talking about it so they don't have to talk about whether killing babies in the womb is right or wrong.
That is why.
Because it's not an issue to them.
There is no controversy.
They know the answer because they're all the same person.
They all have the same opinions.
And so where's the controversy?
Where's the controversy?
You know, it really is an amazing, amazing thing that I do believe that there are some of them, maybe Chuck Todd is one of them, who actually don't think they're biased, who actually think they play the news straight and they don't understand.
It's not the errors, it's the overall attitudes and assumptions.
Why, if 100,000 people march on Washington every single year, why don't you use that day to discuss abortion?
Why?
Because when you discuss abortion, anti-abortion people tend to win the argument because they're right.
You know, and that's why you don't do it.
So you bury it, you make it, it's off limits.
It's all about like something Ben Shapiro said had the word Hitler in it, so it must be controversial.
You know, literally, there is zero controversial about what Ben said, and they just do it to avoid the issue.
And it works because what happens then is you start talking like I'm talking now about whether Ben was right or not or whether he should have said that or not or whatever it is you start talking about.
And the fact is that's not the issue.
What you should be talking about is abortion, but they don't want you to be doing it.
And meanwhile, they have this women's march.
You know, it is now so riddled with anti-Semitism that even the mainstream media had to pay attention to the fact that it is riddled with, that its leaders are anti-Semitic.
I mean, they're standing up using what is supposed to be a women's march to tout, you know, boycotting Israel and to tout hating Israel.
Tamika Mallory, is that her name?
Yeah, Tamika Mallory is on firing line.
Is this, guys, is this Margaret Hoover here?
Yeah, okay, I haven't seen her in a long time.
She's a very smart lady, and she's asking Tamika Mallory about an anti-Semitic remark that she made.
Listen to this answer.
You were quoted in the New York Times.
Tell me if the quote is right.
We learned a lot about how while white Jews as white people uphold white supremacy, all Jews are targeted by it.
So first of all, that was an organizational statement.
Okay.
That's not your statement.
That's by the...
It was an organizational statement that was written by a number of people, the Jewish folks, black women, white women, you know.
If I was saying that out of my mouth, I would have said all white-skinned individuals, including Jewish women.
Anyone who has white skin in America is able to benefit from white privilege, and white privilege is, in fact, a part of white supremacy.
So it's not, not that I hate Jews.
I hate all white people.
It's like white privilege.
In other words, just by being white, you are part of white supremacy, which is ridiculous, obviously.
White supremacy.
I thought Margaret did a good job of keeping a straight face.
And she did continue to question her, so she looked worse and worse.
But these are the people who are leading the march.
How did that happen?
How did it happen that the one country, Israel in the Middle East, where women have rights, the one country, becomes the enemy of the women's march?
Because it's all about leftism.
And of course, nobody thought to cover it that way the first time it happened because they were all Democrats, all attacking Donald Trump, all appalled by Donald Trump.
So it was portrayed as a wonderful event.
Breitbart went out, and Breitbart, obviously, a slanted site.
It's not supposed to be.
It is an opinion site.
But they went out and just interviewed some of the people at the Women's March.
And our guys here put together a little montage of what they found.
Oh, my gosh!
F ⁇ you!
I'm not even!
No!
No!
No, it's not!
You're a man!
You don't get the comments about me having a f ⁇ ing baby!
No!
You're a woman, you can't talk about my manliness.
I did!
You're showing me, oh, no, no, no, honey!
You're showing everyone that you're a b ⁇ by what you're doing right here!
I've had two abortions.
I don't give a f.
It's my body.
It's my choice.
No uterus!
No opinion!
No uterus!
It's not a baby, it's a blob of cells!
Economy!
Smell!
I mean, this is, I think a lot of what you're seeing there is actually mental illness.
I think that's true on college campuses too.
I think a lot of kids who have troubles and whose parents are not paying enough attention and who aren't around to make sure that they deal with those troubles, it's much easier to drug them.
It's much easier to give them antidepressants.
The kids go to college, they get tired of the muzziness of being on antidepressants, they get off the antidepressants, and they're the kids who show up and say things like you heard some of those women saying, the kind of screaming craziness, the hatefulness.
Of course they're hateful.
Of course they're hateful.
The entire idea of feminism is that women's values are no good and that women should adopt men's values.
That's an incredibly anti-female point of view that feminists put forward.
You know, but that kind of, the interesting, the fascinating thing is there was an article in the Atlantic about women who showed up for the pro-life march who were atheists and liberals.
And they said, you know, we were welcome there.
We were kind of outliers.
Most of the people were religious conservatives.
But as long as we were pro-life, we were welcome there.
And they were kind of surprised to find that they were included.
Whereas at the Women's March, if you are pro-life, if you are for women but anti-abortion, you are not welcome.
And if you are basically a Trump supporter, you are not welcome.
It's a wholly politicized event.
And so it's become about leftism, and so it's become anti-Israel and so it's become anti-female.
It is an amazing thing that the left always manages to turn everything on its ear.
I just want to end with something that Sean Hannity did because I just think it's so, it was really well done and really powerful.
And obviously Sean, another opinion guy.
But this is the point.
He was talking about the coverage of the border controversy.
And he put two montages together.
And the first one was a montage of Democrats reacting to Donald Trump proclaiming the border situation a crisis because of all the families coming in.
So this is cut number 10.
President Trump must stop holding the American people hostage, must stop manufacturing a crisis.
This president just used the backdrop of the Oval Office to manufacture a crisis.
This is a manufactured crisis.
No crisis exists and anyone making the argument is most likely guilty of fear-mongering and willfully misleading the American people.
Locals will tell him on the border, even conservatives, is that there isn't a national security crisis.
The notion that we have a crisis, their security crisis, is absolute nonsense.
Because this is a manufactured crisis and a crisis that manufactured by the Trump administration.
This artificial crisis of the president isn't going to justify his appropriating money for a wall that Congress is unwilling to give.
Is there a crisis at the border?
The president said there's a humanitarian crisis at the border, is there?
Absolutely not.
We have a challenge.
All our humanitarian issues are challenges for us.
All right.
Again, this is compiled by Sean Hannity.
That's the Democrats.
Here's the press.
The big scam of the whole address was that there's a crisis.
There's not a crisis.
Folks, the president has manufactured one heck of a political crisis for himself.
Donald Trump is manufacturing a national security crisis.
You will hear them say is that this is a manufactured crisis.
It's not a national security crisis.
It remains a Seinfeld shutdown.
All about nothing.
What happens when there is a real crisis?
When there is a real emergency?
Does he take to the airwaves?
Do we give him the airwaves?
Do we believe him?
Some question if there is a crisis at all, as the president has claimed.
There is not a crisis at the border.
It's a manufactured crisis for the president to get a political win.
Crisis can have, as we see now, a very elastic definition.
He's determined to convince you there is a crisis at the border.
Even though an intelligence official tells Sinn and quote, no one is saying this is a crisis except them.
It's hard to know whether the press is taking its talking points from the Democrats or the Democrats are taking their talking points from the press.
The problem is they're the same people.
So it doesn't really matter.
I do not understand at this point, I really don't, how any honest person can go to work at these places and not realize that this is treating the American public unfairly.
It is incredibly divisive.
I would say it, along with Roe v. Wade, is at the center of our divisions.
Because what it does is it angers right-wingers by making them feel they're not represented on comedy shows, in movies, on television shows, or in the news media.
And it gives license to left-wingers to demonize us, to think, oh, well, they're just racist, because that's what they're hearing all the time.
So they don't have to talk to us.
They don't have to listen to our opinions.
They don't have to reconcile their own ideas with the facts.
It really is wrong, and it could be so easily fixed.
Three words, hire some conservatives.
It is almost time for our next episode of The Conversation.
Comedy's Role in Meaningfulness00:11:13
Tomorrow at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, there will be, I don't know who will be, oh, it'll be me.
Oh, my goodness.
I'll be answering all your questions.
And as you know, that means all the answers will be correct and they will change your life, possibly for the better.
Who knows?
But as always, this episode will be free for everyone to watch on Facebook and YouTube, but only subscribers can ask the questions.
Once again, subscribe to get your questions answered by yours truly tomorrow at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific.
Join the conversation.
We have the lovely and talented Michael Knowles coming up to talk to us.
He is, of course, the star of Another Kingdom, which is coming out in novel form in March.
It just got a really beautiful blurb from best-selling thriller writer Greg Hurwitz, who I think we'll have on the show soon.
And he just sent a really nice blurb for the book.
Please go on Amazon and pre-order the book.
You can save the receipt and I'll get you some goodies for the pre-order.
But it really helps us to get, if you're going to buy it, and if you'd like to own a copy, please pre-order it now.
It really helps sell books and move the book and make the book rise up the ranks, which really is helpful to us.
Knowles coming up right after a moment.
All right.
So I want to talk to Knowles today about something I've noticed that we have the SJWs, the social justice warriors.
I think there are 10 of them.
I think there are 10 people, but they have a million Twitter accounts.
And they're the ones who kind of engineer this controversy about Ben and the press just follow suit.
But they're all kind of coming together with the Me Too movement.
So it's all one big thing bent on shutting down anything that stinks of comedy or the truth.
Knowles, how are you?
How are you?
Nice jacket.
Oh, this whole thing?
Oh, thanks.
I only wear the best for this show.
I'm always auditioning for season 10 of another thing.
I'm always.
Season 3 is in the works.
I am working away.
This is great.
Yeah, no, it is.
And I'm really, I've got to say, I'm really happy with this book.
These books have been some of the best books I've done.
And they just kind of write themselves.
I can't even take credit for them.
They just sort of are there.
They're very different than everything else you've ever read.
Everything else, I know.
And that's what's kind of weird about them.
They solved a problem that I had, which was writing, all my old thrillers used to be about the fact that there's no way to find the truth.
But after a while, I started to realize that wasn't true.
In fact, almost the first line of true crime is that there is such a thing as truth, you know.
And once I did that, I thought like, well, how do you then write without being didactic and self-certain and self-certain and where everything is all, it all comes out right because you know the truth.
And this book was like given to me.
It just appeared in my head and it solved that problem.
That's very interesting.
That is, yeah, that's right.
That is the experience of it.
Because having read, I never read novels, but I have on occasion read your novels.
And it is totally different.
And yeah, it's a fresh thing.
And you're doing, I hate to say it, but you're doing a great job.
And he records the audiobook.
That's true.
You can have it on your...
I knocked it out.
I was locked in a cage for 75 hours recording it.
I'm putting it on your shelf and use it for target practice.
That's right.
So, you know, this is the thing that really gets me.
No matter what the left comes up with, no matter what the truth is, and I have some sympathy with the Me Too movement.
I've seen women treated like dogs.
You know, I work in Hollywood, so I've seen a lot of trash like this.
But no matter what they come up with, it just comes up, it just comes out to be a means of silencing people.
It just becomes a tool.
And nowhere is this clearer than in comedy.
Comedy, I think, is the center of it.
Coincidentally, I was at a comedy show on Friday at the Laugh Factory.
Oh, yeah.
Right on Sunset, right by you.
A bunch of comedians that no one has ever heard of.
There were some.
Whitney Cummings is kind of a known nasty Michael Rappaport was really funny.
So there were some people who were good.
There was a sense, though, that people were on eggshells.
They were a little afraid.
They had to.
And these comedians, some of them were really pros.
I mean, they were old pros.
And you could even say they would have to preface certain jokes so as not to offend the political sensibilities of the audience.
So would they preface them by saying, I know I'm not supposed to say this, or would they preface it by saying, screw you, I'm going to say whatever I like.
Oh, certainly the former.
Not that it's always, well, I know, and but, and there are two sides.
And so there were all of these.
And there was this piece that came out in The Guardian.
It said, is comedy doomed?
That was the question.
Because you've had, Kevin Hart has had to leave the Oscars for making a gay joke 10 years ago.
The Oscars now doesn't have a host.
This is true throughout the industry.
This has affected a lot of comedians have been washed away, not just in Me Too, but the weaponization of Me Too against certain comedians.
Jerry Seinfeld doesn't play college campuses anymore.
That's true.
And this isn't just a Hollywood problem.
I actually think that this is a generational problem.
So you see, there was that awful comedy special, comedy special that came out on Netflix called Nanette with Hannah Gadsby.
It was really, it wasn't comedy.
You turned it off after all, yeah.
You couldn't want, I mean, it was tragedy.
She said, I'm not going to tell jokes anymore.
She actually said at one point, she said, comedy keeps people in a permanent state of adolescence.
And I realized that doing comedy, I had to put myself down in order to speak.
Myris Wilson is, okay.
Yeah.
I'll turn on a comedian then.
And this became very popular.
I don't think anybody watched it, but politically it became popular.
As a part of the culture, it became popular.
This is an exclusively millennial problem.
There's that great quote from Horace Walpole, the Gothic novelist.
Yeah, no.
And he said, life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel.
And talk about Shapiro's characterization of the generation.
We are living in the tyranny of feelings right now.
Right now, when you play college campuses, a lot of them require comedians to sign a speech code to say they won't talk about certain things, they won't mention certain words.
You would think we were living in the 1940s or something, and it was the conservatives forcing them to do this.
The reason comedy is dying is because in order to appreciate comedy, you have to have a sense of humor.
And it seems obvious.
Millennials don't have a sense of humor.
They don't have a sense of balance or proportion.
They're the most depressed, anxious, stressed generation that you know.
They themselves say this.
They said, I mean, this has been measured.
ASU did a study.
A quarter of American college students are suffering PTSD from the 2016 election.
That's not a joke.
They have clinically high levels of stress.
Teen suicide is through the roof, teen depression is through the roof.
They're highly medicated with these depression pills.
They actually are stressed out.
They're out of balance.
And I think that what this comes from, and where the left is really responsible, is it comes from pride.
To hear Hannah Gadsby say that, to say, in order to make a self-effacing joke, I have to mock myself.
Yes, correct.
You got it.
That's right.
There was another comedian, Sophie Hagen.
Never heard of her?
Me neither.
She said that it's so good now that comedians can't say many things and say offensive things because previously fat people wouldn't go to comedy clubs because they felt they would be picked on.
And now, which I don't know.
Yeah, it's true.
Sometimes you do crowd work in a comedy show.
They would, she said, now no one gets picked on.
Nobody is offended.
Nobody is hurt.
And there's this real tension here, but I think it comes from pride, which is the queen of all sins.
The left exalts pride.
They have the self-love movement.
All of the left-wing websites talk about self-love, self-care, love yourself.
Never.
You go to pride parades, not just gay pride parades, pride of every sort.
Even we had just had the March for Life over the weekend.
The left no longer has safe, legal, and rare abortion.
They have shout your abortion.
Be proud.
And if you're so proud, not only can you not say comedy, you can't perform comedy, like Hannah Gadsby, who doesn't want to have a little fun at her own expense, but you can't enjoy it either.
You can't accept a joke, and you can't laugh at other people.
It's a real, it's a society that's way out of sort, and it's out of sort because, as Chesterton frequently talked about, sometimes when you take a virtue to the exclusion of the others, it becomes a vice.
And in this culture where we have self-love, self-care, it throws it all out of sorts and you simply can't laugh.
You know, I have to say, your use of the Walpole quote, excellent, excellent use of that quote.
First of all, I'm a Gothic fan, so I like Walpole.
But I think that is an excellent point that it is that comedy is a kind of seeing the absurdity of life.
And the absurdity of life is painful.
It's painful to live in an absurd world.
I mean, of course it is.
That's part of original sin.
When I go and talk to young people, one of the things that really impresses me is, first of all, they're so bright and they're so decent and all this stuff, but they have completely lost any sense of true meaning.
They are shocked when you say to them, don't do what you want.
Do what you're supposed to do.
I mean, that will make you happier in the long run.
And they don't understand that without, you know, corporations, I read a millennial actually saying this.
Corporations are very good at making their work seem meaningful.
And so people work all the time and then they go home and they think, well, what's my real life about?
Because they think that their work is meaningful.
Work is usually not all that meaningful.
What is meaningful is, you know, we know, you know, finding virtue, finding God, finding, you know, these are the things that bring you into your fullest life.
And so your work does become meaningful then because your work becomes part of this realization of why you were created.
You talk to kids about that and like you really have to put it in words of one syllable because it's not inherent.
It's not inculcated into their minds.
That's right.
And it's no coincidence, by the way.
We were all making fun of that Gillette ad last week and how wimpy it was and how deconstructed what masculinity is and all of this.
It is not a coincidence that all of those razor companies, not just Gillette, but other razor companies too, were putting out versions of that ad.
It's no coincidence that right now Hannah Gadsby has a certain cachet and these comedians have a certain cachet.
They are responding to an audience.
And that audience is millennials and Gen Z who do not understand that there is meaning.
I think that's exactly the right point.
Because if their meaning is outside you, you become kind of comical.
You know, I mean, I always say to people, you know, like I have two rules.
One is, if you want other people to take you seriously, you have to take yourself seriously.
And two is never take yourself seriously.
Because who cares what other people do?
I mean, that is the whole thing.
If it's not about you, if it's about something bigger than you and bigger than the corporation you work for and bigger than all your pals and bigger than social media, then you become kind of comical.
You are just a broken instrument of something of a bigger song, trying to play a bigger song.
This is another Chesterton quote.
The angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.
Not that they mock themselves.
That's a great quote, yeah.
They can take themselves lightly.
Yeah, yeah.
And unfortunately, this generation, which is living in a culture that denies meaning, that's living in a self-serious, prideful culture, they can't take themselves seriously.
Action Film Based on True Story00:04:20
And that really weighs you down.
No, it does.
It's absolutely true.
What are you talking about on the show?
Today, we will be talking about how the kids are all right.
I will be giving a 45-minute defense of those poor kids, and I will be lambasting the Catholic Church, the conservative pundits, the mainstream media.
They all came after those kids.
It was disgraceful.
The only adults in the room were the kids.
That's right.
It's great to see you know.
Sorry, I'll tell you again.
All right.
Stuff I like.
This is untrue claims.
That was beautiful.
I'm so moved.
From Tim Rebers.
So, you know, we're doing, we've changed the show a little bit, and instead of doing something, everything on a certain day, we're just doing it when I have something to say.
Over the weekend, I saw, I like action movies, and I like kind of, you know, soldier movies and stuff like that.
And there was a movie that came out that I didn't see, and I didn't see it several times.
I didn't see it when it was in the theater.
When it came out on Netflix, I got it in the mail.
I still get discs in the mail sometimes because they come faster.
I didn't watch it then.
I didn't watch it on pay-per-view.
The movie was 12 Strong.
And the reason I didn't watch it is because of the title.
12 Strong made me feel it was going to be some kind of drumbeating, right-wing, rah-rah, you know, pro-military thing, which, look, it's just too simplistic.
I want to see a, I like action movies.
I want to see a movie with a little bit of substance, but I want to see the action.
This picture, which I watched over the weekend, is a bang-up action film that is based on a true story.
It is based on a true story of the first guys to go over to Afghanistan after 9-11.
And they wound up teaming up with an Afghan warlord against al-Qaeda, the bad guys.
I'm sorry, the Taliban.
And in teaming up with this word, they found that they had to fight on horseback.
So these soldiers who are trained on some of the most sophisticated material ever were suddenly reduced to being horse soldiers.
And as horse soldiers, they just created some of the most heroic battles that have ever been seen where they were fighting on horseback against tanks and mortars and all kinds of the sophisticated weapon that the Taliban had.
And it stars Chris Hemsworth and Michael Shannon, who is, because of his face, Michael Shannon is always playing these kind of weirdos, but here he plays like a real tough guy and he does a great, great job.
It is a really good movie, really entertaining, inspiring.
Here is the scene where Chris Hemsworth, as the leader, the captain of the Americans, it's only 12 guys, is talking to the Afghan warlord about their different points of view and how can they work together.
If you want to kill your own man, that's fine, but I ain't letting you put my men in harm's way.
You understand?
Everywhere you go is harm's way.
Yeah, no ****.
We're fighting with horsemen against tanks.
You have an obligation to tell me everything you know.
You don't have a stomach for everything I know.
Ah, ****.
You ****.
You will not win here because you are not honest with yourself.
You expect victory without blood.
I expect you to share strategic information with us.
Otherwise, what the f ⁇ are we doing here?
Your anger consumes your fear.
Because you live in a place where life looks better than afterlife.
It's not this place.
Here, Taliban kills everything you live for.
Your mission will fail because you fear death.
Molarazanceman, the Taliban.
They welcome it.
Because they believe there is riches waiting for them in heaven.
Come give me the damn information I need and I'll reward every last one of them.
The warlord is played by Navid Negeban, an Iranian actor who does a terrific job.
Michael Pena is in it.
He also, you've seen him a million times, but he is also very, very good and plays a really interesting character.
This is based on a book called The Horse Soldiers, which I guess they couldn't call it because of the famous John Wayne movie.
But 12 Strong, just not a title that really was attractive to me and I had a hard time watching this.
Daily Wire Need00:01:46
And when I finally turned it on, I just thought it was absolutely terrific and inspiring and a great, great story.
It made me want to read the book as well.
Of course, with the reviews, it gets something like a, I don't know, 50% on Rotten Tomatoes.
And the reviews are all just upset because it doesn't talk about the nuances of the Afghan situation.
But you know what?
It actually is a lot more interesting.
I will say that they depict honestly the Taliban and how they treated women.
And if I could press a button and wipe every single one of those guys off the face of the earth, I would do it in a heartbeat without any qualms of conscience.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Clavin Show.
We will be back again tomorrow.
And tomorrow, we will be on the conversation with the lovely and talented Alicia Krauss.
So it is an all-Claven day here, which you're going to need because you know what life is like.
Andrew Clavin, The Andrew Clavin Show.
see you tomorrow.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
I'm Michael Knowles, host of The Michael Knowles Show.
The mainstream media vent their daddy issues by baselessly smearing teenagers from Covington High School.
We will analyze the leftist character assassins and the quasi-conservatives who aided and abetted the slander because the kids are all right.