Jussie Smollett’s $4,000 hoax—staged with bleach and a noose—exposed media bias as CNN and ABC rushed to amplify his racialized attack claims despite implausibilities like subzero Chicago temperatures. Andrew Clavin critiques left-wing narratives prioritizing identity politics over scrutiny, contrasting it with conservative skepticism, while guest Michael Knowles defends Christopher Columbus against Antifa threats, calling him history’s greatest figure. Both segments tie institutional bias—whether in the FBI under Obama or CNN’s fact-checking—to broader cultural control, where vocal minorities reshape truth. [Automatically generated summary]
Empire actor Jesse Smollett's story about being the victim of a hate crime seems to be unraveling.
At first, Smollett told Chicago police that he was attacked on the street by Donald Trump, who shouted racial and anti-gay slurs in a language believed to be ancient Babylonian spoken backwards while his head rotated 360 degrees.
Mainstream news agencies, of course, immediately ran with the story, and Congressman Adam Schiff called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to imprison the president, telling CNN he had personally seen evidence that the attack was real, but couldn't reveal what it was because then everyone would know he was lying.
After police began to investigate, Smollett changed the story, saying his attacker wasn't Trump, but just someone who shouted, this is MAGA country, narrowing the suspect list down to people who didn't realize they were in Chicago.
Smollett said the attacker hadn't used a racial slur exactly, but had harshly criticized the season one finale of Empire as implausible, then demanded Smollett put the accent of his name on the first syllable like a normal person and stop trying to be such a fancy pants.
Police identified two amorphous shapes of interest on a blurry security video, and Smollett said he was sure they were the attackers because they looked exactly like two guys no one would ever be able to find.
Then the Chicago police, who said they had nothing else to do since most of the city's other residents were dead of gunshot wounds for some reason, actually found the shapes who turned out to be two African dudes who say Smollett hired them to attack him.
In the aftermath, Don Lemon went on a show he apparently has and denounced President Trump for being so evil that people have to make up stories about him just to describe how evil he is.
So basically it's another typical news day.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
The birds are ringing, also singing hunky dunkity.
Shipshape 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.
You know, there's a right way and a CNN way to gather the news.
The right way is to get the facts, make sure you have them right, and then let the commentators discuss what the facts might mean.
What's the narrative here?
The CNN way, also known as the New York Times way, the ABC News, and Washington Post way, is to decide what the narrative is and then get the facts that support that narrative.
Obviously, it's easier to get news gathering wrong, or CNN, when everyone around you basically agrees on the narrative.
If you surround yourself with people of diverse opinions and political views, they'll challenge your narrative and drive you toward the facts.
But if not, you'll rush to judgment and make a fool of yourself again and again and then again until finally you look like such an idiot, you get hired by CNN, or maybe get a job at the head of Obama's FBI.
The reason a lot of people love Donald Trump is precisely because he's big enough and loud enough to challenge the elite narrative that has been ruining their country and their lives for many, many decades.
The CNN Narrative00:10:34
That's why they support him even when he is making up a narrative of his own.
And that is also why the purveyors of the elite narrative want to stop him at all costs.
All right, we will talk about this some more and about the Jussie Smollett case and other lies and narratives.
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So we don't know the whole truth yet about the Jesse Smollett case.
I mean, the police now say, the Chicago cops now say that they are looking to talk to him again because the two people who are the people of interest turned out to be these two Nigerian brothers, one of whom worked on the show Empire.
He was like an extra on Empire.
And they are saying, according to sources, they are saying that they were paid, that Smollett paid them four grand to stage this attack in which they put a noose around his neck and poured bleach on him and called him names.
They even rehearsed the attack before they did it so that they would get it right.
It's a pretty damaging story.
Smollett has hired an attorney to defend him.
He hasn't gone back and talked to the cops.
There are rumors that they're convening a grand jury and that he risks three years in prison for filing a false report.
You know, we played, I mean, the first thing we have to deal with about this is the way the press has treated this story because this is the second time in about a month, the other time being the Covington story, that they fell for their own narrative, that they walked into the cloud of unknowing that is created by surrounding yourself with like-minded people and only like-minded people and never getting the news from any other source.
And they fell into that with the Covington kids, where they believed this kind of, I think he's a con man basically, who goes around being a Native American chieftain, but is really just an activist and who didn't represent himself accurately, either as a Vietnam War veteran or as what he was doing when he was attacking these high schoolers.
So that was that.
And then with Smollett, they did the same thing.
Last week we played this montage of them this like credulously reporting this attack on this guy, which remember, it happened at two o'clock in the morning.
It's like, I don't know what the temperature was, but it was cold.
It was 20 degrees below zero.
Implausible that two guys are out there waiting for Jussie Smollett.
You know, you know, you know what we're going to do?
Let's get dressed up in our Arctic, in our Arctic overcoats and go attack the star of this show that we never watch and tell him we're in MAGA country when we're in Chi-Town.
Let me just remind you by playing, because the most egregious one was, of course, Good Morning America, run by our old friend George Snuffalupagus, the Clinton hack, the guy who said to Hillary Clinton, I love you, Hillary, the guy who defended her against, defended Bill against charges from all those women, those charges that we now know were probably true.
That's the guy who runs ABC News.
And on that show, Robin Roberts interviewed Jussie Smollett.
And here is just a quick montage of her basically justifying this guy on Good Morning America, talking about the story he told.
An account that Chicago police have said has been consistent.
He hasn't changed his story.
They also said it's credible.
Police have said that.
And also that he has been very cooperative.
It's been two weeks since that night left actor Jesse Smollett bruised but not broken.
And he's still processing the raw emotions.
Have you ever been threatened before?
Yeah.
I get threatened all the time.
And I asked him about if there were other possible threats that he had threats that he had received.
And he did talk about the letter that was sent to the Fox Studio where Empire has said police have confirmed that letter.
And despite lack of video surveillance footage, Smollett hopes to rewrite the narrative about that night, saying he fought back against his attackers and reported the incident after his creative director called 911.
And there is no doubt in your mind what motivated this attack.
I could only go off of their words.
Which he wrote.
By the way, you know, I did watch this as a writer, as a guy who's actually written movies.
Watching this guy, I was reminded of the famous movie All About Eve, in which one of the, in which the playwright turns to the actress and says to her, at what point do actors begin thinking that they make up their own lines?
Every writer knows that actors are just completely incompetent because they're always making suggestions for the story that make them look good but make the story make no sense, which is why so many movies are bad because the actors, the star has so much power.
Here's a good example of a guy telling a story.
I'm sorry, from the minute he said it, I thought, this is not a plausible story.
I don't want to run the guy down.
I was actually a fan of the first season of the show and a fan specifically of his because of his storyline and his incredible talent as a singer.
And of course, is the news media taking responsibility?
Is there any chance that they will begin to ask questions and reform themselves?
And the only way for them to reform themselves is to start hiring some Trump supporters in the editorial positions.
That's the only way to do it.
The only way is to hire some conservatives to argue with them.
They don't have to be Trump supporters, but they have to be people who don't think Trump is the devil himself, is the devil incarnate.
Here is Brian Stelter, CNN's man on the move about the media.
This is the guy who's supposed to hold the media to account.
And he says basically, no, no, no, you know, we didn't do anything wrong.
He says, this is really about just Jussie Smollett.
This is not about the media.
And in some sense, that's true, because I want to ask you a question about this guy just to get him in your head.
Because think about a guy who does this, right?
In my lifetime, I'm not that, no matter what Shapiro says, I'm not that old.
And yet I'm old enough to remember the first black everything.
The first black anything I remember it in show business.
The first black guy on TV, the first black guy to head a series, the first black woman to have a series.
All this stuff I remember.
Jesse Smollett did none of that.
He did none of it, okay?
I remember when gay people could be arrested for being gay.
That was in my lifetime.
Gay people could be arrested just for being gay.
That was vice, okay?
Jesse Smollett didn't change any of that.
He's too young.
He wasn't there.
His life is a gift.
His life is, oh, I walk in, oh, you're going to play the gay, you're a gay guy, so you're going to play the gay black guy on Empire and make whatever incredible amount of money you're making for pretending to be that guy.
And we're going to tell a story about you in which you'll be very sympathetic and you'll be a hero.
Jesse Smollett should be waking up every morning going, what a great country.
I love this.
What a life I have.
Everything is great.
Everything is tickety-boo.
This is terrific.
Instead, instead, it is important to him.
Think about this for a minute.
He needs to be a victim.
He needs to say, oh, I was attacked.
I was threatened.
I was endangered.
People threw bleach and called me names.
He needs that so badly.
If this story is true, and I know we don't know this for a fact yet, but the story up till now has been implausible, and now it's a lot more plausible.
But if this story is true, that was what was important to him.
No gratitude, no gratitude for who he is or what's happened to him or the people who went before him, who made his life possible.
Just it's still going on.
I'm still, you know, I will talk about this more in a minute, but first I have to talk about Hair Club because I know you're distracted by my incredibly good looks and you think like, do I want to look like that?
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All right.
You know, everybody likes to think that they have struggled and succeeded at things.
I always love it when guys stand up in a ward show at a ward show and they've won the Oscar or the Grammy or something, one of these self-congratulating things that show is rife with and they say, they told us it couldn't be done.
And I always think, I would like the names of anyone who told you it couldn't be done.
Who tells people things can't be done in this country?
Anything virtually can be done in this country.
Donald Trump is president.
Anything can happen in this country.
Nobody, nobody got in your way.
Nobody got in Jussie Smollett's way.
Self-Congratulatory Ward Shows00:03:15
Does he get hate mail?
Yeah, I get hate mail.
You know, everybody gets hate mail.
It's a crazy country.
Everybody has access to everybody.
We all get, you know, lies told about us and horrible, horrible things said about us.
But it was necessary for him.
Think about that.
That's the narrative that he is living in.
It's a left-wing narrative.
And, you know, not only does it prevent, does it shade the way people tell the truth, but it also keeps people from telling the truth.
Not only does it shade the way they report the facts, but it keeps people from saying the facts.
Here is Kamilli Foster from Free Think Media.
He's on Brian Stelter's show or he's on a CNN media show.
And he talks about the fact that people off camera doubted this, but wouldn't go on camera and talk about it.
And he talks about why.
This is cut number six.
At a minimum, there were people who I've talked to people off camera.
I've talked to people sort of in green rooms who were skeptical, who had questions about this story, were afraid to raise those concerns because of the intersectional nature of this particular accusation.
And there are plenty of circumstances like that.
And that is something that we have to be aware of.
When there are stories that involve very sensitive issues of race and sexuality, and there are accusations and allegations that are being made, when you raise questions about those allegations, it is often the case that people will raise questions about your motivations.
I am talking about these stories.
I'm talking about the merit of a particular charge.
And at the end of the day, it's whether or not that charge has merit that matters.
And Robin Robbins, in that conversation, in that interview, had an opportunity to say, you know, just there are practical reasons for someone to ask questions about something like this that have nothing to do with your race or your sexuality.
She didn't do that.
And there are far too many instances where serious journalists aren't doing that.
And I wonder if Foster, this fellow who's talking, I wonder if he thinks to himself, well, wait, maybe that means the entire intersectional narrative is wrong.
Maybe if intersectionality produces the inability to speak the truth, maybe there's something at the core of intersectionality.
Because earlier on, he actually says, well, we know for a fact that Trump supporters are racist.
He goes, do you?
How many of you interviewed?
What are the polls?
Where's your study?
How do you know?
And what's your definition of racist?
I mean, even your definition of racism is part of the narrative.
You walk into a prison and you look into the cells and you see that all the people there are black.
Is that evidence of racism or is it evidence that there are no fathers in black families?
It's the narrative.
You know, you don't know what the narrative is.
You have to get a lot of facts and study it from a lot of different angles before you can figure out what the narrative is.
Are black people in prison because people don't like black people or are they in prison because they don't have fathers?
You know, I mean, it's a perfectly good question to ask.
And you're not, and if you, all you do is shout racist, racist, racist, you shut down the narrative.
Listen to the absolute effort here.
Let's go to Knucklehead Row, the op-ed page in the New York Times.
Here we go.
Oh, hey, hey, oh, hey, ho.
Let's go down to Knucklehead Row.
Here is a headline on a story by Cheryl Gay-Stollberg.
Republicans already are demonizing Democrats as socialists and baby killers.
Republicans vs. Democrats00:14:16
I could not get to my computer fast enough to beat what I knew would be the first guy who was going to send out a tweet going, because you're socialists and baby killers.
They're announced socialists.
It's not like it's not like they're hiding it.
They say, we are socialists.
They say, we want the Green New Deal.
It's a socialist program.
There's no hiding that.
And if you don't want to be called a baby killer, I have a suggestion: do not kill your babies.
Don't sit around and say, oh, yes, we'll make the baby comfortable.
And you know, it's this attitude that has caused, that causes what happened when Trump took office that caused this panic among people in the Obama administration and caused them to do what is really now one of the biggest scandals in American history, what the FBI did to Donald Trump.
There is no Russia scandal.
The only scandal, the only true scandal, and it's a huge scandal, is what the FBI did to Donald Trump.
And you can tell it's a scandal because you can tell all the people who lost their jobs over them, one of them being Andrew McCabe.
You know, we played a cut from him last week.
I'm going to play another one because it's just so amazing.
He's on 60 Minutes and he's talking about the atmosphere when Donald Trump became president and when Donald Trump fired, as he should have done, James Comey.
I can't describe to you accurately enough the pressure and the chaos that Rod and I were trying to operate under at that time.
It was incredibly turbulent, incredibly stressful, and it was clear to me that that stress was impacting the Deputy Attorney General.
We talked about why the president had insisted on firing the director and whether or not he was thinking about the Russia investigation and did that impact his decision.
And in the context of that conversation, the Deputy Attorney General offered to wear a wire into the White House.
He said, I never get searched when I go into the White House.
I could easily wear a recording device.
They wouldn't know it was there.
Now, he was not joking.
He was absolutely serious.
And in fact, he brought it up in the next meeting we had.
I never actually considered taking him up on the offer.
I did discuss it with my general counsel and my leadership team back at the FBI after he brought it up the first time.
You know, this is truly amazing.
First of all, Rod Rosenstein, we should mention, says this isn't true, that he never was going to wear a wire or anything like this.
This is his description, McCabe's description, of why they started the Russia Trump investigation.
The tension, the terrible tension.
It was unbelievable.
What was generating the tension?
Was it Donald Trump generating the tension, or was it their sense of Donald Trump?
Was it their cloud of narrative that created the tension that made them do what they did?
It was the fact that they were surrounded by people who thought they were in charge of preserving the Republic when all they were really in charge of doing was investigating crimes and doing counterintelligence investigations.
There was no crime to investigate Trump for.
Remember, they're not doing, there was never a criminal investigation of Donald Trump.
There was a counterintelligence investigation, which was based on the fact that they didn't like what Trump was saying about Putin.
I mean, that is an amazing, amazing thing.
It should, you know, Lindsey Graham is calling for an investigation, and I agree with him.
Do we have the Graham cut?
Yeah, there is cut one.
I think everybody in the country needs to know if it happened.
It's stunning to me that one of the chief law enforcement officers of the land, the acting head of the FBI, would go on national television and say, oh, by the way, I remember a conversation with the Deputy Attorney General about trying to find if we could replace the president under the 25th Amendment.
We're a democracy.
People who enforce the law can't take it in their own hands.
And was this an attempted bureaucratic coup?
I don't know.
I don't know who's telling the truth.
I know Rosenstein's vehemently denied it, but we're going to get to the bottom of it.
I do know there was a lot of monkey business about FISA warrants being issued against Carter Page, about dossiers coming from Russia that were unverified.
Mr. Mueller is going to look at the Trump campaign as he should to see if they violated any laws during the 2016 election.
And I'm going to do everything I can to get to the bottom of the Department of Justice FBI behavior toward President Trump and his campaign.
I mean, that is the responsible thing to do.
This was a genuine, it looks like genuine malfeasance, and it looks like an attempted coup.
I'm sure they didn't think of it as an attempted coup, but it reminds me of those old thrillers they used to write back in the 70s, like seven days in May, where all the bureaucrats get together and the military people get together to overturn the presidency that they don't like.
So what does Brian Stelter do?
He goes on TV and mocks the idea of a coup.
Now, remember, you have to remember this.
All the news stories that have come out of CNN about what Trump was going to do, he was going to fire Mueller.
He was going to interfere.
He was going to obstruct justice.
He was obstructing justice.
All the number of times CNN has had people on who called Trump guilty of treason, right?
All those times, and that's been in every paper.
Oh, Trump is planning to do this.
Trump has not done one thing, not one thing, to interfere with this investigation.
He's complained about it.
It obviously drives him nuts.
But he has not done, as president, one thing to interfere with Mueller or any of the Senate or House investigations, not one thing.
So listen to what Stelter is making fun of.
Coup, coup, coup, Oliver Fox News.
Watch.
Was this a coup?
An attempted coup?
A coup d'état.
A soft coup.
For lack of a better word, coup.
This is a low energy coup.
It's a coup attempt.
An open coup.
Essentially a coup.
It was like, essentially a coup.
So it's even reached some of the president's family members.
Philip Bump, what are they talking about?
Yeah, what are they talking about?
Maybe they're talking about it's a coup.
You know, I mean, you can make fun of them for all using the same word, but it happens to be a good word.
He cannot get out of the narrative.
They will mention when they've made a mistake sometimes, but they will not change the narrative.
They won't admit that it's the narrative that made them do it.
I'm going to talk about one way this may be happening on the right in just a second.
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So here is something that pains me.
You know, Donald Trump called this emergency, declared an emergency at the border.
And I don't think it's a good idea.
Let me be blunt.
It's not.
People keep saying, well, the left has declared emergencies.
They're not the same.
Most of the emergencies that have been declared have to do with freezing assets of hostile nations and hostile parties.
To declare an emergency at the border is to extend executive power in a way that makes me and should make every conservative uncomfortable.
So Rush Limbaugh, and I got to preface this by saying, Rush is like a hero to me.
Rush is the granddaddy of all commentators.
When he says he is 98.7% right or whatever he says, he is.
He has literally changed the culture of this country for the better.
He is a hero among broadcasters and among people who care about the culture.
He's a great guy.
This is a moment when I disagree with him so seriously that I have to bring it up because it's a narrative that I think we can fall into, which is the Trump narrative, the narrative that if Trump does it, it must be right.
Principles matter because principles will come back to bite you.
Here is Chris Wallace calling Rush out on the fact that Rush slammed Obama, quite rightly, for his executive orders and his unconstitutional use of executive orders, but is celebrating this emergency order at the border.
I understand that you like what President Trump is doing and you didn't like what President Obama was doing, but that's the concern here, is that to the degree that you give the president more and more powers, yes, you're going to get some things, executive powers from one president you like, but you're going to get things, executive powers from another president that you don't like.
You may look at it that way.
I don't.
I look at it right and wrong.
And what Obama was doing was furthering this existing problem in a, he was politicizing this, using whatever executive powers he wanted to use.
Yes, I objected to that, but primarily because of what he was doing with these executive powers.
He was taking action that I deemed to be harmful to the country.
I look at what Trump is doing as something he has to do because he's not getting any cooperation.
Both parties, Chris, let's be honest here.
Both parties have people that are still trying to get rid of Donald Trump.
Again, worship Rush.
The guy's a God to me, but that is a bad answer.
The idea that you do something because you can't get cooperation from Congress, that's the way the government works.
If you don't get cooperation from Congress, you don't have cooperation from Congress.
You've got to get it.
You've got to be in there wrangling the cats and pushing them around and making sure you get the cooperation you need.
He's right.
There are people on both sides who do not want to solve this issue.
There are people on both sides who do want to get rid of Donald Trump.
But it's not a question.
You know, good outcomes can be gotten by bad means, and the bad means can override the good outcome.
I mean, we always knew this when Obama was president.
It's not what you do.
It's sometimes how you do it.
If the Supreme Court is making law, it doesn't matter if the law is on our side or their side.
That's not their job.
Their job is to play referee.
Is this law constitutional or not?
When the Supreme Court declares that you have a right to have an abortion or you have a right to have a homosexual marriage, whether you agree with those things or not, that is not the way our laws should be made.
And once you have that in place, it all becomes a question of power.
It all becomes a question of who has the power.
If you're going to silence the free speech and free religion rights of a cake baker because he doesn't want to go to a gay wedding, then when his side has the power, they're going to silence your right to have a gay wedding.
Your freedom depends on the freedom of the people you hate.
Your freedom depends on the freedom of the people you hate.
And Rush got this one wrong.
I hope he thinks about it and changes his mind because he's always right.
And I hate to disagree with him.
But that's the way the narrative can work for us, too.
You know, you get swallowed up in this cloud and you don't realize that the narrative itself is wrong.
It is almost time for our next episode of The Conversation tomorrow at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific.
None other than Michael Knowles will be answering all of your questions.
So send him some really difficult ones because I like to laugh at him when he gets things wrong.
As always, this episode will be free for everyone to watch on Facebook and YouTube, but only subscribers can ask the questions.
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So that'll make it worthwhile.
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Join the conversation.
Mr. Knowles himself, the star of Another Kingdom, is going to be with us in just a moment.
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Hi.
Long time to see.
Michael Knowles.
You know, at least I don't say nasty things behind your back.
I say them right to my face, six inches away.
I appreciate that.
So you are traveling a lot, and I noticed you're now being threatened.
Finally.
You know, I've been threatened.
I'm sorry.
Either me.
Between you and Ben, it's like having 10 Antifa groups around every day.
But I've been going around the country spreading hate facts now for at least a year.
I hate those hate facts.
Those hate facts.
They're all hate lies.
So I'm giving a speech on Thursday.
I'm very excited for this.
In Notre Dame, there's been a big controversy over Christopher Columbus.
They're covering up pictures of Christopher Columbus.
They want to tear down Christopher Columbus.
Notre Dame.
He's just on the land that Christopher Columbus helped fly.
Christopher Columbus is one of the greatest men in all of history.
He's a great man.
He is a truly great man.
He is blamed for things that he never did.
He is blamed for things that other people did.
He is vilified for doing good things.
He is one of the great all-time men of history.
We should all be profoundly grateful to him.
I will be giving that speech at Notre Dame on Thursday.
I may not make it back.
I may be beheaded on the spot.
I can't believe this.
They actually are calling for people to attack you.
Yes, they are.
Antifa is now calling for people to come out and attack me at Notre Dame.
And I am more than willing.
People always say, this is how you know that you're having a Twitter argument in bad faith.
They say, well, is this the hill you're willing to die on?
I said, I'm not going to die on a hill.
I just want to give my opinion.
This is a hill I'm willing to die on.
Christopher Columbus is the hill.
I will defend that guy and all of the Western civilization he represents.
One of the great Jewish men of history.
One of the great Jewish men.
That's one of my favorite theories about Christopher Columbia.
He may have been, actually.
Lincoln's Legacy00:09:49
No.
I think the evidence is sketchy.
I'm willing to entertain all sorts of historical conspiracy theories.
I'm not totally buying that one.
But he was black and an alien.
His navigator was a Jewish.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
And he actually, I mean, he did leave at the very year that the Jews were expelled from.
So a lot of people think like, well, he was getting at a Dodge.
That's why.
It's like he didn't go to Discover America.
We don't need to go to the Indies, but we can't stay here.
All right, let us talk.
You know what?
One quick, we've got to go one quick ad for Another Kingdom.
Let's do it.
AnotherKingdomBook.com.
If you pre-order, you get all kinds of goodies, including a prequel that I wrote that's almost the size of a small novel.
And you can do it by getting also your audiobook, which is you.
The audiobook was so fun to record.
I told you, I hate to compliment you like this.
I actually teared up.
I had to take a moment when I was recording some of the last chapters of Another Kingdom, the audiobook.
It's just fabulous.
It's a great novel.
And I don't even like novels.
And it takes a lot for me to like.
This is the only novel you've read since I've met you, I think.
All right, let's talk about President's Day.
Happy.
It is President's Day.
It is.
Well, it's Washington's birthday.
It's Washington's birthday, right?
It really is, right?
It actually isn't President's Day.
There is no federal holiday called President's Day.
It remains Washington's birthday.
Yet, everyone says President's Day now because we live in a degraded culture.
It's a degraded culture.
I mean, I don't want to celebrate like Millard Fillmore.
Do I want to celebrate Franklin Pierce?
Oh, happy Franklin Pierce Day.
You know, there was an act of Congress in 1789.
It established a holiday for George Washington's birthday.
This is a good thing.
George Washington is the greatest president of all time.
He is consistently ranked the greatest president of all time.
Deservedly so.
Part of the confusion of whose birthday it is is because, actually because of Protestantism, because when the fall of Rome, Protestantism, those Protestant Visigoths.
It was in because the Church of England left Rome before the advent of the Gregorian calendar.
So we measured Washington's birthday on the Julian calendar, and then later we switched over to the Gregorian calendar.
And so there was always this question of, well, was Washington's birthday on February 22nd?
Was it on this date because of the Julian calendar?
So Washington is born February 22nd.
Lincoln is born February 12th.
So some people wanted to combine the two into one holiday, President's Day.
Now, those two guys, I'm happy to celebrate.
Some of the others, not so much.
There was an attempt in 1951 to establish the President's Day Committee.
Virtually anything that ends in committee is going to be bad.
It's going to turn out for the worse.
So there was this movement to try to get the law changed.
There was a vote in 1968 to change the law to an all-encompassing President's Day.
It failed because people love Washington.
But in the 80s, corporate America, which is the culture, it is leftist culture, decided to start advertising President's Day broadly.
And that's how we ended up with this confusion.
No kidding, this is a corporate, this is a- This is a total corporate event.
You don't even hear them say Washington's birthday anymore.
I mean, you still see Washington and Lincoln as the representatives of President's Day, if it's not sheets.
I mean, mostly it's about sheets.
That's only for the Democrat presidents, though.
Yeah, that's true.
How did it become about betting?
Where did that become the best?
That's a really great question.
You know, they started this trend.
And so now people, it's always Washington and Lincoln.
But they're, you know, look, they were white guys, probably straight Lincoln.
I don't know, some questions.
And what it really is, is, I'm sort of joking about the identity politics of it, but it is that we feel uncomfortable attributing giving veneration to individual men.
You know, it's really interesting about George Washington especially.
Everybody, everybody has had revisionist history.
It was true that they put forward, it was a nonsense theory, but they put forward that Lincoln was gay because in those days men would actually share a bed if he was a girl.
He had a roommate.
Yeah, so they said he's gay.
What does that say about?
He had multiple roommates.
But no, you know, that was nonsense.
But they've done all this revisionist history.
And there are interesting questions about Lincoln.
There are interesting questions about the fact that he shifted the kind of center of gravity of American gravity from liberty to union.
And that's a legitimate question.
I mean, everything is overridden by the evil of slavery, so he gets away with it.
But I think it's an interesting thing to discuss.
With Washington, they cannot lay a finger on him.
I mean, the guy was just, he was exactly what everybody at the time said he was.
He was like the avatar of virtue, basically.
King George III is said to have said, with actually good provenance, that George Washington was the greatest man in the world.
Because he refused to be king.
That's right.
He had an army at his back.
He walks in with an army at his back and hands his sword over to the civilian army.
Hans over his commission.
I mean, I can't think of, does that happen any other time in history?
They talk about Cincinnati going home, you know, after winning the fight.
But nobody with that much power, and the people would have celebrated him.
They would have celebrated him as king.
That's right.
And he is peerless.
He is simply peerless.
And so this is what's so offensive.
Even ranking Lincoln there.
Lincoln, one of the great presidents.
But even none of them touch Washington.
That's right.
And so today, to celebrate President's Day, we're celebrating Andrew Johnson.
One-term president, Democrat VP for Lincoln.
He supported an end to slavery.
He opposed the 14th Amendment.
He opposed bringing the South around during Reconstruction.
He basically said, let them do whatever they want.
He vetoed the first civil rights bill.
Republicans have passed virtually all of the civil rights bills, with one exception, in 1964.
And even that civil rights bill was passed with majority Republican support.
He vetoed that.
He only survived impeachment because he didn't have a vice president to replace him.
And everyone was afraid of Benjamin Wade.
He was the first.
Killing Lincoln was one of the most effective assassinations in history.
It really did.
It changed everything.
Reconstruction would not have been the disaster it was.
And I don't think that the Jim Crow things would have necessarily taken hold if Lincoln had remained.
Because Jim Crow really only began in earnest a couple decades after the Civil War.
It was really a bizarre reaction.
People like to pretend that the antebellum South was full of lynchings and Jim Crow had a lot of slavery.
But Jim Crow was a reaction to the Civil War, to radical Reconstruction.
And radical Reconstruction, which I don't think Lincoln would have supported.
I mean, obviously, yeah, you had to reconstruct, but you do.
Look, it was a utter, when you have an evil like that, like slavery, it has consequences.
Well, this is what's interesting.
When you look at all of the worst presidents, you try to, you know, you read a biography of every president, you try to.
Basically, the question of slavery is what separates the wheat from the chaff.
So you have James Buchanan, another widely considered one of the worst presidents in history, fairly so, one-term president just before the Civil War, also a Democrat, just coincidental, also like Johnson.
He was pro-slavery.
He defeated the first ever GOP candidate, John Fremont.
He allegedly, and historians buy this, influenced the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott, which said that blacks can never become American citizens.
Dred Scott was decided before Buchanan was inaugurated, but after he won the election, and it's believed that he leaned on the court, he thought that would end the slavery question forever.
Good thinking.
Good thinking, buddy.
Well done, James.
He basically let the Civil War break out.
He was a bachelor.
It's kind of weird.
You know, bachelor president.
I'm not listening.
I don't know that there's anything wrong with that.
Franklin Pierce, another one.
Franklin Pierce did one good thing.
He was the first president to put up a Christmas tree in the White House.
Good for him.
Good for him.
Also one term, also vehemently pro-slavery, even after he left office, vehement critic of Lincoln.
He took the oath of office not on a Bible.
He took it on a law book.
This is the kind of guy he was.
He gave his entire 3,300 words.
He was a creep.
He was a real creep.
He gave his 3,300-word inaugural address from memory and then immediately canceled his inaugural ball.
You get this sense of him as just a sort of like sociopath robot, you know.
He was also a drunk who died from alcoholism, but occasionally had bursts of championing temperance.
He was one of those guys.
Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.
And then you get to Fillmore, Millard Fillmore, as we mentioned him earlier, another one-term president, last Whig president.
He told Zachary Taylor, who was president before him.
Fillmore's the vice president.
Fillmore is a war hero.
He's a Whig.
He's anti-slavery.
He's a great guy.
He told Taylor. that he would back the compromise of 1850, fugitive slave laws, all of these laws that entrench slavery, basically bring us the Civil War.
And Zachary Taylor is there, dying, saying, no, no, no, don't do this.
No.
Taylor dies.
Fillmore doubles down, supports this compromise after Taylor died in office.
Maybe it put off the Civil War a few years, but it made it inevitable.
You know, this is actually, you're making a really good point.
In some ways, this kind of supports some leftist narrative that racism has divided.
I mean, probably Woodrow Wilson is one of my least favorite presidents.
And one of the first presidents that blacks, first Democrats that blacks voted for, just a screaming racist.
That's a horrible expression.
Oh, yeah.
He's certainly one of the worst presidents.
He was the Obama of his age.
I mean, the left loved him, the intellectuals loved him, and all this.
So we have to finish, but like, is this still officially Washington's birthday?
Yes, we are officially celebrating Washington's birthday.
David Brock's Shift00:07:24
And, you know, I have to, before we leave, I do have to make a point.
People always say Warren Harding is one of the worst presidents.
They go, because all the actual worst presidents are Democrats.
So they try to throw in Warren Harding.
Warren Harding was a very good president.
Was he?
Returned to normalcy.
He was extraordinarily popular when he was alive.
He won the presidency by the greatest popular vote margin up to that point in history.
He gave us Calvin Coolidge upon his death.
What a wonderful thing to do.
Only guy to shrink the government.
He was great on civil rights.
He was great on anti-lynching.
They try to harangue him for this one stupid scandal after he died, this non-troversy called Teapot Dome.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
You know, he gave a sweetheart contract or whatever.
Who cares?
It's BS.
All of the worst presidents from Wilson before Wilson, after Wilson, they were all Democrats.
And coincidentally, a lot of it does focus on their treatment of race, slavery, and racism being an affront to human dignity.
It is an affront.
What are you talking about on your show?
Well, now I'm going to have to talk about this.
I'm all fired up.
No, I'm going to be talking about fake hate hoaxes and real state hoaxes.
Excellent.
Real state crimes, rather.
Yes, yes.
That's an excellent subject.
Noel's on after me and also tomorrow on the conversation, 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific.
Thanks a lot.
I got to end up with just talking about something that happened over me, happened to me over the weekend.
I was at California State University, and thank you very much for hosting me, California State University.
And it was a lovely program.
But I felt really kind of overwhelmed by it.
It was about fake news.
And it was me and Amy Holmes, who was also a conservative, and then two liberals, a liberal sociology professor, I think it was.
And I can't remember what the other one was, but they were both liberals.
But they were both liberals who didn't know they were liberals.
They just thought they were kind of normal.
Nice people.
And this is nothing personal about this.
But I was stunned by the kind of the way the cloud, the cloud of narrative just surrounded us, so that I felt like a crank for pointing out when people were saying things that I just didn't think were true.
So like, for instance, we were talking to young people.
I don't know if they were high school students or young college students.
But they would say, well, how can we defend ourselves against fake news?
And people would say, well, go to the established sites like CNN.
And I would say, but CNN is a left-wing station.
And everybody would roll their eyes.
Oh, there's the old conservative.
But CNN is a left-wing station.
I mean, it is a left-wing station.
They would say, you know, go to PolitiFact.
PolitiFact.
You know, the Federalists once did a very, very close computer study of PolitiFact and showed that the way they treat Republicans is much, much different than the way they treat Democrats and that all their most honest politicians are Democrats and all their least honest politicians are Republicans.
And unless you believe that Democrats lie less than Republicans, which just on the face of it is nonsense.
You know, you have to know that PolitiFact is a left-leaning organization.
And that's the way, that's why I feel like nobody should censor fake news because nobody is completely objective.
Let the people learn how to get information.
But it was just really interesting.
I mean, let me just play this piece of a CNN covering Kamala Harris.
OK, there's CNN and there's a CBS reporter in here, too, I think, covering Kamala Harris.
And they go and help her buy a jacket.
She's got her hands out.
Oh, yeah.
That's it.
Let's go, Midnight.
Yeah, so it's kind of like that time they went out and helped Donald Trump buy a tie.
You know, you remember, oh, wait, that never happened.
And it never will happen.
And this cloud, it's so, what really struck me about this panel was how hard it was for me to simply say, I don't want to be the frog in the salad.
You know, I mean, it's hard to me to simply say that some of these things that you know to be true are not true.
Everybody, everybody, all three of them were talking about Pizzagate.
Pizzagate was, of course, you remember, the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was running child sex ring through this Washington, D.C. pizza parlor.
That was dumb.
At the time, I said it was dumb.
I remember right-wingers sending me all kinds of hate mail, telling me how awful it was, and obviously this was a true story.
It was obviously a false story.
But the pizza parlor in question was owned by the former lover of David Brock.
David Brock is a smear merchant.
He used to be a right-wing smear merchant.
Now he's a left-wing smear merchant.
He is the guy who has been the main power, the Soros-funded power behind the crusade to censor fake news on social media, which is all means censoring conservatives.
No left-winger is ever thrown off Twitter or Facebook.
Only guys like Knowles, Jeremy Boring, the God King of the Daily Wire, was thrown off for making a joke about Cabbage.
That doesn't happen to liberals.
David Brock was the guy.
So there's some question, at least, of whether Pizzagate, which was believed by idiots on the right, but whether it was started by people on the left as part of a plan to make fake news an issue.
Remember, fake news became an issue because an organization funded by Alphabet, the people who own Google, and the second biggest contributors to the Hillary Clinton campaign, they started the campaign.
This is all from Cheryl Atkinson's book, Smear.
And they started the campaign, and then Barack Obama took up the campaign saying, oh, we have to censor fake news.
We have to get people to curate fake news.
Then Hillary Clinton took it up, and then David Brock.
And it was David Brock whose ex-lover ran the pizza parlor.
And when the guy walked in and shot up the pizza parlor, that's when this became a big, big issue.
All I'm saying is there's a lot of things that people know that aren't true.
And when you have information, I have a lot of information about the media and the way the media works.
And when you have that information, you find yourself just kind of cranking about it.
And that's the power of narrative.
And I'm going to talk about a little bit more tomorrow about how powerful narrative is over history, because the things that happen without the majority actually supporting them are amazing.
It's not the majority that moves things.
It's the vocal minority who owns the culture.
My battery is running low and it's getting dark.
I got to go.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'll 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.
Fake hate crimes and real state crimes abound as Jesse Smollett's ridiculous story finally falls apart and the FBI's even more ridiculous story about Trump and Russia falls apart as well.