Andrew Clavin’s Mueller Indicts the Press dissects how $40 million Mueller probe—exonerating Trump of collusion—exposed media malfeasance, from retracted CNN/WSJ lies to Schiff’s unsubstantiated claims. Mocking Democrats’ shifting narratives (e.g., Chuck Todd’s "obstruction implies collusion"), he frames the press as prioritizing partisan attacks over truth, comparing their behavior to WMD-era deception. The episode pivots to Leaving Neverland, condemning Streisand’s defense of Jackson’s abuse as left-wing hypocrisy, while tying it to SPLC’s corruption and media’s distraction tactics—ultimately arguing Trump’s credibility eclipses that of a biased press. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrats and the media, but I repeat myself, are demanding a special counsel be appointed to investigate why Donald Trump did not stop the last special counsel from investigating Donald Trump.
Congressman Jerry Nadler, in a statement issued from under a rock, said, quote, connect the dots, people.
Robert Mueller found there was no Russian collusion, and yet Trump did not obstruct his investigation.
That means Trump just stood by and allowed the government to waste over two years and $30 million looking into something that he knew all along never happened.
This is completely irresponsible waste of taxpayer dollars, and we need to get to the bottom of why Trump allowed it to go on, unquote.
Congressman Adam Tailgunner-Schiff waved a sealed envelope in the air and said, quote, I have in my hand photographic evidence proving beyond a reasonable doubt that I continually lied by saying I had seen evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of Trump's collusion.
And yet, while Trump clearly knew I was lying, he did absolutely nothing to thwart my committee from squandering the people's hard-earned dollars on an absurd witch hunt.
How could Trump even pretend I was sincere?
Look at my face.
The whole idea of me telling the truth is ridiculous, unquote.
On CNN, where facts come sooner or later, no matter how hard they try to stop them, Brian Stelter spoke to an audience of six guys running to catch a plane into coma, saying, quote, this president has repeatedly endangered our constitutional rights by allowing the press to report fake news and wild conspiracy theories until we expose ourselves as both liars and fools.
Trump needs to be investigated immediately before we continue to make a mockery of the First Amendment by moving on to the next phony conspiracy, unquote.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, published an editorial apologizing for its now disgraced reporting.
The Times promised to reform its journalistic processes, cease publishing anti-Trump hate speech, and instead tell the truth objectively.
Then I woke up.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Years are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-hooky.
Trigger Warning Clowns Car00:02:33
Ship-shaped topsy, the world is it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Well, the American press has become a metaphorical clown car in the sense that it is a metaphorical car filled with literal clowns.
When I say they are literal clowns, I mean the so-called journalists at ABC, CNN, NBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post are fumbling, stumbling, bumbling idiots in gigantic shoes and white makeup whose rubbery red noses honk when you press them and also who pour out of their metaphorical Volkswagen and lie and spew bias, speculation, and nonsense in order to damage Republicans and conservatives and bolster and protect their fellow Democrats and socialists.
But I repeat myself.
The fact that Robert Mueller and his team of Democrat investigators spent more than two years on something like 40 million bucks investigating Trump and yet could come up with no evidence to indict the president is an indictment of the news media and raises questions about the questions that they have not been raising from the very beginning.
And did I mention they're clowns?
They're clowns.
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So just to remind you, this is a little long, but it's worth listening to.
Final Indictments Dropping00:14:44
Here is what we've been listening to from the press for the past two years.
Well, this week, on Friday.
He is going to be delivering what I think are going to be his indictments, the final indictments.
I would not be surprised if there were a number of indictments that's still going to come down the pipe.
There are indictments in this president's future.
That's a bombshell.
The bombshell.
This bombshell dropped the bombshell.
Bombshell accusation.
Bombshell accusation.
This is evidence of willingness to commit collusion.
If this BuzzFeed news report is true, then we are likely on our way to possible impeachment proceedings.
If this story is true, we must begin impeachment proceedings.
This is suborning perjury.
I think there's no question it's an impeachable offense.
And at that point, we are in high crimes and misdemeanor, and we are in impeachment.
This president needs to be impeached.
Impeachment is the remedy.
I mean, the president can't.
The only remedy.
The spirit of what Trump did is clearly treasonous.
This is moving into perjury, false statements, and even into potentially treason.
There's outright treason.
I mean, there is no question.
I think he's feeling the noose around his neck.
The noose is tightening.
And I think they're shocked that the noose is tightening.
He feels the noose is tightening.
The noose is tightening.
The sound of hoofbeats of all those investigations catching up with Donald Trump must be loud in his ears.
He may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time.
People might go to jail for the rest of their lives.
I think they're all going to jail.
Well, I think they're all going to end up together in prison.
And maybe that's a good question.
Oh, my God.
He has no idea that he's going down.
You're confident that at least some Trump associates will wind up in jail.
If I was betting, I would say yes.
And here is the actual conclusion of the Mueller report.
No collusion, no collusion, no collusion delivered, as delivered by Maxine Waters.
This is, we have from A.G. Bill Barr, from the Attorney General, we have this kind of summary of the Mueller report handed in Friday, late Friday.
The one time I felt there was an actual excuse for a late Friday dump that was the end of the work week.
The special counsel investigation was exhaustive.
The question of Russia's role during the elections has been examined by two congressional committees and U.S. intelligence agencies.
Mr. Mueller's findings were based on material gathered until using 2,800 subpoenas, nearly 500 search warrants, and about 500 witness interviews, making it the most exhaustive probe yet.
There was no finding of Trump collusion.
Mr. Mueller's investigation didn't establish that President Trump or any of his associates participated in the Russian conspiracies to affect the 2016 campaign, which did exist.
Mr. Mueller said that coordination would be a crime, but didn't find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
No decision on obstruction.
The Barr letter quoted Mueller as saying that he had not been, that Trump had not been exonerated on obstruction, but both Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said that they were making the determination not to prosecute on this.
I'll explain why in just a moment that this is a complete, a complete exoneration.
Anything else is a lie.
It's an indictment of our press.
It's an indictment of the Democrats.
But I think first we just have to do the Trump happiness montage.
We're going to win so much.
We're going to win at every level.
We're going to win economically.
We're going to win with the economy.
We're going to win with military.
We're going to win with health care and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
Yay!
You'll say, please, please, it's too much winning.
We can't take it anymore.
I feel pretty.
Oh, so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and gay.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
It's been a while since we played that.
I've missed it.
You know, you're going to hear, obviously, oh, this quote from Mueller that he was not exonerated for obstruction of justice.
But if indeed there was no proof of collusion after this massive investigation by most...
No collusion, no collusion, no collusion.
That's my...
Even Maxing Waters agrees there was no collusion.
There was no collusion from this investigation, right?
How could anything he do have been obstruction of justice?
The whole thing was skeyed around James Comey's firing, which he had the complete right to do.
In order to obstruct justice, you have to break the law, right?
You have to break the law and do something dishonest to obstruct the justice.
The entire thing is a complete nonsense.
And here's Trump's actual reaction, which I thought was completely fair.
After a long investigation, after so many people have been so badly hurt, after not looking at the other side, where a lot of bad things happened, a lot of horrible things happened, a lot of very bad things happened for our country.
It was just announced there was no collusion with Russia.
The most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
There was no collusion with Russia.
There was no obstruction and none whatsoever.
And it was a complete and total exoneration.
It's a shame that our country had to go through this.
To be honest, it's a shame that your president has had to go through this for before I even got elected.
It began.
And it began illegally.
And hopefully somebody's going to look at the other side.
This was an illegal takedown that failed.
And hopefully, somebody's going to be looking at the other side.
So it's complete exoneration.
No collusion.
No obstruction.
I'm sorry, but it's so absurd.
If you were a reporter, I mean an actual reporter, not a Democrat agent, the question you would be asking now, the entire question, you would blink once with a big blink and say, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
How did this get started?
You investigated the campaign, a campaign for president of the opposition party, the party in opposition to the party in power.
The FBI started an investigation over what exactly? some minor guy, Papadopoulos or whoever, making a comment about something, this steel dossier that was opo research paid for by Hillary Clinton.
Just think for a minute of what the press would be saying if George W. Bush had done that to Barack Obama.
This entire investigation started on that, and the New York Times instead, Maggie Haberman, they're compiling charts and calendars of how many times Trump criticized the investigation.
Why wouldn't he criticize the investigation?
Why wouldn't he be angry?
I mean, if you were investigated for something you knew you didn't do and all this money of over nothing, but on the instigation of nothing.
Let's just take a look at what the press has been doing instead.
Here's from The Examiner, some stories that they ran.
Prior to ex-FBI Director James Comey's appearance in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, CNN reported his congressional testimony would contradict President Trump's claim that Comey told Trump he was not under investigation.
CNN was later forced to retract its story.
In June, CNN reported then White House Director of Communications Anthony Scaramouche was involved with the Russian Direct Investment Fund and that the Senate Intelligence Committee was examining him over a meeting he had during Trump's transition with an executive from the RDIF.
This was based on a single anonymous source.
CNN retracted.
December, ABC News reported former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn would testify that he was directed by then-candidate Trump to contact Russian officials in the midst of the 2016 campaign, but it was revealed that Flynn's contacts with the Russians only occurred after the election.
ABC News, forced to retract.
December, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reported that Mueller had subpoenaed Trump's bank records from Deutsche Bank with the journal naming Trump specifically and Bloomberg claiming that the subpoena has zeroed in on the Trumps.
Both later issued corrections.
December, CNN reported Donald Trump Jr. received emails hacked by Russia.
April, McClatchy reported Mueller had evidence that longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohn was in Prague.
We now know that to be untrue.
November, again, The Guardian reported Paul Manafort managed to sneak into the Ecuadorian embassy in London three different times.
I mean all of this stuff.
Matt Taibbi, a left-winger, a stone left-winger, writes this.
In the early months of this scandal, the New York Times and Trump's campaign had repeated contact, said Trump's campaign had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence.
The Wall Street Journal told us our spy agencies were withholding intelligence from the new president out of fear he was compromised.
News leaked out of our spy chiefs had even told other countries like Israel not to share their intel with us because the Russians might have leverage of pressure on Trump.
CNN told us Trump officials had been in constant contact with Russians known to U.S. intelligence and the former director Hillary Clinton insisted Russians could not have known how to weaponize political ads unless they'd been guided by Americans.
Asked if she meant Trump, she said it's pretty hard not to mean Trump.
None of this has been walked back to be clear.
If Trump were being blackmailed by Russian agencies, if he had any kind of relationship with Russian intelligence, that would soar over the overwhelming and bipartisan standard and Nancy Pelosi would be damning torment.
I mean, all of this stuff, it's all nonsense, all of it from the press.
And you think, well, shouldn't there be a reckoning now?
Shouldn't our journalists turn and examine themselves and change what they say and change the way they report things?
But who is going to force the reckoning?
The press?
I mean, that's where the force of reckoning usually comes from in our society.
It's usually the press running scandals that makes people come forward and confess or take care, clean out their organization.
Who's going to clean out ABC?
Who's going to clean out CNN?
Who's going to clean out NBC?
Instead, what we're getting is this.
I mean, just listen to the reaction.
What we learned, what we learned from the Mueller report is that our president did not collude with our geopolitical enemy, the Russians, to win an election.
We learned that our...
No collusion, no collusion, no collusion.
As Maxine Waters, as Maxine Waters herself is saying, no collusion was involved, right?
Oh, so that's what we learned.
Good news, right?
This is good news.
Listen to Rachel Maddow.
If you're not watching, you won't be able to see it.
She is close to tears.
There was never anything the special counsel sought to do that Bill Barr stopped Mueller from doing.
And that's fascinating.
Of course, everybody would like to hear that from Robert Mueller as well as from Bill Barr.
But at this point, it's only Bill Barr who is speaking on Mueller's behalf.
Robert Mueller is still at this point publicly silent, as he has been from the very beginning.
Although we'll have more on that in a moment.
She should be singing hallelujah.
Instead, she's blinking back tears because the president did not commit treason.
That's what she's doing.
She's blinking.
Oh, she didn't.
I wanted him to.
What's his name, Chris Matthews?
He's angry.
Listen to this.
You do not get the motive unless you hear from the person himself who's being targeted, a subject of the investigation.
How can they let Trump off the hook?
So far tonight, so far tonight, we have no reason to believe Trump is going to be charged by rhetoric in the document itself in the Molly Report.
No, he will not be charged with obstruction or of collusion without ever having to sit down with the special counsel Moore and answer his damn question.
So Chris Matthews is angry because Mueller, what does he think?
Mueller didn't do a good job.
He didn't do a thorough job.
Let me tell you something.
I've never attacked Mueller because I don't know him and I hear different things.
Jim Jordan backed him.
I mean, Jim Jordan is a guy who's kind of a straight shooter.
He's on the and he's certainly on the right.
He backed him.
Molly Hemingway has been picking on him all this time.
She's a straight shooter.
She's on the right.
But I don't know.
I just don't know.
But what I do know is this.
I do know is this.
The guy is a prosecutor.
When you put a guy in that position, he wants to find guilt.
He wants to find guilt.
They can tell themselves they don't, but that's what makes the world turn for them.
I mean, it's just like a newspaper man.
If a newspaper man gets a tip that there's corruption in a company, he wants to find corruption in that company because that's the story.
That's the big story.
The idea that after two years, after all this money, after all these investigations, some of these people known to be supporters of Hillary Clinton, some of them known to dislike Donald Trump, and they didn't find it.
And Chris Matthews in his little office there in front of a camera is going to tell us that, oh, he didn't do a good job now.
I mean, the press will never, it will never take themselves into consideration.
They should be asking, they should be really on this story now.
It's a big story.
I think it's a huge story.
If the FBI and the Justice Department under Barack Obama felt that they were justified because of a comment by George Pompadopoulos, because of a piece of oppo research by Steele, if they felt they were justified in a weaponized investigation where they were bugging people's phones, they're tapping people's phones.
I mean, look at the, you know, all these indictments, they keep, one of the things they keep doing is throwing the number of indictments that came out of this.
Some of them of Russians who will never be held to account.
So you can indict a ham sandwich.
That doesn't mean anything.
Some of them of guys who we know, we've always known are kind of sleazy, Michael Cohn and Manafort and Roger Stone.
But still, that they got caught up in this net that they would never have gotten caught up on up in if this thing had not gotten started with no apparent, for no apparent reason, for no reason except that Barack Obama did not want this guy coming after his legacy.
The Role of Government Policies00:13:13
That's what it seems to have been.
I mean, he didn't want him coming after his legacy so that he weaponized our intelligence agencies.
What about, you know, all these people?
What about Mike Flynn?
What about Mike Flynn?
Here's a guy who served honorably in the military all these years.
He made a legal phone call in which he discussed legal things and then basically they put the squeeze on him to confess to a felony because he didn't want to bankrupt his family because there was some talk that his son might have been exposed for not reporting all of his income from foreign governments.
And now this guy has confessed to a felony because of a legal phone call, because of a crime that would not have existed if this dubious investigation hadn't started in the first place.
Should the press not, should every story about the press not be, you know, why didn't we investigate this?
Let's investigate it now?
Wouldn't that be what an honest press would be doing?
Instead, we're getting this stuff from Brian Stelter, who really, at this point, I mean, if he had an audience, he should lose it.
He should be fired for the way he's behaved.
But listen to this kind of, what's the word, a rationalization of their incredibly absurd and corrupt behavior.
That's what hundreds of journalists have been doing, trying to solve pieces of this Trump-Russia puzzle.
But here's the thing, speculation actually has value too.
It helps open our eyes, helps open our minds to what's possible.
I know people like to mock cable news in moments like this.
It's an easy punchline, right?
We are kind of standing by to find out what the news is going to be, waiting for A.G. Barr to tell us something.
But that does have value too.
This country needs to know what Mueller found and needs to know what he didn't find.
And I think all of us as news citizens, news consumers, need to make sure our tuners work so we can distinguish between what is true and what is news versus what is wishful thinking, speculation, opinion.
So don't be fooled by the partisans who cherry pick the worst mistakes of individual journalists or the craziest ideas from commentators and claim that's the entire media.
It's not.
It is.
It is.
He's lying.
He's wrong.
It's just not true.
It would be true if the mistakes weren't on all on one side.
If the mistakes weren't all Trump has been convicted, Trump is being investigated.
Trump dealt with the Russians.
Trump is Boris Badenoff.
You know, Trump is in Putin's pocket.
Trump is blackmailed.
If it weren't for that, it might be true.
Then they would just be incompetent.
Then they would just be incompetent buffoons rushing too fast to get the story, falling prey to the 24-7 news cycle.
Then we could believe that.
But it's not.
Whenever they heard something about Trump, they reported it.
Their sources, they were plagued by sources.
And this is another thing, by the way.
If this is corruption, you know, Matt Taibbi, being a leftist, he says this is like the WMD scandal, the fact that the press fell and the Democrats fell for the WMD thing.
That wasn't George W. Bush lying.
That was either error or I guess it was error on the part of the intelligence agencies.
Everybody believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction because every department of the intelligence agencies said he did.
That was why George W. Bush acted in the way that he acted.
That's why Hillary Clinton voted to let him act that way.
That's why John Kerry supported him.
And then they all ran like rats deserting a sinking ship when it turned out that they couldn't find the WMD.
Maybe they were there, maybe they'd been shipped into Libya, but they couldn't find them.
So suddenly all of the Democrats just abandoned them.
Suddenly, those intelligence agencies became unpatriotic to attack them when Trump said, hey, they're investigating me for nothing.
Suddenly, the same people who did the WMD mistakes, the James Clappers and the John Brennans, they became talking heads.
Why?
Why?
Why are they talking heads now?
Why is Adam Schiff, you know, I just want you to hear Chuck Todd like basically trying to talk his way out of this?
I mean, it's embarrassing.
Listen to this.
I think Democrats very fairly will say, well, wait a minute.
If this doesn't exonerate him on the obstruction question, then if you haven't resolved obstruction, how do you resolve collusion?
Because if you didn't get cooperation and they obstructed in the investigation, could you necessarily get to the bottom of the collusion question?
But Kate, I'll be honest with you, I think that is a hard political argument to make for Democrats to push as hard as perhaps some would like them to push.
No collusion, no collusion, no collusion.
It's a hard political argument to push because it makes no sense, because it's nonsense.
If he could come after him for obstruction, he would have.
He didn't.
He did nothing illegal.
So what he's saying is, if we don't know whether he obstructed justice, how do we know whether he colluded?
I mean, that's kind of insane paranoia.
But what about all these guys, the Adam Schiffs?
I mean, what about Adam Schiff, who coming on?
Again and again and again, he said, I've seen evidence of collusion.
He said it again and again.
And then he would bring up these kind of minor things that didn't really mean anything.
And now he's on TV.
He's on with George Snuffalumpagus, the Clinton hack, and he's still selling this.
Why isn't there just a trapdoor under his seat that opens up?
It's like, sorry, Adam, you're gone.
Listen to this.
There's a difference between compelling evidence of collusion and whether the special counsel concludes that he can prove beyond a reasonable doubt the criminal charge of conspiracy.
And as I've said before, George, I leave that decision to Bob Mueller, and I have full confidence in him.
And I think, frankly, the country owes Bob Mueller a debt of gratitude for conducting the investigation as professionally as he has.
So I have trust in his prosecutorial judgment, but that doesn't mean, of course, that there isn't compelling and incriminating evidence that should be shared with the American people.
What you're seeing some of the president's allies already say is that this is vindication for the president.
Well, they've been saying with each indictment that it's in vindication that now about six people close to the president have been indicted.
That hardly looks like vindication to me.
But again, let's see what the report has to say.
If they're so confident that the report is going to exonerate them, they should fight to make that report and the underlying evidence public and available to Congress.
But I suspect that we'll find those words of transparency to prove hollow.
No collusion, no collusion, no collusion.
Maxine just, she gets it.
You know, Maxine Waters gets it.
You know, this thing about transparency, transparency is one of those words that the left likes because it sounds good, but it isn't necessarily, you know, it's not necessarily good that you have transparency if you send money to a cause that you like and then your business gets shut down by people who don't like that cause.
I think ordinary citizens should be allowed to contribute to whatever they want without necessarily being exposed.
And in this case, when you have a grand jury investigation, Starr said he may not be able to release everything in the report because it was done under a grand jury, which is typically secret, right?
And the reason it's secret is if somebody accuses you of something, say you didn't do it, and the grand jury investigates and it finds some things that you did do, some things that are just embarrassing but aren't illegal, why should that be exposed?
You shouldn't have been investigated in the first place.
That's the position that Trump is in.
He should not have been investigated in the first place.
Why should everything be released?
I mean, I like transparency too because I want to know.
I'm curious about it.
But I understand why people may not want to release everything, but Adam Schiff is not going to stop.
He is a McCarthy.
But the thing is, this points to something even bigger about the press.
It points to something that underlies the press's corruption.
The press is corrupt because they're all Democrats.
That's what makes them corrupt, okay?
But there's something underlying that that is also a kind of corruption, a kind of corruption of the intent of journalism, the purpose of journalism.
The argument that we're in is mostly not an argument about what problems we have.
I mean, there's some kind of stuff like the panic over global warming that I think is nonsense.
But still, you know, we all agree that we want the poor taken care of, that health care gets expensive.
We agree on these things.
The argument we're having is the role of government.
The founding principles of this country is that the federal government should not be in control of your life, that they should be limited to the things that are enumerated, the powers that are enumerated in the Constitution.
And for a century at least, the left, through the courts, through bad decisions, through bad laws, through bad use of regulation, has been eating away at that.
So a lot of times what they'll say is, well, everybody should have a living wage.
And you'll say, no, that's ridiculous.
The press, you know, if the government becomes, if you become dependent on the government, the government has power over you.
They'll say, well, you don't care about the poor.
You say, yeah, I care about the poor.
We're discussing something else, okay?
That's the argument we're in.
The press is dedicated to giving the government more and more power as long as the government is them, as long as the government is their friends, it's their elites.
And it doesn't matter Republicans or Democrats.
Elites are elites, okay?
The thing about politics is it's not really about personalities.
Personalities matter, I get that, but it's about policy.
It's about policy.
Look at Seattle.
Look at San Francisco, where leftist policies, LA, where leftist policies have littered the streets with homeless people, with addicts, with drug addicts.
Look at Baltimore, where the mayor is under investigation for selling her self-published children's books to the University of Maryland for like $500,000, where there's corruption.
Look at New York City, which after being lifted out of hell by Rudy Giuliani, while he was attacked every day for racism and all the usual things, it's now sinking slowly back.
The murder rate is climbing.
The subways are going down.
The quality of life is declining.
Every time I'm there, it's gone a little bit down because they now have a socialist administration, crime spiking all this.
It's all about the policies.
It's all about the policies.
And to keep from pointing out the fact that left-wing policies make life worse, the press focuses on personality.
And Trump, God love him, is all personality.
He's got a great, great big personality for them to focus on.
But think about this.
They distract us with that, with Nixon's sweat and Kennedy's good looks.
And once they do that, they're absolutely free to be as biased as they want.
Okay, so if Mitt Romney comes out and says, I put women in binders, they make that into some sort of big deal, which it's nothing.
It's nothing.
It's not a news story.
It has no effect at all.
We all knew what he was trying to say.
It's nothing.
But if Ted Kennedy leaves his mistress to die, to slowly drown in a car underwater, he's the lion of the Senate.
When you're just covering personalities, there's no responsibility whatsoever.
If you're covering policy and the results of policy, then you have to explain why San Francisco is a hellhole, why that beautiful city has become a hellhole, why Portland has lost the rule of law, why Seattle is a hellhole, another beautiful city turned to garbage by the left.
They do not want to cover policy, and that's the corruption.
That's the way their corruption works.
They are corrupt because they're all Democrats.
They are corrupt because of that.
That makes them corrupt.
But the way their corruption expresses themselves is by using our natural yearning to see personalities and making that an excuse to cover up the policies on the left that do not work.
Obama's policies didn't work.
Trump's policies do.
Everything else is just noise.
All right, Michael Knowles is going to come up and we're going to talk about Michael Jackson.
But first, I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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Michael Knowles, you're heartbroken.
I gotta tell you, I can't tell you.
I was traveling for the last few days.
I just got back last night.
Is there anything in the news?
There's anything else?
Slow day.
Slow day.
Okay.
I'll find something to talk about on my show, I guess.
Rachel Maddow was crying.
That was sad.
Well, I remember I was there.
I remember.
That's right.
We never see you two together.
I switched my alter ego so that I got the tears on the glasses.
Trump did not commit treason.
I don't know.
It's just like, oh, no, our country's not in the throes of a foreign takeover.
These guys are unbelievable.
The press is trash.
They are trash.
As I was preparing what we were going to talk about today, I think we should just scrap it and I should just dance on the table or something.
If it weren't so beto orgasque, I think I would do it.
What a fabulous conclusion in the last two years.
And everything Trump said turned out to be true, which I knew.
I've been saying it myself.
I mean, he uses the best words, first of all.
And he's got more credibility than the entire mainstream media.
Kids and Celebrity Excuses00:08:52
There's just no question about it.
How crazy is that?
Donald Trump, a tabloid, he's been, he's Donald Trump, has more journalistic integrity than the entire mainstream media.
It is amazing.
And what I like is I would like to go back to that New York Times story that had the calendar of how many times he criticized the investigation and just check off how many times he was right.
Every time, every time.
Anyway, let's talk about another area of corruption because I asked you to watch, I haven't gotten a chance to watch this yet, but it really sounds good.
I asked you to watch this thing about Michael Jackson.
What's it called?
It's called Leaving Neverland.
Leaving Neverland.
This is an HBO documentary.
It is by far the best thing you've ever had me watch.
The trouble is, because you're a sadist, it's also disgusting and horrifying and really tough to watch.
Unbelievable.
It is.
So you watch it.
It's a very good film.
It lays things out very clearly.
You realize about halfway in, this is not a documentary about Michael Jackson.
This is not a documentary about pedophilia.
This is not a documentary.
This is a documentary about celebrity.
And it's a documentary about our relationship to celebrity.
Which is essentially what we're talking about, because celebrity has corrupted the press because they can use it to hide what they should be covering, which is policy.
Exactly.
What do we know?
I mean, I won't go into the five hours of this document, two parts and all of this.
Multiple little kids accuse Michael Jackson of doing exactly the same thing to them.
We know for a fact he would take these boys.
He'd spend a year with them.
He'd sleep in the same bed with them 30 consecutive nights in a row or more.
We know that he would befriend the families.
He would push the kids away from the families.
He would invite them to Neverland.
He'd have the parents stay in a guest house all the way across the property.
He'd have the kids in his bed.
We know that he lined up the hallways to his bedrooms with bells so that when people were approaching, he could hear that they were approaching.
Cameras, multiple locks.
We know he kept porn and images of naked boys in his room.
They found the fingerprints of the boys on the pornography.
We know all of this.
And yet, not until 2019, and even still, there were people who say, no, he didn't do it.
How did he avoid conviction?
How did he get the kids in the first place?
Because I mean, even if you get to the conviction.
Yes, good point.
But it's the same answer, which is people were utterly enthralled with him.
And it's actually hard for us to understand this today, especially for millennials who grew up in the 90s or even 2000s.
We're living in a reality TV culture.
We're living in an age basically without movie stars.
We're living in an age where people who were once inaccessible to us, where we'd lift up our heads to look at them on the big screen, now they come to us on our phones and they say stupid things and we hate them.
And we hate all the movie stores and they're so human.
Michael Jackson was not human.
He didn't look like a human.
He didn't move like a human.
He didn't grow up like a human.
He was, there's no comparison of a musical celebrity.
He was essentially a ride at Disneyland.
They put that movie at Disneyland and you went and saw it and it was enormous.
Yes, that was him.
And so these parents in the movie talk about this.
They say, you know, we just loved being around Michael.
He would call them up.
He would ask to go to their homes.
He would ask to have the little boys sleep in his bed for however long at a time.
And they would say, yeah, we just, we really liked going there.
He had a lovely wine cellar and he would give us all of his nice wine.
In all of these cases, the fathers were not really kids live.
All fathers, because a father would have punched his light out.
Even a bad father would have punched his light out.
I mean, you know, the best article on this, of any of the think pieces, was from your sister.
It was.
She was great.
It's worth looking up.
Caitlin Flanagan.
Caitlin Flannagan.
It's beautifully written and it's wonderfully observed.
My favorite part of it, by the way, was the opening two paragraphs where she talks about in this documentary, the camera swooping down on this house, like Peter Pan, who chose his houses because that's by finding the people who believed in him.
And that's exactly what he did.
That's exactly what he did.
And it does, in a way, connect to all of the news today about the Mueller investigation.
But you wonder, how did people for two years, how did some people seriously believe Donald Trump was Boris and Natasha from Rocky and Bull?
How did they really believe he was a Russian spy?
The fantasy cracks.
How did people convince themselves that this behavior from Michael Jackson, which went on for years and years and years, he'd holding hands with little boys sleeping with them.
How did they convince themselves that this was normal behavior?
Chris Rock talks about this.
He said, you know, we love Michael Jackson so much.
We gave him one little boy.
We gave him one.
And then he kept going back to, and we were in that fantasy too.
This is not just about Michael.
This is still going on today.
And it's incumbent on us to crack that fantasy.
We're going to keep letting terrible things happen, terrible crimes happen, and keep divorcing ourselves from the reality that's right in front of us.
You know, when you talk about this investigation, the Mueller investigation, and these things are connected because they are about celebrity and they are about focusing on personality rather than focusing on the things that matter because we all have personalities.
We all have corruption.
We all have things about ourselves we don't like and that we're all fallen people and all this.
But really, it is always about policy.
But when you look at this, you think like, I'm not an insider.
I wasn't talking to Mueller.
I was just reading the information.
And I'm not Sean Hannity.
If I had thought Trump was colluding with Russia, I would have said so.
I mean, I shouldn't, I don't mean to down talk to Sean, but he always backs Trump.
But I don't always back Trump.
You know, if he was doing something wrong, I'd have said so.
It was obvious that this was a fantasy.
About, I would say about three, four months ago, it just became obvious that it was a complete fantasy.
And I started to say that into the mic, right?
How did these people keep that fantasy alive?
It just is indicative of how much people can live in their own heads.
And they're making excuses now.
Yes.
You know, when the doomsday cultists are waiting, the end of the world is going to happen.
They're all waiting.
The end of the world doesn't happen.
What do they do?
Do they abandon the cult?
No.
Do they double down?
That's right.
And you know, the thing that got me about this is that Barbara Streisand's comment.
And, you know, she said basically, what did she say?
These kids wanted to do this?
She said, look, they're married now.
One of them's got a kid.
They're fine.
It didn't kill them.
And they said, Michael Jackson had sexual needs.
Right.
His sexual needs were his sexual needs for his sexual needs.
So now, My point about this is Barbara Streisand makes a lot of political comments and her political comments are covered.
When somebody says that, they're erased for me.
They're ashes in terms of reputation.
When you say a child being molested, I mean, is there some place, there's got to be some place we draw the line.
And listen, I haven't seen the documentary, but I read about it, and the stuff they're talking about is as graphic and as horrible as the worst thing you can imagine, right?
And she says that.
It raises the question, why did we ever listen to anything she says?
These people who are actors and dancers and singers, God knows they're blessed.
I mean, they have incredible talent.
Michael Jackson had incredible talent, one of the best dancers I've ever seen.
But that doesn't make them moral characters.
It doesn't make them spokesmen of anything.
We used to lock up our daughters when they came to town.
Now we give them, you know, why are they on TV being asked about politics?
I think the two are related.
I think being a Democrat is basically having a modern day indulgence.
Indulgences still exist, but in the culture, the way we talk about indulgences, that is what it is to be a Democrat because you hear Barbara Streisand on her soapbox all the time, moral preening, and then to defend child molestation.
And to defend it clearly and undeniably.
Yeah, I mean, we should mention she apologized.
She apologized.
But still, you know, there was no ambiguity.
It was a gaffe in the sense that a gaffe is when you say what you really like.
Exactly.
And she did that.
But what we see with all of these preening politicians, all of these preening celebrities who talk about left-wing politics, is there is this kind of cover-up, this patina, this facade to cover up a worldview that is utterly depraved, that gives a leeway to moral depravity.
And I'm sorry, because I don't want to sound like a Democrat here, but there's a racial element to this.
If these were the kids of the people who cheated their way into university, those rich white kids, it wouldn't even have occurred to Barbara Streisand to say that.
It's the fact that they're little black kids, nobody really cares about it.
Right.
Nobody gives it a lot of money.
Or even the family, I mean, some of the kids are white.
Media Scandal Exposed00:03:34
The families lived in these little middle classes.
In the middle of nowhere.
It really is appalling.
So anyway, what are you going to do?
You have nothing to talk about.
I don't know what I'm going to talk about today.
I just don't know.
Do you want to borrow my Trump happiness montage?
Yeah, I think that's going to be the whole day.
Actually, I mean, I've basically been writing today's show for the past two years.
I got on.
I was sitting middle seat in the back of coach yesterday on my airline.
I had the best flight of my life reading the reaction, because there were two scandals.
There's the political scandal of all of this, and there's the media scandal.
And the media scandal is the greater, the greater.
I agree.
And the end, inburied in the media scandal, is the Department of Justice scandal, which is right.
Which is not being covered.
I mean, it's amazing.
It's great to see you.
Good to see you.
All right.
You know, let us, in a final reflection, talk about another, another hotbed of corruption, the Southern Poverty Law Center.
You know, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been proclaiming people of conservative bent hate groups.
And they have been listened to, and they've been allowed to get their grips on social media.
They've been allowed to have commentary and sway over Google and Facebook and Twitter.
And this is a corrupt organization.
And now that corruption is coming out.
After the shooting in New Zealand, the press was using the SPLC to say that hate groups were on the rise.
And some of those hate groups were simply traditional Christian groups or conservative groups who believed in conservative values.
And that's hateful to them.
But now it turns out that everybody at the top of the Southern Poverty Law Center is going down.
The president, Richard Cohen, announced his resignation.
This is the latest in a series of high-profile departures at the anti-hate organization.
And I say that with scare quotes around it, that have come amid allegations of misconduct and workplace discrimination.
We're talking about sexual misconduct.
The details haven't come out.
They're covering them up.
But a lot of their top people have left because of allegations of sexual misconduct.
And as we look at this, and some of this has been covered in the mainstream press, their treatment of black people who were called the help has been appalling.
And of anybody who was from a minority, the top people there, the lawyers, they were all white guys, and the women were treated badly, and the people of color were treated badly.
And then these people would come out and tell, you know, the family defense council, whatever it was called, the family council that defend, that opposes gay marriage.
They would tell them that they were hateful.
And in doing this, they raised a ton of money, over $100 million.
And they said, you know, they said we ran this as a business.
John Edgerton, writing for The Progressive, painted a damning portrait of the Dees, the center's longtime mastermind, as a super salesman and master fundraiser who viewed civil rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible northern liberals.
You know, northern liberals would be a little less gullible if they would simply engage with the opposition, if they would simply talk to people on the other side of intelligence instead of always running them down, instead of always attacking them personally.
If they would simply listen, they would find that there are arguments on both sides and things that we can discuss on both sides.
But once you become that kind of partisan, once you start to excuse the corruption on your side, once you start to give authority to people like Barbara Streisand and the Southern Poverty Law Center, you have gone down the road to absolute destruction and personal corruption.
Daily Wire's Betrayal00:01:31
You know, this is something that really needs to be looked at because we can see now our press has abandoned us.
It has abandoned the tenets of journalism.
It has abandoned the telos of journalism.
It has abandoned the purpose of what they do in order to support what they believe.
And that has left us on our own.
And we've got to start to make our own way and find our own heroes and our own truth.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
will see you again tomorrow.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam 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.
The special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election has concluded and it has found no collusion from Donald Trump, from the Trump campaign, or any other American.
It's done.
Finito.
Punto e basta.
Speaking of basta, just a little cherry on top.
Creepy porn lawyer, Democrat Michael Avenatti has just been indicted by the Southern District of New York because today is the best day for conservatives since the fall of the Berlin Wall.