Ep. 669 dissects how leftist figures like Bernie Sanders and AOC exploit identity politics—Sanders mocked as a "Stalinist" relic while Ocasio-Cortez’s incoherent capitalism critique dominates Gen Z (61% pro-socialism). The episode contrasts Liz Cheney’s anti-Semitism callout with media defenses, slams Captain Marvel’s forced feminist messaging as reductive, and blames left-wing bias for suppressing dissent (e.g., Tucker Carlson’s decade-old comments). It warns that progressive narratives—from Hollywood to academia—monopolize culture while framing right-wing pushback as "conspiracies," culminating in a critique of AOC’s alleged historical ignorance. [Automatically generated summary]
Bernie Sanders is running for president again, but many political observers say his time may have passed.
The 107-year-old Stalinist launched his latest attempt to destroy the nation's freedom and prosperity by releasing one of them video thingamabobs on that inter whatchamacallum all the kids are talking about.
But many political consultants and other useless wastes of space say that while Sanders is clearly a lunatic who has managed to ignore every single fact about history and economics he might have learned in his 113 years of life, he may not be quite crazy or ignorant enough for today's Democrat Party.
Chairman of the Democrat National Committee, Nicholas Maduro, no relation, told CNN, quote, In the last election, we ran the usual corrupt machine Paul with enough sense to hide her leftist views behind a veneer of American sloganeering.
In that atmosphere, a wild-eyed loon like Bernie was a breath of fresh air.
But now we've got people like that Alexandria, what's her name with the breast, and those evil Muslim chicks, genuinely malevolent airheads out to raze this nation to the ground.
So it's hard for an old commie like Bernie to really stand out, unquote.
Some experts also feel Bernie has a race problem.
Shameless Bader, author of the new book, How to Make a Million Just by Complaining, made the point in a speech to several hostages, saying, quote, in the old days, we might have let some old white man talk a good game about race while making black lives worse with leftist policies.
But today, we want a black woman to do that, unquote.
While Sanders argues that he would be the first insane Jew to hold the office of the presidency, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar responded, quote, that may be true, but we all know the Jews secretly run the country anyway with their money and their international conspiracy.
Oops, did I say something wrong, unquote.
Clearly, when it comes to being crazy, ignorant, and destructive enough to win the Democrat nomination, Bernie Sanders has his work cut out for him.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity-do.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
So on Thursday, I had National Reviews David French on, and we talked about the reasons behind his never Trumpism.
And I think it was pretty obvious that I like and respect David a good deal and that I completely disagree with him.
I had some complaints that I should have destroyed David, as they say on YouTube, but no one was hurt in the making of the interview.
David put forward the idea that the ultimate cultural cost of electing a president of low character like Trump is worse than the immediate political cost of electing a president of low character and leftist ideas like Hillary Clinton.
It's one thing for the idiots on the left to do that in his view, but we're the good guys and we should do better.
I think that's a better argument than the one Max Boot made because I thought Boot was so unnerved by Donald Trump that he actually rewrote history.
He would say that Clinton and Obama weren't so bad and Clinton wasn't so corrupt and all this stuff.
And David was seeing things clearly.
He just had a certain philosophy about it.
Boot has now announced he's no longer a conservative.
He's published a whole book about it.
Whereas David is claiming he's never Trump because of his conservatism, also a big difference.
Now, I disagree with David, and I think there will be a cultural cost to electing a guy like Trump, but we don't know what it is or what we'll be able to do about it in the event.
Whereas we can be pretty sure that Clinton's judicial appointments and her policies would have undermined the American experiment in ways that would have lasted for decades, if not forever.
But I disagree with something else as well.
I disagree that being a Christian requires me to elect people based on their high character and to denounce them for their personal failings.
I didn't think Clinton should have been impeached for his affair with Monica Lewinsky, even for lying about it.
I don't think JFK's being a scoundrel changes the way that I look at his presidency.
And I wish I could still enjoy the acting of Kevin Spacey in the comedy of Louis C.K. because frankly, I don't give a damn that they misbehave.
If people commit crimes, put them away.
If not, let them do their jobs and I'll make my own choices.
Because here is the funny thing about all this.
Our obsession with people's personal lives and these gotcha moments we're always pulling on people, has it improved the characters of the people we elect?
I think it's made them worse.
And that may seem like a paradox, but it's actually not.
We're going to talk a lot about this.
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I'm going to start off this conversation with a cut from the former Colorado governor, now one of the hundreds and hundreds of Democrat candidates, Hickenlooper.
John Hickenlooper is that his first name?
Yeah.
John Hickenlooper.
John Hickenlooper's Socialist Dilemma00:07:20
He's asked on Face the Nation whether he's a socialist.
Once you get back into these labels, am I a capitalist?
Am I a socialist?
How much of a capitalist am I versus how much of a socialist?
That becomes kind of silly, doesn't it?
Well, in a funny way.
The other candidates were comfortable answering the question.
So I wanted to offer you a chance to answer it.
I understand you're not comfortable directly answering, but I want to move on to some comfortable.
I'm happy.
Let me just, I'm happy to say I'm a capitalist, but I think at a certain point, the labels do nothing but divide us.
You know, everything about that is untrue.
Everything about that is untrue.
The most important thing about this guy is what his ideas are, whether he's a capitalist or whether he's a socialist.
It's not whether he cheats on his wife.
It's not whether he curses on the air.
It's not whether he's one day said something that he shouldn't have said.
It's not any of that.
It's what he's going to do in office.
We're hiring him for a job.
Now, of course, there's a level of corruption at which we can't trust him to be true to his ideas, a level of dishonesty and corruption, in which case the words coming out of his mouth don't mean anything.
But up to that level, basically, what I want to know is, is he a capitalist or is he a socialist?
What is he going to do when he gets in office?
You know, I just saw this movie.
I think I've talked about it before, The Frontrunner, which is Hugh Jackman playing Gary Hart in the 1988 election.
And he was the frontrunner.
He's this Democrat, who kind of had that Kennedy vibe going.
And they caught him out having an affair with this lady, Donna Rice, a model named Donna Rice.
And this is the moment when the press decided, yes, we can go after these guys on these personal things after years of protecting JFK, who was sleeping with anything in a skirt that moved.
And then LBJ, as you heard Knowles tell you about after when we were talking about the frontrunner, LBJ said, you know, that's going to still be happening now that I'm president, and I hope you'll ignore it as you ignored it with Kennedy.
And they did, and they did.
And now they decided, no, no, no, this is the character issue, they called it.
And in the movie, they say, well, who decided that this is now the news?
And somebody says, the readers decided, our audience decided.
That's crap.
I was there.
I was there when the corporate heads came into some of the bigger news places in New York where I was working.
I was not a big guy there.
I was a small guy in big places, but there were big places.
And the corporate guys came in and said, we're covering sex now because nobody cares about the budget.
We're covering condoms.
We're covering sodomy because it was causing AIDS.
And we can talk about it.
Won't that be fun?
And we're going to cover all this stuff instead of the work of the government.
It was a decision they made.
Yes, because they knew the people would go for it.
But of course the people go for it.
The people always go for the salacious hot story and don't want to care what the budget is.
It was the news person's job.
I mean, this is the flip side of capitalism.
As I've said before, capitalism doesn't work without ideals, without standards that you hold to.
Capitalism just wants the money and will always go downhill.
That's how Hollywood movies are made.
You know, you start out with a ghost story that makes money and you end up with torture porn because it's always going to go to that place where they know they can get their money back.
But you've got to have standards.
So compare, you know, AOC talking about capitalism.
She was at this place, I can't remember what it's called, this leftist place where she goes and she just blithered for an unbelievably long period of time just saying things.
But this was the one thing that she said that actually made a certain amount of sense.
This is cut number two.
Just as there's all this fear-mongering that government is going to take over every corporation and government is going to take over every business or every form of production, we should be scared right now because corporations have taken over our government.
And in my opinion, we should be wary of any entity in which both of those things are combined, whether it's through one way or the other.
And that's why the emphasis in democratic socialism is on democracy.
And it's not about, you know, it's just as much a transformation about bringing democracy to the workplace so that we have a say and that we don't check all of our rights at the door every time we cross the threshold into our workplace.
Because at the end of the day, as workers and as people of society, we're the ones creating wealth, not a corporate CEO.
Now, everything, again, everything she says makes no sense.
She says it's not a good thing when corporations and government are combined.
That's what socialism is.
She doesn't know that.
She thinks that socialism is this modern kind of bastardization of socialism.
Socialism is supposed to be the takeover where the state governs the means of production.
What she thinks socialism is, because that failed, because that failed so spectacularly in the Soviet Union and everywhere else it was tried, what she thinks it is is go ahead, do your capitalism, but then we'll take all your money away and give it to poor people.
And she also, and she reiterates Karl Marx's famous mistake, which is that the value of something comes from the workers.
You have a hunk of metal, workers put it together in a car, and then it's a car which has more value.
So the extra value must come from the workers.
But that's untrue.
Give a bunch of a hunk of metal to a worker or to me, and it's going to remain a hunk of metal, right?
The people who change it are the people who have the idea, you know, hmm, I could take that hunk of metal and turn it into a car.
What's a car?
Trust me, you're going to like it.
That's the person who is putting in the value.
The CEO, the capital, is what makes the workers possible.
The problem is for the worker, the problem is for a worker that there are more workers than there are people who can be CEOs, right?
There are more workers than there can be Henry Ford's.
So Henry Ford is worth more because he's rarer than the worker.
So workers combine and they say, well, all of us are going to walk out.
That's the idea of a union.
That's the idea of collective action.
There's nothing wrong with that per se.
You know, there's actually nothing wrong with that.
That means you have two power centers.
But the idea that the worker is the person producing the value, he's contributing to the value.
It's a noble thing to do, to be a worker, to build things.
But you cannot say that he is the source of the value.
It's just a mistake.
It's a mistaken idea.
I don't care who AOC is sleeping with.
I don't care.
I don't care if she says something that she shouldn't have said off mic.
That's the problem.
And you know, there's a new poll out from Axios.
It says Gen Z, which is 18 to 24 year olds, they prefer socialism to capitalism.
Now, being 18 to 24 is by definition being an idiot.
I mean, it's being an ignoramus.
You don't know anything.
But 61% of Americans between 18 and 24 have a positive reaction to the word socialism.
How did that happen?
It happens because they go to schools where they're taught that.
They didn't think that up themselves.
You know, what are they thinking about?
You know, they're thinking about having sex and going out and doing stuff that 18 to 24 year olds do.
It's people, adults, telling them that this is what they should be doing.
It's people winning the war of ideas by teaching their stupid ideas to the young without anybody to disagree with them.
There is a conspiracy video that must have been sent to me five times over the weekend, okay, by a guy named Mr. Reagan.
He's a YouTuber, and he has this conspiracy theory.
Adults Influencing Youth00:02:55
And his conspiracy theory is this: that Alexandria Occasional-Cortex is not really a congresswoman.
She's an actress who's hired to play a congresswoman by a left-wing group and Chenk Unger, you know, the guy from the Young Turks.
Here's a little piece of his video.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not really the congresswoman of New York's 14th congressional district.
She is essentially an actress.
She's merely playing the part of a New York congresswoman.
I know this sounds crazy, but bear with me.
In 2017, a group called the Justice Democrats held auditions for potential congressional candidates that they would run on their platform for various congressional seats throughout the country.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's brother, Gabriel, submitted her for the role.
Now, I've auditioned for many acting roles in my day.
I've also cast many of my own projects.
I know how this works.
If you find somebody with star power, even if they don't 100% fit the part, you go with it.
Obviously, AOC has star power.
Just look at her.
Okay, so she's hired by this group called Justice Democrats to play the part of a congresswoman and represent their ideas.
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Tucker And The Media's Reckoning00:14:48
So here's the problem with Mr. Reagan's conspiracy theory.
His conspiracy is the Justice Democrats hired this person to play a congresswoman.
She is mouthing their ideas and they're influencing her.
The only time he says she says anything intelligent is when she's repeating their ideas.
There's a name for that conspiracy.
It's called politics.
There's nothing he says.
He says Chenk Unger had this idea, this conspiracy, that they were going to take over Congress with leftist congresswomen.
He says this like in that same dramatic, shocked voice.
That's politics.
That's what you're supposed to do.
You're supposed to win the battle of ideas.
They have won the battle of ideas by taking over our colleges and our schools and teaching our children their wrong ideas about where value comes from, about what's fair, about what justice looks like.
They have taught them those ideas.
That's how you win.
And we sit around and go, well, that's not, that's a conspiracy.
No, that's democracy.
That is living in a republic.
You know, there's a book around that.
I've never read it because you can't get hold of it.
It's so hard to find.
It's like $80, $90.
It's called After the Ball.
And people cite this all the time.
I hear Christian people cite it all the time.
They say, you know, this is the gay plan to make homosexuality acceptable in America.
And I think it's from back in the 80s, around the AIDS time.
And they said they're going to take over the culture.
They're going to tell these stories and put on TV shows where gay people are acceptable.
And I thought, like, why shouldn't they do that?
That's their corner.
That's their interest.
That's their idea.
If you wanted not to do that, you should have made the other movies.
You should have made the other TV show.
If you wanted to fight that idea, you should have gotten stepped up and made your argument.
Instead, instead, we were impeaching Bill Clinton because he slept with Monica Lewinsky.
We didn't say, you know, his ideas don't work.
I mean, some people did.
Newt Gingrich did, and Newt Gingrich turned the Clinton presidency into a success by forcing him to the right, by forcing him to do right-wing ideas that worked.
But the rest of us are complaining because the left is doing what they do.
And so you get these people like our people have gotten worse and worse.
And the problem is, of course, because they own the media, because they own the colleges and the universities and all the means of communication, the only people who get hit when you're talking about personality are going to be people on the right.
You know, Ted Kennedy drops a girl on a drink, leaves her there to drown, changes his clothes, gets an alibi.
He's the lion of the Senate.
He's the lion of the Senate.
Donald Trump says, you know, when you're a celebrity, women let you grab him.
Oh my God, he's an abusive, horrible monster who goes after women.
You know, I mean, that's the problem.
And so then we start to say, well, if they're doing it, we can do it.
And the character of the people we elect gets lower and lower and lower.
Right now, the people in our Congress, the people in the presidency, the people in every level of government are not necessarily people I'd have over for dinner.
There are plenty of good people in government.
There really are.
But the way the government is working is a nightmare because of so many of the people who are the worst people, the AOCs, the Ilhan Omars with their virulent, nasty, ugly anti-Semitism, are being protected by the press.
And therefore, we start to say, well, why shouldn't we do the same thing?
I mean, I want you to listen to just this one more Alexandria Casional Cortex clip on capitalism, talking about how bad it is.
Just listen to what she says, her actual words.
This is cut number eight.
I think that our government is irredeemable.
If I did, I wouldn't have run for office.
But capitalism in particular.
Right, because it could be different.
So I think the tough part about this, about like, is capitalism redeemable, et cetera, is that it's hard to have these conversations, I think, as a society because we all have different ideas of what, just in the public imagination, there are different ideas of what does capitalism mean, what does socialism mean, et cetera.
But for me, when I think about what those definitions are, capitalism isn't, to me, it's an ideology of capital.
It puts capital, the most important thing is the concentration of capital, and it means that we seek and prioritize profit and the accumulation of money above all else, and we seek it at any human and environmental cost.
Woman is an idiot.
In that last sentence, she finally gets to the sense that she makes.
She babbles for a, I don't know, that felt like it was about a minute.
She babbles.
It's a word salad.
I mean, I was always thinking like, does she offer meds here for a minute?
But then she gets to this thing where she says she has her idea.
It's all about profit.
It's all about money.
And we on the right say, yes, it is all about making your life better.
Money is neither good nor bad.
Money is a mark of how much people desire what you're creating.
I always say to young people, when they tell me, I want to work in non-profit.
And I say, so you want to work for some, doing something that nobody wants.
I mean, money is desire made manifest.
Money is, I want that iPad, so therefore I'm going to pay this amount of money for that iPad.
That's what it is.
It means everybody starts to rise up because they want to make their lives better.
But nobody's arguing this with her.
They're all arguing about her personality, about her figure, about how, you know, nobody is arguing the ideas with her.
They're arguing about someone did this and someone did that.
I just want to play this clip of Liz Cheney with Chuck Todd.
Really, really an interesting clip because she starts out.
I want to play the first clip first, if we've still got it.
Yeah, this is cut number three.
When Chuck Todd, you remember, I played a clip of his last week where he's defending Ilhan Omar.
And again, once it's about the people, you start to defend the ideas.
You say like, oh, you know, anti-Semitism, not so bad.
I mean, I've heard nothing but these defenses of Ilhan Omar.
Nancy Pelosi said, well, she didn't know what she was saying.
Is she a child?
You know, of course she knows what she's saying.
She does it again and again and again.
And then when she apologizes, she says, well, I apologize for making evil Jews feel bad about being evil Jews.
I mean, she's not really apologizing.
Liz Cheney goes after Chuck Todd, and they start with this exchange.
This is the first cut.
The Democrats have been in charge now for about two and a half months in the House.
And in that time, they've become the party of anti-Semitism, the party of infanticide, the party of socialism.
They've passed legislation that's violated the First Amendment, the Second Amendment.
It's really time for the Democrats, the leadership in that party, to stop it, to stand up and to act worthy, frankly, of the trust the American people have placed in them.
It's crucial for the nation.
And now, Todd does what he did last week, where he starts, well, it's both sides, the whataboutism.
He calls his whataboutism whataboutism.
And Cheney shuts him down.
There was some concern by singling her out.
You only make her a target.
And they pointed to that West Virginia Republican Party flyer.
Chuck, I'm sorry, but this is getting, but my point is we are getting a lot of things.
It's a dangerous way, though.
You can describe it that way, but you are wrong.
When you have a situation in this country and around the world where we have seen global rise in anti-Semitic attacks, when we have had the kinds of attacks that you had on the synagogue here in the United States recently, that is a moment when you absolutely anti-Semitic.
Anti-Semitic, no matter where it comes from, is wrong.
And when you're in a situation where you are an elected official, where we are in a situation where we have the history that we have, what happens when you don't stand up and say, this is evil and call it what it is?
We all have an obligation to do that.
And I think it is absolutely shameful that Nancy Pelosi and Leader Hoyer and the Democratic leaders will not put her name in a resolution on the floor and condemn her remarks and remove her from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
That is a battle of ideas.
That is Liz Cheney winning a battle of ideas.
I mean, he starts in with the ideas that what aboutism thing is just wrong.
It's wrong when you're comparing a shooter, a schizophrenic, anti-Semitic nut job from the right, no question about it, a schizophrenic, anti-Semitic nut job to an American congresswoman.
That is not a fair comparison.
And she cuts him down and she does it with ideas.
Let's compare that to what is happening to Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson must be one of the most effective spokespeople at Fox because they have been trying to cut him down forever.
Now, Tucker had, you know, he's had a career where he started out as kind of a bad boy.
So Media Matters goes out and they track down, what is the name of this guy?
Bubba the Love Sponge or something like this.
He finds this guy who has a radio show named Bubba the Love Sponge.
And have I got that right?
Is that his name?
Bubba the Lonespon?
I think it is.
Anyway, this is a guy who literally changed his name legally to Bubba the Love Sponge.
It's true.
He did.
He has a Bubba the Love Sponge, whatever his last name is.
And he has a show in Florida.
And Tucker, 10 years ago, calls in and they have a little naughty boy talk.
So Media Matters goes through 10 years, 10 years of transcripts.
And Media Matters is just a left-wing hit job, right?
This is a hit site.
That's all they do.
And they go through this and they're looking for it because they don't want to argue with Tucker Carlson.
Because when you argue with Tucker Carlson, a lot of times you lose.
So they don't want to do that, but they can find some naughty boy thing.
He said, and that's exactly what it is.
It's naughty boy talk.
He's talking about that Warren Jeffers, I think his name is.
He was a cult leader.
He was put in prison.
And he starts making fun of him.
And then added to that clip is a clip something he says.
And they, well, let's play the clip of Tucker.
Let's play what he says.
He's not accused of touching anybody.
He is accused of facilitating a marriage between a 16-year-old girl and a 27-year-old man.
That's the accusation.
That's what they're calling felony night.
That's bullshit.
I'm sorry.
Now, this guy may be self-treed.
I'm just telling you, arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old and a 27-year-old is not the same, and I'm pulling a stranger off the street and raping her.
That's bullshit.
You know what, in my brief experience, you know what gets women going is arguing with them.
Really?
Yeah.
Brad, I never use that.
It's true.
You debate politics with a woman and just go, you know, just full-blown out there, especially feminism.
If you're talking to a feminist and she's giving you, you know, well, you know, men really need to be more sensitive and this, you know, actually, men don't need to be more sensitive.
You just need to be quiet and kind of do what you're told.
And lighten up a little bit.
Love it.
So there's Tucker and Bubba being bad boys on the air.
And Media Matters, boy, they're outraged.
You know, you know that they wake up in the middle of the night and think I am outraged.
They don't wake up.
They think we can get this guy.
We can get this guy.
We can cause enough trouble where his sponsors retreat, where people go after him and make his life miserable.
That's what they're doing.
It is about the silence.
By the way, Tucker Carlson's response, an adult response, he says, Media Matters caught me saying something naughty on a radio show more than a decade ago.
Rather than express the usual ritual contrition, he says, how about this?
I'm on television every weeknight live for an hour.
If you want to know what I think, you can watch.
Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why.
That is grown-up talk.
That's grown-up talk from Tucker Carlson hitting back at this kind of childish thing.
And I'm sorry, but I think that fundamentalist Christians or evangelical Christians have been guilty of doing this, of saying that we want our leaders to be saints.
And then when they changed their tune, when they realized that Donald Trump was going to support religious freedom, which he has, more than the left did, they suddenly said, well, he's kind of like, you know, King David or like Cyrus, the Persian, who helped us even though he wasn't a good person, you know, who King David did a lot of bad things, but he was a great king.
Cyrus sent us back, you know, from the exile.
So suddenly they came up with that idea instead of the idea they had in the Clinton era that we have to elect people who don't cheat on their wives.
The thing is, when they changed their minds, they were right.
When they changed their minds, they were in the right.
And that's why I disagree with David.
That's why I disagree with David French.
I think that the concentration on people's characters past the point where their corruption makes their word, you know, where you can't believe that they're going to hold on to their ideas.
You can't believe that they're going to act in the way they say they're going to act up until that point.
You know, I just don't care.
I just don't care.
I do not care that they're cheating on their wives.
I think it's a bad thing to do.
Anybody who knows me knows that I think that cheating on your wife is one of the lousy things that you can do.
I think it's lousy to your wife.
I think it's lousy to your children.
I think it's lousy for your soul.
I think it will ruin your life.
I've told this to my friends face to face.
But these guys aren't my friends.
These guys are hired to do a job.
And if they're doing a good job, they're doing a good job.
And this is why I think this kind of talk simply puts us in a silly battle about nothingness, about who can catch Tucker Carlson out with Bubba the Love Sponge.
You know, I want to say this is about silencing Fox News, the one and only right-wing outlet on mainstream media.
I mean, there are plenty of us here on the internet, but not that many, like in cable news.
It's the one voice that's saying what it's saying.
And all they want to do, the Democrats want to bar it from hosting debates.
They want to make sure it's silenced in the Washington Post, where democracy dies and trying to shut down the opposition.
They're running editorials about it.
You know, I'm going to end with this one clip from Terry Moran on ABC, right, on a left-wing network.
Terry Moran is a reporter.
I think he covers justice or whatever.
He's talking about the Mueller hearing, and they keep expecting the Mueller report to come out any day now.
And he's asked if that's going to be a big deal if Mueller says that Trump did not collude with Russia.
How big a deal is it if they don't find collusion for the president?
Huge.
He's cleared if Robert Mueller comes back.
Mueller became a folk hero in the United States.
Robert Keller.
Even if he finds all sorts of things.
Sure.
No, but the central and most serious question in this investigation, the reason Robert Mueller started it, is did the current president of the United States assist the Kremlin in an attack on our democracy?
And if Mueller, after two years, comes back and says, I don't have the evidence to support that charge, that's a reckoning.
That's a reckoning for progressives and Democrats who hoped that Mueller would essentially erase the 2016 election.
It's a reckoning for the media.
It's a reckoning around the country if, in fact, after all this time, there was no collusion.
See, that to me is so true.
That to me is if all this time, for two years plus, the media has been telling us about Russia and there's no collusion, that's a reckoning.
Reckoning For The Media00:07:31
That idea is coming home to roost.
If what you tell me is that George Stephanopoulos is a bad guy, let alone that his bias is a big deal, his bias is important, but you're telling me that he's a bad person, I don't care.
I don't care.
The left, you know, it's so funny.
The left is good at capitalism.
We have think tanks that are paid for by donors.
They make movies that people pay to see propaganda.
The left works with ideas.
They take over the universities.
They take over Hollywood.
And we sit there and say that's unfair.
They want to take over Congress.
And we say it's a conspiracy.
It's not a conspiracy.
That's how society and democratic free societies work.
You fight over ideas.
If we're not fighting over that, we're fighting over nothing and we're going to lose if we're sitting around pointing fingers because they can do that better than we can.
Michael Knowles is coming up.
This time I really tormented him.
Just for that, it's going to be worth hearing.
But I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come to dailywire.com and subscribe.
You get the show, you get Shapiro Show.
Sometimes you get Knowles.
I think we take off, we discount it if you get Knowles as well.
And you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
It's 100 lousy bucks for an entire year.
Come on over.
Knowles.
I know.
I said, it's me.
It's manly of you to shake my hand.
I really wanted to try to be cordial on this show today.
This was the thing you made me do this weekend was worse than Southside of You.
It's the only thing I could think of.
It's worse than Southside of the TV.
Yeah, it's just, oh, now I'm feeling like I should be wearing like a full leather suit.
Spike.
Thank you.
Thank you, Drew.
May I have another Marvel movie?
Oh, God.
You went and saw Captain Marvel.
I saw Captain Marvel.
This movie, it's a terrible genre.
Okay.
This is the first problem.
Yeah.
The genre is terrible.
The genre is repetitive and it's repetitive and terrible.
There have been a couple good superhero movies, neither of which were in the Marvel universe, right?
There was Dark Knight was a good movie.
Logan was a good movie.
Is it Logan Marvel?
It's not made by Marvel, I think.
Isn't that made by Fox or something?
I don't know.
I don't think it's actually made by Mozilla.
It's Fox, but it's not MTU.
It's Fox, but it's not MT.
Okay, excuse me.
Calling all the nerds in the back.
That's why we keep them in a little closet in the back.
We got the nerd club.
So, right.
So of the actual Marvel movies, they're all terrible, all of them, every single one.
And this one was particularly bad.
It is bad, okay.
It's mostly bad because it's one of these movies.
It also happens to be this feminist-y thing that makes it just 23% worse.
I have to say, watching the previews, I think Brie Larson is a very good actress, by the way.
She's got this kind of very girly little voice.
And it's like, hi, I'm a superhero.
I don't buy it.
I will say, there are two somewhat interesting moments in the movie.
The first one comes early, so it's not a spoiler, is that Brie Larson's character finds out that she's not very good at physical activities because the boys are better at race car driving.
The boys are better at acts of brute strength.
And she thinks that she can do these things just as well as the boys, and she can't.
That's actually an interesting observation and tells you something about sexual difference.
That's obviously true.
And then the other, well, I suppose there are three interesting points.
The second point is that it's her biggest weakness is that she's overly emotional and she lets her emotions run away with her.
And again, that's actually a pretty interesting sexual commentary if you're doing a superhero movie about sex differences.
The third interesting point, and this is a little bit of a spoiler, so close your ears for 10 seconds or something if you actually don't want to hear it, is that at the end, the bad guy, the way the bad guy finally tries to trick her is by appealing to her pride.
Not by, it's not some physical exact, it's by appealing to pride and the way that she could go down.
Worked with Eve.
It worked with Eve.
And that actually is pretty smart.
The reason the movie doesn't work is because she can just do anything.
Right.
That's always the problem with superheroes.
But at least some superheroes have a weakness.
Her weakness is pride, I guess.
So that's a human weakness.
That's kind of an interesting observation.
But when you show that human weakness in a superhero movie, and that's your only weakness, there's just no stakes.
You're just invincible.
You know, I haven't seen the movie, so I'm not commenting on the movie, but it strikes me that the plot you're describing has the same flaws as Black Panther, which basically says, instead of saying, you know, black people are as good as anybody else, which is a perfectly fair, valid, true point.
It sort of says, like, well, if they'd only had this magic dust, they would have had a different civilization.
This is saying that women are weaker and more emotional than men, but if only they weren't, they would be better.
Then they wouldn't be, instead of saying, you know, that women actually contribute something different than what men contribute.
Yes.
I mean, so in that way, it's really just the closest it makes to an interesting point is the kind of first-level conservative feminist point, which is that if the only way that women are physically as strong as men is if they have guns.
Right.
Which is true.
And so if you have guns shooting out of your hands, then you are physically as strong as men.
But the movie beyond that...
Don't they have gun control for those?
No, I guess not.
I want a trigger lock on those hands.
Other than that, because there are no stakes to the movie, who cares?
You can get past the tedious girl power feminine, whatever.
I mean, that's fine.
You can get past, you know how the movie's going to end.
It's one of these superhero movies.
They're all formulaic.
But there aren't any stakes whatsoever, which is, I think, why you're seeing it gets bad reviews, even from female critics.
And then Rotten Tomatoes decided to purge all the bad reviews.
Well, this stuff drives me crazy.
It's as if the future of women depends on whether this is a good movie or not.
Right.
That's right.
And the other thing is, there have been superhero girl heroes forever.
There was always a supergirl.
Wonder Woman was a good movie and it was a successful movie.
It's like, what did they think?
Why does this suddenly become like an issue?
Like, oh, it's a black superhero.
But there were black superheroes before.
Wesley Snipes was in a trilogy of guy fighting, you know, and we didn't even notice.
It was just Wesley Snipes.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, I think in some way it's a marketing gimmick.
I almost think controversy.
I expected the movie to be worse than it was, given Brie Larson's ridiculous PR campaign.
And it wasn't, it's not that it was ultra-feministy, it's just that it wasn't a good movie.
Right, right, right.
And it was, you know, 20 or 30% worse than all the other Marvel movies.
And so whatever.
You know, how many have there been?
There have been like 20 of these movies.
This year, I think it was.
This year, yeah, this month I think.
But she actually made it out to be worse than it is.
And I think it was to drive up controversy because people are all ginned up over identity politics.
And now I had to go see it.
All the critics have to go see it.
Well, I guess the left can thank capitalism for seizing on their stupid ideas and turning them into a money-making proposition, right?
That's right.
That's the bright side.
Is that the silver mining?
I guess so.
After listening to AOC, I'm now 10% stupider than I was when I started my program.
Games vs. Storytelling00:06:23
I don't even know what I'm saying.
What are you talking about on your show?
We're going to be talking about why AOC is wrong about everything.
She's how she's wrong about everything.
Yeah, she gets everything exactly backwards.
And it is because she doesn't know any history.
She knows a whole lot of historiography.
She knows a whole lot of the broad trends they teach you in Yorktown Public High School.
Right, right.
But she doesn't know any actual facts, so she gets everything exactly backwards.
Have you heard this new conspiracy theory that she was an actress cast to play part of a congressman?
No, you've got to listen to this.
It's an actually interesting video where this guy, Mr. Reagan, says, you know, it was a casting call and they just hired her to do this.
I thought that's true of most congressmen.
Well, that is true.
Yeah, really.
Third string actors show business for implications.
They have people whispering in their air, say this, say that, or I won't give you any money.
This is sinister political.
Anyway, you know, by the way, I noticed that a few, apparently, some people are now getting the audiobook of Another Kingdom.
They're a little confused about their pub date, but I've heard some great things about your performance.
I'm glad, because I know, yeah, it was my father, my grandmother.
No, my wife wasn't.
No, I'm very excited.
You know, it was so much fun to do the audiobook.
Yeah.
It's really a totally different experience to do that than to do a podcast.
Yes.
And yeah, I guess we'll see.
The audiobook is released now.
It is supposed to be coming out like in a week.
Right.
But I did see on Audible they're starting to have some reviews.
That's great.
You know, especially when books come out, it's always like it comes out a week early.
Yeah, I know.
Some people get it and they don't get it now.
Amazon doesn't care.
And the way it works is Amazon gets it.
They start sending it out.
Anyway, it's great to talk to you.
Don't go away.
I'll continue talking to you after the show.
I want to finish what I was saying about video games.
I was telling my life in video games and I got so interested in what David French was saying that I stopped.
I went over time and I didn't have a chance to finish up.
And I was talking about, I had just been talking about the 90s, which I thought were the first golden age of video games.
Art forms usually have a golden age right at the beginning, and then they have good examples of the breed and bad examples of the breed.
And then they usually have a second golden age toward the end where you get the kind of cynical version.
So if you see like you see TV, it had this golden age of Playhouse 90, live drama on TV, Rod Serling doing the Twilight Zone, and then it went into this kind of wasteland phase, and then it came back with a kind of darker, more cynical view of the Sopranos and Breaking Bad and The Shield and all those programs.
But they were great shows.
Movies, kind of the same thing.
You had the wonderful golden age in the 1930s and 40s where they were making kind of smiley-faced all-American films.
They went into the 50s, it got a little darker.
And then you've had this resurgence in the 70s when you had guys like Steven Spielberg and Scorsese and Coppola making this kind of darker, deeper, richer versions of the old films than that you had before.
The video games in the 90s, they just had some of the wonderful, wonderful games, and they started to experiment with how far they could go with telling a story and playing a game.
And in my opinion, they hit a wall.
There is a point at which the telling of a story gets in the way of playing a game and the playing of a game gets in the way of telling a story.
That is why Super Mario is still such a great game.
No story.
Princesses Kidnapped.
It's all about being this immersive visual experience of being in this wonderful, crazy world.
And I think that this has been a problem as the in the in these latest days of video games, it's been a problem for me, at least, that even though some of these games are very good, they are restrained by the technique of playing a game.
And that's why you never see any good movies made of video games, because video games are essentially linear.
You run, you fight, you move, you fight, you climb a wall, you fight.
And that doesn't make for very good movie storytelling, which should have kind of interweaving narratives, or if it has one narrative that should have a lot of twists.
And that's why I don't, I'm always getting letters by video game lovers.
Have you played The Last of Us?
Have you played Red Dead Redemption?
And I've started a lot of these games, and I've liked them and admired them for the skill with which they were done.
But they were nothing new to me.
It was just an interesting story between the shooting, and there was no new way to play the game.
My favorite games now are indie puzzle games like Braid and Limbo and Inside, where the thing moves across a linear plane, but the story is kind of almost esoteric.
It's almost like a mind story, like a dream, and they have these wonderful puzzles that you have to solve that engage your mind.
One thing I will say about this is you have to understand that my attitude toward art is different than most people's attitudes.
Art is like sex.
It's a pleasure, but pleasure is not the point, right?
Pleasure is why we do it, but pleasure is not the purpose.
And I feel art is the same way.
Art is a delight.
Art is fun.
Art is, you know, interesting.
Art is engaging.
Art takes you out of the world and adds to your experience.
But art has a purpose, which is to record and transmit the inner human experience, which I feel is the heart of everything we are and everything we do.
When you experience a good work of art, whether it is entering a world visually as you do in a video game, looking at a world and entering it visually as you do with a painting or sometimes a movie, or whether it's telling a story of people's interactions, whether it's telling a story that has a political angle to it, when you have that experience and you release yourself into that experience, it adds to your experience of life and therefore adds to your wisdom.
That's why I don't necessarily hit at a work of art because of what it's saying, quote unquote, because it says maybe I don't like the attitude behind a movie like Get Out.
And if I talked to the guy, I would argue with him.
But in the movie, I'm brought into the experience of the fear of assimilation in that movie, Get Out.
And I love that because it gives me like another life.
It gives me an hour and a half of another life, which makes me wiser.
It makes me deeper.
It makes my life richer.
Video games can do that, just like any other art form when they reach the level of art, as they do with some of the 90s games and even some of the games today, like Braid, they take you into a world and they expand your mind and they expand the way you think about things and they're a delight.
What else can you ask for?
I think that is a brilliant, brilliant thing.
And by the way, all American arts hit their peak before the intellectuals find them.
And video games have now been discovered by intellectuals.
Another Life, Wiser Mind00:01:02
So you're going to be fighting for your life to keep the leftists from destroying them.
Good luck, because I love them and I don't want to see them destroyed.
That's it.
We'll be back tomorrow.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sajovitz.
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.
Democrat darling, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls capitalism irredeemable and America garbage.
We will examine why AOC and all the fresh faces of the Democrat Party are wrong about everything.