Andrew Clavin and Michael Knowles dissect the New York Times’ collapse into leftist propaganda, from its Pulitzer-winning "Trump-Russian collusion" hoax to the 1619 Project’s absurd slavery-capitalism link. They mock Woodstock’s sanitized myth—800+ deaths, LSD-laced Kool-Aid, and a $2M loss—while framing it as a microcosm of utopian failures like communism. The episode ties media bias to systemic decay, from Yale’s socialist leanings to Disney’s woke perversion, ending with a call for cultural reckoning against revolutionary fantasies. [Automatically generated summary]
The website Slate has published a leaked transcript of an emergency staff meeting at the New York Times, a former newspaper.
Times editor-in-chief, Blithering Prevarication III, oversaw the gathering where a mob of journalists ran amok, demanding to know why the ex-news outlet had run a headline about Donald Trump that was honest instead of derogatory.
Wearing balaclavas and wielding clubs, the shrieking swarm of reporters threatened to do to the Times what they had done to Portland if Mr. Third did not do to Trump what he had done to The Times, namely drag it into the mud and destroy its reputation.
In an attempt to calm the slavering horde of J school graduates, Mr. Third defended his efforts to keep the erstwhile newspaper erstwhile and swore to continue to spend every last shred of the Times' bygone prestige in an effort to diselect the man he calls unpresident Orange Man Very Bad.
In a statement released from under a desk, Mr. Third told the rioting correspondents, quote, never forget this former newspaper won two Pulitzer Prizes for covering a story of Trump-Russian collusion that didn't even exist, while simultaneously covering up an Obama conspiracy to misuse our intelligence services to overturn the will of the people.
If transforming Democrat fantasy into reality is not what this once great institution is here for, then my name is not Blithering Prevarication III, unquote.
As the rampaging scribes set trash baskets on fire and beat elderly patriots into unconsciousness, Third went on to say, quote, Now that the collusion story has been exposed as a hoax, we need a new strategy for covering Icky pseudo-president non-person.
We are now considering a careful campaign of unfounded and increasingly hysterical charges of racism, mingled with spurious accusations of mental illness that should return this once journalistic institution to its glory days when we downplayed the Holocaust and covered up the Soviets' forced starvation of millions, unquote.
The meeting was then adjourned after a rousing chorus of the old red flag, followed by a pipe bomb explosion.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hurrah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hoorah!
You know, originally my opening satire was going to be called New York Medical Examiner declares the death of the New York Times a suicide.
The joke was to compare the self-destruction of the former newspaper as a news gathering organization with the death of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Ultimately, though, I found it unfair to compare the Times to a high-end pimp peddling underage girls to other rich dirtbags.
Which is probably the nicest thing I can say about the Times.
It's not a high-end pimp peddling underage girls to other rich dirtbags.
The Times can put that on its shelf next to the two Pulitzers it won for covering a Russian collusion story that was, start to finish, a Democrat hit job with no substance to it whatsoever.
At least my praise is not a corrupt cover-up meant to lend credence to a corrupt cover-up, so there's that.
The reason I pick on the New York Times is because The Times is the flagship paper of the left.
Every day, its budget, the list of stories it covers, is sent to news operations throughout the country who then echo its news judgment because they feel the Times' moral authority gives those stories a certain credibility.
I've been in a newsroom when this happens.
Some radio news director, a TV news director, a newspaper editor in Poughkeepsie or Podunk or wherever sees the Times budget come over the wire and figures those are the day's big stories because the Times says so.
But like Yale University, like NBC News, like Disney, like all sorts of other once great organizations that are now taken over by leftists, The Times is an empty shell of its former self, a New York Times costume being worn to disguise a so-called progressive philosophy that is in fact a failed remnant of the failed French and Russian revolutions.
How many civilizations does one philosophy have to destroy before we abandon it?
What's interesting to me is that all these organizations, Yale, NBC, Disney, The Times, achieved their greatness under a different philosophy, the capitalist liberty that grew out of a successful revolution, the American Revolution.
That means their leftism is in fact a kind of corruption.
It's the sort of perversion that people indulge in when they have so much money, so much success, so much leisure, they forget the principles that gave them everything they have and wallow in self-indulgent pleasures instead.
Leftism is a perversion made possible by the success of American liberty.
So it's almost as if the New York Times is like, it's like a pervert that's committed suicide in a philosophical cell.
Wait a minute, that could be a good opening satire.
All right, we're going to talk about this more.
We're going to talk about the New York Times because of what it says about the left in just a second.
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So let's stick with the Times for a minute, right?
After the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, the Dayton shooting doesn't exist in the New York Times.
They haven't written a single thing about it because the Dayton shooting was committed by a leftist, whereas the El Paso shooting was committed by kind of a rightist.
He was kind of an eco-terrorist.
So without this kind of an eco-fascist, so without this environmental craziness on the left, he probably wouldn't have been as crazy as he was.
But let's grant the New York Times that, as I've said repeatedly, white supremacy or whatever you want to call it is a disgusting philosophy.
So I'll condemn it.
But that's all the New York Times talks about.
Only the El Paso shooting exists, article after article after article.
However, after the El Paso and the Dayton shooting, Donald Trump came out and condemned racism.
He condemned the racism on both sides.
So let's play cut number six.
This is Trump after those shootings.
The shooter in El Paso posted a manifesto online, consumed by racist hate.
In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy.
These sinister ideologies must be defeated.
Hate has no place in America.
Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart, and devours the soul.
So the New York Times runs a headline, Trump urges unity versus racism.
And the readers of the New York Times, who are now all leftists, because who would read the New York Times except a satirist like me and a leftist, right, who would read it?
Because all it has is left-wing news.
That's all that's in there.
And the left-wing point of view just dominates the paper.
It is not a newspaper anymore.
It is a college rag, basically selling socialism.
But they got angry, so they had to rewrite the headline to assailing hate, but not guns.
So we had to make sure that Donald Trump was somehow failing the obvious fact that the public should be disarmed.
You know, what always gets me about this argument about the public should be disarmed?
The reason we have the right to bear arms, right, is to fight the government.
That's what it's there for.
I mean, we always, they talk about hunting, they talk about this.
So they have these two arguments.
One is that you don't need such powerful weapons.
And the other argument is you can't beat the government anyway.
So that's the first thing.
And then they say, well, you don't really want to fight our wonderful government, do you?
Oh, but by the way, Trump is Hitler.
So the entire argument makes no sense.
But never mind, never mind.
So they have this meeting.
And at the same time, one of their minor editors and deputy Washington editor, Jonathan Weissman, is putting out some tweets that they interpreted as racist.
They were just kind of dopey tweets saying that some of these urban candidates in the Midwest don't actually represent the Midwest.
You could understand what he was saying.
But Roxanne Gay, who is this, she's just this horrible.
Her description as an, she's a New York Times op-ed writer and other things, but her description is that she covers the intersections of identity and culture, tells you everything you need to know about her.
So she starts attacking this guy on Twitter.
He gets demoted.
So they have to have, anyway, a crisis meeting.
Dean Baguette, or whatever his name is, the New York Times editor, calls a crisis meeting and the reporters, so-called reporters, are up in arms, right?
And this is what, is it Bequet, I guess it's Beke, Dean Bequet, says he comes out and he's apologizing for the fact that they had this headline and this guy was tweeting stuff and oh my gosh, we're not being tough enough.
And he says the problem is that the story we just spent two years covering was crap.
It was nonsense and now we're stuck on how to attack Trump.
This is essentially what he says.
I'm going to read you the transcript that was acquired by Slate.
We built our newsroom to cover one story.
He's talking about the Russian collusion story.
And we did it truly well.
Now we have to regret it.
I mean, they did it truly well.
There was no story.
If they had done it truly well, what they would have said is, oh, the Democrats arranged this illegal investigation into a political campaign.
Then when they lost, they turned it into an investigation into Russian collusion.
All of it, all of it, utter nonsense.
And so that would have been covering it well.
But instead, they pumped it up.
They pumped up the Democrat point of view.
And so that's what they call covering it well.
And of course, they got two Pulitzers for it because that's what the Pulitzers are for.
Here's a Pulitzer for promoting the Democrats.
All right.
So he says we've covered it truly well.
Now we have to regroup.
Why?
Because the story was a hoax, right?
We have to shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.
And I'd love your help with that.
This one is a story about what it means to be an American in 2019.
He's deciding what the news is, right?
This is what the, the guy is in a newsroom deciding what the news is going to be.
He doesn't know what it's going to be tomorrow.
It might be about Hong Kong, but it doesn't matter.
It's about what it means to be an American in 2019.
It's a story that requires deep investigation into people who peddle hatred, but it is also a story that requires imaginative use of all our muscles to write about race and class in a deeper way than we have in years.
In the coming weeks, we'll be assigning some new people to politics who can offer different ways of looking at the world as if, as if they will assign somebody with a different way of looking at the world, right?
And we'll also ask reporters to write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions.
I really want your help in navigating this story.
So he's asking a bunch of millennials, or actually younger than millennials, he's asking a bunch of kids basically what he's supposed to put in the paper.
What does he think they're going to say?
Is there one Republican among them?
Is there one person who voted for Donald Trump?
Is there one person who doesn't share the attitude, who has a different point of view, who has the attitude of the other half of the country?
Forget about it.
So this is still, this is Dean Beguette still talking.
Chapter one of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom, but frankly for our readers, was, did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians and was there obstruction of justice?
No question about whether that's a valid story or not.
Just that's what it was.
That was the story.
That was a really hard story, by the way.
And let's not forget that.
We set ourselves up to cover that story.
And I'm going to say it, we won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story.
And I think we covered that story better than anybody else, almost as well as the Brothers Grimm covered Hansel and Gretel, which was also made up.
All right.
Listen to what he says.
The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened.
Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, holy blank, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.
And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think, because, you know, for obvious reasons.
Because he wasn't guilty.
Because the whole thing was exposed.
That's exactly what he said it was, exactly what Donald Trump said it was.
He says, we've got to change.
We've got to change.
I mean, the vision for the coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier.
How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of remarks?
How do we cover the, I mean, it's so completely reactive.
Trump defines their news coverage.
You know, there was this story over the weekend.
Rashid Talib and Ilam Omar were denied entry into Israel, which has an actual law on the books saying we're not going to let people on if they want to destroy our country.
Now, the thing is, these congresswomen could have gone on a bipartisan congressional, they could have gone as part of a bipartisan congressional delegation to Israel, but they decided instead to go on an independent trip.
And it was sponsored by this organization, what's it called?
It's called MIFTA.
So MIFTA is a nonprofit organization headed by Palestinian lawmaker and longtime peace negotiator Hanan Ashwari.
And these guys, the New York Times called them, this is I'm taking from a David French piece in the National Review.
They called it an organization headed by a longtime Palestinian lawmaker, but it is also an organization that peddles the ugliest, most disgusting form of anti-Semitism.
They have actually published Blood Libels, which is a famous medieval libel against the Jews that they use the blood of Christian children to make their unleavened bread for Passover.
This was deep, deep in medieval literature.
Chaucer wrote about it.
It's called the Blood Libel because it's, I mean, look, Shapiro does it.
But I mean, most Jews are not, I'm joking.
But this is one of the reasons that there were pogroms in the Middle Ages.
And these guys are publishing this garbage.
And these are the people sponsoring Ilhan Omar and Rashid Talib.
So Barry Weiss, who is also a staff writer for the New York Times opinion page and more honest than others.
I like her.
I don't agree with her all the time, but I think she's an interesting writer.
I have to be honest and say that her father is a friend of my family.
So I think I just, just for full disclosure there, but I also like her.
Problems of Capitalism00:14:54
Listen to what she says about why the Times didn't cover this, why nobody covered the fact except David French at National Review, the right-wingers.
Nobody covered the fact that this was a visit to Israel sponsored by virulent anti-Semites, and Tlaib and Ilhan Omar were on board all the way.
One of the huge stories this week was the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu decided to bar the entry of two Democratic members of Congress, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, from entering Israel based on Trump's bullying him into that position.
He reversed course.
Now, that's a huge story, one that I wrote a column about.
But another huge story, one that has not been covered by any mainstream paper network, is the fact that their trip to Israel, or as they called it, Palestine, was being sponsored by a group that literally published neo-Nazi blood libels and said that it supported female suicide bombers, you know, hailing them as heroes.
That's a scandal.
If someone like Steve King was going to Sweden or Norway and meeting with neo-Nazi groups, that would be front page news.
One of the questions I think we need to ask is, is the fact that Trump has lodged racist, horrible attacks on these women, has that made them sort of untouchable for us to cover in an accurate way?
I think that's one of the problems of this moment, that it's very hard to cover sort of complicated characters in stories like them because the president, everything he touches, becomes toxic.
Does everything he touch becomes toxic, or is that their point of view?
I mean, this is the thing.
You know, Trump did say that thing about go back where they came from, which is not what he said.
He said, go back and solve their problems and then come back and tell us how you solve their problem.
So it just came out.
It came out badly.
I admit it.
And he admitted it.
He changed it.
He changed it almost immediately.
But does everything he say come out toxic?
You know, our friend Heather McDonald is in the Wall Street Journal today saying it's not Donald Trump.
It's not Donald Trump who's saying racist things.
It is the left.
And she says, long before the El Paso massacre, President Trump's political opponents accused him of sowing division with his racist language.
Mr. Trump exploits race, uses race for gain.
These are quotes from the left.
He's engaged in a, quote, racially divisive reprise of his 2016 campaign, stokes racial resentments and puts race at the fore, all quotes.
The New York Times has reported said all these things over the past several months.
Now Heather McDonald goes on to say, yet Mr. Trump rarely uses racial categories in his speech or his tweets.
It is the media and Democratic leaders who routinely characterize individuals and groups by race and issue race-based denunciations of large parts of the American polity.
In other words, you remember that Jordan Peterson interview he did in Britain where the woman kept saying, what you're saying is, what you're saying is, and kept translating his words back in leftism, in leftees.
Well, that's what they keep doing to Donald Trump.
He says we need a wall of the border.
They say, oh, he wants to keep up brown people.
He says it's an invasion.
They say, oh, well, that's just what this shooter said, so he's a shooter.
She goes on to say, she says, Mr. Trump rarely uses racial categories.
It's the media and Democrat leaders who routinely do it.
She says, some examples.
Quote, as race dominates the political conversation, 10 white Democratic candidates will take the stage.
That's from WAPO.
Mr. Trump's rally audiences are overwhelmingly white.
That's from multiple sources.
Your son's whiteness is what protects him from not being shot by the police, says Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.
White candidates need to be conscious of their white privilege, says Pete Budagiej.
White supremacy manifests itself in the criminal justice, immigration, and health care.
In other words, they translate everything into racism.
And this is obviously, obviously true.
I mean, let's just take a quick look at Grabian put this out, a montage of all the things Donald Trump has in fact said about actual racism.
This is cut seven.
We are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all of its very ugly forms.
We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.
As I said on Saturday, we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence.
It has no place in America.
Racism is evil.
And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.
And you had people, and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.
I mean, that's what he says when he talks about race.
Most of the time, he's talking about something in what the Times and all these other media outlets and all the Democrats are saying is what he's really saying is, what he's really saying, Dan Rather said, let's not report what he says, let's report what he's thinking, what he really thinks, you know?
That's what they're doing.
And because they have set the terms of what constitutes racism, it doesn't occur to them that there's some other terms that might be used.
It doesn't occur to them that, oh, talking about the border is talking about the rule of law.
It doesn't occur to them that the worst, the lowest of the low economically are the people who get hurt most by illegal immigration.
None of these things occur to them because they hear everything in terms of race because they're racist.
And listen to this.
This is the thing that I want to get to.
The New York Times is now running this new thing called the 1619 Project.
Now, listen, this is a newspaper, all right?
Their job, their only job, is to go out and get the news, right?
It's to go out and find out what's happening.
But listen to what their project is.
This is their description of it.
The 1619 Project is a major initiative from the New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery in 1619.
It aims to reframe the country's history, understanding 1619 as our true founding and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.
Now, I know I read some of this last week, but I'm going back to it because it basically frames the entire story of the left.
The story of the left is trying to rewrite the American history that made them rich enough to portray this stuff, that made them rich enough to hold these stupid ideas without being harmed because they're so wealthy, so powerful, that it's not going to harm them to say stupid crap, right?
They want to reframe that entire history for who knows what reasons.
So they have all these different stories.
One of them is American capitalism is brutal.
You can trace that back to the plantation.
And the logic of this, first it starts out, this article is hilarious.
I read the article because I just wanted to follow.
I didn't want to just go off on them about what they're doing.
I wanted to see if they had any point at all.
First, they talk about how we're so much worse.
America capitalism is so much more brutal than other countries.
How do they know?
Listen to this.
Consider worker rights in different capitalist nations.
In Iceland, in Iceland, where we all want to live, 90% of wage and salaried workers belong to trade unions authorized to fight for living wages and fair working conditions.
34% of Italian workers are unionized, as are 26% of Canadian workers.
Only 10% of American wage and salaried workers carry union cards.
That's their proof that America is not as great a place to live as Iceland.
And I'm sure the writer of this will be moving off to Iceland any day now or moving off to Italy where the economy is in shambles.
So who is to say that even being part of a union is a good thing?
I think unions were a necessary evil that outlived their purposes once industry got the idea that they should treat their workers well.
Those searching for reasons, the American economy, I'm still, I'm reading from this now, those searching for reasons the American economy is uniquely severe and unbridled, have found answers in many places, religion, politics, culture.
But recently, historians have pointed persuasively to the natty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks as the birthplace of America's low-road approach to capitalism.
Why?
Okay, I can't read the whole thing.
I don't have time to read the whole thing, but it's because the people who ran plantations had business, you know, were practicing the evil of slavery, no question, but they also had business practices.
They charted data.
They looked out for how their expenses were going.
And can you believe it?
Capitalisms, capitalists do that this very day.
They still rely on data.
They still rely on finding out what's going on.
They still rely on prices and try to make a profit, just like the slaveholders.
I mean, it's absolute lunacy.
It is absolute lunacy.
It's like saying modern buildings are made with stone and the pyramids were made with stone.
So it was really Jewish slavery in Egypt that led to the empire state building.
I mean, that's what it's like saying.
It's like a person raving in a padded cell.
It is absolute craziness.
And they go on with this.
They have, oh, sugar.
There's so much sugar.
You know why there's so much sugar in American diets?
It's because it's connected to the barbaric history of white gold that fueled slavery.
That's why we eat so much sugar.
Why doesn't the United States have universal health care?
Because of policies enacted after the Civil War.
America holds on to an undemocratic assumption from its founding that some people deserve more power than others, as opposed to what?
As opposed to what system?
Well, we know because these are the same clowns, the New York Times, the same clowns who published the series called Red Century, in which they told us that the, in which they told us that under communism, not under socialism, this new, when they use socialism now, what they really mean is capitalism with high taxes and a welfare state.
That's what they mean by socialism.
That's what people like Elizabeth Warren mean.
They mean we're just going to come and you make the money and then we'll take the money and spend it on what we think is important.
You know, that works in Norway, so we're going to do it here so we too can invent the paperclip like they did in Norway instead of all the things that we've invented that Norway uses to keep itself alive.
So that's the new social.
But they're not even talking about this.
In the Red Century, they were talking about communism.
They're talking about the murder of 10 million, the murder of 20 million people that they covered up in their stories because they didn't cover the communist starvation of the peasants there.
That's what they're saying.
And they're saying, oh, you know what was great?
Women had great sex.
They had great sex under communism.
I mean, you had to live with other people under communism because the economy was so bad.
You had to live with your mother-in-law sitting in the same bedroom.
You weren't having any great sex.
It was like absolute craziness.
And they blame everything.
Everything is a reaction.
It is always our fault.
I mean, one of the other articles in this 1619 project is about how conservatives, which they call reactionary, they call us reactionary or far right or whatever they call us.
Conservatives trace their lineage back to slavery too.
So the Republican Party, I'm reading again of the Obama years, didn't just recycle its Gingrich era excesses.
It also pursued a policy of total opposition, not just blocking Obama, but also casting him as fundamentally illegitimate and un-American.
Not that they would ever do that to a president.
No, no, no.
He may have been elected by a majority of the voting public, but that majority didn't count.
It didn't represent the real America.
And this goes back, of course, to slavery days, right?
You know, the left has no idea, and I know this from my leftist friends and relatives.
They have no idea how divisive a president Obama was.
They think it's just us.
They think it's racism.
Now, what you're really saying is you don't like him because he's racist.
It's not because he apologized for America to tyrants.
It's not because he went to the Middle East and apologized for American arrogance.
It's not because he treated 9-11 as if it was just some event that traumatized us instead of the expression of a brutal philosophy.
He couldn't even mention Islam and terrorism in the same breath.
I mean, that's how politically correct he was and how unwilling to see that other people did that.
You know, all this stuff that he didn't, they don't even talk about the fact that right after he was elected, when he started to shove his stupid Obamacare down the throats of the American people and the Republicans protested in a meeting, he said, well, we won, you lost.
He wasn't divisive at all.
He just thought that he, having won an election, should now control everything.
You know, you can say what you will about Trump.
I've said it a million times.
He has a big mouth.
He's rude.
He has no self-discipline, no self-control in what he says.
But again, he didn't use the IRS to silence his opponents.
He didn't lie about Benghazi.
He didn't tap the phones of reporters.
Barack Obama was a far greater threat to the First Amendment than Donald Trump was.
So they just, they're so locked in this cell of racism.
And you know, if you want to talk about, like, do pseudo-psychohistory like they're doing, like, I'm a conservative, so therefore I'm linked to slavers.
Who are the slavers?
Democrats.
Who are the pro-slavery team?
The Democrats.
Who were the Ku Klux Klan and the Jim Crow guys?
The Democrats.
So maybe this is just guilt on the New York Times' part.
Maybe they're just trying, it's just projection saying that we are the people who grew out of slavery.
Our philosophy grew out of slavery instead of theirs.
All of this, all of this is the problem of luxury.
All of this is the problem of a country that has gotten so wealthy that it no longer has to attend to the gods of the copybook headings.
It no longer has to attend to the basics that make people rich, freedom, capitalism, all those things, you know, sexual self-control, sexual discipline.
It no longer has to adhere to all those things because we have so much money, we can afford to make stupid mistakes.
The New York Times, all of the leftists are so rich.
College kids are so rich living in a country so safe, so protected, that they can sit around and talk about whether men are really women if you close your eyes and wish real hard.
They can talk about those things because we are so successful.
We have problems at the border.
Why?
Because everyone wants to come here.
Why?
Because we're so successful.
That's why all of these problems are the problems of wealth.
They're the problems of success.
And so when the New York Times, which made its bones in a capitalist country, which became the New York Times, in a capitalist country, is selling communism and telling us our capitalism is related to slavery, when Yale University and the Walt Disney Company, which came to fruition, which became rich and great under a policy of freedom and under policies of capitalism, when they're selling socialism, that is just the perversion of wealth.
Woodstock '69: The Promise Unfulfilled00:10:58
That is all it is.
All right, I want to bring on Michael Knowles.
We've got a great conversation to have about Woodstock and the past.
But I just wanted to point this out that the news business, like Jeffrey Epstein, has hanged itself in its own cell.
And I think that we're all suffering from it because we need the news and we need the news business to report what's going on.
Come over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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You get the whole year.
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We're doing backstage live on Wednesday, right?
Isn't that when we're going to do backstage?
Yep.
I'll never know until they come and just shove me into a bus and take me away.
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We've got Michael Knowles coming up.
We're back.
Knowles.
Good to see you.
Good to see you.
How you doing?
I'm pretty good.
I saw you dancing with Gloria Elric.
It was one of my favorite TV moments.
I think that was right.
It was a real.
Moon landing and you dancing with Gloria Allred.
That was, of all of the unexpected moments I've ever had, that was really up there.
Yeah, we were debating on this local show is me, Gloria Allred, Antonio Villaragoza.
So obviously I was outnumbered.
And by the end of the show, we couldn't seem to come to an agreement on anything.
But I did get to dance with Gloria Allred, and she did insist to me.
She said, Michael, I'm a feminist, so you have to let me lead.
It was a struggle the whole time.
My only question is: if I took any liberties while I was dancing with Gloria Allred, who would represent Gloria Allred in the sexual harassment series?
You know, not if you did take liberties, if she wanted to accuse me.
She wanted to accuse me of taking liberties.
That's right.
It was great, though.
And to be absolutely honest, with all the arguing and screaming at one another we do, we should occasionally stop and remember everybody's a human being.
That's right.
You know, listen, we're all going to die at some point.
I can't get that right.
Which nobody deserves, right?
What is she like 80 now?
She is, I think she's pushing 80.
She looks great, by the way.
Yeah, I think she's in her 70s.
Sheer meanness keeps you, you know.
That's what it is.
I got to say, I was kind of expecting she might have mellowed out.
She'd maybe grant me a few premises online.
Nope, not at all.
As left-wing as ever.
Anybody who goes in, anybody who is in courtrooms, they're vicious.
They're vicious animals.
Either side.
And it doesn't matter.
If you are a courtroom lawyer, you're a killer.
She is.
She's a total killer and very, yeah, doesn't miss a beat on the show.
So it was very fun to do.
You can check it out.
I'm sure it's floating around the internet somewhere.
So I've been talking about the New York Times rewriting history to cast everything they don't like as connected to slavery.
That's essentially what they're doing.
They're rewriting history.
So I thought we should talk about history because it's, was it yesterday?
It was the 50th anniversary of Woodstock.
That's right.
And there are a lot of people my age who remember this with great fondness because they were drugged out of their mind and getting laid.
That's why.
So they think, yeah, that was good.
I remember that.
Because that's what they remember.
There were a lot of people who remember it with great fondness because they were drugged out of their mind and getting laid.
And a lot of people, probably more people, who look back on it with great fondness because of a manicured, fictitious image that was put out by Hollywood in the film about Woodstock and all of the nostalgia about it.
They say that nostalgia is history after a few drinks.
And the nostalgia of Woodstock is history after a few tabs of acid, I think.
We should tell people Woodstock what it was.
I mean, it was this big rock concert, right?
That was supposed to just be a kind of random thing and turned into.
Turned into this mess of hundreds of thousands of people, 1969.
And the way it was presented was three days of peace and love and music.
They tried to recreate it.
They were going to do a Woodstock 50 concert.
The organizer, the co-organizer of the original Woodstock, was going to do it.
Guess what happened?
Spoiler alert, it completely collapsed.
And there's actually a pretty good piece in this on, or in rather in the Rolling Stone, which talks about how the age of Aquarius turned into the age of Mercury in retrograde.
And it's the story.
It was the first good piece I've seen in Rolling Stone in a while.
Eventually, these guys of the recreated show spent way more money than they had.
They'd spent 32 million on talent alone.
Wait, whoever heard of baby boomers doing that?
I know.
So they racked up debt that they could never possibly pay off.
It was, this is what they said about it.
This was the co-organizer.
It was one problem after another trying to write the ship with every turn.
That's not so unusual.
That's not beyond what I've experienced, but it just didn't work out.
I really point to the mistake in the partnership that was really the cause of this not happening the way we envisioned.
This is the story, not just of Woodstock 50.
It's the story of Woodstock 69.
It is.
It's actually the story of an entire hippie generation.
It is really.
I mean, this is what people don't know about the original Woodstock.
What they do know is peace, love, and music.
What they don't know is it was not at all profitable.
The organizers were millions in debt.
They only recouped it because of this money of the film and the soundtrack that cast Woodstock as something that it was not.
They ran out of food at Woodstock.
When they ran out of food, they raised the price of hamburgers from 25 cents to $1.
How did the hippies respond?
They burned down the food tents because they said that Woodstock was giving in to capitalist exploitation.
Fortunately, some local farmers gave them all granola.
That's why the hippies like granola.
A couple people died at Woodstock.
One died from a drug overdose.
Another one died when he was run over in the mud by a tractor that was just there to remove the copious sewage.
And they didn't see the hippie sleeping in the sewage and they crushed him with a tractor.
Sanitation was non-existent.
The drinking water was contaminated.
The hippies were living in their own filth.
Estimates vary on how many people there were for every port-a-john.
One says there were 800 people for each port-a-potty.
One says there were 10,000 people for each port-a-potty.
I mean, it didn't matter.
That was immaterial.
People were just in their own filth.
The nurses reported a number of cases of burned-out eyeballs, some real burning on their eyes.
Why?
Because the hippies were dropping acid.
And staring at the sun.
They were staring at the sun.
They fell down.
They stared at the sun.
Ravi Shankar, the Indian musician, the sitar player, described the original Woodstock as a, quote, terrifying experience.
And he likened the muddy people to water buffaloes in his own native India.
Environmentally, it was devastating.
It took two weeks to even begin to clean up the mess.
And they didn't really clean it up, which is why the Native American Indians had tears falling down their cheeks.
Also, the people that we remember Woodstock is all the most important bands from the 60s and 70s.
Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, all these people.
The people we remember are the ones who made it into the film.
The people we don't remember are the ones who didn't make it into the film.
The Keith Hartley band.
You're a huge fan of the Keith Hartley band.
I have all their records.
All their sets.
I don't know what they make.
Totally forgotten.
The lore of Woodstock was just this nostalgic creation of professional entertainers.
And what came of it in the end?
You know, once the 60s passed and you got into the 70s, you had venereal disease, heaps of trash, and crippling death.
And drugs.
They talk about the mass incarceration, a lot of it coming out of the crack boom.
Who was it who told people that drugs were, you know, tune in and drop out?
Tune in, drop out.
I mean, there were actually a lot of people at Woodstock, obviously many people choosing to take drugs, but they also were lacing all the Kool-Aid with drugs.
So not quite in the Jim Jones way, but also a ton of acid in the Kool-Aid.
So there were a lot of people who were inadvertently tripping on acid there.
I mean, so we're grappling right now with the legacy of the hippie generation, right?
Because they're now no longer 25-year-olds rolling naked on acid.
You saw it in this movie, the Quentin Tarantino movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, shows you the real underbelly of what hippie dumb was.
And I think now you're also seeing the younger generation that seems to be appreciating this lesson that was lost on the hippies, which is that goods have costs.
If you spend three days rolling around in filth doing drugs, you're not going to be productive.
It's going to cost you money.
It's going to take a toll on your body.
It's going to take a toll on the environment.
There is a cost.
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
You know, in many ways, culturally, we're still paying for Woodstock.
And I think about those, the lyrics.
You know that song, Woodstock?
Yeah, the Joni Mitchell one.
The Joni Mitchell one.
It was done by Crosby Stills Nash and Young.
By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong.
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.
Yeah, we're starlight.
We are starlight.
We have got to get ourselves back to the garden.
That is the utopian promise of Woodstock, the summer of love.
That was the utopian promise of socialism.
That's the utopian promise of communism.
It's the utopian promise of every leftist movement, and it turns out to be a lie.
It is literally, it was literally the promise of the French Revolution.
It was literally the Rousseauan idea that we've all gone wrong.
You know, what is it?
Man, man is born free, but he's everywhere in chains.
You know, and it's just not true.
And you know, the Christian idea, the Christian idea, which is like best expressed at the end of Paradise Lost, where they have to go forward into history to get to the other side, to get back to heaven, you know, that everything we experience is based on original sin, but there's no going back because of the flaming swords, right?
That's why it's flaming swords outside of the world.
I mean, you know, during this exact same time, literally the same year, right, or within the previous five years, you had John F. Kennedy and you had RFK using this one quote repeatedly.
They used it.
It's one of the most inspirational lines in Democratic politics.
It's been repeated for 50 years since.
Some people see things that are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say why not.
It's Emerson, I think.
It's George Bernard Shaw.
It's George Bernard Shaw, who was an absolute fascist, crazy man.
Atheist.
And what they don't mention, because at least JFK did attribute it to Shaw.
What they don't mention is the play that it comes from from Shaw is a play called Back to Methuselah.
And the line comes from the serpent tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden.
It's the words of the devil.
It's the promise of the age of Aquarius.
And we're looking around now.
That's really interesting.
I did not know that.
That is really interesting.
You'd think they would have Googled it in the 60s.
Why would you quote the devil?
But we are seeing the reality of that lie today.
It is so true that so much of this stuff, and you know, it really does get me to have the New York Times.
I don't know why I pay attention, except that the New York Times does send out its trash to all these different news outlets that think it's still the New York Times.
They think it's still the New York Times.
They say, no, everything comes from slavery.
Which is absurd, right?
I mean, over that period of time of history, it's like you can't say what things come from.
They have a million costs.
But certainly, certainly my generation, I always say I wish my generation could die without taking me with it, you know, because certainly my generation threw away so much wealth, so much acquired greatness that had been handed down to us by our fathers and forefathers and threw it away on this philosophy that had failed a million times.
It failed at the French Revolution.
It failed in the Romantic era.
Why Shadow Is Art00:03:42
It failed.
Every time people have tried to get this paradisical, Edenic idea back, it's gone down the drain.
It's gone down the drain.
It's thrown away material wealth.
I mean, we've seen it throw away material wealth and, of course, spiritual, intellectual, historical wealth gone.
And now you've got a generation which is poor, uncultured, and uneducated trying to pick up the pieces of it.
Yeah, right.
What are you talking about on your show?
Fortunately, not that.
It's so damn depressing.
talking about how we've got to buy Greenland and I'm talking about...
Absolutely.
And I'm talking about why Bibi Netanyahu, I think he was actually right to not allow those Jew-hating monsters into his country.
You know, I tweeted out about Greenland.
I said, buy it.
We're America.
We should conquer it.
I said, who are we afraid of?
The Dutch?
Those wooden clog-wearing.
I thought, oh, wait, it's the Danish.
The Danish.
Well, then, they're sort of Vikings.
They might kill us.
Greenland has, they've got pretty socialistic policies over there.
We need to go in.
We need to free and liberate these poor oppressed people from their Danish tyrants.
And we need to make all of Greenland America.
MAGA.
I like it.
You know, I always do get the Dutch and the Danes confused because who cares?
All right.
Final reflection.
Listen, here is an actual great film that you might not like, but I want to tell you about it because you might like it.
It is called Shadow, and it is now on pay-per-view and on Amazon Prime.
It's made by very famous Chinese director Zhang Yumu, who made some films that I don't like.
I raised the Red Lantern, got a lot of great reviews, but I didn't like it very much.
He made this picture of the Great Wall, which is supposed to be terrible, but I haven't seen it.
But he also made Hero, which I thought was a fantastic picture with Jet Li.
It's what they call Wuxia or something, but it's that crouching tiger, hidden dragon, overdone fight scenes, the kind of romanticized fight scenes.
This picture, the reason I say some people may not like it, it's slow.
It's a slow-moving movie.
It's a slow meditative film.
It is a work of brilliance.
It is so insanely beautiful.
It's based on, I think, on Chinese ink, Zen ink drawings.
It looks so beautiful.
It's so simple and yet so profound.
And when you sit in front of it, you remember how simple great art usually is and how cool great art often is.
And it just really stopped me because I'm not a guy who thinks, oh, the foreigners or foreign films are always better than American films.
Americans have made great films, although not recently they haven't.
But this thing just partakes of art.
And you know, it's really interesting because it reminds us that so much of what the left says is simplistic garbage about an underlying profound principle.
So this is a film, it's called Shadow, and it's about the Tai Chi principle of yin-yang.
And it's about how everything has a shadow, masculine and feminine.
You know, this guy has a, there's a guy who has a double in the film, and he's the shadow.
And does the shadow exist if the original is not there to block out the light?
And it's just a really, really interesting take on the masculine and feminine in human life and how it interrelates and the way that people seek to remake themselves in a better form than the form that they're actually in.
It's an amazingly beautiful movie, and I just highly recommend it if you can stand the slow-moving, meditative pace of it, which is the one thing that made me hesitate to recommend it.
However, when you see it, I think when you're finished with it, you will understand the difference between a work of art and a work of entertainment and why it is such a high-level thing to produce something like the shadow.
Take a look at it if you can.
I just thought it was terrific.
I got to stop there.
I'll be back tomorrow.
Masculine and Feminine Shadows00:01:23
I'm Andrew Clavin.
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President Trump surreptitiously defunds Planned Parenthood and somehow nobody seems to have noticed.
Then Trump suggests purchasing Greenland, an absolutely wonderful idea.
Finally, the New York Times embarks on a new strategy to call all conservatives racists.
How novel.
We will examine America's original sin from the very beginning.