Ep. 645 dissects Roger Stone’s arrest—a 650-agent raid over verb tenses—while exposing media bias, comparing it to unpunished lies by Clapper and Comey, and framing Trump’s border deal as a strategic win despite Pelosi’s backlash. The Oscars face scrutiny for snubbing The Death of Stalin in favor of Black Panther, accused of shallow diversity messaging, while Bohemian Rhapsody’s nuanced Mercury portrayal sparks Hollywood outrage. Stone’s conviction is dismissed as politically motivated, Jake Tapper’s rape joke condemned, and modern art’s shift from divine symbolism to subjective impressions linked to cultural moral decay. Trump’s Bible literacy push emerges as a counter to progressive ad hominem politics, framing the wall debate as a clash between elite globalists and working-class economic protectionism. [Automatically generated summary]
Roger Stone, longtime sleazy political advisor to Donald Trump, has been indicted in the Robert Mueller probe.
Stone was charged with five counts of speaking to the FBI in the past continuous tense while using verbs in the present perfect, and two counts of addressing Congress under oath with sentences that included dangling participles.
In a pre-dawn raid, 650 federal agents carrying AR-15s and accompanied by a team of CNN reporters parachuted from helicopters onto the lawn of the 66-year-old political consultant's house, whereupon they knocked in his door with a battering ram and threw in several flashbang grenades before shooting the family dog.
Then, led by CNN's Jake Tapper and 17 cameramen and sound engineers, the FBI agents shackled Stone and carried him out to a waiting armored car, pausing only to strike a few heroic poses for the cameras before driving Stone to a military air transport where he was locked in a cage last used for Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs.
Tapper reported the arrest from the scene, standing on Stone's neck and giving the details to whichever of CNN's 23 viewers hadn't yet left the airport waiting area to board their planes.
Tapper said, quote, Roger Stone is being taken to prison where he'll probably enjoy being raped because I've heard he's one of them homosexuals, yuck, yuck, yuck, unquote.
The charges of felony misuse of grammar are so serious, many CNN commentators believe they justify the fact that federal agents in the Obama administration spied on a Republicans' presidential campaign due to personal animus and information gleaned from the Democrat candidates' Russia-based opposition research.
As CNN's Allison Camarota explained, quote, we hope our reports on this matter will help restore America's faith in its unrestrained and fascistic federal law enforcement agencies because that is our job as journalists, unquote.
The Stone indictment also claims the Trump campaign reached out to Stone for information on Russia's hack of Hillary Clinton's emails, suggesting Trump had no clue what Russia was up to and the entire Mueller investigation is a politically motivated fraud.
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-dunky-dunky.
Shipshape ipsy-topsy, the world is ippitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
I'm going to get back to that amazing Roger Stone arrest, but first let's deal with some bigger issues.
My old friend Genghis Khan used to say, there is no value in anything until it is finished.
Now, that has two possible meanings.
One meaning is that all your efforts are worthless if you don't finish the job, but another meaning is that you can't tell whether something is good or bad until it's done.
Both of these meanings apply to Donald Trump reopening the government under terms essentially dictated by Nancy Pelosi.
Multiple Meanings Matter00:02:35
There's no question the president handed Pelosi, the Democrats, and the press, but I repeat myself, a chance to gloat over their victory.
But whether he'll ultimately accomplish his goal of greater border security is less clear.
Because there's another thing old Genghis knew.
It doesn't matter whether you defeat your enemies while you're charging at them or in retreat, as long as you ultimately defeat them.
One thing is clear.
The wall and border security are part of a much larger debate about where true political power is going to lie in the future.
And we'll look at that in just a moment.
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All right, we got Michael Knowles who's going to come on later and talk about the Oscar.
You know Michael because he is, of course, the star of Another Kingdom, which is coming out in book form in March.
Please go and pre-order it.
Now, you know, they're always calling me a New York Times bestseller, and I'm always correcting them because, in fact, one or two of my books got on the New York Times extended list, which is right under the one that goes up in the paper.
But I've always felt it was unfair to call me a New York Times bestseller.
I want this book to go on the New York Times bestseller list so I can stop having to correct people all the time, which is just a pain in the neck.
And half the time I can't even do it.
But please pre-order it, bolster it up.
It really does.
It really does help the sales of the book and helps push the book forward.
So thank you.
Keep Quiet, Listen00:15:34
So the government is open now.
And instead of not doing anything because the government is closed, now they cannot do anything because they're a bunch of raving incompetents who can't agree on anything or get anything done.
So Trump basically, the big question is, did he cave?
But of course, that question is for children.
That's a child's question.
Did he cave?
He was in the midst of a strategy where he thought, well, I'm going to keep the government closed until they give me something from my wall.
And Nancy Pelosi said, no, we're not going to negotiate.
And she used the power of the press, which is always, Glenn Reynolds, an Instapundit, said today, it's like air support.
It doesn't mean you'll win, but it's a big help to turn the debate toward the suffering of federal workers not being paid instead of the suffering of people getting killed by guys coming over the border illegally.
So here's Trump making the announcement.
I will sign a bill to open our government for three weeks until February 15th.
I will make sure that all employees receive their back pay very quickly or as soon as possible.
It'll happen fast.
I am asking Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to put this proposal on the floor immediately.
After 36 days of spirited debate and dialogue, I have seen and heard from enough Democrats and Republicans that they are willing to put partisanship aside, I think, and put the security of the American people first.
I do believe they're going to do that.
They have said they are for complete border security, and they have finally and fully acknowledged that having barriers, fencing, or walls or whatever you want to call it, will be an important part of the solution.
So there's going to be a 17-member bipartisan panel.
They're going to negotiate.
Trump has recently said that he gives them under a 50-50 chance of succeeding.
He says that he's not sure whether he's going to declare an emergency.
If they don't get it in three weeks, the government runs out of funds again.
They might try spending less.
Maybe that would keep the government open more longer.
But the one thing Trump did get was agreement in the press, Real Clear Politics, ran an article called the headline, Trump finally brings the media together, all agreed he caved.
This is by Caleb Litaru.
He says the media's reaction to Trump's spectacular reversal was perhaps best summarized by the New York Daily News Saturday front page headlined, Caveman.
I saw that one.
I thought that was pretty good.
The HuffPost ran similar headlines, including, this is a cave, not a wall.
And I love this one.
Trump caves on the shutdown to a woman who questioned his manhood.
You think they're trying to leave a mark?
You think they're trying to get him riled up?
Politico titled it, Complete Total Surrender.
The conservative press was not much kinder.
The Washington Examiner offered Art of the Bad Deal yields an F. Trump's cave-in to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
And Coulter, of course, called Trump equally.
I love Andy.
You can always really rely on her to just really go for the throat.
She called Trump the biggest wimp ever to serve as president of the United States.
Breitbart proclaimed Pelosi Trump's Trump, while the Gateway pundit tendered Trump caves.
And the New York Times, I love the New York Times, a former newspaper, they ran a war-declared headline.
It went across the entire page, Trump's stinging defeat or something like this.
And you know, listen, all of that is fair to a degree.
As a snapshot, Trump tried a technique.
He started to realize it was not going to work.
The narrative of suffering people not being paid was powerful.
People do use government services.
There was a danger that something might happen, like an airplane crash, and that would have been a genuine disaster.
There would have been no coming back from that.
And I think he just thought, you know, this isn't working.
Jared Kushner, I guess, is moving behind the scenes to do some of this negotiation.
But, you know, basically, he said it wasn't working.
And of course, if you're trying something that's not working, if you're trying a technique that's not working, pulling out of that technique does give you this momentary failure.
But in the bigger picture, it really matters what happens at the end.
You know, Genghis Khan really did do this.
Because he was on horseback, his guys were on horseback, and he was invading cities.
He knew that whether he killed people while he was retreating or killed people while he was attacking didn't matter as long as he killed people.
That was his strategy.
So if he could lure people out of the cities to chase after him and he could turn around and kill him, it didn't matter to him whether he was running away.
And I think Trump feels the same way.
Trump is basically has, if you've watched him, he's been very untrumpy of late.
I talked about this last week.
He's been very much the man of reason, very much coming out, you know, making offers, making reasonable offers.
And while his poll numbers have remained essentially the same, Pelosi's poll numbers, her negatives on her poll numbers, have skyrocketed or they've spiked.
And, you know, she doesn't have to worry about that because she lives in San Francisco where people are willing to let people die in the streets as long as they can stay in their rich Silicon Valley homes and tell themselves how virtuous they are.
So she's not going to lose any votes.
But that matters to other Democrats.
And that's what Trump is counting.
Nick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff, was on Fox yesterday.
And he was talking about the fact that he thinks that there are people in the rank and file who are now willing to turn against the leadership.
Let's hear, this is the second one of his, it's cut four.
Some of the rank and file, also some of the leadership.
Dick Durbin said some decent things about a border barrier.
Jim Clyburn, my former colleague from South Carolina, said that if the experts thought we really needed a barrier, he could vote for it.
So this gave a chance to the Democrats to prove whether or not they really do believe in border security and are willing to go against Nancy Pelosi or whether or not they are so beholden to their leadership that they're never going to vote for a barrier on the southern border.
Well, so we'll see if he's got that actually, has got some of them moved.
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You know, the other thing Mick Mulvaney said, I just want to throw this in here because I wish Trump had made this argument before, is he points out that the 5.7 billion that Trump is looking for is not a random number.
I've made fun of that number because it doesn't seem like enough, but he made a very good point here.
President wants his $5.7 billion.
Keep in mind, why is that number?
It's not a number that's made up.
It's what the experts have told him.
He's listened to DHS.
I've been in on the meetings.
He's listened to CBP.
He's listened to ICE.
We have identified the top 17 highest priorities in terms of where we can put up barrier to discourage people from crossing the border illegally.
It's about 243 miles.
That's what's driving this discussion.
It's not a made-up magical number of $5.7 billion.
It's the wall where we need it the most and where we need it the quickest.
That's what's driving this.
So this is not something where the president's married to a number.
He's married to border security, which is the right thing for the president of the United States to do.
So these are the things that actually will carry the day if they keep it up.
Common sense, explaining what they're talking about.
This is why Trump has been so untrumpy.
He's basically waiting.
The biggest weapon that Trump has is that the Democrat Party has gone insane.
They have lost the plot of America.
They've lost the plot of freedom.
And this is part of it.
Border security is part of it.
You know, Ann Coulter, I was laughing before how Ann Coulter called Trump a wimp, but she was on Bill Maher's show, and she was, obviously, she's talking to a raving left-wing audience.
And she explained to them, the audience, why this is not really a question or left of left and right.
Here's her telling Maher's audience why they should care.
We've been lied to over and over and over again by politicians, by respectable people, by people like Mitt Romney and George Bush, Obama and Clinton.
We're going to protect your jobs.
And if I could just say for a second to an audience that is not wild about me, I think this build the wall line has become, I mean, it sounds like crooked Hillary or lock her up.
It isn't that.
You're being played.
This is, as Bernie Sanders said, a Koch brothers idea.
This is lots of cheap labor pouring into this country is good for employers.
It's not good for employees.
You know who wants it?
The Koch brothers.
They want it.
Rupert Murdoch wants it.
My party wants it.
Why hasn't Trump been able to get it through with the Fridays?
The point is that the Protestants are not going to be able to do it.
Because the Republicans don't want it.
It's all of mass immigration.
It's our legal immigration.
It's no e-verified.
The wall is a big part of that.
And you're being played to have everybody keep acting like this is some sort of racist thing.
You're working class wages have gone down.
Middle class wages have been stagnant.
It's great for the rich.
It's good for you.
Okay, but this is.
It's bad for people to work.
Ann is making a great point here, and it goes even beyond this.
First, I have to just say, as always, kudos to Bill Maher.
He is a snarky, one-sided guy, and half the stuff he says is half true.
But he will have Ann on and have a friendly conversation with her.
And I think it's great.
I think it is great the two of them can talk like that.
And that audience, you even heard some people tentatively applauding me, except they were afraid for their lives.
But, you know, she was making this great point.
The issue is not, it's not just the cheap labor and all this.
It's the issue of national sovereignty and the will of the people.
Your freedom, the freedom of individuals, is protected by national sovereignty.
Why?
Because we have a constitution that we can hold our leaders accountable for.
We can't hold accountable to, we can't hold the UN accountable to the Constitution, just like England can, Britain can't hold the EU accountable to its traditions and its laws.
Your freedom is protected.
We are in a gigantic argument.
We are in a gigantic argument about where political power lies.
Does it lie with the elites who are the experts, who know everything, who always get it right, or does it lie with those dumb, fat, racist, bigoted people with their MAGA hats out in some middle of nowhere where they're taking opiates?
Are they going to be, you know, because the thing is, you can't love freedom if you don't love ordinary people.
If you think ordinary people are dumb, bigots, ignorant, mean, cruel, then why should you expect them to be free?
Why should you want it?
And that is why the arrest of Roger Stone, who I have no respect, I have zero respect for Roger Stone, but that's why it was a true, truly sad moment to see the press, who are the Democrats, in their Trump hatred, support what is abusive action by our federal law enforcement agencies.
All right.
Roger Stone is a jerk.
He's another one of these Trump hanger-ons.
Trump loved these guys, Michael Cohen, these make-believe tough guys who brag about how clever they are and how tough they are and how they play dirty and they brag about that.
And then the minute they get in trouble, they cave.
He's just another one of these people, is dishonest.
He's always trying to build himself up, say he's got more information than he has.
However, however, look when they go and they arrest this guy, and they obviously clearly inform CNN they're going to be there, and he's the 66-year-old man without any guns or anything.
And on the basis that they were making sure that he wasn't going to destroy any material, they essentially invaded his house as if he were Vietnam, as if he were a foreign country.
And CNN is there to cover it.
Here's the coverage and CNN explaining how they got this scoop.
This is exclusive CNN video.
This is what happened this morning before sunrise, just before 6 a.m. when Roger Stone, longtime Trump associate and advisor, was taken into custody by the FBI.
There's a moment of audio on here that I want to play for everyone because this is what the first sounds that Roger Stone woke up to this morning was the FBI pounding on his door and shouting this.
I want to just play this for a moment.
You didn't know that this was coming.
Why were you there in position?
Allison, it's reporters' instinct.
Yeah, my ass as I compare the reporters instead.
Of course they were tipped off.
Come on.
And the other thing, and the thing is, just to put this whole thing in perspective, Roger Stone was not indicted for lying to Congress.
He was indicted for lying to Congress while being associated with Donald Trump.
James Clapper lied to Congress.
He was, remember, the National Security Director, and he said there was no domestic surveillance, and now he's got a job on TV.
He wasn't indicted.
John Brennan, that pompous blowhard, he lied to Congress.
He said that the CIA, he was the CIA director.
He said that they weren't looking into senators' computers.
They were.
He's on TV with his blowhard sanctimony.
James Comey, who gave like a gangster's testimony before Congress, I don't know, I don't remember.
I don't remember.
I wasn't there.
I don't know.
I can't recall.
You know, he might as well just have pled the Fifth Amendment.
James Comey hasn't been honest with Congress, and he's still walking around, and he did something else.
Andrew McCarthy at National Review, who is the gold standard for covering this probe, he is doing a great, great job.
He really, it really couldn't, his commentary could not be better over at National Review.
But he pointed out that back in February 2017, Comey, who was then the FBI director, gave this public testimony at a House Intelligence Committee hearing.
He said, I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
And that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts.
As with any counterintelligence investigation, this will also include an assessment of whether any crimes were committed.
So he basically told people we're investigating Trump and whether Trump is a Russian spy.
Stephanopoulos On Trump Investigation00:05:13
And here's what McCarthy says.
He says it is standard government practice.
Remember, McCarthy was a former federal prosecutor.
He says it is standard government practice never to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.
This is especially true of counterintelligence investigations, which target foreign powers, not individuals, and which are classified.
It violates Justice Department and FBI policy to identify a subject of any investigation if that subject has not been charged with a crime, which Trump has not.
And he says it is simply not true that as a matter of course in a counterintelligence investigation, the Justice Department and FBI do an assessment of whether any prosecutable crimes have been committed.
A counterintelligence is just to get, it's just that.
It's to gather intelligence on whether we're being spied on.
The FBI, the FBI, so they basically, James Comey, in a complete break with protocol, put Donald Trump, put out a press release essentially saying Donald Trump is being investigated as a Russian spy.
And remember, the FBI, to rein Trump in, that was their language, they started an investigation and promoted this Russia collusion idea using Hillary Clinton's opposition research to get a FISA warrant, which was actually obtained from Russia.
That was actual disinformation from Russia.
And the press, in their hatred of Donald Trump, is promoting this.
Here's Roger Stone going on George Stephanopoulos' show and on ABC and explaining what happened to him.
First, let's hear Stone's description.
Well, I must tell you, George, I think the way I was treated on Thursday is extraordinary.
I think the American people need to hear about it.
I'm 66 years old.
I don't own a firearm.
I have no prior criminal record.
My passport has expired.
The special counsel's office is well aware of the fact that I'm represented.
The idea that a 29-member SWAT team in full tactical gear with assault weapons would surround my house, 17 vehicles in my front yard, including two armored vehicles, a helicopter overhead, amphibious vehicles in the back where my house backs onto a canal, and that I would open the door looking down the barrel of assault weapons, that I would be frog marched out front, barefooted,
and handcuffed when they simply contacted me.
I think people need to know about that.
Yeah, but as you know, it's pretty standard for that to happen.
They work in the middle of the moment.
Let me know what's going on.
That's what our terms are.
There's our press.
Our press.
In the person of former Clinton hack, George Stephanopoulos, I guess, whatever his name is, George Stephanopoulos.
There's our press defending a military-style raid on this old guy's house.
And again, this is nothing about Roger Stone, nothing defending him or even saying whether he's guilty or not.
Defending this military touristic raid on the basis, oh, we didn't want him to destroy any documents.
Two guys, two armed agents could have walked in there, knocked on his door.
And he says they were very polite once they got there.
But still, it's absurd and it's obscene.
But here's the other thing.
Now listen to Stephanopoulos describe the indictment itself.
Let's get right to what may be the most explosive paragraph in the indictment right there on page four.
Mueller and his team write, after the July 22nd, 2016 release of stolen DNC emails by Organization One, that's WikiLeaks, a senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization One had regarding the Clinton campaign.
Stone thereafter told the Trump campaign about potential future releases of damaging material by Organization One.
Stone also corresponded with associates about contacting Organization One in order to obtain additional emails damaging to the Clinton campaign.
So Russia hacks Hillary's emails, which they didn't have to hack.
They could have leaned over her shoulder and looked at her using her stupid phone before she bleach bit it to erase it all.
They hack it.
They send it to WikiLeaks.
This is what the intelligence agencies say.
And the Trump campaign is calling this clown, Roger Stone, to find out what's in the WikiLeaks emails.
And he says he didn't even know.
He was just kind of trying to find out.
So obviously the Trump campaign had no way of calling Putin.
They had no way of calling.
They didn't know what the hell was going on.
The entire indictment basically erases the purpose of the investigation.
It's basically saying the Trump campaign was stumbling blind.
Yeah, they were trying to use this information once it was out there to get at Hillary Clinton.
That's perfectly fair, rough and tumble politics.
But the fact that they had to call Roger Stone shows you that they weren't colluding with the Russians or they would have known what was in there.
They would have gotten had back channels to find out.
And Mueller knows they didn't know.
Comey knows they didn't know.
And they still have sent this out.
It's a political hit against a guy who is not part of this elite global idea of where the power is going to be.
Trump, listen, Trump, there's a million things wrong with Donald Trump.
They can hit him.
But the reason it took a guy like Trump to stop them is this is how powerful they are.
They are the press.
They are the federal investigators.
They are the deep state.
They are all of them basically saying, no, no, the power is not with you anymore because you guys are MAGA hat-wearing racists.
The power is with us.
Oscars and Political Machinations00:12:52
We'll take care of it.
You can vote from time to time, but it's not going to mean very much because we're all the same.
None of us want border security.
None of us want nations.
We're all the same, so it doesn't matter who you vote for.
And Donald Trump comes along and ruins that.
And they went after him.
And the press is with the power.
The press is supposed to be against the power.
The press is supposed to be with anyone who's abusing, against anyone who's abusing power, and they're not.
And that's what's so dangerous about this particular moment.
All right, we've got Michael Knowles coming up.
And coming up tomorrow, you can tune into our next episode of Daily Wire Backstage.
Daily Wire God King, Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and maybe even me will be taking on all the pressing issues of the day and listening to the State of the Union, which will not be happening.
So we'll just be staring at each other and always, as we always are, staring at the lovely Alicia Krauss, because that's the kind of low-life boars we are.
But she will class up the joint and take your questions as they roll in.
Only Daily Wire subscribers get to ask the questions, so make sure to subscribe today.
We got Michael Knowles coming up.
Come to dailywire.com and subscribe.
It's a lousy $10 a month, a lousy $100 for the entire year, and you get to ask us all kinds of questions, and sometimes we'll even try to answer them.
Before we get to Knowles, I just have to play this one thing that I just love.
You remember the Gillette commercial where they attacked men?
You know, men, if you want to shave with R razors, you've got to be better than these nasty, toxic men.
So Barbasol, I just love this.
Barbasol ran a counter ad of a guy in World War II talking to young men today.
Here it is.
Oh, hey, buddy.
It's your great granddad here.
In case you haven't noticed, I'm kind of busy fighting for your freedom in this little thing called the Second World War.
But now, you're using that freedom to hurl insults at celebrities on Twitter.
Listen, hashtag, you're not going to fight like a man.
At least shave like a man.
Excuse me.
Barbasol.
Stop LOLing everything.
I am shaving.
I already shave with Barbasol because it's inexpensive.
But that basically seals the deal.
How you doing?
As long as I'm not seeing you.
You're leaving, somebody told me.
Are you going away again?
I'm going away forever.
I don't know.
There are like three trips up in the air right now, but I'll definitely, I'll be speaking in North Carolina.
I'll be speaking in Georgia.
I might be speaking here in L.A. There are a lot of things going on.
Oh, man.
All right.
I don't have anything to say.
Do you have any suggestions on what to say?
Well, if you can publish a blank book, why can't you just stand there silently?
Because John Cage will sue.
The Cages statements.
The Cages State.
That's right.
They'll basically give you some kind of major grant for artistic speech.
Let us talk.
You were not nominated for your performance in Another Kingdom.
Not yet.
I don't know if there's a second wave because what's going to happen is probably half of these movies are going to get boycotted by the Academy.
Now they're going to have to fill it in with the new ranks.
This is the new thing.
When you get nominated for an Oscar, they go back and find out if you ever insulted gay people.
This is a film.
This is why I'm actually fairly convinced I'm going to win an Oscar this year for my performance in Another Kingdom.
The nominations are now out.
The campaign to destroy all of these people politically is on.
But they've already destroyed me politically.
So what is there to lose?
I'm telling you.
Don't blame other people.
Take responsibility.
So what do we know?
What do we learn from these nominations?
What we've learned from these nominations are if you do not have an explicitly time-sensitive, right-in-the-moment political message in your movie, you're not going to get nominated for the big awards.
Really?
With the exception of Freddie Mercury.
Bohemian Rhapsody actually was just a very enjoyable sort of popcorn film, very impressive popcorn film, though.
And that did manage to get Best Picture to.
But this is the one with the director who's being charged with all the boys around the room.
So they fired the director, but now all of the other movies with really serious social messages, they're really angry, so they're going after Bohemian Rhapsody for that.
They're also going after Bohemian Rhapsody because it presents Freddie Mercury's relationship with a woman in a serious way, and it presents his sexuality as complicated rather than as one long Harvey milk march for gay equality.
And because of that real portrayal of sexual complication, some people in Hollywood are angry with it.
The one thing we know now is the Oscars are somehow in more disarray than they were even last week.
Yeah, well, go ahead.
So they have no host.
It seems they're not going to have a host.
The ratings don't look great, even just looking ahead at these movies that are being nominated, probably not going to attract a huge audience.
They've also now said they're only going to have two musical performances.
So every year they have the musical nominees that perform.
So they've announced they're only going to have two performances, which is to say to the other three, you lost.
You're not going to get it.
So now you don't get any music.
You don't get any comedians.
You don't get any jokes.
You don't get any host.
Last year, the Oscars were at a 44-year low.
Oh, wait, wait, but you still get actors patting each other on the back and then yelling at you for your political.
You do get that.
So that's worth turning in, both.
These nominations, it is outrageous.
I mean, I'm not just being a cranky conservative saying that you have to have a political leftist message to get nominated.
The CBS headline: black Klansmen, Roma, bring diversity, historic firsts to the Oscars.
Oh, please.
But actually, it doesn't really.
It goes on to say that Yalitsa Aparicio, who is in the movie Roma, is the second Mexican woman to receive a best actress nomination.
So she's not the first.
Selma Hayat got it in 2003.
Oh, yeah.
It talks about.
This is a direct quote from this coverage.
Another nominee from Roma is Mexican actress Marina DiTavira, who's up for Best Supporting Actress.
Also in that category, Regina King, who is black, received her first Oscar nomination for Best Actor, Rami Malik, who is Egyptian-American.
And it just goes on.
It lists their, like, you've got to produce a pedigree.
You know, obviously the SAG Awards came out and they gave them all to Black Panther.
And I've been saying Black Panther is going to win because, first of all, it cleaned up the box office, actually made money.
Right.
I think it's responsible for half the take of the Oscars, something like that, some huge number.
And, you know, I mean, I watched it.
You know what I care about.
The women in it are fantastically beautiful.
I mean, the girl who plays the love, I don't even know their names, the girl who plays the sister and the girl who plays the love interest.
I spent most of the movie going like, oh, they're nice idea.
They're pretty girls.
That's the best thing you could take away from that movie.
I mean, that's the only thing.
It was a sad movie.
It's a sad movie.
It's a movie that basically says, you know, I wish we had built a European civilization, basically.
If only aliens had come down from outer space, then black people could be European.
I mean, that's the message of the movie.
It's so pitiful because blacks have contributed immensely to our society under terrible, terrible conditions a lot of the time.
They have a lot, there's a lot that they could be proud of, but proud of this imaginary world in which, and also, as my son Spencer pointed out, it is so materialistic.
The idea is if only they had had this kind of junk that fell from space, then they would have built the society.
And the problem with us, the problem with European societies is it stole stuff from Africa.
But, you know, they forget about the ideas and the power of ideas.
This is the materialist Oscars.
I mean that in the real philosophical sense that it's all about stuff.
Even I saw The Favorite last night.
This is about Queen Anne and Lady Marlborough and.
Oh, I watched that.
Yeah, I actually liked that movie.
You didn't like it?
I know I did like it, but it's very materialist.
The movie is also basically an argument for taking away women's right to vote.
It says, this is what happens when the women run England.
Like I said, I like this movie.
But the movie was very enjoyable.
I totally got a kick out of it.
But it's all about flesh.
It's all about appetite.
It's all about stuff and grotesqueries.
Yes, but it makes, and it does do things like, for instance, first of all, I agree with you about the fact that it is a government without men in it, and it shows you how bad that is and why it's bad in a particularly feminine way.
I said that to my wife as we were walking out, and then when I regained consciousness, I actually, no, I didn't.
So what movie did we see?
But it does do that.
And it also, oh, I forgot.
What were you saying?
It was talking about the appetites.
Oh, yes, it also relates those appetites and the grotesquery of the finery and everything to our present day.
My favorite scene in the movie was when they dance and they start out and it's a typical kind of old-fashioned dance.
And then it turns into a breakdance, basically.
It was really funny.
No, it was a really pretty charming movie.
And so it actually, the one good thing about these Oscars is that movie got 10 nominations and it was interesting and that's fine.
And then the rest, I mean, all of the coverage just talks about all of the political headaches because Roma is this movie which nobody has seen, but it's about a Mexican housekeeper.
I couldn't get to the last letter in the title.
That's how boring that sound is.
I think it was Deadline.
One of the trade papers covered it and said, if Roma hits the wall, expect another political headache for the Oscars.
There were some major snubs.
Bradley Cooper did not get the best director nomination.
He probably should have.
Well, you know what they did?
You know how now movies are either popular or kind of intelligent and leftist?
They gave the movies that didn't make money to the directors.
They nominated directors.
That's why I think Spike Lee and Black Panther are going to win.
I think they'll give it to Spike Lee.
He's never won one, and he is kind of a force and then Black Panther because it made money.
Right.
That's a very good guess.
I mean, just looking down the nominations, one does wonder if people have seen these movies.
They've seen Black Panther, which was simply dreadful, just an awful movie.
And then the other, I don't think people really saw most of the other movies.
And there were major snubs.
First Man was snubbed, the movie about Neil Armstrong.
First Man, nobody seemed to like it.
I haven't seen that one, but nobody seemed to like it.
I don't know.
Won't You Be My Neighbor, the Mr. Rogers documentary?
The one movie that actually should win, I think it was this year, was The Death of Stalin.
Right.
Did you see The Death of Stalin?
Yeah, on an airplane.
I watched it on Earth.
It's tremendous.
That's a great movie.
But this is the point, is you and I, we're culture vultures.
We're constantly.
And a lot of these movies we haven't seen.
We're not interested.
We don't want to watch it.
Probably we have to, just for work we have to.
Consider the rest of the country.
Who does the Academy think is going to watch this Oscar movie?
You know, it's true.
I think the one that doesn't stand a chance, I don't think, is Green Book.
And I saw that and found it a pleasant little movie, but people like that movie, you know, and they liked, I think they liked the one about the rock star, the Bradley Cooper film.
Star is Born.
Star is Born.
You know, obviously they loved the Black Panther, but they love all those superhero movies.
You know, I don't know.
When was the last time, maybe Black Panther, that people sat around and talked about a movie?
They talked about TV?
Everybody talked about it.
This is the issue.
I mean, and this is, by the way, the way you know when something is totally dead is when all we talk about are these political, slimy machinations about it, which is the Oscars.
Really, the Emmys should be the new Oscars.
That's where the art is taking place.
It's on TV.
And they're all going to streaming services and Netflix and all those things.
I mean, it's driving the Nets.
I know this.
It's driving the Nets crazy.
Right.
That their shows are now basically for, you know, it's like blue bloods.
You sit and watch them going, eh, I love this show.
It's a really nice show.
I mean, actually, it's an enjoyable show, but it is for people who are 110.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
All right.
What are you talking about on your show?
So today we're talking about Roger Stone.
I actually think he's going to make it out of this because he's so dishonest.
Because that's my prediction.
No, that's actually a really good point because they're charging him with doing stuff that he was always pretending he knows.
He always brags about things he didn't do.
So we'll talk about that and we'll talk about a little Bible literacy for dummies.
That's good.
I may talk about that tomorrow.
I think that is a really, really...
Did it bother you, that raid?
Did that raid bother you?
I don't want to steal your shows.
It was bizarre.
It was outrageous.
I mean, thankfully, a 66-year-old Republican fop is off the street.
Thank goodness they got him.
And the press is supporting it.
And CNN was waiting.
I know.
Somehow CNN was.
That's probably what it was.
Jim Acosta there looking in the mirror, and then he got a phone call from the FBI, and he thought, okay, my instincts are kicking in finally.
All right.
I'll see you later.
It's great to see you.
So you have a great trip.
You know, before we go on to stuff I like, I want to play that one cut of Jake Tapper remarking on the arrest.
This is that very short cut seven.
The truth is, no one's going to cry if Roger Stone goes to jail or when he goes to jail.
He might like it.
But he might.
Second Level Meaning00:06:09
Who knows?
He might like it.
He might like jail.
I mean, obviously a rape joke.
And, you know, I got to say, I'm not somebody who gets outraged and offended.
I don't think he should be fired or anything like that.
But I would apologize.
If I made that joke, we all make bad jokes.
We all make jokes in the spur of the moment.
But I would say something about that.
Roger Son is a real person.
Rape isn't funny.
And that's, you know, it's one thing to make a joke about rape in general.
It's another thing to make it about a real person.
I think Tapper probably regrets he said it, and he should take it back.
John Pod Horace made the same joke, and it wasn't funny then either.
All right, here's some stuff I like.
Stuff I like.
My wife loves it when we play that.
You know, we're talking about the pictures.
Here are some pictures I saw over the weekend.
I took my first day off of the year this weekend, and my wife and I went to the wonderful Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.
It is a spectacular small museum with beautiful gardens, and I was looking at the paintings.
The guy who made the collection, I guess it was Norton Simon.
He just had fantastic taste.
And I was looking at two paintings from the 17th century and two from the 19th century.
I want to show you these because they really do speak about something that is at issue in our culture when we talk about Bible literacy.
One of them was the birth of John the Baptist.
This is from the 17th century.
The painter's name Murillo.
And I'm showing it here, but obviously some people are listening.
First of all, the faces in it are unbelievable.
The face of the young woman attending the baby, gazing at that baby with such tenderness, and you can just tell that she's unmarried, that she doesn't have a child, that she yearns to have a child.
You can see her whole life in her face.
It's just an amazing piece of work.
But what strikes me about it, of course, are the little angels up on top breaking through the clouds above and watching this, which suggests a level of meaning to the scene that it doesn't necessarily have in nature, right?
If you just look at it, it's just a baby.
The ladies are taking care of it.
There's a man in the background there, but they're all the mother, Elizabeth, is lying in her labor bed.
But the angels suggest that this is important at another level of meaning.
The same thing is true of this beautiful painting of Joseph and the infant Christ, also 17th century by Basicio, I think his name is.
Beautiful, beautiful painting of this.
Obviously, in tradition, Joseph was an older man, and the baby's playing with his gray beard.
But over his head, he's got a halo.
And there was another picture of St. Peter denying Christ.
Just very, very vaguely, you just see this halo kind of dimly up above their heads, suggesting that this has a meaning, a deeper meaning than just a man with his son.
It's not just a man with his infant son and the joy of it and the joy of old age confronting new life.
It's not just about that.
There is also a second level of meaning.
Now we move into the 19th century and the Impressionists.
You have the Van Gogh picture of a peasant and nothing like that.
It is all about the artist, what the artist sees, it's impressionism, it's the artist's impression, and there is no other level of meaning except the meaning of human consciousness.
The meaning of a heavenly level, of an exterior, a superior level of meaning has vanished from this.
The same thing is true of Degas, who did these wonderful paintings.
This one is of a laundress where she is yawning, and you can just see Degas was in love with the female form.
He found the beauty of the female form in not just in ballerinas, but in ordinary people here, these ordinary women, that motion she's making of yawning and stretching behind her back, it's just amazingly realistic and real.
But no other level of meaning.
It is the fact of life.
Now, I'm not criticizing one of these over the other.
I'm not saying that one is better than the other.
Both of them represent the society as it was moving, where it was moving.
This was what art was now reflecting.
Art was now reflecting the mind of the painter, the eyes of the painter, rather than an outer reality that had a superior reality above it.
Those are two different ways of looking at the world.
And it is, it is the issue that is haunting our society right this moment.
It is every issue.
Every issue is this issue.
Is there another level of morality and meaning, or is it all about the way we see things?
If we are the happiest, richest, most powerful society on earth, and yet we're aborting 50 million babies a year, are we a good society?
Is there any meaning to that at all?
Or is that nothing?
I mean, these babies in there, these cherubs looking down, they're not saying, oh, don't sleep with somebody out of wedlock.
They're not saying, oh, don't be gay.
They're simply saying, you know, life has a moral meaning.
We don't necessarily know all the time what it is.
We maybe approach it with half measures, but it is there, and we can start to talk about what we do and the actions that we take in terms of that superior moral meaning and why we turn to books like the Bible, why we turn to even, you know, to Buddhist scriptures and all the other metaphysical scriptures that work metaphysically above the physical.
And, you know, somebody the other day at church pointed out, the pastor of church pointed out, that we are so opposed to hierarchy because we think it means something is higher than something else.
But that's not actually its source.
It actually comes from a word meaning sacred.
It's the hierarchy means to rule.
It is the rule of the sacred.
We have actually ended that rule and we have decided that we are the arbiters and what we see and our impressions.
We're living in an impressionistic world.
What we see and our impressions are the final moral arbiter.
And that's why there's so much, there's so little debate about issues and so much attack on personal people.
Well, you're a racist, you're a sexist, you're a homophobe, therefore your opinions don't matter.
It's entirely possible you could be any of those things and your opinions could, your policy opinions could be absolutely true.
But we have ceased to believe in that other level, those angels watching us, those halos over people's heads.
We've stopped believing in that.
And so it's impossible to have debates on a moral level.
And that's why I think Bible literacy is such a good thing.
We might want to remember that whether we believe in that level of meaning or not, it's there.
It's there.
And so we're going to be answerable to it in the long run, if only in the fall of our society, if not in eternity.
Believing in That Level00:01:02
All right.
Tomorrow, I will be back.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
will see you then.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
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Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, Copyright Daily Wire, 2019.
I'm Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles Show.
President Trump touts Bible literacy bills that want to teach students the most influential book in the history of the world.