Ep. 692’s Andrew Clavin mocks CNN’s Mueller report coverage as a Democrat "unicorn show," while ABC’s Po Face Blather downplays its lack of indictments, framing Trump’s economic wins and judicial appointments as overshadowed by media bias. He contrasts Trump’s transparency with Obama-era scandals like Fast and Furious, dismissing obstruction claims as performative outrage and predicting a damning IG report on FISA abuses. The episode pivots to late-night comedy’s "claptor" culture, conservative censorship in entertainment, and Hollywood’s agenda-driven criticism—from Unplanned’s suppression to Marvel’s "woke" shift—culminating in accusations of media hostility toward Christianity, all while promoting his book Another Kingdom. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrats and the news media, but I repeat myself, are delivering their takes on the Mueller report just as quickly as they can read the report summaries by the 19-year-old interns who read the report.
Over at CNN, a panel of one shrieking Democrat dressed as nine different commentators declared that the report marked a tipping point at the beginning of the end of the noose tightening while the walls close in, causing Trump to lose the 2016 election, thus making Hillary the first woman president, just like in their dreams.
At ABC, news analyst Po Face Blather said the report is a damning indictment of Trump, except without the indictment.
And when he comes to think about it, he actually added the word damning just for effect, since without the indictment, it doesn't really make any sense.
Chuck Todd, whose face looks exactly the same upside down as right side up.
Not that that has anything to do with anything.
It's just kind of weird.
Anyway, Chuck Todd says that Attorney General William Barr has absolutely disgraced himself by saying the report showed no evidence of collusion when in fact the report uses very different words to say the same thing.
Looking stupidly into the camera with his face either right side up or upside down, I couldn't tell which, Todd said, quote, just because a jury finds you not guilty, that doesn't mean you're innocent.
And just because a prosecutor doesn't prosecute, that doesn't mean we in the media can't ceaselessly spin his words into an insinuation of guilt until you just want to put your fist through the television set and punch me in the chin, or perhaps the forehead, whichever one is on top, unquote.
To be fair to the MSM, the report did show Donald Trump in an unflattering light as a loudmouthed, over-emotional, and rash Donald Trump-like figure who has repaired the economy, defeated ISIS, and appointed great justices just like he said he would.
So bite me.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bibby-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
So the more attentive among you may have noticed my laryngitis is a little better, but not gone.
So I'm going to push through and then we'll have the Clavenless weekend and hopefully I will recover, but bear with me.
One of the oldest tricks in the leftist playbook is to put the adjective American in front of the common sins of humankind.
American racism.
They talk about American injustice, American sexism, as if these things were unique to our country.
In fact, when you study these subjects in depth, you discover the word American can usually be translated to mean less, less racism, less injustice, less sexism.
So it is with Donald Trump.
For more than two years now, the Democrats in the media, but I repeat myself, have been telling us that Trump was evil, dishonest, corrupt.
And now the Mueller report has revealed that Trump was, he was kind of Trump.
He was flawed.
He's over-emotional.
He's furious when attacked.
Stamps.com And Beyond00:02:13
He's inexperienced and even naive when it comes to operating in the swamp of politics.
Robert Mueller spent two years going after him with a vengeance and came up with nothing indictable.
That wasn't true of Comey's slap-dash and slanted investigation of Hillary Clinton, which by all rights should have put her behind bars.
And it wouldn't have been true of Obama if his attorneys general hadn't been as corrupt as the left pretends Bill Barr is.
It's not what about ism to point out that in the world of politics, Trump may be roguish, sometimes, and comically brash, but he's actually more transparent and more straightforward than virtually everyone else around him.
And we're going to talk about that in a minute.
But first, let us talk about stamps.com.
We love stamps.com because we live in LA.
I live in LA.
The post office is, I don't know, maybe half a block away.
That's three hours of driving.
You get to listen to an entire book before you get to the post office.
No, I want my post office in my computer with everything else of value that I have.
Stamps.com, it's one of the most popular time-saving tools for small businesses.
It eliminates trips to the post office and saves you money with discounts that you can't even get at the post office.
Stamps.com brings all the amazing services of the U.S. post office right to your computer.
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Right now, our listeners get a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and a digital scale without any long-term commitment.
Just go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, and type in Clavin.
That's stamps.com.
Enter Clavin.
You'll be able to stamp your letter right from your computer, send it out with the question: How do you spell Clavin?
How indeed?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Yesterday, despite my voice, I did a special conversation on Another Kingdom where I signed copies of Another Kingdom.
You can still get your copies signed if you purchase them.
I can't remember.
Premier Collectibles, premiercollectibles.com/slash AnotherKingdom.
It was a great conversation.
Rogue Doctor Scandal-Free00:14:57
Please go on and listen to it.
Answered some really, really interesting questions and talked about how the devil hates this book.
Satan hates this book.
He plagues me with laryngitis, with all kinds of physical ailments, with all kinds of technical glitches.
Even at one point, my house filled up with centipedes when I finished the first draft, when the first book in the Another Kingdom trilogy.
If you don't want to be a tool of Satan, you must buy this book.
If you don't buy this book, that's what you are, and you'll start to grow horns.
It'll be terrible.
So go ahead and buy Another Kingdom.
All right.
You know, they played the Barr press conference live on television.
So a lot of people thought they saw the whole thing.
But we exclusively at the Andrew Claven show what really happened at the Bar press conference yesterday announcing the release of the Mueller Report.
Here it is.
As the Special Counsel report makes clear, the Russian government sought to interfere in our election process.
But thanks to the Special Counsel's thorough investigation, we now know that the Russian operatives who perpetrated these schemes did not have the cooperation of President Trump or the Trump campaign, or the knowing assistance of any other American for that matter.
That is something that all Americans can and should be grateful to have confirmed.
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.
Zip-ba-dee-doo-dah, zip-ba-dee-ay.
My, oh my, what a wonderful day.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
Yay!
You 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.
The Trump obviously was delighted.
I got to play one more clip from the bar press conference being the greatest moment in the bar press conference was when the reporter went after him.
This is cut number 13.
Just to show you the difference, the level of intelligence, competence, and professionalism between Bill Barr and the people trying to now smear him as Trump's toady.
Mr. Attorney General, let's talk with Democrats who have questioned some of the process here.
A Republican appointed judge on Tuesday said, you have, quote, created an environment that has caused a significant part of the American public to be concerned about these redactions.
You clear the president on obstruction.
The president is fundraising off of your comments about spying.
And here you have remarks that are quite generous to the president, including acknowledging his feelings and his emotions.
So what do you say to people on both sides of the aisle who are concerned that you are trying to protect the president?
Well, actually, the statements about his sincere beliefs are recognized in the report that there was substantial evidence for that.
So I'm not sure what your basis is for saying that I'm being generous to the president.
You face an unprecedented situation.
It just seems like there's a lot of effort to say, to go out of your way to acknowledge how this is.
Well, is there another precedent for it?
No, but it's a pretty good question.
Okay, so unprecedented is an accurate description, isn't it?
Yes.
What do you say to people who are concerned that he was trying to protect the president?
Eric.
Eric?
You called it unprecedented.
Is there a precedent?
No, there's no other precedent.
Trump, obviously delighted.
He was talking to the wounded warriors and was back on his Trumpian trolls, which is my favorite Trump, as he was accepting an award from the Wounded Warriors, a statuette.
This is really beautiful.
This will find a permanent place at least for six years in the Oval Office.
Is that okay?
I was going to joke, General, say at least for 10 or 14 years, but we would cause bedlam if I said that.
So we'll say six.
Yeah, so Trump is feeling pretty good.
And again, here's what I saw in the report, and I spent most of yesterday reading it.
Trump was Trump.
You know, obviously, it was obvious that Mueller really wanted to get him.
Who in Washington could withstand a two-year investigation into everything, every single thing his associates did that could have been interpreted as bad?
I mean, it was like clearly Mueller, and you know, possibly some of this was personal animus.
I got the sense that Mueller really disliked Trump, really disliked the kind of roguish, you know, I'll tell you a funny story.
When I was a young man in New York City and I started writing mystery stories, I was at a party and I found myself sitting next to somebody in the construction business.
And I turned to him and I said kind of jokingly, I'm writing a mystery story and I'd really like to know what would happen if you buried a body in the foundation of a building when you were building the building.
I have this scene in one of my books.
You're building a building and you dump somebody into the cement, what would happen?
And the guy, without missing a beat, turned around and described step by step what would happen if you had a dead body in the foundation of a building and how it would affect the building over time until it was obvious to me that he'd done it or at least seen somebody done it or heard of it being done.
The construction business, the real estate business in New York is a tough business.
And guys like Trump, I'm sure, have done a lot of things that I wouldn't want to do and I wouldn't want my son to do.
But Trump just seems to be a rogue.
He seems, they've been after him for so long.
I have to believe that he's obviously not a criminal.
He seems to be a rogue.
And guys like Mueller, prosecutors like Mueller, hate those guys.
And I am sure that there was some personal animus in Mueller's almost Xavier-like from les miserables hunt to find guilt.
But he didn't find guilt and he was honest enough to admit it.
And so when you say, oh, well, he didn't say he was innocent, he said what he had to say.
He said, I can't prosecute this guy.
And he should have said, when he said, I won't prosecute him, I won't clear him.
I won't exonerate him for obstruction.
He should have said, I won't prosecute him for that.
That was his job.
And there's a lot of stuff he didn't talk about.
I'll talk about that in just a second.
But first, let's talk about Ring.
You know, we like Ring because Ring's mission is to make neighborhoods safer.
And it's something that you need, especially if you live in a city, but really anywhere you live.
If you're isolated, you want to know when somebody comes to your door who it is.
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You want to be able to talk to him, even if you're not home.
And that's the kind of Ring smart video doorbell that you can use that will go right to your phone no matter where you are.
Somebody comes to the door that you don't know.
You can see them in your phone and talk to him.
You can even get a floodlight cam that will have motion-activated floodlights come on.
I told you how our own Jonathan Hay had this happen to him and immediately he had the ring doorbell.
3 o'clock in the morning, somebody came to his door.
He could question them, get rid of them.
And then he went around and put ring security lights and security cameras all around his home to protect himself.
As a listener, you have a special offer on a ring starter kit available right now with a video doorbell and the motion-activated floodlight cam.
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Just go to ring.com/slash clavin.
That's ring.com/slash clavin.
Anyone comes to your home, you can see him, you can say, how do you spell clavin?
It's k-l-a-v-a-n.
If he doesn't know that, do not let him in.
You know, he didn't talk about in this report any of the stuff that started the report.
The steel dossier is never mentioned, the start of the investigation.
He never mentioned it.
Sean Davis over at the Federalist talks about the fact that he talks about Carter Page, but he never discloses that Page was previously an FBI informant.
He talks about Roger Stone and Michael Caputo and Henry Aknyansky, but fails to disclose that this Aknyansky was an FBI informant.
There's a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff that was not mentioned about how this investigation got started and whether Trump was right in his sincere belief that he was being targeted.
I think it really does seem to me that he was.
So when they talk about the president and now they're going after the president, oh, he did this and he did that.
Sometimes the president went off when somebody said, oh, you know, he went off to Don McGahn and said, get rid of Mueller.
And Don McGahn didn't do it.
And everybody says, oh, you know, that just shows that only the fact that his subordinates wouldn't do what he said saved him from obstruction of justice.
No, Trump has a temper.
He goes off.
He knows he has a temper.
He knows he goes off.
And he doesn't follow through because he knows that he gave the guy the wrong instructions.
If he had wanted to fire Mueller, Mueller would have been gone.
He had the power to do it.
He could have done it.
But he didn't.
He gave him all the papers he asked for.
He didn't call on executive privilege as Obama did when he was covering up for Eric Holder during the fast and furious investigation.
Eric Holder stonewalled Congress.
They went after his papers.
President Obama suddenly declared everything was covered by executive privilege.
Donald Trump could have taken most of this report and covered it up with executive privilege.
If he were Obama, he would have done it.
The press would have said nothing.
He didn't do it.
The press gives him no credit for it.
Sometimes the president comes before us and he's like a Carney Barker.
He exaggerates.
Sometimes he even lies.
But he never lied like this.
Take a look at this.
If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor under the reform proposals that we put forward.
If you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep it.
If you like the plan you have, you can keep it.
If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor too.
We will keep this promise to the American people.
If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period.
If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan.
Period.
This has been a difficult week for the State Department and for our country.
We've seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men.
We've seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing to do with.
You're saying no corruption.
No.
None.
No.
There were some bonehead decisions.
Boneheads out of a lot of people.
No mass corruption.
Not even mass corruption.
Not even a smidgen of corruption.
Trump never lied like that, and he never lied like this.
And he's been scandal-free, frankly, in the White House.
We haven't had that for a while.
He ran an administration that was largely scandal-free.
There's a White House that takes pride in being scandal-free.
That in the Obama years, which are remarkably scandal-free.
A lot of people were talking about how he's going to be remembered for the scandal-free administration that he ran.
The president has been very rightfully proud of the lack of scandal in his administration so far.
There's been no major scandals of brown top aides.
But President Obama has run an amazingly scandal-free administration, not only he himself, but the people around him.
These chosen people who have been pretty scandal-free.
This has been a scandal-free administration for the last eight years, and oftentimes people don't even talk about that fact.
So Trump, you know, you can see it in this report.
Trump is a rogue.
He's a flawed man.
He's an overly emotional man.
And he's kind of naive in a lot of ways.
When he had that line about, oh, now my presidency is over because they've appointed a special counsel.
You know, what he was saying, and it's in the report, they make it sound like he was saying now they're going to get me and arrest me.
What he was saying, it's in the report right there, is this is going to hold up, you know, put a cloud over my administration.
It's going to tangle me up in this stupid investigation.
He had every right to be furious.
He was targeted.
He was treated unfairly.
And the people who treated him unfairly protected people who were much, much worse than him.
The thing that comes across in this report to me is that Trump is Trump.
We know who he is already.
We know all the stuff.
Yeah, did he bang Stormy Daniels and then get her, you know, pay her off to keep quiet?
Yeah.
Did he lie about it?
Yep, he did.
No question about it.
But he didn't lie about major policies like Obamacare.
If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
He didn't stand in front of the bodies, the coffins of fallen Americans and lie about the cause of what killed them, cover it up so that Barack Obama could continue to lie about how he had decimated al-Qaeda.
He didn't do that.
He didn't sit and let the IRS silence his political opponents and then lie about that.
He lies about the fact.
He's a rogue.
He's a roguish guy.
And he does, you know, he does things that we all disapprove of, that I disapprove of.
But he's in this place where he's surrounded by people so much worse, including, including the press.
And listen to the press try and spin this thing to make it sound like they were right all along instead of wrong every step of the way.
This is cut number seven.
I hope I'm not playing a semantic game here, but Barr said that there was no evidence of collusion.
No, what the conclusion of the report is, is that there was no prosecutable case.
There was not enough evidence to bring a criminal case insufficient evidence to bring a criminal case involving the Trump campaign and Russian interests.
That's different from no evidence.
And I think there is more evidence in the report than I had certainly known about connections between the Trump campaign and Russia.
One of the things that they have said to us when they've been doing this touchdown dance for about three weeks now and accusing the media of trying to pull a fast one on the president here and a fast one on the American people.
Time and again in this Mueller report, reporting from major news outlets is confirmed in this Mueller report as being accurate.
Time and again, it is revealed.
They gave us false statements about what was going on during the course of this Russian investigation.
Time And Again Revealed00:15:28
So that utter, utter rationalization, utter self-defense in the midst of an absolute disaster for the American press.
What Toobin is saying, oh, well, he didn't say there was no evidence.
He just said he wasn't going to prosecute him.
That was Mueller's only job.
The meetings, when you go through the meetings that the campaign had with Russian people or people with, they're completely petty.
They're the kinds of things that could have happened to anybody in the chaos of a campaign, especially a campaign that was peopled at the start with a lot of neophytes and people who didn't know what they were doing.
On top of which, on top of which, some of these guys may have been sent in by the FBI.
We don't even know.
We don't even know that yet.
And what Acosta, look at me, I'm Jim Acosta, says, is complete crap.
I've heard this a couple of times, that we got it right.
It's true.
They got a lot of the stories that were in the Mueller report.
They reported them, and they were right about those.
But it was surrounded by this swamp of garbage.
Michael Cohn went to Prague.
Trump told Cohen to lie to Congress.
Paul Manafort sent polling data to Putin.
Trump made the RNC soften its platform on Russia's Ukraine invasion.
Jeff Sessions was colluding with the Russian ambassador.
Donald Trump was a Russian asset.
All those stories appeared on the news.
So the fact that amidst that garbage, amidst that trash, amidst those lies were nuggets of truth is not getting the story right.
That is not getting the story right.
Everything they did went wrong.
I mean, it was an absolute, absolute disgrace.
You know, and again, the person that we're seeing, the Trump that we're seeing, is the Trump we know.
We already have everything we need to know about Donald Trump, you know, displayed out before us.
There are no big surprises with Trump.
He comes from a world where you cut corners.
He comes from a life of privilege.
He comes from a world of self-indulgence and dishonesty.
We all know that.
That's all true.
But the people he's dealing with are just as bad.
That's not what about ism.
That's context.
That's why we sort of look at him and say, well, at least he's who he says he is.
He's not some desiccated gothic ruin of corruption like Hillary Clinton, pretending to be the noble, high-minded first woman president of the United States.
He's not a Chicago Paul who practices machine politics like Barack Obama while he's pretending to be above us all, like the gods and the wise savior, light worker of the world.
He is what he seems.
And that is an asset.
That is some kind of authenticity.
And yes, you shake your head at some of the stuff he does and you roll your eyes, but only because he does it out in the open.
Mueller says this at one point, that it would be very hard to prove criminal intent in obstruction because he does it all out in the open.
And Mueller just seems bemused by this.
He says, well, it's still obstruction, but how do you show that a guy is corrupt when he's just doing it right in front of you?
So let me just play, I got to play this one thing, this one comparison, just to show you the blindness and why people stick with Trump and why people support Trump.
Because after all, he's doing a good job as president, in spite of his personal flaws.
He's also doing a good job as president.
But let me just show you Brian Williams going after Bill Barr for the way that he presented the report as being pro-Trump.
So this is cut number eight.
That brings us to the relevant question of this morning.
Having taken one publicly for the team, does Barr's influence fall off a cliff in the next hour?
And as I say, after a long career in the law, the Attorney General will have to reconcile himself to the fact that this will be how his reputation is set in legal history again at the age of 60, 80.
Yeah, Joyce, it's already been mentioned around here, though it would harken back to a conflict decades ago.
We would not be surprised if some headline writer somewhere came up with Baghdad Bill Barr for what we saw today.
So that's Baghdad Bill Barr is Brian Williams talking about Attorney General Bill Barr, who has led a career without scandal, a career without ever being accused of any of this because Brian Williams, hired by MSNBC, formerly of NBC, doesn't think that Bill Barr was honest.
Now let's just play Williams.
Let's go back in time a little bit and remember why Williams was suspended, but never really punished for the things he said on NBC.
Here is Brian Williams lying into the camera.
The story actually started with a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG.
Our traveling NBC News team was rescued, surrounded, and kept alive by an armored mechanized platoon from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry.
According to Variety, a person familiar with the situation said that NBC News executives had counseled Williams in the past to stop telling the story in public, though this is disputed by someone familiar with current NBC news operations.
After Friday's recounting, one of the crew members of that helicopter challenged Williams with this Facebook post.
Sorry, I don't remember you being on my aircraft.
I do remember you walking up about an hour after we had landed to ask me what had happened.
Other crew members confirmed this discrepancy to the military magazine Stars and Stripes.
And, you know, there was also Brian Williams' lies about Katrina and how he saw someone committing suicide in the stadium about Katrina.
That turned out not to be true.
I'm not playing this to pick on Brian Williams, although he deserves it.
That's not what I'm doing it for.
I'm just doing it to show you the blindness, the blindness of the people reporting, the blindness of the people attacking the Adam Schiffs who lied about having evidence, more than circumstantial evidence about Russian collusion.
All these people lying in line and twisting and turning and then saying, oh, look at Trump.
He's evil.
He's evil.
Trump is no perfect guy.
There's no question about that.
Trump is a roguish guy.
But as it turns out, he is actually, it is not what about ism, it is context to say that he is actually better than the people around him in that swamp in D.C.
So what happens now?
Well, we know what the media wants to happen now.
They were talking about it yesterday.
This is cut number one.
They just want the Democrats to push ahead with impeachment based on information in the report.
If you're going after the truth, go all the way to the truth.
And a way to get to the truth is an impeachment exercise.
Many of us do think the president's unfit for office, but unless that's a bipartisan conclusion, an impeachment would be doomed to failure.
Impeachment in the House of Representatives simply requires a majority vote, and the Democrats have a clear majority.
This is an invitation to Congress to say you can do it using the impeachment power.
Now, I don't know if they will, I don't know if they should, but the idea that this is some sort of exoneration seems very highly contradictory to this.
I'm not the fire department, because the Justice Department says you can't indict a city president, but here's the smoke.
When you say that it's Congress's responsibility to hold the president accountable, does that mean impeachment?
That's one possibility.
There are others.
We obviously have to get to the bottom of what happened and Take whatever action seems necessary at that time.
If you choose to go toward impeachment, how important would this report be?
Do you think this is a magnetic roadmap?
I think it was probably written with the intent of providing Congress a roadmap.
So that is the future in the Democrat slash media eyes.
Here is another version of the future from Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch.
Certainly it is a focal point now of the Office of Inspector General at the Justice Department to focus on how this all began in the first place.
That we expect that report, what, in the next 60 days, that is going to be, to me at least, the far more interesting report.
I think it will be, but remember, it will be more narrowly focused, at least that's what we're led to believe, on the FISA warrant applications, the shady applications that Mueller, by the way, benefited from and used.
But, you know, the Attorney General has got to take a broader view as to what went on.
Remember, the FISA warrants were only one aspect of the spy campaign against President Trump.
It included leaks.
It included political bias by Strzzk, Page, McCabe, etc.
And, of course, they were trying to entrap the Trump team by launching spies against the Trump campaign.
Never in American history has there been such a spy effort against a candidate and abuse of power by an administration targeting its political opposition.
Never before.
Not Nixon, not Johnson, never before.
And Barack Obama, this is his legacy, this corruption.
You know, that to me is the future.
The Democrats, if the Democrats go down the impeachment road, which Nancy Pelosi knows will be a disaster, it will be a disaster.
She is absolutely right.
But if Trump goes forward and starts to investigate the Obama administration, I don't think too many people are going to go to jail, but I think the truth will be devastating to the media and to the Democrats and might serve as a corrective that the media needs to be reformed.
The media is out of control in their Democrat support.
They are corrupt, far, far, far more corrupt than Donald T. Trump and the Democrat Party, and they corrupt the Democrat Party by protecting them with their lies.
That, to me, is what the future has to examine and has to explore.
All right, we got Christian Toto, our favorite film critic, coming up.
I'm not going to break away so you can watch this on Facebook and YouTube.
While you're watching on Facebook and YouTube, go to dailywire.com and subscribe so you can watch it right there on the site.
It's lousy 10 bucks a month and lousy 100 bucks for the year.
You get the leftist tears tumbler.
And I just noticed that somebody handed me the God King Jeremy Boring's Leftist Tears Tumblr, so I'm drinking out of the magic God-Kings tumbler myself.
And if I start to levitate off this chair, you'll know that's why it is.
Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, film critic, and podcaster.
He's the founder of Hollywoodintoto.com and the host of the weekly Hollywood in Toto HIT podcast, which offers a right-of-center perspective on entertainment news.
Lord knows we need it.
Christian, it's good to see you.
How you doing?
I'm good.
I'm glad to be back.
Yeah, it's really nice to have you.
You know, you've been writing such interesting stuff on your website on HollywoodintToto.com.
I want to start by talking about some of the stuff you've been writing about comedy.
I've been really kind of obsessed with this because every night I see one comedian after another.
The New York Times does a thing, what they're saying on late night TV, but they're all saying the same thing.
Is there any light at the end of this tunnel?
There isn't.
You know, I just read a whole article.
All the different late night show hosts talking about the Mueller report.
And it's almost, I can sum it up with saying, yeah, but still.
So they see all the facts, they see all the conclusions, and they keep going on the narrative.
It's almost like they're living in this alternate reality that they created and they can't let go.
I mean, that in itself is kind of funny.
But as far as comedy goes, you got to put it in scare quotes these days.
It's just, it's claptor, it's hectoring, it's punditry at its worst, and it is so disconnected from reality.
My jaw dropped when I read it.
And then, you know, it's all about, you know, redactions and, you know, yes, but he's still a criminal.
He's still a crook.
And then they go with the whole, oh, he was too dumb to be a Russian agent, even though we've been telling you he's a Russian agent for two years.
So I don't even know how they can't even square it with themselves.
It's pathetic, really.
You know, I saw you use this phrase, this term before, clapter.
What does that mean?
I've never heard that before.
It's not my phrase, but it means you're telling a joke, not that it's going to get laughter, it's going to get clapped.
I see.
So it's kind of a combination.
It's a joke meant to gain applause, but it's not really funny.
That's great.
I haven't heard that before.
I've been watching guys like Bill Burr, who I find very funny at times, hilariously funny at times, and Ricky Gervais, and they're great because they're politically incorrect, but they're also anti-religion and kind of liberal and kind of left-wing.
Is there something stopping conservatives from being as funny as guys like that?
Or is it just that they're blacklisted?
It's the outlets or lack thereof.
I mean, is there one late night show that is even remotely center or center right?
No.
If you, you know, you and I are on Twitter a lot.
If you go on Twitter, it's hysterical.
I see people I follow on a daily basis who are extremely funny, cutting, sharp, insightful, illuminating.
And I'm thinking all of those jokes could make it on late night TV if they could be, if you could squeeze them into Colbert's mouth, but they don't fit there.
Yeah, yeah.
But the comedy's all there.
It's just, it's out in front of us.
I mean, AOC is a cornucopia of material.
They don't want to tell it.
So the material is there, but there's no Netflix-like service saying, hey, Jane or Jim, we like you.
We see you're right of center.
We want to give you a show because half the country is not being appreciated.
No one's ready to do that quite yet.
It really is true.
So let's talk about some of the stuff that's happening.
A lot of films that reflect our values tend to be Christian films.
They tend to be faith-based films.
And a lot of those films, as we know, are just not very good.
They may be fine.
They may be uplifting, but some of them really don't have the depth or talent involved.
Now, there have been two films recently that have kind of given us hope about this.
And I have to tell you, I say that, but I haven't seen them because I've been on the road constantly.
So one of them is unplanned, which I was very encouraged by the reception it got in spite of the just onslaught of people trying to shut it down on Twitter, on Facebook, by the reviewers.
Have you seen it, first of all?
Yeah, you know, it's a good movie.
It is aggressively pro-life.
And if you are pro-choice, I understand where that would be uncomfortable.
So it makes no bones about what it's trying to do, but it is a well-crafted movie.
I don't think it was as powerful as Gosnell, frankly.
Oh, well.
Which I thought was more balanced and I thought it had a finer level of craftsmanship across the board.
But it's a good film.
It's a step above the usual faith-based movie.
But I also want to mention a movie called Breakthrough, which opened this week just a few days ago.
And that one I thought was just terrific.
It is a tearjerker.
It has got beautiful performances.
And it's got the kind of depth that I love in a movie.
It's not just a kid falls in the icy waters and we're trying to pray to get him back to life.
It is about a family.
It's about a community.
It's about a marriage and how complicated that can be, especially when you've got grief involved.
It's a really wonderful film, and it is an absolute tear jerker.
So if you go see it, bring many, many Kleenexes.
It's really a beautifully made movie.
Bring Many Kleenexes00:09:51
Because that's getting no press whatsoever.
I mean, if I didn't read your site, if I didn't read HollywoodandToto.com, I would not have known that movie existed.
And it's based on a crazy true story.
So that in and of itself would be, oh, if I'm a reporter covering Hollywood, it's got Chrissy Metz, Josh Lucas, Topher Grace, name actors, Mike Coulter.
I would think I'd be curious about it.
What's going on?
What's the story behind the story?
And you would think that would be interesting, but it doesn't ring the bells that the Hollywood reporter types need to be rung.
It's just the way it goes.
It is funny.
I mean, thinking about this with Gosnell, which, by the way, did get a screening at the White House.
I was sorry I missed that, but I had three days to come home and see my wife.
And I thought I better grab that.
I actually do prefer my wife to the president or anybody else.
But that was very nice that they screened it there.
I was really happy about that.
The thing is, though, that when you don't have budget for promotion and when you don't have the press building you up, you've got to have controversy of some kind to at least bring people in.
And the right loves to feel that they're punching back against this incredible infrastructure of leftist criticism and media.
So that criticism helps the picture.
But a picture like Breakthrough sounds like it's just living on human drama, and that's a lot tougher sell.
It is.
And, you know, the competition is always tough.
The marketplace is always very, very strict as well.
But I looked at Rotten Tomatoes, and I think the movie's got in the mid-60s, which is kind of a rave for a faith-friendly movie.
So I think even critics are saying, hey, this is actually pretty good.
You know, it may not align with our worldview, but they're at least like giving it a chance.
So I give my fellow critics some credit there.
But, you know, I've seen other critics will condemn movies and they'll be just flat out false.
Listen, you cannot like a movie for a million reasons.
But if they say that Gosnell is very gory, or if they say that other things are just not true, and then I kind of scratch my head.
I'm thinking, okay, you've seen a movie that is different than the one I saw in the theaters.
And that means something.
It means you're trying to bring in a theme, an element that doesn't exist because you have an agenda.
It's the way film criticism works today that I don't think was happening 10, 20 years ago.
No, I'm absolutely certain of that.
I mean, one of the first times I ever saw it was for a film called Not Without My Daughter with Sally Field, where she marries a Muslim and he turns out to be an abuser and she has to escape from him and get back to America.
And Vincent Camby of the New York Times, then the big reviewer in the New York Times, panned it.
And it's a wonderful film, a really tense, exciting, dramatic film with a great performance by Sally Field.
And Vincent Camby panned it.
And later, after he retired, he said, that was political and I shouldn't have done it.
And I think they've completely lost their sense of that kind of conscience.
Where do you go when you want to read about, besides Hollywood and Toto, which is where I go, where do you go when you want to read about an honest take on movies and entertainment?
You know, my old tag team partner, John Nolte, is excellent.
He's at Breitbart News.
And he's got so much passion, so much pizzazz.
And he really, you know, he will love a hard left movie if it's good and interesting and thought-provoking.
So I turned to him.
Kyle Smith from National Review is wonderful.
He's very tough, and he's very funny when he's shredding a movie.
But I think he's got a good meter between, you know, what is hype and what is reality.
So those are two people that jump to mind.
But it's a shrinking crowd for sure.
And I wish that weren't the case.
Is there any?
I always ask you when you're here, what you're looking forward to.
I'd like to hear if there's anything good coming down the pike.
Yeah, I'm 50 going on 12.
If I could go online for Avengers Endgame right now, I would.
I fear that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is going woke, but I think this might be our last great storytelling hurrah, at least I'm hoping it is, but intrigued about that.
Why do you feel it's going woke because of the Black Panther stuff?
Well, Captain Marvel, putting Brie Larson sort of in charge of the whole franchise, the fact that the people behind the scenes are talking about, you know, inclusion, more gay-friendly themes.
And I think just Captain Marvel, the movie itself, was very sort of feminist.
It was very outspoken.
And the great entertainment at the MCU got pushed aside while all those other themes came to bear.
So I think, listen, it may not happen, but I fear it is happening.
We'll see.
You know, it's funny.
It's kind of comical.
It's kind of comical that we're fighting over superhero movies, that like people think that having Wonder Woman win World War I somehow changes the game for actual women in the real world.
Do you think that there's any legitimacy to this?
Do these movies accomplish something when they go woke or do they not accomplish something when they don't?
How does that work?
You know, it's tricky.
Everyone spends money on advertising because they want to influence the audience.
People make these movies because they want to influence the audience in certain ways.
If you watch a lot of TV shows, it's anti-Trump, anti-Second Amendment, pro-abortion.
There is a reason why they're doing it.
Now, it's always challenging to do the cause and effect.
This movie made this happen.
But they're going to try and they're going to try very hard.
And it's very possible that these things will influence the culture.
I mean, if it happens again and again and again, then that drumbeat does have an impact.
It's just hard to measure exactly how much.
Christian Toto, go over to Christian in Toto, Hollywood in Toto.
Sorry, it's Hollywoodintoto.com.
Listen to the Hollywood in Toto podcast.
It's just good coverage of the entertainment business.
You're not going to get anywhere else.
Christian, thanks so much for coming on.
I'll see you soon.
All right.
Thanks again.
Bye.
Hopefully when I see him next, I'll be able to talk out loud.
Final reflections.
My old colleague and pal from England, Ruth Dudley Edwards, she's a mystery writer, a talented mystery writer.
She tweeted out an article about the coverage, the BBC's coverage of the Notre Dame fires.
And the coverage has been intensely dishonest and intensely silent about the things that matter.
As I said before when I covered it on this show, I'm willing to believe it was an accident, though it seemed to me they made that decision very quickly.
But it's happening in a context of church desecrations.
It's happening in a context of Muslim Islamist violence and in a sort of assault on the underpinnings of Western culture, which in fact are in Christian belief and Christian faith.
So Ruth tweeted this article that said it really was a remarkable feat for BBC One's News at 10 last night to get through the entire program about Notre Dame without a single mention of any of these words.
They covered, pardon me, they covered the entire story without mentioning that happened at Holy Week, which is one of the things that makes us suspicious.
They didn't mention Christianity, Catholic.
And this is in keeping with a New York Times story about the heroic priest, Jean-Marc Fournier, who ran in to the burning building of Notre Dame to rescue relics.
And the relics, he said he had two priorities.
One was to save the crown of thorns, which was a relic, and the other was to save the Blessed Sacrament.
But when the New York Times first reported this, instead of saying the Blessed Sacrament, they said he was carrying a statue of Jesus because, of course, the sacrament is the body of Christ.
So the New York Times, in their ignorance, said that he was carrying out a statue because he said he was carrying out the body of Christ.
And, you know, they've been attacking Ben, they've been attacking other people for being white supremacists, for bringing out what this, the gutting of this church meant by fire, by saying it's a symbol for some of the underpinnings of Western civilization under threat because of the attacks on Christendom.
And my feeling is, you want to be hostile against Christianity.
Okay.
But if you're a journalist, if you're a reporter, if you're a commentator, you ought to know what it is.
You ought not to be an ignorant fool.
You ought not to be an ignorant buffoon when it comes to reporting on Western civilization and what it is.
You hate Western civilization?
Fine, but at least know where it comes from.
If you are ignorant, you are spreading ignorance.
If you don't know what you're talking about, stop talking.
And I want to say also to some of the people who are absolutely sure they know that Christianity is a finished deal, that it's obsolete, that it wise, the smart, and the good no longer adhere to that.
Just remember who is telling you those things?
Who's informing you of those things?
People who do not know the first thing about it and hate what they don't know.
They don't know where they came from.
They don't know what formed their society.
They don't know where their values are based.
Do you?
Do you know?
If you're getting the news from them, you don't.
All right, I'm done.
I can't talk anymore.
I'm going home for the Clavenless weekend, hopefully to recover my voice and come back on Monday.
It doesn't matter because most of you are not going to make it through the Clavenless weekend.
Let's be honest about it.
But if you want the Clavenless weekend not to be Clavenless, go get yourself a copy of Another Kingdom.
You will like it, I promise you.
And of course, you will be defeating Satan.
Otherwise, you're just Satan's glove puppet.
All right, I'll see you on Monday.
Producer Jeremy Boring00:00:48
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Clavin 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.
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