Ep. 658 – Socialism Rising exposes how socialist policies—from the 1928 platform’s nationalization demands to Bernie Sanders’ "justice" agenda—have infiltrated mainstream politics despite minimal electoral success, fueled by media bias (85% Democrat journalists) and polling distortions. The episode ties leftist narratives to the 2008 financial crisis, Jussie Smollett’s hoax, and Hollywood’s woke double standards, where figures like Smollett face no consequences while others (Roseanne Barr, Kevin Hart) are destroyed. Christian Toto highlights Oscar politics as propaganda, dismissing Roma’s win over Green Book as ideological, and warns of cultural surrender to authoritarian "climate justice" plans like AOC’s Green New Deal, concluding that reclaiming media narratives—not elections—is the only path to resistance. [Automatically generated summary]
I was sitting around minding my own business when suddenly I was attacked by a gang of thugs screaming racist and anti-Republican slurs.
One of these animals, a raving white woman with the dead eyes of a zombie, screeched in my face, if you voted for Donald Trump because you didn't like Hillary Clinton, that doesn't make you not racist.
That makes you racist.
She then put a noose around my neck, but she worked for CNN, so I think it was fake news.
After that, a particularly idiotic-looking black man with a bizarre twitch of saying the word racist over and over again for no apparent reason screamed at me, we have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men.
Luckily, I was able to knock him unconscious, which seemed to make absolutely no difference in the intelligence level of his remarks.
After that, a crazy old woman with a bottle of Chardonnay gripped tightly in her fist staggered out of the mob and bellowed, you and your kind are deplorable racists and haters.
She then attempted to throw bleach at me, but it turned out to be bleach bit, which only erased all the information on my cell phone, which she then tried to smash with a hammer, thinking it was her cell phone because she was drunk out of her mind.
Police are interviewing several people of interest, including Kirsten Powers, Don Lemon, and Hillary Clinton, and they're now saying that someone may have hired these people to launch these mindless attacks on me, namely CNN and the rest of the Democrat Party.
Already, this vicious attack is being compared to the attack on actor Jussie Smollett in Chicago, although one significant difference between the two incidents has emerged.
News organizations have not yet reported on that difference because none of them has taken the trouble to look up the meaning of the word reality.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
So here's a chilling little piece of information from the famous 1980 book Free to Choose, which was by Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman and his wife Rose.
So here's a really good idea.
Friedman was probably the most influential economist of the Ronald Reagan presidency.
And he writes this, he says, in 1928, the Socialist Party put forward an extremist platform.
And as Friedman points out, because they had no chance of winning, they didn't have to mince words about it.
They could just state their principles bluntly.
The platform involved nationalizing travel and some energy, interest-free state loans, shorter workdays, and all that stuff.
At no time, at no time from 1928 on did the Socialist Party ever receive more than 6% of the popular vote for president.
And more often, they were down around 1 or 2%.
And yet, by the time the Friedman book was written, virtually every plank of their socialist platform had been enacted into law.
How come?
Well, the Friedmen say it was because the climate of opinion changed.
That's what I usually call the narrative.
Influential intellectuals in universities and in the media went from believing in liberty, self-reliance, and local voluntary institutions caring for their own, basically the American way, to thinking that government programs were needed to solve all our problems, regardless of the fact that government programs have disastrous effects on family, charitable giving, and individual freedom.
Today, we're making fun of the Green New Deal as an idiotic plan to put a final end to the incredibly successful American way, and we keep pointing out that the polls are against it.
But the narrative, the climate of opinion, is on the side of socialism and the end of freedom.
And if we're not fighting that battle, we're not fighting at all.
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All right, so let me-I'm going to read you a couple of paragraphs from the New York Times, a former newspaper, and see if you can spot the big lie embedded in this story.
All right, just a couple of paragraphs, but just see how subtle this is, how subtly they lie, but how completely they lie.
All right, Trump delivers blunt warning to Venezuela military over aid empasse.
He's warning Venezuela that if they don't get their act together, maybe get rid of Maduro, they're going to have trouble getting American aid.
Dateline, Miami.
Okay, this is by Anatoly Curramansi, Nicolas Casey, and Anna Carney.
I guess they couldn't get a job at a real nice newspaper, so they had to settle for the Times.
All right, here's the story: President Trump on Monday delivered his sharpest warning yet to Venezuela's military authorities in an increasingly tense showdown over that country's crisis, proclaiming they would lose everything by remaining loyal to President Nicolas Maduro and refusing to allow an emergency, refusing to allow in emergency aid stockpiled on the border.
Mr. Trump gave the warning in a speech denouncing Venezuela's brand of socialism to an enthusiastic crowd in Miami that included many Americans of Venezuelan descent who have fled Venezuela or have relatives in the country, once Latin America's wealthiest but now facing the greatest economic collapse in generations.
Now, here's a clip with some selections of what Donald Trump said.
See if you can spot the lie in the Times story.
Venezuela was the wealthiest nation by far in South America.
But years of socialist rule have brought this once thriving nation to the brink of ruin.
That's where it is today.
The tyrannical socialist government nationalized private industries and took over private businesses.
They engaged in massive wealth confiscation, shut down free markets, suppressed free speech, and set up a relentless propaganda machine, rigged elections, used the government to persecute their political opponents, and destroyed the impartial rule of law.
In other words, the socialists have done in Venezuela all of the same things that socialists, communists, totalitarians have done everywhere that they've had a chance to rule.
Socialism has so completely ravaged this great country that even the world's largest reserves of oil are no longer enough to keep the lights on.
This will never happen to us.
Okay, did you catch it?
Did you catch the big lie buried in the New York Times story?
Here it is again.
I'm going to read it to you again.
It's just this one sentence.
Mr. Trump gave the warning in a speech denouncing Venezuela's brand of socialism to an enthusiastic crowd in Miami that included many Americans of Venezuelan descent.
Did you hear Donald Trump say anything about a brand of socialism, about a specific kind of socialism as opposed to some other kind of socialism?
And didn't he specifically say that the socialists have done in Venezuela what socialists do wherever they rule?
But the New York Times, the New York Times hates Donald Trump.
They couldn't even report what he said because they are so committed.
They are so committed to creating the climate of opinion, to creating the narrative that socialism, that there is a form of socialism that works, that's different.
They actually put the words into Donald Trump's mouth.
They said that he denounced Venezuela's brand of socialism.
He didn't.
He denounced socialism in total.
And yet, and yet more and more people are signing on to this.
Bernie Sanders announced that he was running for the presidency and there was absolutely nothing.
McConnell's Safe Bet00:04:25
He held nothing back.
He said exactly what he wants to do.
Here's his part of his announcement.
Our campaign is not only about defeating Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in modern American history.
It is not only about winning the Democratic nomination and the general election.
Our campaign is about transforming our country and creating a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial, and environmental justice.
Our campaign is about taking on the powerful special interests that dominate our economic and political life.
I'm talking about Wall Street, the health insurance companies, the drug companies, the fossil fuel industry, the military-industrial complex, the private prison industry, and the large multinational corporations that exert such an enormous influence over our lives.
Our campaign is about redoubling our efforts to end racism, sexism, homophobia, religious bigotry, and all forms of discrimination.
So there it is.
It's the social justice, and it's all going to be done through identity politics.
You know that he's not ending any kind of bigotry at all.
And when he says religious bigotry, you know that it's not going to be religious bigotry against Christians.
He only means religious bigotry against Islam or any other religion that is anti-Western.
That's what he means.
And you know that he doesn't mean actual fairness for black people or gay people.
He only means fairness for black people or gay people who toe the socialist line.
Identity politics is just a mask for socialism.
But there it is.
He's out there.
And last time he did really well.
Now, look, you could make the argument that last time he did really well, you can say, well, he did really well in spite of the fact that the Democrat Party was protecting Hillary Clinton.
But you could also say that he wouldn't have done as if they hadn't been protecting Hillary Clinton.
There would have been other candidates who would have taken his thunder away.
I don't know.
But young people were awfully, awfully enthusiastic.
And I'll talk about that more in just a second.
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Enter Klavin.
How do you spell it?
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Fred Barnes, remember Fred Barnes?
He founded the Weekly Standard, which just went out of business.
He was a big George W. Bush supporter.
He writes a piece in the Wall Street Journal, an interview with Mitch McConnell, Cocaine Mitch, in the Senate, which is really interesting.
This is Barnes speaking.
He says, we're entering a new political era.
The issues are bigger.
They're far outside the mainstream.
And they're reminiscent of an earlier time, and the stakes are higher.
One of the first to recognize this was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
I can pretty safely say, says McConnell, I can pretty safely say this is the first time in my political career that I thought the essence of America was being debated.
I never thought we would be debating things that were debated in the 30s, both communism and socialism.
Those ideologies were largely discredited at a time when Americans would have found these arguments pretty appealing in the middle of the Great Depression.
McConnell thinks socialism ought to be a tough sell today given the prosperous economy and low unemployment.
But, you know, let me pause there for a minute, because that's not actually true.
Why Socialism Resurfaces00:14:24
I mean, the fact is the better things get, the more small problems seem like big problems.
The more, you know, we were talking about Jussie Smollett yesterday and his attitude of ingratitude.
I mean, this is the thing.
You know, we all know that gratitude makes your life better.
It makes you feel better.
It makes you happier.
And it's also when things are going relatively well, it's also realistic.
You're lucky to be alive.
You're lucky to be free.
You're lucky to be in a country where people aren't putting you in jail for expressing your opinion yet.
And, you know, if you have that attitude, like I said, Jussie Smollett is a lucky man.
Jussie Smollett is born in a time when he can be who he is.
He can be a gay black guy and be a success without it being any controversy at all.
No one, no one except a leftist is surprised that Jussie Smollett was a success.
And yet he is trained, he's taught that he has to be upset, that he has to be, he's oppressed.
And if he's not oppressed and people are not treating him like a victim, he has to go out and pretend to be oppressed.
And that narrative is important to them.
The narrative is important because it keeps them dependent.
It keeps people dependent, blacks, gays, women, whoever buys into the victocrat illusion is dependent on government largesse.
The government is going to protect you.
It's going to protect you.
You need your snowflake.
You need your safe space.
The government is going to protect you.
All the authorities are going to protect you.
You can't do it alone.
You can't build a business.
Everybody hates you.
Everybody's out to get you.
You walk outside just to get a sandwich in 30-degree weather.
Two large guys are going to attack you and call you names.
You know, that attitude, that attitude is why people think, oh, we need a government takeover of all those businesses and everything's so bad.
And the stuff they're complaining about, in the old days, they were complaining about lynching, stuff that was bad.
They were complaining about the fact that they couldn't get a job, that they couldn't be treated fairly.
That's not, it's just not so anymore in an institutional way.
Everything the government can do about racism, government has done, which is namely get the racism out of the government.
Now it's up to you to be good enough and successful enough and creative enough and excellent enough where people just have to give you stuff for what you create.
I mean, that's the way it works.
That's the way every single minority in America has gotten ahead, not through government largesse, but by basically saying, hey, you know, I don't care if you hate me.
You're going to want my product.
You're going to want my services.
There is every indication that that would happen with black people because it does happen with the people who come here from places like Jamaica where they don't have that ethos, that Victocrat ethos.
But they're so committed to this narrative.
Listen to this.
This is from, I think Grabian put this out.
Corey Booker and Kamala Harris both reacted.
I know this is a bit of a side issue, but still, it is part of this point of why socialism, why we've created an atmosphere where socialism, which has failed everywhere, could be sold to us in the midst of our success.
Here is Kamala Harris and Corey Booker reacting to the Jussie Smollett news before and after the news was basically put in doubt.
Senator Corey Booker said the vicious attack on actor Jussie was an attempted modern-day lynching.
Kamala Harris calling the attack an attempted modern-day lynching.
Which tweet?
What tweet?
About saying that it is a modern-day lynching.
Sorry.
Jussie Smollett.
Okay, so I will say this about that case.
I think that the facts are still unfolding, and I'm very concerned about obviously.
Well, the information is still coming out, and I'm going to withhold until all the information actually comes out from on-the-record sources.
We know in America that bigoted and biased attacks are on the rise.
So before it's a lynching, it's terrible.
And afterward, it's like, let's let the facts come out.
Afterward, afterward, after things start to fall apart, then they start to get cautious about the facts.
But even so, Corey Booker wants to sell the narrative.
And he's right that hate crimes are on the rise.
You know who they're on the rise against?
Mostly?
Jews.
I mean, as always, it's the Jews.
And I mean, I think that, and who's pushing that narrative?
The left.
Who's pushing the anti-religious narrative?
A lot of the hate crimes are against religious people for religious reasons.
Who's pushing that narrative?
I mean, it's the left.
And so, you know, I don't know, they can be thrilled by the rise in hate crimes.
And a lot of these hate crimes, by the way, are minor stuff.
I mean, it's bad.
We always have to add that even one hate crime is too many, but human nature being what it is, there's going to be that.
So anyway, this is a big deal.
The idea that we're victims, that everything is bad, is one of the reasons socialism is gaining ground.
But there's another, and this is an important one, and it has to do with both the right and the left.
We went through a major, major economic crisis in 2008.
This was a big, big crash, and our leaders failed us on every single side.
First of all, the origins of the crash came on the left.
There was a narrative sold that banks were not making home loans to black people.
There were big articles about it, big studies about it.
It was untrue.
It was untrue.
Banks were not making loans to people who couldn't pay them back.
And of course, in areas where the poverty was mostly among black people, that was going to affect black people, but it was never racist.
The numbers proved that it wasn't racist.
But they used that.
They put the big narrative push to make sure that banks were demonized.
And then they said to banks, you better start making those loans or we're coming after you for racism.
So banks started loaning to people who couldn't pay the loans back.
And they started selling loans to people, telling them not to worry about it.
They couldn't pay it back.
At the same time, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd in the House and in the Senate started pushing this Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac.
Was that that?
Yeah, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, these two essentially government institutions that were going to back up these loans.
So all these loans were apparently backed up.
Wall Street is now stuck, right, because that's where the loans go.
Wall Street is now stuck with all these bad loans.
What are they going to do?
Wall Street starts to bundle the loans so that all that bad money spreads out through the economy.
And when people, big surprise, when people can't pay back their loans, the economy collapsed.
I mean, it just fell in.
It was hollowed out by leftist theory and by reckless Wall Street.
Now, Adam McKay, who just made that movie Vice, he makes the movie based on the book, I read the book as well, called The Big Short, blaming everything on Wall Street.
Everything was Wall Street's fault.
It wasn't.
It was Barney Frank, George W. Bush warned Barney Frank about Freddie Mac, about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac again and again and again, but he had spent all his political capital on the wars of the war against terror, so he couldn't do anything about it.
And Barney Frank said, I am willing to roll the dice.
He rolled the dice, he crapped out, and we all crapped out with him.
Who wrote the reform bill?
Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, both of them, the guys who basically started the crisis themselves.
They wrote the reform bill.
So that's the Dodd-Frank bill.
Barack Obama, did he convict anybody?
Did he send anybody to prison for what they did on Wall Street?
Was anybody?
No, they bailed all those companies out, so many of those companies out, which meant that these Wall Street guys, these capitalist guys, these guys that Republicans, we conservatives, have been carrying water for, saying, no, you know, it's not bad to be rich.
It's not bad to be CEO because they're taking all the risks, see?
And so they should get all the rewards.
When they took the risk and they lost, it was like, we want the government money, just the same as some college kid saying, I want the government to pay for my education.
Exactly the same.
We're too big to fail.
Think of the children.
You know, it was exactly the same thing.
The capitalists, the so-called capitalists, were exactly the same as the Occupy Wall Street people who were crying out that everything should be paid for and the corporations were evil.
They all became the same people, both the right, both the capitalists and the socialists failed.
And both Obama, Obama didn't prosecute anybody for this.
Maybe one guy went to jail.
I can't remember.
But basically, there was no cleanup.
There was no reform.
He did nothing.
He didn't go after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
You know, he did nothing.
And Bush was helpless to stop it.
So, I mean, it was a major, major failure.
And that makes capitalism look bad.
It's not really capitalism.
It's crony capitalism, which is just one step from socialism.
It has the word capitalism in the title, but it's almost exactly the same as socialism.
It's socialism by power, by who you know, instead of what risks you take and whether you win or lose.
In capitalism, if you make a mistake, if you take a bad risk, you eat it.
You're the one who goes down.
And that is not what happened.
We did.
The taxpayer paid for all those guys.
All those things that Frank and Dodd and Wall Street did wrong, you and I paid for by bailing it out.
And that was a major, major failure.
And that's why a lot of these kids think socialism sounds good to them.
Here's a poll.
This is still from the Fred Barnes piece from 216.
Showed Democratic primary voters in every age group, every gender, and every race view socialism favorably.
Among Democrats, 45 and under, 45% preferred socialism to 19% for capitalism.
That changes a little, by the way.
It goes down a little when you tell them what socialism and capitalism are.
So people don't always know what they're talking about.
But socialism, again, again, it's a climate of opinion that this is okay.
It is immoral.
Socialism is immoral.
It basically says that the government has the right to decide how to invest your money, where to spend your money.
Government has certain prescribed, narrowly prescribed roles that we pay for, that we pay for.
Socialism basically says it can do anything it wants.
And look, you know, I got to play this.
Tucker Carlson put together this montage of Alexandria Occasional Cortex, the woman who is basically fronting this Green New Deal, which is just a blueprint for the end of American freedom.
That's all it is.
Tucker Carlson put this great clip, this great montage together of the kinds of things that come out of her mouth while the press is selling us this idea that she is this lovely, intelligent, wonderful new leader in office.
Here's the clip.
Here's the montage.
I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.
But being factually correct is important.
Absolutely important.
The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change.
And your biggest issue is your biggest issue is how are we going to pay for it?
This is our World War II.
What this requires is massive government intervention.
It does.
It does.
Yeah, I have no problem saying that.
The right does try to mischaracterize what we're doing as though it's like some kind of massive government takeover.
Obviously, what we're trying to do is, well, obviously it's not that.
You're talking about zero carbon emissions, no use of fossil fuels within 12 years.
That is the goal.
It's ambitious.
How is that possible?
You're talking about everybody having to drive in an electric car?
It's going to require a lot of rapid change that we don't even conceive as possible right now.
I mean, the woman is an ignoramus, and she's also dishonest, and she's also kind of vicious.
I mean, all of the bad things I would say about Donald Trump, I would say about her, none of the good things.
The woman wouldn't be anywhere, wouldn't be anywhere without this massive, massive effort to make the kind of American death she's selling palatable, to change the climate of opinion.
That's why I'm always talking about this, because I know it's not about the polls.
I hear conservatives do this all the time, drives me crazy.
Oh, this is unpopular.
This is unpopular.
The socialists were unpopular, but the climate of opinion made it feasible to push their agenda into being, into law, without there ever being popular enough to get elected to anything.
You know, I'll end by just saying this.
You know, Lara Logan, they say that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged.
I don't know if Lara Logan was ever liberal.
She's a CBS reporter, but she's the woman who went to Egypt during the Green Revolution and was essentially, I mean, she was essentially a rape.
She was surrounded by a mob of men and they sexually abused her.
And now she goes on this show, Mic Drop, with, what's his name?
Mike Ritland, a former Navy SEAL, I believe.
And she basically tells him what you hear on this show all the time, almost in the same words.
Maybe the best place to start is with the facts, right?
You say the media is mostly liberal.
Do I agree with that?
Does everyone listening agree with that?
What's our position on that?
I agree with you.
It's true.
Why?
Why can I say that with certainty?
Well, first of all, because I've been part of this for all my life.
I'm 47 now and I've been a journalist since I was 17.
And the media everywhere is mostly liberal, not just in the U.S.
But in this country, 85% of journalists are registered Democrats.
So that's just a fact, right?
No one's registering Democrat when they're really a Republican.
So the facts are on the side of what you just stated.
Most journalists are left or liberal or Democrat or whatever word you want to give it.
I always joked that the other 14% were too lazy to register.
And there's maybe 1% that's on the right.
That's a joke, but really when you think about it, visually, anyone who's ever been to Israel and been to the Wailing Wall has seen that the women have this tiny little spot in front of the wall to pray, and the rest of the wall is for the men.
To me, that's a great representation of the American media.
That's almost exactly the same joke I make.
85% and the rest of them are lying.
But, you know, this is the cloud of information of the climate of opinion, the narrative that we're all surrounded by, and it is dangerous.
And we are very bad, I think, at fighting back.
And it's the reason.
It's the reason I talk about not taking back the House, not taking back the Senate, not taking back this seat or that seat, but taking back the culture, because the polls do not matter a damn, and the culture does.
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Tonight, it's tonight, right?
Yeah, tonight at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, Michael Knowles will be answering all of your questions in the conversation.
So send him some good ones because he's got a lot of words that he spared from his, that he held over from his blank book.
As always, this episode will be free for everyone to watch on Facebook and YouTube, but only subscribers can ask the questions.
Once again, subscribe at dailywire.com to get your questions answered by the one and only Michael Knowles tonight at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific.
Join the conversation.
Then, if you want the right answers, tomorrow is the mailbag.
I forgot to mention this before, but it is the mailbag tomorrow.
So you want to go to dailywire.com, go to the podcast place.
It says podcasts.
Go to the Andrew Clavin podcast.
There's a little picture of a mailbag.
Press that.
If you are a subscriber, you can ask me anything you want.
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Oscar Push in Hollywood00:15:15
We have conservative movie critic Christian Toto coming up, but I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come over to dailywire.com, subscribe.
You can ask Knowles questions in the conversation tonight.
And then tomorrow, you can get the right answers by asking me in the mailbag.
All right.
Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, film critic, and podcaster.
He's the founder of HollywoodintToto.com and the host of the weekly Hollywood in Toto HIT podcast, which offers a right-of-center perspective on entertainment news.
I wanted to bring Christian on because he's one of the few conservatives who knows what he's talking about when we talk about the movies.
How are you doing, Christian?
It's good to see you.
I'm good.
I'm good.
How are you?
I am good.
But you know, I want to talk to you about the Oscars.
But before we do that, what's your take on Jesse Smollett?
I mean, it's just, it's just, it seems like a story that's going to be hanging around for a while because Smollett is saying he is refusing basically to talk to the police.
You want to talk to him again.
It's pretty amazing.
You know, a lot of celebrities came out and basked Trump and Trump supporters when that attack was announced, and it was suspicious right off the bat.
So now that everything has basically collapsed around him and he's just not admitting what happened, not too many people in celebrity land are saying, oops, I'm sorry.
I don't think any tweets that have been deleted.
I've actually shared some and said, oh, by the way, this tweet is still up and alive.
So that's part of it.
The fact that Roseanne Barr sent out one just awful, awful tweet and lost her entire kingdom.
This guy's still actively employed by Fox on Empire.
It sounds like his show's status has been reduced and maybe he won't survive for the next season, but he's not been instantly fired yet.
But look what he's done.
And look at all the manpower that's been wasted by the Chicago police, who I think have better things to do than chase down hoaxes.
It's amazing.
You know, it's a really good comparison to Roseme Barr.
I hadn't even thought of that.
I mean, she did, she was destroyed almost utterly.
She lost her entire career.
And this guy has done, and what did she do?
She made a rude remark, which didn't change the culture.
It didn't have any effect on anybody.
You know, there are hate crimes.
I mean, I know a guy who was gay bashed.
I know this stuff happens.
You know, it's like, and now when a person who's really been victimized goes forward, they've kind of detracted from that.
Somebody who's telling the truth is now going to get the double eye because of Justice Smollett.
He's really done damage.
He really has.
And this is where the outrage police are so inauthentic because they're not in full drudging over this, but other things.
An old John Wayne interview from 1971, that's going to be the main news cycle of the next 24 to 48 hours.
That's what we're dealing with here.
It's an inauthenticity that drives me crazy.
And I see the double standards across the board in Hollywood.
I follow it every day.
And it's exhausting, but it needs to be pointed out because this is the culture.
This does matter.
And we can't let this whole episode go by without the consequences being paid.
Justice Millett's got to understand that you can't just do this.
And I suspect he will not be finished in Hollywood.
I think he's still got a career.
And that's amazing.
Yeah, no, he'll definitely be, he may lose his job this time, but he'll be reinstated and come back.
The thing about John Wayne, by the way, is driving me crazy.
This attack on John Wayne guy was born, I think, in like 1907 or something like this.
I just feel like when you have his list of movies, when you have his talent, when you've embodied the American spirit the way he did on film, then you can pick on him and he'll beat the crap out of you because he's John Wayne.
His ghost will beat the crap out of us.
So let's talk about the Oscars.
What do you make of the list this year?
There's 10 films.
Well, you tell me how you would characterize them.
There are some good choices.
There are some obvious choices.
And there are some political choices.
Now, Black Klansman, I thought was a very good movie.
Spike Lee hasn't made a very good movie, a good movie in a long, long time.
This one sort of is a course correction for him, but it's pretty political.
The ending is hyper-political.
The Indian is crazy.
And if there is a sleeper pick for Best Picture, it could be that, but I think it's going to be Roma.
And I don't think Roma is a great film.
I'm not even sure it's a good film, but it's on Netflix.
It's in black and white.
It's artsy.
It's about, you know, people who are in the working class.
It's got all these different factors working toward it.
And no other film is really blowing the doors off the Oscar voters.
So I think that's going to pave the way for Roma.
Was there any?
I was, my favorite was the favorite.
I mean, I liked that picture.
I thought it was intelligence and funny.
And that one scene, that one dance scene actually cracked me up, which is kind of rare in the movies now.
Do you have a personal pick?
Green Book.
I thought Green Book was excellent.
It touched me.
It stuck with me.
And I think in today's day and age, a movie about racial healing, that's not going to wash.
It's not woke enough, which is amazing because it's all about racism and how awful it was in the 1960s and how it corrodes the soul.
And yet, because these two characters were able to kind of come to an understanding and to grow, I think some people on the far left don't like that.
I think they like to weaponize racism in any form it stands.
And so I think from that perspective, it's going to hurt its Oscar chances.
I just want to mention one other thing.
I've never gotten more stuff from a movie than Roma.
I want to show you my pillow.
See if you can see this.
It's a Roma book.
Whoa, whoa, you got a Roma pillow.
I didn't get a Roma pillow.
I've got this big book.
It's a Roma book from Netflix.
You know, the Oscar campaigns don't get enough attention, but they are serious and there's a lot of swag.
And I get the very smallest amount of swag, but it's part of the push that goes on between a movie and a different movie.
I've got no Green Book stuff, nothing in my desk here.
So that's just one of the reasons I think Roma's going to win.
Do you think some of the controversy about Green Book and also about Bohemian Rhapsody?
I mean, I know it's Brian Singer, right?
The rumors about him are so open that I've heard them.
I mean, I've heard them in fairly close order, like not just not third or fourth hand.
I've heard them pretty close up about his sexual malfeasance with underage people.
Do you think these things come up purposely at Oscar time because people are releasing them?
Quite possibly.
It's no accident.
It happens every year.
So I think there are sort of campaigns.
I mean, it is an Oscar campaign.
The actors go from press junket to breast junket, from lunch to dinner.
They press the flesh.
They give speeches during different awards.
It's all part of the Oscar push.
It's all leading to Oscar Knight.
So I don't think it's an accident.
There's also cultural forces here.
I mean, the Me Too movement and the fact that R. Kelly was just, you know, reintroduced as a possible sexual predator.
So I think all those things add together.
Yeah, it's not an accident, but I think if you're Studio A and you've got some dirt on Studio B, this is the perfect time to release it, right?
It's pretty vicious.
It's pretty vicious stuff.
I mean, and it is funny that Singer just keeps getting hired.
You know, they have all this Me Too stuff and nothing has stopped him from getting hired.
Nothing's even slowed him down.
He's getting these major, major pictures.
Whereas, you know, the guy from House of Cards, Kevin Spacey, he's basically done.
I mean, he's been tossed out on his ear for far less and accused of far less than Singer.
And let's not forget who's going to host the night.
It was going to be Kevin Hart, maybe the most popular comedic actor around Hollywood, a bankable star, who was chased away in 48 hours or less because he had an ugly tweet or joke from eight years ago.
Put that into context.
And yet Brian Singer, in a sense, could be nominated or win for his film.
Well, maybe they should get Jesse Smollett.
I think he's going to be free.
Well, what do you make of the show?
Is anybody going to watch the show?
They've got no host.
The movies, none of the, well, some of the movies, I mean, Black Panther made most of the money of them all.
Some of the movies actually were fairly big hits.
Is anybody going to watch the show?
It'll be a modest audience for sure.
I can't imagine it'll be more than last year.
I think it'll be less.
Here's the dirty little secret about the Oscars and all these award shows.
I don't know if you saw the Golden Globes, but they had Andy Sandberg, who's a pretty funny fellow.
He's the co-host.
Did you see that monologue?
There wasn't one legitimate hardcore great joke in that bunch.
They no longer think it's important to entertain us.
It's about sending a message.
It's about being woke.
It's about empowering.
It's not about being funny.
It's not about putting on a grand show.
And it hasn't been for a long time, which is why the show is about eight hours long.
They don't care.
They're not really here to entertain us.
There's a whole different, sorry, there's a whole different agenda in play here.
And that's their mission.
So if you get eight stand-up comedians and say, give me your best joke, they could come up with a killer monologue and maybe pepper those jokes throughout the night.
They don't want to do that.
That's not their purpose.
Their purpose is to let the actors get political.
Their purpose is to show how woke they are.
That's what matters now.
And that's why you just don't get entertaining Oscar shows.
When I was a kid, it was funny.
It was interesting.
There was glamour.
There was excitement.
There's none of that now.
There's nothing.
It's just a bunch of stale jokes.
So then that raises this question because the one thing I'm always being told by people who've never been to Hollywood, like I'm one of the few conservatives who's actually worked in Hollywood in a real way.
And they're always telling me all Hollywood cares about is money.
And I'm always saying, you know, that's just not true.
They make a lot of movies.
What is it?
Where did they, why is it that they feel free to lose the audience at this point?
Why can they make money without us?
Well, I think the individual actors don't care about the Oscar ratings.
If I'm George Clooney, I don't have anything invested in ABC's broadcast of the Oscars.
I've got invested in what I want to say.
So no actor is going to go on stage and think, well, for the sake of the Oscar ratings, I'm going to keep quiet and just talk about my movie.
So there's that.
And, you know, otherwise, I'm not sure because the Oscar producers, this was maybe a year or two ago, they actually tracked the ratings minute by minute.
And when it got political, the ratings drooped.
So if I'm an Oscar producer, I say, listen, host or hostess, please avoid the politics.
You can poke fun at Hollywood.
You can poke fun at George Clooney.
Let's keep it light and funny and vibrant and make this all about the razzle dazzle of Hollywood.
It's not their mission.
It's why they make a movie like Vice for $60 million.
And they had to know they're not going to get that money back.
But you know what?
The Vice movie's out there in the culture.
You're going to see it on streaming services, on Netflix, on HBO.
And that hardcore anti-GOP movement is going to be everywhere for the next decade, two decades, forever.
So they will spend that money to get the point across.
I'm going to be talking about Vice at the close of the show.
Christian Toto, thanks so much for coming on.
Go find him at Hollywoodintoto.com.
And he's also the host of the weekly Hollywood in Toto podcast.
Good to see you, Christian.
I'll talk to you soon.
Thanks so much.
I got to end a closing reflection on this picture of Vice, which is by Adam McKay, the same guy who made the Wall Street movie, blaming Wall Street for the crash and not really mentioning Barney Frank and Chris Dodd or any of the leftist things.
Let's just take a look.
You know, I talk sometimes about watching Hallmark movies on occasion because they inform me about the daydreams of women.
They don't inform me about the reality of women's lives.
They're not supposed to.
They're the daydreams that women, that some kind of women have.
And you watch them and you kind of learn something about a person that you're not.
Vice is a hallmark movie for hate-filled, angry leftists.
It is, I mean, McKay is identified as a socialist.
He has said he's a socialist.
And this movie, they hate you.
When you watch this movie and you consider that this is nominated for an Oscar, all I could think was, screw you, screw you, because this movie depicts ordinary Americans.
They're all bigots.
It depicts its depiction of Vice President Dick Cheney is absurd, absurd.
He has no human motivations whatsoever.
They show him at one point as a guy willing to give up a presidential run to protect his gay daughter from the spotlight, but at the same time, he's also willing to just blow Iraq to pieces for profit, just for oil money.
That's the only reason.
They never, at no point do they ever show him caring about what he's doing or having a system of beliefs, which is ridiculous.
They have a scene where he says to Don Rumsfeld, what do we believe?
And Rumsfeld laughs in his face.
They have no beliefs.
Here's a little clip from the trailer of him getting the, accepting the vice presidential nomination from an absolutely idiotic George W. Bush.
And basically the premise of the movie is that Cheney ran the Bush presidency.
What do you say?
I want you to be my VP.
I want you.
You're my vice.
Well, George, I'm the CEO of a large company.
And I have been Secretary of Defense.
And I have been White House Chief of Staff.
The vice presidency is a mostly symbolic job.
However, if we came to a different understanding, I can handle the more mundane jobs.
Overseeing bureaucracy, military, energy, and foreign policy.
Yeah, right.
I like that.
Yeah, so he's going to just take over the entire presidency.
George W. Bush is just this passive idiot wandering around with Dick Cheney telling him what to do.
It truly is nonsense.
The depictions of ordinary Americans are ridiculous.
The last scene in the movie, and this is not a giveaway, it's got a lot of comedy involved in it.
The last scene in the movie is a kind of a focus group conversation.
And the right-wing Fox News, oh, that's the other thing.
Fox News.
We just heard that 85% of the press is Democrat, but Fox News is the villain moving America ever further to the right.
Since when has America been moving ever further to the right?
It's an absurdity.
The only thing that's been moving to the right is free speech.
We actually have more free speech, and the left has been doing everything it can to demonize that.
It's an amazing, amazing film.
Consider this.
If you don't consider that the narrative is what this fight is all about, if you don't consider the narrative is actually the battleground we're on, consider this.
The Path to 9-11, Cyrus Nawasta's miniseries about how 9-11 happened, which absolutely distributed blame fairly between George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, but it did show that Bill Clinton was so caught up in the sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky that he did not kill Osama bin Laden several times when he had the chance.
That movie has not been released on DVD.
ABC Disney will not release that movie on DVD to protect Bill, to protect Hillary, but mostly to protect the narrative.
Narrative Battleground00:02:14
There's a depiction in this movie, Vice, of Jimmy Carter.
What a wonderful president he was.
He was one of the worst presidents ever.
He was a mean little man.
He continues to be a mean little man.
And his presidency was awful.
And then Reagan, of course, is the villain.
Listen, they have the right to their opinion.
All I'm saying is they spent $60 million on this film.
They nominated this film for an Oscar.
Do you think a true story about Reagan, about what a great president he was, a true story about Pope John Paul II, you think those would be nominated for an Oscar?
We already know American Sniper, the best film in the last 20 years, was nominated, but there was no way it was going to win ever.
I mean, and only Clint Eastwood could have made it.
It's just that is, this is what's important to them, and they're right, because this is what happens.
The socialists never have to win a majority to win the day.
They never have to win a majority if they win the narrative.
All right, it's the mailbag tomorrow.
Come to dailywire.com, hit the podcast button, the Andrew Clavin podcast.
Hit the mailbag, ask your questions.
I will answer them all.
All my answers will be correct.
It's an amazing thing to watch.
Just the actual performance of always answering things correctly is just amazing to watch.
Be here tomorrow.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
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Edited by Adam Sajovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, we're going to talk about the courageous journalist who is out speaking the truth about her profession and calling her fellow journalists to task.
It is a very brave move on her part.
So we're going to look at that, talk about that.
Also, headlines yesterday were screaming that a middle school boy was arrested for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, but that's not the full story at all.