Ep. 778’s Jokers dissects Elizabeth Warren’s rally exaggerations and false claims, mocking her as a "150,000-strong fraud," while skewering Bernie Sanders’ puppet-like return and Biden’s bus-rally corruption metaphor. The segment slams media bias—from the Times’ "Knucklehead Row" to Chuck Todd’s Ukraine impeachment hysteria—while defending Ron Johnson against FBI-leak smears. It pivots to transgender debates, framing a UK doctor’s firing as an attack on Genesis 1:27, then contrasts Botham Jean’s brother’s forgiveness with secular outrage over a courtroom Bible. Joker is dissected as leftist propaganda, accused of racial dishonesty and nihilism, with its 69% RT score vs. 90% audience approval exposing ideological bias. The episode warns against polarization, urging resistance to media manipulation while defending free speech and spiritual dignity. [Automatically generated summary]
The excitement of the Democrat presidential race is heating up as the field narrows down to the make-believe Indian, the corrupt old man, and the basically dead guy.
Senator Elizabeth Warren seems to have taken a substantial lead with her signature strategy of blending an energetic professorial persona with complete dishonesty and a socialist agenda that would leave the American economy looking like one of those burned-out cities in gears of war with the gigantic wormy monsters exploding up out of the pavement and devouring everything in sight before returning to their offices at the IRS.
At a recent rally attended by 150,000 wildly cheering complete idiots and college students, but I repeat myself, Warren said, quote, as someone who has pretended to be a minority for career advantage my whole life, I understand the struggle of black people like Justin Trudeau and Virginia Governor Ralph Northam.
And as a woman who lied about getting fired for being pregnant to make myself seem a victim when, as an American woman, I'm really among one of the most privileged categories of human beings on earth, I think I understand how feminism works as well, unquote.
Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, tried to showcase his socialist philosophy by having a heart attack and then insisting he be taken to Cuba for the free health care.
He's gotten back on the campaign trail, though some reporters have noticed he's now made of wood and the guy standing next to him moves his lips when Sanders speaks.
Joe Biden held his latest rally under a bus where he'd been thrown by House Democrats who have developed a brilliant new plan to destroy Donald Trump by exposing Biden's lifetime of nepotistic cynicism and corruption.
As for Donald Trump himself, he's taking advantage of the weak Democrat field by climbing to the top of the Empire State Building with a screaming blonde in one hand while he swipes airplanes out of the sky with the other.
Who among us is not looking forward to 2020?
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey, life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Well, as I constantly like to remind you, politics makes us stupid.
Politics insists we make black and white decisions when the answers are always gray, and it puts us in the position of supporting one group of awful politicians simply because the other group is so much awful.
Another way it makes us stupid is by attacking people's personal piccadillos as a way of supporting truly dangerous and destructive political movements.
So just to give, for instance, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is finally fighting for the people's will to be done and trying to win back British sovereignty from the usurpers in the EU.
So the press attacks him for allegedly squeezing a girl's thigh under the table 20 years ago.
Since Bojo is the only man crazy enough to actually get Brexit done, the question you have to ask yourself if you're British is, should Britain lose its sovereignty forever because Johnson copped the feel?
Of course not.
It's madness, it's idiocy, it's also politics.
We see it here every day.
It's called mainstream news.
Trump is rude and belligerent.
He's a big mouth and sometimes says things he shouldn't.
So we're supposed to turn the government over to a bunch of baby-killing socialists who want to destroy free speech and confiscate the guns we need to defend free speech.
Sure, they say, maybe we can't prove that Brett Kavanaugh mauled a girl in high school, but shouldn't we surrender the Constitution to be rewritten by leftists just in case?
Thanks, but no thanks.
This trick works for a lot of reasons.
For one thing, small sins are personal.
Very few of us have a full emotional understanding of what it means to live under socialist tyranny, but most girls have been pinched or groped or otherwise disrespected at some point, so they and their male allies can relate to that and get emotional about it.
For another thing, there's some level at which a person does disqualify himself through personal behavior.
If a couple of Boris Johnson's ex-lovers turn out to be buried in his cellar, we'd all agree he should step down.
Well, personally, I keep him in office until after Brexit, but that's just me.
Therefore, there's a lot of motivation to make every venal sin your opponent has ever committed into a mortal sin to convince the voters that you've reached the threshold of removal, especially if, like the left, the media is backing you up, and especially if, like the left, your ideas absolutely suck on every single level.
It's up to us to stay cool, wait for the truth, and think out the consequences.
Otherwise, politics will make you so stupid, you lose the most precious thing you have, namely your freedom.
We're going to talk about that.
Threshold of Removal00:16:11
I'm going to show you what I mean exactly in just a second.
But first, we will talk about Bolin Branch sheets.
You know Bolin Branch Sheets, I love them particularly because I'm awake all night.
Bowl and Branch will help you sleep better.
They're so comfortable.
They look great, but you'll be asleep, so you won't appreciate them.
Take it from me, who is up all night long, that Bolin Branch also remain beautiful while you're sleeping.
What makes Bolin Branch unique is that each sheet is crafted from 100% organic cotton.
That means Bolin Branch sheets not only feel incredible, they look amazing.
And since Bolin Branch sells exclusively online, you don't pay that expensive retail markup.
You get twice the quality for half the price.
You will love these sheets.
Try them for 30 nights, see for yourself.
And if you're not impressed, you can return them for a full refund.
I know, because I'll still be awake.
Go to BolinBranch.com today, and you'll get 50 bucks off your first set of sheets plus free shipping in the U.S. when you use the promo code Clavin.
That's 50 bucks off plus free U.S. shipping right now at Bolinbranch.com, spelled B-O-L-L and branch.com, promo code Clavin, Bolinbranch.com, promo code Clavin.
I like the way they assume that you can't spell Bol.
It's four letters long.
It's B-O-L-L, but they think that you can spell Clavin.
I mean, come on, look at yourself.
You can't spell Clavin.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
No Ease.
In Clavin, I just make it look easy.
Another Kingdom is up.
First and second episodes are now available wherever you get your podcast.
You don't have to be a subscriber.
You can just listen to them.
Please listen to them because you will like them.
I'm telling you, listen to this first episode.
It's only like half an hour long.
It'll blow your head off.
It really is terrific.
I think this is the best story of the three.
It's the deepest story of the three, the richest story of the three.
And we're going to play it out.
You know, it's going to go a little longer this time.
I think it'll last probably into next year.
So pick it up now.
It really is good stuff.
Knowles is doing a great job.
The sound crew is doing a tremendous job.
Our own Austin Stevens is producing it.
You really want to listen to Another Kingdom.
And Knowles will be on later on.
We'll be talking about Joker.
We both saw it, and I have a different reaction than every other reaction I've read.
So you'll want to stay tuned for that.
You know, before I get into the, you know, at this point, you're kind of forced to cover this Ukraine nonsense.
It remains nonsense.
It remains, I just cannot believe the press is just going off the same cliff they went off with Russian collusion.
They don't care.
It's just like it's news.
It's something going on.
And so they're going to follow it.
They're not going to follow, you know, the unemployment numbers that are better than they've been in a million years.
They're not going to follow any of that.
They're just going to follow the silly story.
But before I talk about that, I just have to put it in context.
And to put it into context, there's no place better to go than the New York Times, a former newspaper, and their op-ed page, or as we like to call it, Knucklehead Row.
So it's not entirely fair to say that the New York Times, because it ran a certain op-ed, is supporting that op-ed, but it is fair because the New York Times excoriates everything they don't like about America as being racist and due to slavery in their 1619 project or whatever it's called.
They basically have elevated Soviet slavery in their Red Century articles, which all praised the wonderful sex women were having under the Soviet system, which was nonsense because they were living in a room with four other families.
They probably weren't having much sex at all.
So you can say this is a communist newspaper now.
It's so woke that it has gone to sleep to the actual reality.
So they have this article on the op-ed page, Free Speech is Killing Us.
It's by Andrew Morantz, a staff writer at the New Yorker, which has also become so woke that it is asleep to reality.
This is what he says.
There's never been a bright line between word and deed.
There's never been a bright line between word and deed.
So if I say I punch you, you fall over with a bloody nose, I guess.
But there's never been a bright line between word and deed.
Yet for years, the founders of Facebook and Twitter and 4chan and Reddit, along with the consumers obsessed with these products and the investors who stood to profit from them, tried to pretend that the noxious speech prevalent on those platforms wouldn't metastasize into physical violence.
In the early years of this decade, back when people associated social media with Barack Obama or the Arab Spring, Twitter executives referred to their company as the free speech wing of the Free Speech Party.
Sticks and stones and assault rifles could hurt us, but the internet was surely only a force for progress.
So he's saying that was true under Obama, but no, no, no, no one believes that anymore.
Not after the social media-fueled campaigns of Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump.
Not after the murder.
There's only a semicolon after Donald Trump.
So this is a list, right?
Not after the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, not a semicolon, not after the massacres in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and a Walmart in majority Hispanic part of El Paso.
So the election of Donald Trump, your president, is the election of Donald Trump is in a list with these mass murders, right?
This is all the same thing.
This is the problem.
The Christchurch gunman, like so many of his ilk, had spent years on social media trying to advance the cause of white power.
He also, by the way, drank mother's milk.
So there's a direct relationship between mother's milk and violence.
But these posts he eventually decided were not enough.
Now it was time to, quote, make a real-life effort post.
He murdered 51 people.
The question is where this leaves us.
Noxious speech is causing tangible harm.
Yet this fact implies a question so uncomfortable that many of us go to great lengths to avoid asking it.
I don't go to great lengths to avoid asking.
I'm just not coming up with the answer that he, look, I don't have to go on with this.
You know where he's going.
He basically compares, he basically compares speech to the noxious fumes that might come out of a car and says government should, just like government can say, oh, yes, you can drive a car, but we have to control the pollution.
They should be able to say, yes, you can speak, but we have to be able to control your speech.
When your speech gets noxious, the government has to be able to control it.
So let's follow that logic, right?
So what he believes is that Donald Trump should be able to tell him, Donald Trump, the government, the head of our government, should be able to tell this guy, Morantz, what he can say.
But no, of course he doesn't believe that.
He only believes that a government that he likes should be able to tell you what you can say.
That's all he thinks.
And let's point out that murders are way down.
We are in a very, very low crime period, especially for hyper-violent crime.
There's a very low crime period.
So the problem doesn't actually exist.
Yes, it's true that bad people are going to say bad things, and the people among the people who say bad things are going to be bad actors.
All that is true.
Maybe they're inspired by talking.
But it's unfortunate, it's unfortunate that there's no one to give the power to censor who deserves the power to censor.
That is the problem.
The problem is not that we shouldn't, that there's not speech that we don't want to hear.
The problem is, as always, who decides, right?
So he knows it's not going to be, he doesn't want it to be Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is the government.
Donald Trump may win next time in 2020 and may win, he may win majorities in both houses.
Then what's this guy going to do?
Does he still want the government to control his noxious speech?
No, of course not.
So this is what they are talking about.
This is the kind of thing in the New York Times that they think passes, that they think passes for deep thought because they realize they're living in this fantasy world.
There's nobody around them to disagree with them.
They're all living in the same little bubble.
They think that speech can be regulated without hurting their speech because it's only going to be the speech of people they don't like.
And they use the most extreme speech, but we all know it only takes 10 minutes.
They're already talking about banning Joker, a movie, about a comic book character, because they don't like the message that they feel is embedded in the film.
So we know, we know that the minute they get their hands on the First Amendment, the First Amendment is gone, the same way we know about the Second Amendment, the minute we let them start regulating guns, they'll take our guns away.
We know this.
We know that's who they are because they show us it's who they are.
Now, right after Donald Trump was elected, there was a brief little flashing moment of time, a little sparkle of time, when the left started to say, hey, you know, maybe the people in the middle of this country haven't been well served by our constantly calling them bigots and racists, by our constantly spitting on them and their opinions and their religion and their lives and their customs.
Maybe they have something to say as well.
Let's all read Hillbilly Elegy.
seems like a civilized person.
Let's find out about that lasted for about 20 seconds.
And then the Democrat base got rose up and said, no, no, no, these are the guys we're trying to destroy.
Let's destroy them.
These are the deplorables.
These are the 64 million people we want to eradicate in terms of their opinion.
These are the guys in the New York Times want to shut up.
So let's return to Knucklehead Row.
Play Knucklehead Row.
going back.
Another piece in the New York Times by David Brooks, one of the head knuckleheads on knucklehead row, why Trump voters stick with him.
Now, let's play a game, all right?
Let's play it.
Let's say like a quiz show.
We're going to turn this into a quiz show.
David Brooks is writing why Trump Voters Stick With Him.
Is he looking at a poll?
Is he looking at opinion polls?
Did he get in his car or get in his driver's car and have his driver take him out to, I don't know, Pennsylvania, someplace where Trump won and interview people who voted for Trump?
You know, I'm joking, right?
He has what is an imagined conversation with Flyover Man.
David Brooks, they not only don't want to hear from you, they not only don't want to hear from anybody who supported Donald Trump, they're willing to make you up now to avoid it.
He's making up a conversation.
So flyover man says, you know, first the guy says to him, I hope you read the rough transcript of that Trump phone call with the Ukrainian president.
Trump clearly used public power to ask a foreign leader to dig up dirt in his political opponent.
Flyover Man says, I haven't really had time to look into it.
There's always some fight between Trump.
Because he's too stupid to know that this is the end of our Constitution.
These guys are so upset that you will not join them in the fantasy bubble where everybody agrees with them.
They're now coming after you again.
You're deplorable again.
For about 10 seconds there, they thought they might listen to you.
The way we interviewed Henry Olson last week, and he says these guys have something to say.
They're being abandoned by conservatives as well.
The conservatives weren't listening to them either.
Nobody was listening to them.
They're the backbone of the country.
They remain the backbone of the country.
They're not going to be written off.
They're not going to be paid off.
A guaranteed yearly income is not going to shut them up.
They want lives of meaning and happiness and decency and freedom.
And if you don't give it to them, they're going to come and vote for the people they want to vote for.
And pretty soon, pretty soon, when black people, black Americans, start catching on to the fact that they've been gamed by the left, they're going to join them as well.
And then you're really going to have problems.
So you go on TV and what you're seeing now is a temper tantrum, a temper tantrum that after they lied to you about Russian collusion for two and a half years, you're not willing to be gamed about this Ukraine as if it were virtually no matter what happened, as if it were some kind of reason why you should hand over the government.
To who?
Who have they got now?
Who are they playing?
Who is running for office?
This make-believe Indian, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, God love him.
I hope his health holds up, but the guy had a heart attack.
I mean, he's not really the guy who's not going to get elected, let's face it.
Joe Biden, who this whole thing has exposed as utterly corrupt.
These are the people they want you to vote for.
I'll talk about this more in just a minute.
I don't want to get distracted because I want to give you our ads who keep us on the air and who have something to say, right?
This is govmint.com.
They are offering a limited number of $10 gold liberty coins in uncirculated condition at an unbelievably low price.
And the reason you want this luck, you look at the financial news, same as I do.
Nobody knows what's going to happen.
It is just uncertain, whereas gold's value has increased over 28% within the last year.
So now looks like a good time to buy.
And these are actual gold coins treasure hunters and collectors seek and prize.
These are not replicas.
These are historical treasures that are the same solid gold coins once carried by titans of industry like the Rockefellers and Carnegies.
To secure your coins at this exceptional gov mint price, call GovMint at 1-888-2017051.
They'll give you a free gold guide just for calling.
And remember, you support our show when you support our sponsors.
So write this down or put it into your phone now because the only way you can get this special offer is to call 1-88-201-7051 to secure your coins and receive a free gold guide.
Call 1-88-201-7051.
So let's take a look.
I want to take a look at this thing that happened with Chris Todd.
Now, Chuck Todd.
Chuck Todd is a fake in a way on the face of it, right?
Because he not only works for NBC Meet the Press, but he works for MSNBC, a leftist, an openly leftist cable channel.
So we know what he is.
He goes on and he gives, this is on his NBC Meet the Press.
He does Meet the Press daily on NBC.
This is cut number 10, where he tells us about his fantasy about this Ukraine thing, which has now gotten, it's gotten kind of silly at this point.
I mean, well, let's talk about it first.
Let's see it first through Chuck Todd's eyes and how frustrated he is that you won't see it this way.
Welcome to Thursday.
It's Meet the Press Daily.
Good evening.
I'm Chuck Todd here in Washington.
I don't say this lightly, but let's be frank, a national nightmare is upon us.
The basic rules of our democracy are under attack from the president.
We begin tonight with a series of admissions by the president that all but assures his impeachment in the House of Representatives.
It's a moment of truth for Republicans, and they've been largely silent on what we've seen from the president.
Today, he publicly called on two foreign governments to interfere in the presidential election by investigating his chief 2020 political rival.
So check me on this.
Are you having a national nightmare?
I mean, seriously, you know, whether you think like, ah, there's a lot of noise out there, this is not the way I like it.
I don't like Trump.
I don't like the Democrats, whatever.
Is this a national nightmare?
Unemployment is at 3.5%.
We're not at war with anybody.
You know, I'm not having a national nightmare.
I mean, this is, and remember, the national nightmare phrase is a phrase that became famous when Gerald Ford said it after the Watergate scandal and Nixon stepped down and Jerry Ford said, our long national nightmare is over.
Not for Chuck Todd.
For Chuck Todd, we are in the midst of this national nightmare.
Now, let's just key in on this, right?
Because this is worst case scenario, worst case scenario.
Donald Trump asking the Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is a constitutional nightmare.
But Barack Obama tapping phones that included conversations with Donald Trump aides during the election for a Russian collusion story that we now know for certain didn't happen is fine.
So we're not going to be completely incurious about how that happened, how the CIA and the FBI engineered the spying on Donald Trump.
We're going to be completely incurious about this.
But boy, oh boy, are we up at night with our nightmares about Donald Trump saying to the guy, why don't you investigate Joe Biden in the Ukraine crane?
I mean, really, that is the worst case narrative.
So let's watch what happens when Senator Ron Johnson, right?
Yeah, from Wisconsin, comes on and says, what about this story about the spying on Donald Trump?
He tries to wake Chuck Todd up from his national nightmare.
So let's look at the first one of these.
This is number one.
Are you investigating those leaks that Peter Strzok talked about in the FBI?
I have no idea.
So again, why a Fox News conspiracy propaganda stuff is popping up on here.
I have no idea.
I have no idea why you're going.
That is the best way to do that.
Senator Johnson's Wake-Up Call00:11:34
Because they're asking and lying exactly why President Trump is upset and why his supporters are upset with news media.
It's not about the media.
Senator Johnson.
Senator Johnson, please.
Can we please answer the question that I asked you instead of trying to make Donald Trump feel better here that you're not criticizing?
I'm just trying to ask you a simple question.
What made you wince?
I'm asking a simple question about you clearly were upset that somehow there was an implication that military II was being frozen because the president wanted an investigation.
Why did you wince?
Because I didn't want those connected.
But we now know that this whole thing is a fraud.
We know that the Ukraine didn't know that their asses were being frozen so that there was no quid pro quo on the face of it.
We know that Adam Schiff lied.
He lied on air about whether he had heard about this whistleblower's report.
The way Kimberly Strassel had a wonderful column on Friday, kind of just showing the timeline, the way Adam Schiff played the news media on the Dianne Feinstein model of Kavanaugh, the way they remember they held the charges against Kavanaugh to the last possible minute and then threw them out there completely unsubstantiated.
And once they were completely unsubstantiated and we saw that even the people who were supposed to have been there weren't there, we were supposed to still stop the process, delay the process of confirming Kavanaugh.
And then more and more things were leaked out.
So now they're leaking out.
Oh, there's another whistleblower.
It's on the same call.
We've seen the transcript.
Even if, I mean, this is the thing they're selling you.
What is amazing about this is it forces Chuck Todd into the position, and he calls it a Fox News.
I love when Fox News is used as a pejorative by NBC.
I mean, Fox News is an openly conservative station.
NBC is supposed to be a news station and is a left-wing news station.
So they're the dishonest ones.
But Fox News is a pejorative.
Now Chuck Todd is accusing Senator Johnson.
You don't trust the FBI?
You don't, I mean, this is an amazing moment in American journalism, especially if you're my age and remember when the FBI and the CIA, remember the Born Identity?
The reason there were stories like the Born Identity, where a guy wakes up and finds, oh my God, I'm a CIA assassin.
This is the worst thing ever, is because that's the way the press taught us to think about the CIA.
They taught us to think about them as evil.
Oh my God, they're evil.
They're trying to assassinate Castro.
Like, I'm not sure that evil and trying to assassinate Castro go together in the same sentence.
So now you've got Chuck Todd upset, upset that anyone would distrust the FBI who spied on Martin Luther King and tried to engineer his suicide practically and the CIA who were the villains of the press for so many years.
I just want the truth.
The American people want the truth.
So do you not trust the American people?
Do you not trust the FBI?
You don't trust the CIA.
I'm just confused here.
Absolutely.
You're trusting Lisa Page?
Okay.
After James Coley, you believe the FBI and the CIA.
John Brennan, no, I don't trust any of these guys in the Obama administration.
I don't trust any of them.
You don't trust them now.
You trust them now.
No, I didn't trust him back then.
And you don't trust them now.
I do not trust John Brennan.
So wait.
Chuck.
Chuck is no one, it's like the CIA is a poor heroine in an old movie tied to the train tracks, and our hero, Chuck Todd, is going to rescue our fine, fine CIA by bringing John Brennan on, this pompous blowhard who helped engineer this investigation into the Trump administration, which is just a Fox News conspiracy.
Never mind the fact that it actually happened, that we know it happened.
Never mind the fact that the DOJ is preparing an inspector general report on it.
Never mind the fact that the DOJ is investigating it.
This whole thing is meant to distract you from that.
We're completely incurious.
You know, if Chuck Todd came on and said, hey, you know, there's been some abuses here.
I don't like Trump talking to the Ukraine this way, and I don't like what Barack Obama did.
And I covered Barack Obama when he was doing it instead of saying he was a light worker who was, I wanted to know why he was so enchanted with the presidency.
If that were the case, we'd be listening to all of it, but we're not listening to any of it.
And he's got this blowhard John Brennan on, former communist, former CIA director, so basically a former communist spy defending himself.
Listen to this.
What'd you say about the stability of the democracy?
I think it's no longer a democracy if an autocrat has it in his hands.
And people like Johnson and others are putty in his hands, which means that the democratic principles upon which this country are founded are eroding right now.
So the CIA would not assess America as a stable democracy?
I think it's, well, given the polarization of the country as well, there's just tremendous political instability here, which is consuming the government now, and it's not able to take care of the issues that it needs to address, whether it be on the domestic front or the national security or the foreign policy front.
So yes, I think there's a real question about the stability.
Chuck Todd is upset that the CIA, according to John Brennan, would no longer assess America as a democracy.
You know, that's what you're watching on TV.
That's NBC.
That's a network telling you this stuff, that the CIA, according to John Brennan, would no longer assess the United States of America as a working democracy because the Democrats lost.
Because the Democrats lost, we are no longer a democracy.
This is the stuff they're selling, and they can't believe, they can't believe that you won't step into the fantasy with them.
You know, I want to pull back again.
I got to pull back again because we started out looking at the bigger idea that they're after your free speech rights, that they really, seriously, truly want to end free speech in America, which has now risen to a level it's never been ever in the world, the kind of free speech we have today.
They want to take away your guns because they know that you'll use your guns to defend your free speech if it comes down to that.
They want us to trust the CIA telling us about Donald Trump, but we're not allowed to trust Donald Trump telling us about Joe Biden.
So that's the narrative.
I just want to go back and look.
I want to look at a couple of cases that came up over the weekend.
One is a case from England where a doctor in the national health in one of the departments of the national health was fired because he said theoretically he would not call a man with a six-foot man with a beard a woman.
He would not say, he did not believe that that was scientifically correct, and he did not believe it was biblically correct because the doctor was a believing Christian.
So he was fired.
He was asked to leave.
And he appealed to a court.
And the court said, you know, believing in the truth of Genesis 1.27 is not in keeping with human dignity.
This is what the court said.
And Genesis 1.27, for those of you who don't know, it says, God created man in his own image.
In the image of God, he created him, male and female.
He created them.
And so Christians take that to mean that God's image can be expressed in both men and women, and that is how they are created.
And saying that they're not or cutting off their bits is not going to change who they are.
All of which seems to be is backed up by science.
But most importantly, most importantly is this man's right to see the world as he sees it and express the world as he sees it.
That's the important thing, is that when they tell you you have to use a certain pronoun, they are telling you that you are not allowed to say what you perceive reality to be.
All right?
But the other thing about this is the fact that God created man in his image may be the most important sentence ever written in human history.
It is why we think human beings have dignity.
It is why the concept of human dignity exists, because we believe that man is created in God's image.
It is why Jesus says to love your neighbor as yourself, because that is part of loving God, because man is created in God's image, male and female.
So in other words, they're pulling out the bottom Jenga block of the tower, the block on which all of human dignity rests, and by telling you that that is not in keeping with human dignity.
Now, I want to combine that with the fact that we played last week the beautiful video of the brother of the man who was killed, Botham Jean, who was killed in the Amber Geiger case.
Remember, this is the cop in Texas, walked into the wrong room, thought, according to her, that she was being robbed, and shot a man, an innocent man, sitting on his sofa.
Terrible, terrible story, and a weird story.
I mean, it's a weird story.
I still haven't gotten my head around the entire, all the facts.
I can't quite figure out what happened, but it seems that she thought this guy was in her apartment.
She shot a guy who was sitting there watching TV, totally innocent man.
The guy's 18-year-old brother gets up and forgives the killer in the name of Jesus and says, all I want for you is that you accept Jesus into your life.
The judge then comes down and hands the woman that she's going off to jail, Amber Geiger, hands her a Bible and tells her, you know, please keep this Bible.
There's now a complaint being filed by the, what is it, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, saying that this judge went too far and that was coercion, giving this person a Bible.
Didn't say you have to believe in God.
There was no quid pro quo.
Didn't say if you don't believe in this Bible, you know, you're going to get 20 years.
Didn't say anything like that.
It said, here's a Bible as one human being to another.
NPR is writing stories about whether or not forgiveness is a good thing, right?
The NAACP is saying, oh, I've preached for, you know, former NAACP president Cornell Brooks said, I have preached forgiveness for 25 years, but using the willingness of black people to forgive as an excuse to further victimize black people is sinful.
Black people forgive.
Here's another activist saying, black people forgive because we need to survive.
We have to forgive time and time again while racism or white silence in the face of racism continues to thrive.
In other words, they want to get rid of, they want to get rid of forgiveness because it forces them to move forward and they lose their power.
The thing is, they are not attacking God and the Bible because they hurt human dignity.
They're attacking human dignity itself.
They're attacking the idea of a spiritual man who does not, is not based solely on money, is not based solely on the material goods that they can supply.
They're attacking the idea of a spiritual man who, though he was hurt, forgives and moves forward because that's freedom.
That is freedom.
That's where your freedom comes from.
It's when you forgive and move forward.
Listen, I'm saying this as a white man to a black man.
I am telling you, if you don't let this go, if you don't let this go, your life is still in chains.
The minute you let it go, you're free.
That doesn't mean you have to tolerate somebody being racist in your face.
That's not what it's about.
It's about letting things go that are beyond correction, that happened a long time ago.
If you let those go, you are free.
And then, you know, we had the pilot from the Tuskegee Airmen here.
He happens to be one of my heroes, one of the few heroes I can name who's actually alive.
Most of my heroes are dead.
And he said, I kept my eyes on the prize on doing what I wanted to do, not on the people who were trying to stop me, but on what I wanted to do.
And by doing that, he became a massive American hero.
They are trying to undermine the very basis of all our thinking about freedom, about human beings, about forgiveness, about God's love, and about our love.
Between Comedy and Clowns00:14:28
And then they're going to bother us because Donald Trump was on phone to the Ukraine to hell with them.
We're going to bring on Knowles to talk about Joker.
Come over to DailyWire.com and subscribe because we want your money.
But if you subscribe, it allows you $10 a month, allows you $100 for the year.
You can get another kingdom early.
You can be in the mailbag.
And of course, you can get this exquisite steers tumbler.
Come over to dailywire.com.
Nice.
Long time no see.
Good to see you, pal.
Are you the writer of the star?
Am I?
I guess you're right.
I am.
And that's coming out today.
That is now released for the public.
Subscribers got it a little early, but now it's out for everybody.
You know, we always try to promote this because we want people to listen to it because it's good, but it's so good.
It's so good.
I'm listening to it, and it's so good.
So it's, not only is the story excellent, and it's really, really good.
And there are moments when I'm recording it when I just burst out laughing.
Yes, we lost you last week.
You lost me.
There was one scene in particular, I won't ruin it, where I couldn't get through the scene.
But the sound quality is, the production is so good.
I guess we fired all the guys who used to.
Yeah, you know, and now we've got new guys.
It is really brilliantly made.
Yeah, and it's all audio now.
So it's just focused on that.
I've never heard anything quite like it because it's not a radio play.
It's not an audio book.
It's something kind of in between.
And I just think it's great.
I think if people are missing this, they are missing something really, really different.
And also, all the complaints about the left owns the culture and all this stuff, they should listen to this.
This is it, because we can talk ad nauseum.
You always hear people talking in political context of how the conservatives need to own the culture.
Yeah.
Here's the culture.
And it's not a political story.
It's just a story written out of our perspective.
Right.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Speaking of stories.
Speaking of stories.
So I'm going to warn you, my take on Joker is different than everybody else's.
It'll probably be different than yours.
But I want to hear yours and what you think, because you always have good insights into these things.
I thought insight is a good word.
I thought the movie was quite insightful.
I thought the movie was a really full movie.
I think one reason I liked it is it's not a superhero movie in really any sense of the word.
The Batman story is not really a superhero story other than that he's very rich and has good technology.
But this is not a superhero movie.
I mean, this is about a guy who is mentally disturbed, who becomes a criminal.
Right.
I thought the insight of it was brilliant.
I thought it told us a lot about where we are right now.
I won't give any spoilers, but the song that was going through the trailer, and it is in the movie, is Send in the Clowns.
And Send in the Clowns, people don't understand the song.
The song is about how we're all the clowns.
It's this love song from a Santai musical, and Send in the Clans.
The clowns are already here is the last line.
We are the clowns in this movie.
The Joker gives a great speech, which is true.
The kind of climax speech that he gives is true, except it lacks introspection.
It's like your comment about bigotry.
It's not that bigots are wrong about the other guy.
It's that they're wrong about themselves.
And it, I think, really represents, in particular, the political left in a way that says, yes, you have certain complaints.
You just don't have the introspection of yourself.
I think it exposes our hypocrisy on mental health.
We always say we need a conversation on mental health.
Nobody wants to talk about it, left, right, or center.
I think there are huge political overtones.
It's clear, I think, even from the trailers, that the billionaire who is running for mayor of New York is a Trump-like figure.
His opponents have resist signs.
They are obviously the left-wing figures.
And what I love about the movie in particular is that I think it allows for free will without giving away too much of the plot.
There is enough of a sense in the movie that the Joker is not merely the inevitable consequence of decisions that have nothing to do with him, but that he actually plays some role in it.
No, absolutely.
We have to stop for a minute and talk for just a second about the fact that the left is on this movie like I hate this movie.
The New Yorker wrote a piece that was so incoherent.
And not everything in it was untrue, but it was just incoherent.
It was just a guy blithering about.
I mean, it starts out very first scene, because we don't want to give spoilers, but very first scene, five kids, they're all white, right?
Of course.
They beat them up, and they said, well, this is to represent the five Central Park jogger kids.
I thought, it has nothing to do with it.
There is nothing in the text or the movie that's existing.
So there's a lot of, but because of this, there's a lot of reason for right-wingers to really love the movie.
You know, we want to go out there and all that.
I thought the movie was okay.
I thought it was a one-note movie.
I thought it was incredibly bleak.
And I thought there was a lot of sociological dishonesty in it, which really bothered me.
So here's the thing.
The reason the left hates this movie, I think, is you're absolutely right.
He's a left-winger.
He blames all his problems on the rich, all the clowns, and it blame all the problems of the rich.
And it takes place in a 1980s, 70s, 80s New York, which is clearly the result of leftist policy, right?
I mean, it's clearly, when you see the movie theaters, they're all gay porn.
And one of the movie theaters is this girl on her hands and knees and it's called Ace in the Whole, very graphically pornographically.
That's the leftist world, and it's coming back.
Right.
It's coming back.
It's not just the leftist ideology.
That actually happened in New York, and that's what we're seeing.
Now, when I say it's only a social movie, I have to point out that I felt it was a comic book version of Taxi Driver.
Yes.
And I didn't like taxi driver.
I'm the only person in America.
I thought taxi driver was simplistic and silly, too.
But, you know, great performances.
And Scorsese is a great director, so it had all that.
But I just think it was a silly movie.
And I thought this was a silly movie in a lot of ways.
But the thing that got me about it, and the guy in the New Yorker actually hits on this, but he hits on it from the completely wrong angle, is it is a racially dishonest movie, right?
It has a Bernard Goetz scene in it, right?
But where the victims are Wall Street guys.
But in real life, they were black guys.
And the thing was, the crime that was taking place in the 80s was centered in the black community.
It was black crime.
It wasn't Wall Street.
It was committed.
It wasn't Wall Street Committee.
Right.
It was black crime.
And because the criminals were black, the left was defending them, which of course is absurd, right?
A black person has no more right to commit a crime than a white person, right?
And because they got Getz, Goetz went on a subway.
It was called the Death, what was that Charles Bronson movie, Deathwish?
Right.
The Deathwish killings.
He went on a subway armed and waited till he was attacked and then shot these guys.
But the way they, and a lot of people supported Getz, right?
A lot of people said, yes, I'm tired of being victimized.
But the way they got him was Getz said something racist.
And there was some racist stuff they got.
They said, see, it is all racism.
Instead of focusing on the crime, this movie just eradicates race.
Race in it is in a 2019 phase, while the rest of where everybody's just kind of together, where the rest of the movie is taking place in 1980.
Even more so, it's doing what Hollywood often does, which is that the good guys tend to be black people and the bad guys tend to be white people.
But by doing that, they condemn the left, because in the end, Joker is a leftist.
It's all about the rich.
And all the clowns are all like, oh, the rich, the rich, the rich.
It's incredibly simplistic.
You know what I love about, you're right, that it is sort of one note and it is a small story.
What I sort of like about that is Joaquin Phoenix is an incredibly talented actor, but he's not a broad actor.
But you see, you're an actor, and you know Jeremy, the God King, he loves Joaquin Toen.
Joaquin Phoenix is maybe his favorite.
What do you think?
I think Joaquin Phoenix is really good at playing a range of roles that goes about four inches wide.
When he does that, he really shows you so much of the character.
But he always plays the kind of creepy, loner, awkward.
I mean, that's basically been every role he's ever played.
He does that very well here as well.
Brando did a lot more.
You know, there's also this thing, and you and I talked about this off-screen once, where we both noticed that he has no relationship to the audience, which could be looked at as good acting because he's totally in the character, but it's also kind of annoying.
Yes.
But because it's so, the one thing that I think his performance in particular gives to this movie is that, you know, the left is upset that the Joker could be a hero to some creepy people.
It's a hero to the left.
That perspective is important because you do understand his point.
You do understand the clowns in the street.
You do understand the left's perspective here.
It's just wrong.
And so if you look at this movie with moral clarity, it's a clear movie.
If you look at this movie without moral clarity, Joker's the hero.
Well, this is the other thing.
They keep comparing Joker to a white Trump supporter, but there's nothing like that except that he can't get a girl.
Right.
Which is, by the way, another thing.
And this is a little off topic, but still, they kept saying he's an incel.
And an incel is a, what is it?
It's a involuntarily celibate.
So an incel is a loser.
An incel is a guy who can't get a date.
And the only reason I say that, I know that sounds cruel, like a lot of conservatism, it sounds cruel, but it's not, because a loser can become a winner.
A loser can get in shape.
A loser can find out how to meet girls.
A loser can overcome his fears and find out how to become a more social.
An incel sounds like a disease.
It sounds like something happened to you.
How do you stop being an incel?
That's a category of human being, you know?
And nobody is a category.
Nobody is an incel.
You're just a loser who needs to take charge of yourself and stop being that way.
Exactly.
Now, there is stuff in there.
The other thing about this is everything in it comes from other movies.
It comes from Taxi Driver, it comes from King of Comedy, a little bit from Fight Club.
I mean, it's just every single thing in it is from another movie.
And it's all made into comic book stuff, which means that like, I don't know, it gets very simplistic in a way.
And it's not, it isn't a great movie.
It's better than the critics are saying, I think.
The critics are not.
No, it is.
It's not a bad movie.
It's not like, I didn't hate it.
Exactly.
But I think the critics have it at 69%.
The audience has it at 90% on Rotten Tomatoes.
It actually was higher on Rotten Tomatoes, so you wonder what's going on in there.
But it is a small movie for a very particular moment that I think does tell us something.
Because also, the movie being not a spoiler, it's so nihilistic.
It's so bleak.
It's so.
It's so bleak.
And it's from his perspective.
So, of course, he has a bleak, nihilistic, cynical perspective.
Doesn't need to be.
The other characters in the movie who are not this guy, who are not the Joker, are living okay lives.
They're living pretty good lives.
They're living lives with purpose.
If the movie were from their perspective, I'm sure it would be very different.
As far as I can tell, every little trick, every time I've heard someone tell me that the movie is really leftist because this happens to the Joker or that happens to the Joker, there's an answer for that.
There's actually a rejoinder.
Yes, and it is interesting.
One of the things I really did like about it is that the actual truth of the story is very hard to get at.
Like you're never quite sure what the actual bottom-level truth of the story is, which I thought was fine.
That was good.
Life is like that.
That's fine.
But I just think it is, I don't see how any leftist can look at that and not feel offended and attacked because it's happening now.
It's happening to San Francisco.
It's happening to L.A.
And we're living in it right now in LA.
Heather McDonald had a piece that was in City Journal originally, but was also over the weekend in Wall Street Journal in an edited form, where she goes to San Francisco and she just says they have let these people on the streets, they've let the homeless have all the drugs they want.
They give them needles.
They say it's fine.
And it's gotten worse.
Of course it's.
It's gotten worse.
And that's the city that you see in Joker.
Yeah, you see the consequences of that.
And on the broader point of it, one thing I do like about the movie is it takes up the question of comedy.
What is comedy?
You know, in the opera Pagliachi, one of the lines is, when the guy is dying, is the comedy is finished.
And actually, Pope Benedict XV on his deathbed is said to have quoted this line.
He says, the comedy is finished.
Not like life is an absurd farce, like the divine comedy, like it has a happy ending.
Like it all makes sense.
And the Joker obviously talks about comedy all the time.
He uses these kinds of lines.
The two songs that are juxtaposed in the movie are two Sinatra songs, Send in the Clowns and That's Life.
And so when he brings up the question of comedy, it's, is this comedy an absurd farce or does it make sense?
And I think if you watch the movie in a coherent way and with some clarity, you can see that his life doesn't make sense, but life itself does make sense.
Yes, yes.
And the idea of laughter, which I, again, I don't want to give any spoilers, but the idea of laughter and how much pain goes into laughter is one of the central themes of it.
And it really is true.
And as the director, Todd Phillips, said, he made Hangover, which is actually a very good comedy.
And he said, I can't make comedy anymore because these leftist guys are tearing me apart.
And the left's response was, what do you mean calling us guys?
How dare you.
There are a few moments in the movie, like actually since the movie, when people are talking about it, the actors and the writers and the directors, where they get it wrong.
They don't quite understand the movie.
They don't quite understand their characters, which happens all the time, I guess.
It is true this is a shallow, it's shallower than a great movie.
It's one note.
It's kind of small.
In a world where all we're making are these awful formulaic comic book movies, I actually agree with you on Taxi Driver and on Scorsese.
Scorsese isn't my favorite either.
But if we can elevate cinema from the Marvel universe to this universe, taxi driver or to this universe, I'm pleased to do it.
You know, I have to say, the fact that we're having this conversation, which could go on another 15 minutes, but I'm out of time, says something about the picture.
It's nice to have a movie you can talk about.
And that's always better than a movie you can't talk about.
From Marvel to Taxi Driver00:01:24
But you know what you can talk about more?
Another comment.
Another kingdom.
You've got to listen to this.
Please, take a half hour.
You will see what I'm talking about.
I got to stop.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
See you tomorrow.
Hey, if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe.
And if you want to help spread the word, give us a five-star review and also tell your friends to subscribe too.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Austin Stevens and directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
And our supervising producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Assistant Director, Pavel Wydowski.
Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Kormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
Animations are by Cynthia Ngulo.
And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
If you prefer facts over feelings, if you aren't offended by the brutal truth, if you can still laugh at the nuttiness filling our national news cycle, well, tune on in to the Ben Shapiro Show, where you'll get a whole lot of that and much more.