Ep. 827 – Intellectual Idiots skewers leftist elites for mocking patriotism—citing Steven Pinker’s detachment and Bernie Sanders’ unrepentant praise for Soviet authoritarianism—while defending Trump’s Soleimani strike over Obama’s Iran deal, which funneled funds to terrorists. The episode pivots to Hollywood’s decline, dismissing Moonlight’s niche acclaim while praising Gone with the Wind’s mass appeal, then mocks Noah Baumbach’s hypocrisy in glorifying divorce after depicting its ruin in The Squid and the Whale. It ends by slamming transhumanist leftism and Democratic debates’ racial performativity, framing both as proof of intellectual decay. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrats and journalists, but I repeat myself, are furiously accusing the Trump administration of giving conflicting explanations for the killing of terrorist leader Qasem Soleimani.
Pencil-necked McCarthyite Adam Schiff went on Meet the Press with NBC anchorman Chuck Credulous and actually managed to keep a straight face as he said, quote, administration officials keep changing their story.
First, they said they killed Soleimani because he was going to kill Americans.
Then they said it was because he was going to bomb American embassies.
Then they said it was because he was going to launch terrorist attacks against Americans.
Well, which is it?
After all, we can't rest easy knowing this violent psychopathic murderer of our countrymen may have been harmed unjustly, unquote.
In an op-ed in the New York Times, a former newspaper, editor-in-chief Blithering Prevarication III wrote, quote, The State Department said Soleimani planned imminent attacks, but given their deplorable English pronunciation, it was impossible to tell whether they meant IMMANENT and thus the attack was indwelling and inherent.
They meant it was an eminent attack, being high in station, rank, or repute, or whether they actually were trying to imply that Mr. Soleimani was planning to attack us in the near future, which of course would be an entirely different spelling than the others.
These are the things that should be keeping America up at night, not trifling matters like whether Donald Trump avenged the deaths and saved the lives of our fellow Americans, unquote.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told a mannequin in a department store she'd been lost in since last Wednesday, quote, I have said many times that all roads lead back to Russia, but now it seems they actually all lead to the ladies' lingerie department.
And if someone doesn't get me out of here soon, I may starve to death, unquote.
Pelosi then wandered off to the cosmetics department where she discovered a new shade of lipstick to put on her forehead.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
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You know, one of the reasons I felt compelled to leave my secluded writer's room, which I really enjoyed, and come out, I don't know, it must be like 15 years ago, man, almost 20 years ago, and come out and start speaking about politics was because I saw an appalling decay in American patriotism, and I actually felt it threatened our freedom.
I lived in England for most of the 90s, and I was always put off by the reluctance of the British to wave flags or speak about their affection for their country.
It just wasn't done, old boy.
When I told Brits how much I loved it in Britain, they would frequently look at me in surprise and say, why?
I had to explain to them why Great Britain was great.
Then shortly after I moved back home, we were hit on 9-11, and I saw entertainment personalities and news commentators asking what I thought was the absurd question, why do they hate us?
And I thought, who cares?
We're the best, freest country on earth, and they're the purveyors of a small-minded, bigoted, hate-filled ideology.
Who cares why they hate us?
It's like asking why the Nazis hated us.
Who cares?
The problem has gotten worse since then, especially on the political left.
Witness the appalling way the media Democrat complex all but mourned the death of Qasim Soleimani and tried to blame America for the actions of Iranian terrorists.
I've been covering this since last week, but I can't get off it because it's such crazy stuff.
But this discomfort with national loyalty seems to be a mind disease among elites in general, sometimes even regardless of their politics.
Recently, I read the popular book Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker, and I like Pinker as an author, even though I often disagree with him, but he's really an interesting guy.
And in this book, Pinker says that as an American, he found it sad that American workers were left unemployed by the globalization that sent their jobs to cheaper workers elsewhere.
But as a citizen of the world, he was happy that workers in other poorer nations had been lifted out of poverty.
The problem with that is Pinker isn't a citizen of the world.
His life is made possible by America, and America is made possible by all the people who live and work here.
It's like some guy saying, yes, my wife takes care of me and makes my life possible.
And as her husband, I'm sorry that when I sleep around, it makes her sad.
But as a husband of the world, I'm glad I can make so many other women happy.
It just life just doesn't work that way.
There's a difference between being a free individual, a person who can live by his lights, and being a detached non-person with no loyalty to your family or your community or the nation that created and sustains you.
In order for individual freedom to be preserved, we need a true picture of what an individual is.
Yes, he's a single and unique life made by God in his image, but he's also part of a network of relationships, including a relationship to his country.
And he owes his identity and his love in part to those relationships.
I'm going to talk more about that in just a second.
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I want to riff on this for a minute about elites and patriotism.
You know, when I was a kid, I traveled around the country.
I wanted to be a wanderer like Jack Kerouac or Huckleberry Finn.
I wanted to wander around the country.
It was something that I really dreamed about when I was little, and I actually did it for many years, just kind of I slept in hobo camps.
I went all over the place.
I was in every state, I think, but South Dakota.
Bernie's Vision for Education00:14:38
And I just really, it was really interesting to me because I grew up on the coast where everybody thought he was the intellectual guy and he saw the way things were and those stupid, bigoted people were out there in the middle of the country.
And I discovered, no, it's not true.
Not only were the people in the middle of the country not bigoted, but were very pleasant and really nice and thoughtful people.
But I also learned that people who are not intellectuals and don't have big college degrees are very insecure about their intellects, but often they see things that intellectual people don't see.
I mean, intellectuals analyze things.
That's what they're good at.
They love analysis, which actually means taking things apart.
And sometimes when you take things apart, you don't see them in their completion.
You don't see the whole thing.
It's like a mechanic who can take a car apart, but doesn't know how to drive.
And the thing is, patriotism.
God, love, these are things that only come whole.
You can't analyze them.
When you analyze them, they go away, but they're still very real and very important.
And, you know, to be honest with you, this is a difference I've seen between men and women.
Just out of experience, I have no scientific information about this, and of course I'm generalizing, but I've noticed that women don't think in the same analytical way that men think.
Men think more analytically, and that's why you might want a man.
There may be more men around to build rockets, but women start saying things and you think, you know, this sounds crazy to me, but they turn out to be right an awful lot of times.
And so you listen to women and you hear another way of thinking.
And same thing.
It's just the difference between analytical thinking and seeing things whole.
And I think that the intellectuals and so many of the intellectuals are on the left have fought their way through the things that matter.
You know, Walter Russell Reed, Walter Russell Mead, I'm sorry, Walter Russell Mead, this guy in the Wall Street Journal who I really like writes about international politics, writes a column today about how people are rising up for freedom all over the place in Hong Kong against the Chinese, in Venezuela, against Nicolas Maduro, and now in Iran.
Listen to the way Martha Rattis covers the demonstrations in Iran.
Listen to this.
A week ago, this was a country with masses of people shouting down the United States.
But this morning in Iran, the anger is aimed at their own leaders.
In the aftermath of Soleimani's death, Iranians were united, angrily protesting against the United States drone strike on Soleimani.
Now Iran's unity shattered.
Iranian protesters ripping down posters of Soleimani, the slain military leader, and some protesters refusing to trample the image of an American flag.
This is nonsense.
I mean, in Hong Kong, they're waving the American flag.
As Walter Russell Mead points out in his column, we are the beacon of freedom.
We're not a perfect beacon of freedom.
We have all kinds of flaws, and sometimes we go one way, and sometimes we go another.
But the very fact that we represent freedom to these people all around the world is a perfectly good reason to love this country as if it were your life, because in some sense, it is.
So I'm going to get back to Iran later on, but I want to talk about Bernie Sanders first because he's a perfect example of a guy who has thought his way through the obvious truths of life.
And I have to tell you, there is an absolutely shocking piece of video that came out from James O'Keefe at Project Veritas.
And I'll get to that in a second because it's unbelievable.
I mean, I really like O'Keefe and I like Project Veritas.
I think they do some really good stuff over there.
And Bernie Sanders is now surging on the Democrat side, the Democrat presidential race.
The Des Moines Register over the weekend published the results of its latest poll showing Sanders leading in the state.
That poll has Sanders with 20%, Elizabeth Warren at 17%, and Boutijej at 16%.
And they were all above.
I think they're doing better than Joe Biden.
So Bernie is on the rise.
And the Democrats don't like this.
You remember, they sabotaged his campaign last time against Hillary Clinton.
And now this time they've kind of, they had to, they were so embarrassed by that that they had to rejigger their process.
And it means that the left, which obviously the base are the people who turn out for the primaries, they're the people who are paying the most attention.
So you're going to tend to get more radicalized candidates unless you protect against that.
And so they're rising.
So Bernie is rising.
Barack Obama's 2012 campaign manager, this is from Politico, he's warning that Democrats would struggle in a general election against Donald Trump if Bernie Sanders is the nominee.
He says, if I were a campaign manager for Donald Trump and I look at the field, I would very much want to run against Bernie Sanders.
The Sanders campaign is, and Sanders' life, his whole life, is a triumph of thinking over reality.
It's a triumph of intellection over reality.
So James Keef over Project Veritas, he does all this, you know, he does the secret camera stuff and he was recorded all these people and catches them out.
He caught this guy, Kyle Jurek, who's a field organizer for Bernie.
And, you know, Bernie is always talking about how education should be free.
Well, apparently, free education doesn't mean what you think it means.
It means a re-education.
And Kyle Jurek explains, this is Bernie's field organizer.
He explains why we have to have free education.
In Nazi Germany, after the fall of the Nazi Party, there was a shit ton of the populace that was not to fight.
Like, Germany had to spend billions of dollars re-educating people to not be Nazis.
Like, we're probably going to have to do the same thing here.
And that's kind of what Bernie's like, whole, hey, free education for everybody, because we're going to have to teach you not to be a f ⁇ ing Nazi.
There's a reason Joseph Stalin had gulags, right?
And actually, gulags were a lot better than what the CIA has told us that they were.
Like, people were actually paid a living wage in gulags.
They had conjugal visits in gulags.
Gulags were actually meant for re-education.
So that's another reason we need communism.
I don't know who that kid was, but he's probably running the Sanders campaign.
I mean, that's an amazing piece of video because, first of all, this guy's not a stupid person.
He's just a stupid person.
He's an intellectual.
You know, George Orwell said it's an idea so stupid only an intellectual could believe it.
First of all, if you read Alexander Soltzenitskin, who was Sotslenitsyn, who was in the gulags, they don't sound all that great to me.
They sound a little just a tiny bit like gulags.
They sound like Soviet gulags where people died in their thousands and starved.
And this guy, so this guy's talking nonsense, but he's talking about the American people here.
He's talking about American people as Nazis who need, we need to give them free education because we need to re-educate them to stop being Nazis.
That is what this guy is thinking.
And again, he's not a stupid person.
He's just a stupid person.
He's an intellectual who's thought his way through reality into a complete internalized fantasy of the world that he is living in.
He is so free that he can say that stuff without getting arrested because he lives in a free country and he shouldn't be arrested, but he's in a country where he won't be arrested.
And yet he thinks he's living among Nazis.
Just an amazing thing.
If you even think about the fact of what Nazi Germany was like, even a year after Hitler took power when he eliminated every other political party, how can you make any comparison?
What is the comparison?
It's just people who disagree with him, who he thinks are Nazis.
Now, you can say, okay, there's hundreds of people working for Bernie Sanders.
This is just one of them.
But it's not.
It's Bernie Sanders.
Here's a quick montage of stuff Bernie has said over the years and has never changed his mind.
This is the thing about Bernie.
He's never come out and said, oh, maybe I got the Soviet Union a little wrong.
Maybe after we found out about Stalin, I shouldn't have honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
But here's just a selection of some of the things he said over the years.
You know, it's funny.
Sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food.
That's a good thing.
In other countries, people don't line up for food.
The rich get the food and the poor starve to death.
Way back in, what was it, 1961, they invaded Cuba.
And everybody was totally convinced that Cashkro was the worst guy in the world.
All the Cuban people who are going to rise up in rebellion against Fidel Casho.
They forgot that he educated the kids, gave them health care, totally transformed a society.
You know, not to say that Fidel Castro or Cuba are perfect.
They are certainly not.
But just because Ronald Reagan dislikes these people does not mean to say that the people in their own nations feel the same way.
Most of the people here also were extremely impressed by their public transportation system.
The stations themselves were absolutely beautiful, including many works of art, chandeliers that were beautiful.
It was a very, very effective system.
Also, I was impressed by the youth programs that they have, their palaces of culture for the young people, a whole variety of programs for young people, and cultural programs which go far beyond what we do in this country.
All right, but who knows about cocaine?
Anyone ever seen cocaine?
All right, we just threw the cocaine thing in.
But that last bit, he's talking about the Soviet Union.
He's talking about how great the subway systems are if you don't happen to be in the gulags.
And you notice, by the way, that both Bernie and his campaign worker, both of them use the logic of the left, which is not about the truth.
It's about who is telling you the truth.
So the first guy talks about the gulags and he says they're not as bad as the CIA tells you they are, because in those days they didn't like the CIA before the CIA was spying on Donald Trump.
Those were back in the days when the left didn't like the CIA.
So that's, you know, he's talking about how the CIA is lying to you about those gulags.
And then Bernie is talking about, well, just because Ronald Reagan doesn't like Castro, a mass murdering tyrant, doesn't mean the people don't like Castro, a mass murdering tyrant who has driven them into poverty forever and kept them from becoming anything that they could be.
So he's using that same thing they use today when they talk about Fox News.
Oh, that was on Fox News.
Not whether it's true or not, but it was on Fox News.
So if Reagan says it, it's not true.
Bernie has not changed.
You know, the New York Times, a former newspaper, ran a long, long interview with him, which is, I mean, it's chilling when you put it into the context of that Project Veritas video.
They asked him, can you walk us through the first 100 days?
What will your first 100 days as president be like?
And he says, well, it's going to be, I happen to believe it's going to be a busy 100 days.
In fact, I've made enough promises that I think I'm going to be up all night my first day.
I'm going to go to bed at five in the morning.
I think the most important point aside from the legislation, which I'll get into, is to convince the American people that in fact we can have a government that represents working people and not just the 1%.
By the way, it's working people who are thriving and doing so much better under Donald Trump.
He says we'll be introducing legislation to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure.
We'll be introducing legislation not dissimilar to what passed the House, raising the minimum wage, making public colleges and universities tuition-free.
In other words, what I believe is when you rally the American people around an agenda that works for working people, we can do more than one thing at a time.
So all these things are going to be free.
We're going to be paying for everybody's education.
He goes on and on.
They talk about a political revolution.
It means being an administration unprecedented, certainly in the modern history of this country.
So to me, what my administration is about is not sitting with Mitch in the Oval Office or wherever it is negotiating something.
It's rallying the American people around an agenda they already support.
So he's not going to do any of that politics, that Democrat stuff.
He's just going to get this stuff done.
And if you don't like it, don't worry because there's going to be free re-education for all you Nazis out there.
You'll like it.
By the time the education is over, you're going to really like it a lot.
You're going to be saying, no, Bernie, it's a good thing.
Communism is a good thing.
And you know what?
Your brain will have been washed absolutely free.
It's going to be great.
Unbelievable, unbelievable.
So we have to go back to Iran.
We have to go back to talking about patriotism in Iran because this idea that we represent freedom to people, it's not an accident.
It's not an accident.
You know, going back for a minute to Walter Russell Mead's column in the Wall Street Journal, I keep wanting to say, Walter, I want to make sure I have his name right because, yes, Walter Russell Mead, I like his stuff so much, I don't want to misrepresent him.
But he says, America's alignment with the principles of freedom is both a major foreign policy advantage and a source of confusion and distress.
On the positive side, despite America's flaws and inconsistencies, people all over the world know that the cause of freedom and that of the U.S. are aligned.
Despite our flaws, they know that we're the freedom guys.
This association helps legitimate U.S. power around the world and creates allies in the unlikeliest places, as when Hong Kong protesters carried the American flag or Iranian protesters refused to step on it.
Yet that association brings problems as well.
Rulers like Mr. Qi in China and Vladimir Putin sense that American power constitutes a threat to their own security.
So no matter what we say, no matter how friendly we try to be to Putin or Qi, they know that we don't want them being the gangster occracies that they are.
We want freedom for their people.
And so that makes them threatened and it makes it harder to negotiate with them.
He says the Trump administration must now struggle with these questions.
In the event of a second Trump term, they'll grow more acute.
There's no simple, elegant answer.
But whatever Trump chooses, for good or ill, the U.S. will remain a beacon of liberty, if sometimes a flickering one.
And that is enough.
And as far as I'm concerned, right there, that's enough for you to think this is a great country and it is up to you to maintain what's great about it.
And it's not communism.
It's not socialism.
It never was.
It never was.
It has always been the idea of individual freedom, which, as John Adams pointed out, is only something that a religious, moral people can have.
And that is because, as I've been talking about this week so far, and I hope to be talking about more, it is a religious people who understand what an individual is.
The opposite of that is people who want to triumph over human nature, who want to say that I don't have to be a man just because I was born a man.
I can be a woman because I declare myself a woman.
I can be black if I declare myself black.
I can be anything I want to be.
Instead of saying, no, I'm within the constraints of human nature, but how do I utilize that nature and restrain that nature so that I can be a free individual in the things that matter, which are the spiritual things, what you believe in, what you think is moral, what you think is right, how you think the country should be governed.
Perception of America in the Middle East00:07:38
You know, let's just take a look a little bit.
I keep going back to the way this Iran thing was covered, but I think it is so revelatory.
I think these guys have been caught with their pants down.
They have been caught in front of us hating our country in relation to a terrorist nation like Iran, which oppresses not only their own people, but tries to oppress anybody else around them.
How can you make any kind of moral equivalence between America and Iran?
You know, I have no problem with people criticizing America.
There's a free country.
You should criticize your country.
You should want to make it better.
You should point out the things that are wrong.
We all do it.
We all should do it.
It has nothing to do with that.
But underlying that should be what Edmund Burke talked about.
You want to move into the future.
You want to accept change, but you want to accept change in keeping with the traditions that brought you to where you are.
It's only logical that if it's a great country, the traditions that brought you here are great.
And yes, they may become out of date.
Certain ways in which those traditions are expressed may become out of date.
But you don't get rid of them for that matter.
For that reason, you move on in keeping with those traditions.
A perfect example is race.
It is true that black people were excluded from equality in this country.
There is no question about it.
And the leftist said, well, therefore, the country is evil.
That's the New York Times line.
Therefore, the whole country is founded on racism.
No, the answer is now it's time to include black people, which is only fair, in keeping with our traditions and include them within our traditions.
Not that, oh, because they were oppressed and black, they get to do whatever they want and they get to live in a totally different country.
No, they are now included and they become part of us as they should have been from the beginning, but as they are now and the us that they become part of is in keeping with our traditions.
Let's look at a way a reporter for the New York Times, a former newspaper named Roukmini Kalamachi, okay, the way she talks about what happened between the U.S. and Iran.
And I want to point two things out, just to remind you that what happened was the United States killed two major terrorist leaders, and Iran, frightened by that fact, made a show of vengeance, but it was just a show.
And Donald Trump, recognizing that it was just a show that he had won completely, said, okay, that's enough.
We're not going to kill you.
We're just going to put on more sanctions.
We're not going to go to war with you because Trump hates war.
He said, I'm going to put on more sanctions.
So Trump did everything right.
He got the thing exactly right, beat for beat.
And the Iranians were obviously cowed, obviously terrified, and obviously didn't want to start a shooting war in which they will be wiped off the face of the earth in minutes, okay?
That's the first thing.
The other thing I want to point out is the reporter you're about to hear from the New York Times covers ISIS.
Okay, that's her beach.
That's part of her beat, is covering ISIS.
This is the way she looks at Iran and the United States.
The perception of America right now, I would say in the Middle East, is that we act outside the law.
I hear this all the time from Iraqis, from Syrians who do not see a legal process behind what we are doing, specifically because of the failure of the Iraq war and the tainted intelligence that led to that point.
One of the takeaways of the past week is that we actually saw, in my opinion, Iran act with perhaps more restraint than our own government.
The rocket attacks, the missiles that landed on the bases where there were American troops did not kill anyone.
That seems like a wise decision that they made.
Thankfully, our own government has now backed off as well.
Ever met someone who was so extremely dumb that they don't know how stupid they actually are?
No kidding.
No kidding.
See, I think what it is is she's so intelligent she doesn't know how stupid she is.
She has looked right through the moral truth of the situation because a moral truth is a wholeness.
It is not subject to analysis.
A moral truth is a whole truth.
And it is just true that we are a struggling, imperfect, crazy, nutty, free country, and the Iranians are a bunch of terrorists.
And when the Iranians say we're not obeying the law, what law are they talking about?
What the hell law are they talking about?
Donald Trump obeyed our law in taking out a terrorist.
He's not obeying the law of terrorism.
We're terrorists here.
We know what should be done.
It's nuts.
And if you want to see how we got in this situation with the Iranians, you only have to go back to the Obama administration when they had this idea that somehow if we treated the Iranians differently, the Iranians would behave differently.
In other words, their being a terrorist regime was our fault instead of a natural outgrowth of them as adult people having a certain philosophy that was evil.
You know, the other day, Margaret Brennan of CBS, who seems to be someone who's still trying to practice journalism, even though she's on one of the networks, she seems to be somehow trying to sneak a little journalism in there.
And she confronted John Kerry, who was Secretary of State when they were making the Iran deal, right?
And she said, you know, you gave them all this money.
And the argument that the Obama administration put forward was, well, it was their money.
Iran had billions of dollars that we'd frozen in foreign banks because of international sanctions over the nuclear program.
And now that our deal worked out that whole nuclear business, we could give them the money back.
And so we dropped it secretly in pallets in cash into Iran.
And Don Kerry knew, he knew how they were going to spend it.
This is the old one, the one from the past that you had on before.
Yeah.
I think that some of it will end up in the hands of the IRGC or of other entities, some of which are labeled terrorist.
You know, to some degree, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that every component of that can be prevented, but I can tell you this.
Right now, we are not seeing the early delivery of funds going to that kind of endeavor at this point in time.
I'm sure at some point some of it will.
It points out to him, money is fungible.
That means you can use it for different things.
If you put the money in a box over here and spend other money on terrorism over there, it's still the same money.
You're still giving money to a terrorist regime, but he's too smart to figure that out.
So you can kind of understand why Donald Trump tweeted out this picture.
He retweeted a picture of Schumer and Pelosi dressed up as Iranians.
You know, it says, Democrats, 2020.
And obviously, it's classic Donald Trump.
And so the Muslims are saying, what?
This is an anti-Muslim statement.
But it's obviously not.
I mean, the White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham is cut three.
She explains what he's saying.
I think the president is making clear that the Democrats have been parroting Iranian talking points and almost taking the side of terrorists and those who were out to kill the Americans.
I think the president was making the point that the Democrats seem to hate him so much that they're willing to be on the side of countries and leadership of countries who want to kill Americans.
And you know, if you don't want to be accused of that, don't act that way.
And the other part of this, by the way, is that everybody's saying, what a nasty thing for Trump to do.
This is a guy who for the past three years has been accused of being a Russian spy.
So he is being nasty.
I don't like this kind of nastiness in politics, but he's only being as nasty.
He's only returning the nastiness he got, which is true of Trump in general.
I mean, people keep saying how uncivil he is, but he's only returning the kind of civility the Democrats have always practiced.
And the thing is, they have earned it.
All right.
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Why Films Matter00:15:12
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I think that when they gave an Oscar to that movie Moonlight, I sort of thought, yeah, that's the end of that.
I've talked before about what happens to art forms as they grow old is they separate into an intellectual art form and a popular art form.
And the intellectual art form is sometimes rich in thought, but often unemotional and unappealing to the public.
And the popular art form, a little bit like Marvel comic movies, doesn't really have much content, much soul content.
And so the art, that's the way the art forms die.
novel when they started writing things like Finnegan's Wake, which no one can understand, and then the novel with the parts of novels that really became popular were the genre novels that people liked.
And, you know, if you look back to the pinnacle of the movie business, and you're going to laugh when I say this, but it's true, the pinnacle of the movie business, 1939.
The pinnacle of most art forms comes very early on.
And this is not that long after sound comes in 1939.
Listen to the when I talk about Moonlight, by the way, Moonlight was a decent picture, but it was a tiny little sliver of a picture that was appealing to so few people.
The New York Times called it one of the most influential pictures of the decade, but in order to be an influential picture, you have to influence someone.
Nobody saw it.
Nobody wanted to see it.
It was about, you know, a black guy who was gay, and it's like, yeah, okay, you know, that's an interesting kind of side story about a little tiny sliver of humanity, but it was not something that had mass appeal like films that used to be made that were great films, but also that people liked them.
So if you look back at the nominees in 1939, Dark Victory with Betty Davis, one of the great soap operas of all time, Goodbye Mr. Chips, still a very watchable film.
Mr. Smith goes to Washington, an absolute classic.
The Notchka, an absolute classic of Mice and Men, a very, very good film.
Stagecoach, an absolute classic.
I mean, if you were listening, the greatest films of all time, Mr. Smith goes to Washington, the Notchka Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, all of these things would have been great films.
And I think that was also Gone with the Wind.
Wasn't Gone with the Wind 1939?
I think it was.
So those are like some of the greatest films ever.
But the important thing is they were not just some of the greatest films ever.
They were also top, top box office films.
The best films were the most popular films.
Happened back in Shakespeare's day, right?
He was a popular playwright.
And then once you get to a place where only the elites are going to the movies, you know that art form is moribund.
But, but, so that's why I don't usually talk about the Oscars anymore, because who cares if Moonlight wins an Oscar?
I don't.
I mean, like I said, I kind of enjoyed it, but it was a tiny, tiny little sliver of a slice of life.
But this was a good year for films.
There were a lot of good films this year, many of which I haven't seen yet, but still films that are getting good report.
Ford versus Ferrari was nominated.
Very good film.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, that is my pick so far.
The only reason I'm a little bit resistant is I haven't seen 1917 yet.
I keep trying to get to it.
Jojo Rabbit, you know, it's a small film.
I didn't think it was a great film, but I thought it was a very good and interesting film.
And the performances in it are top-notch.
Joker was an interesting of all these comic book movies.
It was an interesting movie.
It was a movie that people really liked.
It was, I thought, just a remake of Taxi Driver, and I'm not a big fan of Taxi Driver.
Marriage Story, I didn't see, and I'm not going to see, and I'll tell you why.
Marriage Story is written by this guy, what's his name?
Noah, let me see if I've got his name, Bomback, Noah Bomback.
And he made a film that I kind of like called The Squid and the Whale, which was about, told the truth about how devastating divorce is in the lives of children.
And it was about his parents' divorce, which happened when he was a young adolescent.
And it was just about the fact, as I constantly say, divorce blows up a child's planet.
And this whole thing that the kids are all right, the kids are doing fine, the kids are resilient, absolute garbage.
You get divorced while your kids are still home.
It is devastating.
Even if you get divorced after your kids are grown, it's devastating, but not as much.
And then they're adults and they have to fend for themselves.
Still.
So if you can make that film, The Squid and the Whale, and you then get married, he got married to the actress Jennifer Jason Lay, have a kid, and then get divorced, you shouldn't make a movie about it.
You should retire to a monastery and whip yourself, flagellate yourself until God forgives you.
Then you can come out and make a movie about something else.
I have no interest in what he has to say about marriage and divorce.
Literally, I have literally no interest in it because he knew and he let it happen.
And you know, I'm sorry, you got to take more responsibility for your life than that.
you should be you know you should be so penitent after that happens that you hesitate to make a film about it of all things.
He's now sleeping with that Gerda Gerwig, Greta Gerwig, who made Little Women, which is also nominated.
They didn't nominate Knives Out, which is kind of an interesting oversight.
Everybody's worried about, oh, there are no female directors and no, there aren't enough black actors.
I hate that identity politics stuff, even if even if it may sometimes be true.
It may sometimes be true that the people who are making the nominations don't consider people who are outside their mindset.
But even so, once you are awards for art, the arts are ridiculous to begin with because they don't mean the picture is any good.
They don't mean the picture means anything.
They give the picture a little bit of economic power, but not much anymore because nobody cares because we're so tired of listening to the speeches where they attack us.
So giving awards for the arts is kind of a political thing.
It's kind of a financial thing.
It's not really about the quality of the arts.
But once you say you've got to have this many black people and that many females and that many males, one of the reasons, every now and again, they come up with this campaign to get rid of the actor and actress categories and just put them together.
Why is an actor any different than an actress?
The reason you should keep them apart is what's going to happen if you make them one and men win for three years in a row.
And on the fourth year, the best performance is by a male.
Are they going to give it to a male again?
No, it's just going to make things unfair because of this identity politics.
However, however, like I said, there are good films.
I think that Charlotte Johansson should win for JoJo Rabbit.
Sam Rockwell should win, but he won in 2018 for, what did he win for in 2018?
Sam Rockwell won.
Oh, he won for the three billboards outside of wherever it was.
And you can't give it to him every year, though.
Anytime he's in a movie, he deserves it.
Let's just take a quick look at that JoJo Rabbit clip of him.
He is so funny in it.
And Charlotte Johansson is just spectacular.
Frau Bessler, you're looking fetching as usual.
It's because of you my son can't walk properly and has a messed up face.
He stole the hanger leg.
Just took a look.
Yeah, yeah.
So you are going to look after him while I'm at work?
Make sure he has a job and feels included.
Got it?
Got it.
Yeah, really got it.
Good.
Guys, this is Johannes Betzler.
The kid I told you about.
Remember, he stole a hang grenade and blew himself up.
And as a result, I got demorted for negligence.
Now I get to work in this office for all these wonderful kids.
So, Jojo, I'm sure we can figure out something for you to do.
Oh.
Ideas?
Yeah.
Guys?
Yeah.
Yep.
Okay, well, we need somebody to walk the clones.
Also, I think maybe he could hand out this new propaganda and deliver these conscriptions.
I don't suppose I could be conscripted.
I said Charlotte Johanson, obviously, I mean Scarlett Johansson.
She looks like she's cracking up because Sam Rockwell is just so funny in this.
But I just think so far of the pictures I've seen, I think the award should go to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
It's an actual terrific picture with one of the greatest movie scenes I've ever seen in it, which is something else where Brad Pitt goes to the ranch where the Manson family is hanging out.
And it just has a moral backbone that brings it to life.
I don't judge films on their morals and values, but the morality of the idea, the sense of what a human being is, is amazing.
Here's a quick scene where one of Manson's underage girls asks Brad Pitt whether she can give him oral sex.
And here's Brad Pitt's response.
How old are you?
How old are you?
Wow man, first time anybody asked that in a long time.
What's the answer?
Okay.
We got to play kitty games.
18.
Feel better?
You got some ID, you know, like the driver's eyes and the sun.
I can't eat you.
No, I'm not.
I need to see some fish on the verifies that you're 18, which you don't want to have because you're not.
Talk about a bring down bummer, dude.
Not you.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's a bring-down bummer.
And think about the fact that here is a Hollywood dealing with the Harvey Weinstein scandal, which Quentin Tarantino said he wished he'd done more about.
He's taking responsibility for that, talking about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
We're talking about a country that really needs to hear this message.
Hey, you know, where's your ID?
And maybe the fact that I desire something is not enough reason to get it.
It's a good film.
And the point about its values are that the values make it a better film, that they inform it, that they become part of the emotion and the experience of the film.
And Brad Pitt's character is just a masterpiece of characterization.
Really, really good stuff.
We'll see if they have the guts to give it to that kind of film.
All right, a final reflection.
You know, I'm going over after this to do.
Knowles has a new book show over at Dennis Prager, and I'm going over to talk about Hamlet, one of obviously one of the greatest works in human history.
And I was thinking a lot about Hamlet in preparation for the film.
I've written about it in my memoir, The Great Good Thing.
I talk about how I think it is a story about the Reformation, basically.
It's about a guy who no longer knows what the truth is because the model of truth in the world, which was the Catholic Church for so many hundreds of years, has fallen apart.
And that's why he confronts a ghost, which is one of the big questions between the Protestants and the Catholics, whether there could be ghosts, what ghosts were.
And that's why he goes to Wittenberg, where Martin Luther hammered up the theses that started the Reformation.
Anyway, I hope you'll watch the show when I do it.
And I hope when Knowles and I do it, it should be a really interesting conversation.
But I was thinking about the fact that, you know, when they don't teach you these things, when they don't, I mean, Hamlet is a monument of human creation.
It's up there with Newton's rules.
It's up there with Einstein's theory.
It's up there with the formation of America and the Constitution, with the work of Aristotle, with the work of Plato.
It is one of those things that you look at and say, ah, this is what the human mind can create.
This is one of the pinnacles of human creation.
And if they don't teach it to you, in some sense, they're stripping you of the knowledge of who you are.
They're taking away from you an understanding of where you came from, what your culture is, and what the problems are that face you and why there are the divisions in the world that there are.
It's especially true if you live in the West, but I think Hamlet is such a clear picture of humanity that some of the questions that it raises are true universally.
Some of them are specific to the West, but some of them are true universally, no matter what color you are, no matter what race you are.
If you live in the West, these are some of the things that really matter.
In fact, you know, I finished, finally finished Gears of War, the video game, the other day.
And I love video games.
And one of the things I think about video games is when they first came out, I thought this is going to be a new vehicle for storytelling.
I think they have not become a new vehicle for storytelling.
I think the demands of gameplay are so restrictive that they stop it from really exploring how stories work.
What I do think they are is a brilliant, brilliant, new visual art.
So that they have taken painting, which is now useless and abstract and doesn't mean anything to anybody, and has gone through that process I was talking about with the movies where it's divided between the intellectual art and the popular art and is dead, essentially.
But they have taken that and they now have an immersive painting that you walk into and have these adventures.
And as I looked at the imagery that's not just in Gears of War, but it's in all really so many popular games, has a lot to do with ruins.
It has a lot to do with castles in the mist.
It has a lot to do with natural settings and being immersed in nature.
And it very much goes back to the Romantic era when you look at the poetry of Wordsworth and Byron.
And I'm not comparing Gears of War to Wordsworth and Byron, but I'm just saying that those thoughts, the things that we think about through the centuries, continue to be with us, continue to be with us now.
I think divisions between Catholic and Protestant continue to be with us now in our politics.
And these visions of this desire to become one with nature, this desire for our human nature to become part of nature, which is what ruins kind of represent, is a big strain in Western thought.
And it's the opposite, the opposite of this leftist strain of triumphing over human nature, of saying I was born a man, but I don't have to be a man, of saying I'm a woman, but I don't have to be a woman, of saying that our human nature, the things that are natural to us, are not part of our creation, but can be overcome by technology.
And the thing is, they probably can be overcome by technology, but the question is, do we want to overcome them?
What good is it to solve the problems of humankind if we're no longer humankind when the problems are solved?
It really is the place we're going into in the future.
It's the thing we all kind of thinking about.
It's what Marvel comics are about, about characters who are transhuman above human beings.
And I think it's going to be the issue that we're going to have to deal with in the future.
We can do these things, but should we do those things?
And we should not trust the answer to intellectuals because they're idiots.
Mail back tomorrow.
Don't miss it.
Future Of Transhumanism00:01:29
All your problems will be solved right here on the Andrew Clavin Show.
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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is under fire from the race-focused left for once again snubbing performers of color in the Oscar nominations.
But in the Academy's defense, there will at least be more black candidates in the running at the Oscars than there will be at tonight's all-white Democratic presidential debate in Des Moines, Iowa.
We will examine the incoherence and hypocrisy of racial identity politics.