Ben Shapiro dissects media bias through a satirical Biden-Nixon pandemic call, exposing left-wing demonization of opponents while defending free markets against California’s Newsom-led "socialist" failures. He slams the WHO’s China ties and CNN’s softball Biden interviews, then pivots to film—praising Singing in the Rain’s Hollywood satire but warning that Marxist "false consciousness" undermines human ideals like freedom, contrasting it with conservative reverence for flawed heroes. The episode culminates in a critique of lockdowns and AOC’s economic proposals, framing media corruption as the root of societal division. [Automatically generated summary]
Joe Biden, who used to be somebody, has offered to call President Trump and give him advice on how to handle the Chinese flu crisis.
And yes, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, oh, Clavin, you incorrigible wag, how I love your satirical shenanigans and the absurd fantasias with which you tickle our funny bones and invite us to share in the ridiculous concoctions of your whimsical imagination.
But no, this actually happened.
Joe Biden offered to call the President of the United States and give him advice on how to deal with the pandemic.
In a statement addressed to a kitchen mob he mistook for a woman he used to chase around the room, Biden said, quote, by golly, it's time someone got on the horn to that Nixon fellow and set him straight on how to deal with all this flu malarkey.
He's got to talk to experts and make plans and bring information to people instead of standing around with that little Italian guy and that cute girly, what's her name, and all those folks from the newspapers.
We need more of those medical gizmos the modern fellows are always inventing and maybe even some medicine or something.
Why, in my day, we'd set up some tents with cots in them quick as a wink and get on with more important things like the Depression and World War II, unquote.
Biden said he plans to offer a three-point plan with two points in it, one of which he's forgotten, which should make the whole conversation quicker than it would have been if his three-point plan had three points and he could remember what they were.
The White House said they'd be happy to have Biden call and they apologized for accidentally giving him the wrong phone number that caused him to get a busy signal to which Biden spoke for half an hour.
The White House said they would give him the right number this time and thanked him in advance for waiting for the next available operator.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is ticked-boo.
Birds are windy, 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.
So watching our trashy news media botch the biggest story of anyone's career, it occurred to me to wonder what political discourse would look like if rational people could be seen on TV debating issues of real importance to actual human beings.
I think there are debates to be had between left-leaning and right-leaning Americans, issues to be discussed and compromises that could be made.
And I think one of the reasons, maybe the main reason we've become so divided from one another, divided to the point that we hate our fellow citizens, is because a massive left-wing communication industry is demonizing its opponents, leaving rebel media like ours to hit back in any way we can.
Left out are the vast number of Americans who are probably on one side or the other of the 50-yard line and perfectly willing to talk things through with one another.
I believe people when they tell me the price of healthcare is a concern to them.
It seems to me free market solutions would work better than both government healthcare and the mess we have now, but I'd be willing to listen to all kinds of ideas.
I'm just not willing to hear some bozo tell me I'm evil because I think the sort of crappy backward system I lived with in England should be the U.S. model.
Sexuality, it's always a fraud issue, and I understand both why some people feel traditional moral ideas should be enforced and why others take a more libertarian view.
And I know people who hold opposing rational views on both sides without hatred.
Why can't they debate without being demonized, insulted, or blacklisted?
Fascism is garbage and there's no such thing as a socialist system that improves things.
Never existed.
So I think those should be off the table.
But I'm happy to listen to debates about what sort of safety net we should have or whether that can be handled by the private sector.
Why do we have to listen not just to every so-called journalist, but every comedian, every movie star, every so-called expert pose the question in terms of government action versus indifferent wickedness.
That's just stupid.
The left deals in insults, lies, and pseudo-intellectual deconstruction of perfectly rational human systems because it can't defend its historical failures.
Everywhere it turns up, it fails.
The left has taken over our academies, and the academies have infected our communications and entertainment industry.
The rest of us need to find new ways to ignore those hateful, divisive idiots and begin civil conversations among ourselves.
If we build it, maybe the people will come.
It'd be nice to think so anyway.
I know at this moment, we're all thinking a little bit more about how things might look different.
We'll talk more about that in a second.
But first, if you are needing a car part, what you want to do is you want to go down to the car parts store, stand on a line with other people who are sniffling and sneezing, then get some information from somebody who doesn't know anything more about car parts than you do, looking on a computer while he sneezes on you.
Or you could go to rockauto.com, which has the added benefit of being called rockauto.com.
So you get to say rockauto.com, which is so much fun.
Rockauto.com has everything you need from engine control models and brake parts to tail lamps, motor oil, and even new carpet.
And for any car you need it for, for an old car, new car, it doesn't matter.
You can get it right online without going anywhere at their easy-to-use website.
Rockauto.com always offers the lowest prices possible.
They don't change them according to the market.
And rockauto.com is a family business serving Auto Parts customers online for 20 years.
Go to rockauto.com.
Even just say rockauto.com and you'll feel better right now.
See all the parts available for your car or truck.
Write Clavin in there.
How did you hear about us box so they know we sent you?
And then write it again in the box that says, how do you spell Klavan?
K-L-A-V-A-N, there are no E's.
All Access Live.
Franklin Graham Interview00:02:46
That'll be me tonight.
You can listen to me tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific.
This is much more relaxed.
It's just for subscribers, but it's for any level of subscriber.
It was supposed to be for all access members, but we're doing it for all subscribers because we know we're all isolated and we all want to talk to one another.
So this is a good way for us to keep in touch with you.
We love hearing from you.
You'll be able to ask me questions live online, 5 o'clock Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern.
We're doing it every day with different people, sometimes, you know, really interesting people like Jeremy the God King or Ben.
Sometimes, you know, it'll be Knowles, but, you know, it can't be perfect all the time.
And I will be there today.
So it will all be perfect and all my answers will be correct.
Please show up because I love talking to you.
Had a great conversation last time and the video wasn't working that well.
So hopefully it'll be working better today.
We've been working to fix it.
Let me give you an example of stupidity, the way debates become stupid.
And it's not just the left, it's the left's fault because the left owns the media because they monopolize the media.
Samaritan's Purse, which is Franklin Graham's organization.
Franklin Graham, obviously the son of the great evangelist Billy Graham.
Samaritan's Purse is a charity that I support.
I give them money every year, as much as I can afford.
Franklin Graham is going to be on a Sunday special.
Ben just recorded an interview with him for the Sunday special, so that'll be coming up.
We haven't scheduled it yet.
Samaritan's Purse has set up a makeshift hospital in Central Park in New York, obviously a hotspot, the center really of the virus emergency.
And this is a wonderful thing.
I mean, this is why I give them money.
So a guy, Judah Robinson, a reporter and producer at a left-wing outlet called Now This News, and I've seen them.
They're jerks.
It's a ridiculous place.
He puts out a tweet with a photo and saying this makeshift hospital in Central Park is being built and run by Samaritan's Purse, the relief organization run by the notorious anti-LGBTQ plus minister Franklin Graham.
And of course, Franklin Graham is a standard evangelical who believes that gay homosexual action is a sin and that there shouldn't be gay marriage.
This is the way he's treating people and the way he has been welcomed in New York City.
They were just excited that we were there and that we're coming to help the people in New York.
And of course, we don't discriminate.
Anybody who comes to our doors, regardless of their faith, their sexual orientation, their religion, that matter.
We help everybody the same.
And we love everybody the same.
And I want everyone to know that God loves them too.
That's because he feels that way because he's a Christian.
China's Role in Fake News Reporting00:10:23
That's the way that works.
And he's treating everybody and he's helping everybody.
And they start going online and all these lefties come on Twitter and start saying, oh, he's not going to treat gay people or will it even make him sign something that'll treat gay people.
It's just an absolute nonsense.
And then you have to respond.
And Ben responded and I responded.
You have to respond because you can't just let this filth go out over Twitter and not be challenged.
And Twitter's never going to take them off the air.
They'll take me off.
They'll take Ben off, but they'll never take these guys off the air.
And it makes the conversation stupid.
Does anybody really think that Makeshift Hospital in the epicenter of this disaster should be shut down because you don't agree with Franklin Graham?
I don't agree necessarily with his take on this, but that doesn't matter.
It's not a hateful take.
It's a traditional religious take.
He has absolute logic behind it.
I'm happy to debate him.
Other people should debate him.
It can't be a debate between one side and hatred.
That's not the way things work.
All right.
And the other thing about this is that the information we get is so bad.
It's so bad because of this.
It's so bad.
And I know I rant about the news media, but it's not the individuals I'm after.
It's the system I'm after.
It's the system that just believes that one side can talk and one side can fill up all these news divisions and one side can serve the corporate interests of NBC Comcast and somehow that's going to serve the public.
It can't happen that way.
It's a physical impossibility.
You know, we now heard yesterday, I think it was Bloomberg News, came out with this story.
China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, underreporting both total cases and deaths it suffered from the disease.
The U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.
Okay, so this is a sourced story.
Three U.S. officials are saying a report from the Intel community came in confirming what we already know.
The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret and they declined to detail its contents.
But the thrust, they said, is that China's public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete.
Two of the officials said the report concludes that China's numbers are fake.
Now, let's just pause for just a minute and remember that the Russians spent a couple of hundred thousand dollars sending out some stupid propaganda on the last election.
They spent nothing like, nothing like what Michael Bloomberg spent getting no votes.
Okay, Michael Bloomberg spent almost a billion, almost more than half a billion dollars advertising his campaign.
He got six votes.
We can actually name the votes he got.
It's like Mo, Larry, Curley, and then I think the Marx brothers.
Those are the votes he got for his half a billion dollars.
And yet we spent three years of our lives worrying about the $100,000 that the Russians spent on this.
The Chinese lied to us and the people died.
And all we're hearing about is Donald Trump, okay?
I mean, this is, you know, Deborah Burke's, obviously the doctor who's coordinating with the team, with Trump's team.
She said this has been a problem from the very start.
When you looked at the China data originally and you said, oh, well, there's 80 million people or 20 million people in Wuhan and 80 million people in Hubei.
and they come up with a number of 50,000.
You start thinking of this more like SARS than you do this kind of global pandemic.
I mean, I'll just be frank.
When I looked at it, I was like, oh, well, this is not, you know, as close as those quarters are, you know, so I think the medical community made, interpreted the Chinese data as that this was serious, but smaller.
than anyone expected because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data now that when we see what happened to Italy and we hate to see what happened to Spain.
And so what was modeled is not a lockdown.
See, and this is the thing, the flow, you know, I've been talking about this really since this began, about the information we get and the kind of information we get and how hard you have to work, how hard you have to work to get at the good information, partly because, I mean, they distort it.
I mean, they distort everything according to their hatreds.
The press ran with China's numbers long, long, long after we knew they were wrong.
After we knew, you know, in Wuhan, where this thing was going on, the residents, when they could get out, when they can get their voices heard, the residents were coming out and saying, you know, we're cremating a lot of people.
Like the crematoriums are going like overtime.
So I don't know.
And we're ordering all these urns and stuff like this.
And this information is coming out.
The press, well, play the montage over the way the press was reporting this.
And you can hear why they were reporting it this way, because it made the U.S. look bad.
We don't know yet.
We really don't know yet what the U.S., how the U.S. response is going to play out and what we're going to look like compared to other countries.
We just don't know.
I mean, those words, those three words, three little words are more information than you get if you actually watch cable news all day long.
The we don't know is more information, true information than you will get.
You could watch CNN for a year and never get more information than we don't know.
This is the way they reported, just taking China's numbers as if they were real.
The United States now has the most cases of COVID-19 anywhere in the world.
With the United States now reporting the highest number of cases around the world, far more than any other place in the world.
The first country to report more than 100,000 confirmed cases.
Outstripping China and Italy.
When we appeared to pass China and then Italy.
Surpassing China and Italy in the most perverse possible version of Trump's signature slogan, America First.
The U.S. has the highest number of confirmed cases in the world.
Has the U.S. tops the world in coronavirus cases?
The United States now has more than 120,000 confirmed cases, the most in the world.
Of course, that requires that you believe all the other countries reporting, including China.
We are fighting the fake news.
It's fake, phony, fake.
And you know, Trump is right about this.
And it is the thing that I support him in most is his war against the news media.
And of course, it's the thing that drives the news media crazy, although they kind of like it too, because they always like talking about themselves.
They always like scratching their chins.
And after they make a complete mess of a story, like they did Hurricane Katrina, and they reported everything wrong in order to get at George W. Bush.
And then they would do a couple of think pieces afterwards.
You know, were we wrong to get everything wrong or did we get the narrative right?
And that's the important thing.
You know, they love talking about themselves.
That's one of the reasons Trump has got them mesmerized.
That's one of the reasons they can't stop watching him, can't stop talking about him, is because he talks about them.
And he knows that if he deals with them, they'll come back.
They can't resist.
They're just like him in that.
I mean, he is a creation of the news media as well.
And they're just like him in that is as long as you attack them, they will report on that because they want to be talking about themselves.
But, you know, it feeds into this whole idea that we've been talking about about who knew things first.
Yesterday, there was a doctor on Fox who was saying, well, you know, Trump was briefed on this in December 1919.
He was briefed on this last year.
And of course, a lot of people were briefed on things.
They did this.
You know, I can't stop imagining what today's press would say to Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he tried to deal with the Depression and World War II.
You know, Franklin Roosevelt said, We have nothing to fear but fear itself.
They would say, Didn't you underplay the Depression?
Didn't you underplay how bad things would be?
Why are you calling it a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor?
You know, I mean, instead, what they do with FDR is they say, oh, did he intern all of American Japanese?
Well, you know, we all make mistakes.
They don't do that to him because, of course, he's the great Democrat.
But they say, oh, well, Trump was briefed.
Now, Trump is briefed on a million things.
All of us have this information coming in.
And there used to be this conspiracy theory that FDR knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor and he let it happen in order to coax America into the war, which, if true, would be an actual atrocity to let our naval sailors get killed and our ships sunk so that he could entice us into the war.
And the reason that was there is because there was information in front of him.
Oh, there might be this secret attack.
How does he know of all the information that's coming in?
How does he know which is the one that he has to pay attention to?
We all get all kinds of information and we never really know.
And then you point to some guy, Tom Cotton, good for him.
He did see it coming down the pike.
But, you know, again, that is actually, it's not an actual skill.
You know, sometimes you get those things right, but sometimes you're going to get them.
The same guy is going to get them wrong.
And of course, we also have the World Health Organization.
And this is something with China that we need to be reconsidering as we go forward.
The World Health Organization has been fawning over China.
I mean, there's just no other word.
And this is obviously a body of the UN.
It's been fawning over China.
The Japanese vice prime minister said they ought to call it the Chinese, the CHO, not the WHO.
And, you know, there's been a lot of jokes about the old Abbott and Costello routine: who's on first, and with like who's supporting China, who's supporting China?
It's the World Health Organization.
But, you know, the thing about this is, this is not a mistake.
This is not an accident.
There's an article about this in the Federalist by Tim Andrews saying that China worked tirelessly behind the scenes in lobbying to make sure that the guy who runs the World Health Organization, Tedros, would be elected and that he previously served in the government of the Marxist and violently repressive Ethiopian People's Revolution Democratic Front.
So, I mean, these are the kinds of things that our world organizations have been infested with this stuff.
Our entertainment and academy and news organizations have been infested with this leftism.
And it's skewing all the information that we get.
And when I talk about computer projections, they're so bad.
They're so, you know, all of this stuff about climate change, right?
It's all computer projections, just like this.
It's all computer projections.
And all we hear is you deny science, you deny science.
And the reason they think it's science is because there's a computer there.
You know, the computer makes it look scientific.
Computer Projections Crisis00:11:16
If it was just a big glass globe and people were looking into it and say, I see a climate disaster coming, everybody would say, yeah, we don't care that you're looking into that globe, but because you're looking into the globe of a computer, but all you're looking at when you look at a computer is a mirror.
You're just looking at a mirror.
It reflects your concerns.
It reflects your predictions.
It can only predict what you have put into it.
It can only extrapolate from the information that you have put into it.
And so the information we get is very, very questionable all the time.
And we have to be asking questions.
And we can't demonize the people who ask the questions.
But that's what we do.
All right.
Let us pause for just a second to talk about something very important, which is Quip.
You know, we work with a lot of sponsors on this program whose products they believe may be of value and interest to you, our audience, and we share this view.
That's why we're glad to speak out about the products and hopefully connect you to them.
We recognize that our partner sponsorship doesn't imply sponsorship or endorsement of the views that we express, and that's okay with us.
The focus of our sponsors is on making great products.
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G-E-T-Q-U-I-P is not how you spell Clavin.
How do you spell Klavin?
There are no reasons for me.
So, you know, the thing with the Democrats is that everything, you know, it's this tidal wave, the tsunami of leftist information that comes over us that really is the source of the problem.
There's room for leftists in the conversation.
There's room.
You know, personally, I think it's time for guys like Bernie Sanders to pack it in.
Seriously, all of them, all the socialists, all those guys, I think it's time for them to pack it in.
You cannot point to socialism that works.
You can point to social programs that maybe work.
I happen to think they work far, far worse than free markets.
I think free markets solve a lot of problems.
But, you know, I do believe in a safety net.
I do believe that, you know, somebody wrote in, I think, in the mailbag and asked, if I believe in a safety net, why don't I believe in single-payer health care?
And the reason is a safety net is just that.
A safety net is what catches you if you fall.
It is what catches you in a disaster when you have nowhere to go.
And we've always had a safety net for healthcare.
We've always had emergency rooms that had to take people in.
They're not allowed to turn people away.
But it's just a truth.
It is just a truth.
And this is true in England too.
It is true in England too, where they have their magical national health care.
Rich people get better health care.
Rich people are going to be able to buy better health care.
That's just the truth.
And it's always going to be the truth.
And saying it's not the truth is like saying men aren't women.
It's like saying all the things that the left thinks make you virtuous to say.
It's just not so.
But the problem is, the problem is that, again, I'm willing to have all those debates.
I'm willing to have all those debates in a setting where you don't get to call people a bigot or uncaring or indifferent if they say, no, you know, I want to deal with this problem in a free market way or I want to deal with it through some government or whatever people want.
But you can have a system where people are pushing and pushing and pushing for more socialism and the press doesn't question them.
Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, which is a terribly run state.
I mean, one of the things about this state is that Jerry Brown, who was honest about the fact that we were spending all this money, hiked taxes enormously.
There's still homeless people all over the place.
The roads stink.
Our infrastructure is falling apart.
But it did take care of the debt we had because you tax people to death.
And of course, all the businesses are leaving.
They're leaving to go to Texas and eventually the base is gone.
And there's this huge unpaid pension bill that's outstanding that nobody talks about and they don't count that in the budget.
However, however, it's a crappily run state.
However, Gavin Newsom comes out, I think today, he was saying this today, and says, this is the moment we're going to use this crisis to get more socialism.
Here's this clip.
Increasingly, the trend lines were suggesting what is self-evident become a headline, and that is we were going from a three-class society to a two-class society.
So something was fundamentally flawed in that global context, manifested quite acutely here in the state of California.
The richest and the poorest state were the number of the most impoverished metros in the country.
And we've long been struggling to address those issues.
So I see this quite substantively through that lens, that equity lens, looking at those folks that never fully recovered.
You look at medium wages for folks coming out of 08, 09 and the Great Recession that haven't fully recovered, even today that are struggling.
And so what is going to happen to those folks in this current crisis?
And what's the opportunity to your question for reimagining a more progressive era as it relates to capitalism?
So let's just think about this for a minute, right?
He was talking about the 2008 crisis and then coming out of it, there was less equity.
We went from a three-tier system with a lower class, middle class, and upper class to closer to a two-tier system with lower class and upper class, which happens in every socialist government.
Every socialist government loses the middle class.
Why?
Well, for one reason is in order to support a socialist government, you have to have massive taxes.
If you have massive taxes on the rich, you destroy business.
That's what socialism does.
It destroys business.
So the rich never get taxed.
The rich never carry the burden of taxes.
I mean, they look, they'll carry the burden of a social safety net.
They will carry that.
But after a while, if you are destroying their incentive to act, A, they'll leave.
B, they'll protect their goods.
They'll go to the Cayman Islands where like George Soros protects all his money while deciding how you should spend your money.
They will protect their money.
They will leave the country.
Why do you think they built the Berlin Wall?
Why do you think they have to keep people, wall people into socialist societies?
It's because they don't want to be taxed to death and they'll leave, right?
That's why you have to build walls in socialist societies to keep people in.
Where in free societies, you build walls to keep people out.
All right, that's why.
So that phenomenon, that two-tier phenomenon, is a socialist phenomenon.
Does anyone doubt that Obama used the 2008 crisis?
He didn't let that crisis go to waste.
That was Rahm Emmanuel, his chief of staff, saying that.
Don't let the crisis go to waste.
Does anybody doubt that through Dodd-Frank, the reform bill that he wrote that put government into the boardrooms of businesses, through the incredible, massive regulatory overreach that Obama engineered and engineered, he didn't need Congress anymore because Congress has written themselves out of the government by allowing these agencies to control everything.
Does anybody doubt that that crisis, that Obama used that crisis to extend government?
Trump, until this moment, had been dialing that back, but he hadn't been dialing back the systems.
This is the mistake that all Republicans make, the conservatives make.
He was dialing back the regulations, but he wasn't taking apart and dismantling the agencies that create those regulations.
When you dismantle those, if the Supreme Court, this is a big Kavanaugh hobby horse, if they start to dial back the powers of the administrative state, maybe we get our government back and we start to have more of a free market.
It is when you have a free market that you have those tiered societies.
In a free market, you're going to have poor people because you're going to have people who fall behind.
You're going to have the poor will always be with you.
You're going to have poor, but even the poor in a free market will be richer than they'll be in a socialist state.
But because people have different businesses, different levels of talent, different levels of skills, you'll have different levels of income and different levels of class.
Socialism wipes that out.
The burden of socialism always falls on the middle class and eliminates them.
And socialism has been growing in this country.
There's just no question about it.
You cannot say that the government has lost power over the last 20 years or so.
I mean, even George W. Bush.
This is one of the reasons we have this wrecking ball president.
We have this president who wants to break things up because we see it happening and we can't do anything about it because all the elites agree that this is the way it should go.
So my problem with Gavin Newsome is not that there's a leftist who wants to make his point.
My problem is there's nobody there to question him.
There's nobody there to raise these points.
There's nobody there.
First of all, we don't have reporters who are smart enough to raise these questions, but we don't have reporters who have to argue with each other and make their points and so actually know this stuff.
You know, Byron York of the Washington Examiner posted a CNN interview with Joe Biden and just posted the questions from, what's her name, Baldwin.
Nicole Baldwin, isn't it?
I can't remember.
What is it?
Brooke Baldwin.
Yeah.
So he says, so here's some questions.
So President Trump was asked whether or not a federal lockdown will be instituted, and he said thus far that they are leaving it up to the states.
What do you think?
Should all 50 states issue stay-at-home orders to stop the spread of this thing?
First of all, the federal government doesn't have the right to lock us down.
The states do to some degree.
She says, we'll come back to your point about this worry that it will re-erupt in the fall.
But just staying on President Trump for a moment, you know, you said the president should stop misleading Americans.
Do you believe he is doing so intentionally to paint a rosier picture?
I hear you saying he's, you know, it just goes on and on with these easy easy softball questions.
We have nobody, we have nobody to question Democrats the way they question Republicans.
We have no one to talk about, you know, the mistakes that, you know, Adam Schiff is talking about establishing a 9-11 type investigatory agency to investigate what was happening in the response to the Chinese flu.
The first thing I would like to investigate is what was Adam Schiff doing?
What was Adam Schiff doing as the news started to come in in January?
Oh yeah, impeachment.
He was doing impeachment.
That's what Adam Schiff was doing.
If we start to investigate, let's investigate everybody.
It is the absolute, the absolute malfeasance of the news media that divides us from one another, that keeps us from having the debates that we should have, because it keeps us from having the intelligent conversations that we should have, because we've got a news media that's not just stupid, they are stupid, but they're also intellectually corrupt.
All right, I got to take a break from Facebook and YouTube.
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Movies That Matter00:15:01
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All right.
Let's stop talking about politics for a while.
You know, for me, this is the end of my week.
The Clavenless weekend will be coming.
And so I want to talk, just stop for a minute and talk about some of the things that I've been entertaining myself with while we're here.
You know, it really is.
A lot of people are talking about the different books they're reading and the different movies they're watching and the different Netflix shows.
And there's a lot of people talking about what's streaming on Netflix.
I told you I'm watching Babylon Berlin.
But one of the things that I've wanted to do during this time is go back over the movie and watch some of the movies I grew up watching because I grew up watching the movies that my parents grew up watching for the simple reason it was we didn't have the mechanisms to record and save things.
So the only first-run movies you could see were the movies that were in the theaters, and they vanished.
We didn't have VCRs.
We didn't have DVDs.
We didn't have anything to watch a movie once it disappeared.
So all we had on TV were the same old movies our parents watched.
So we were watching movies from the 40s and 50s.
And I grew up watching John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Cagney and all those people.
And some of those movies really shaped my worldview.
They really shaped the way I look at things.
And actually, I think they did it for the better.
I think a lot of those movies were highly intelligent.
I've talked about this before, as today, when you write a screenplay, it's about 105 pages to 120 pages tops.
The old screenplays are up to 250 pages, twice as long.
And the reason is that movies thought that they were more like theater, and so they were based in language when they started.
And through the great period, they were based on language.
As Hitchcock kind of discovered, and the rest of the movies followed suit, it really is a visual art form.
It really tells stories through pictures.
And so the scripts have fewer and fewer words, and they've gotten shorter and shorter.
And so they used to be smarter.
Movies used to be smarter.
They used to be better.
I think 1939 was the peak of quality in movies.
One of the reasons the TV has been so great in these last 10 years is because TV didn't have the money to make the kinds of things movies did.
So they concentrated on two shots of actors talking to one another.
And that's why we had a golden age of TV, which is passing away as money flows in and they're starting to just make movies for television.
So I've been going back and watching some of the old movies.
I want to tell you about some of them that I think, and I'm going to try and focus on ones you might have missed.
Although the first one is a classic that I think a lot of people have seen, but is worth watching again, and that's Singing in the Rain.
And Singing in the Rain is listed as one of the greatest movies ever made.
It was not thought so when it came out.
It got kind of, oh, this is a very nice musical reviews when it came out.
It's obviously Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, and Debbie Reynolds.
And I watched it this weekend with my wife who had never seen it.
And it's an amazing movie.
It is an amazing movie because not just is it delightful as only American movie musicals can be delightful.
There's nothing, there is no art form that is as happy and as smile-inducing as the American movie musical.
It is just amazing.
And this was from a division of the studio.
I think it was Arthur Fried, who was the head of the Freed unit at MGM, who made their glossy, glamorous musicals.
And Arthur Freed, they said they made such great musicals.
And Arthur Fried noticed he had a lot of songs that hadn't made it into musicals or were just kind of lying around or he still had rights to.
And he asked two of the great writers of musicals, what were their names?
Stanley Donan, Comden and Green.
Sorry, Comden and Green were the two of the great musical writers.
And he asked them to come up with a musical to fit these songs into.
Betty Compton and Adolph Green.
A lot of people thought they were married.
They weren't, but they were a great writing team.
And so they just assembled these songs into a musical.
And because many of the musicals came from the 20s and 30s, when the movies went from being silent to talky, they devised a plot about what happened when the talkies came to the movies.
And it becomes an incredible satire of movie stars and of movie star worship.
It opens with a wonderful, wonderful scene where Gene Kelly, who's the great silent movie star, and Gene Hagen, who is his co-star in all of his silent movies, are at a premiere for their new silent movie.
And they get interviewed as they do on the red carpet for all the people.
And she asked them to tell the story of his life.
Here's just a little clip of that.
Won't you tell us how it all happened?
Well, Lena and I have made a number of pictures together.
Oh, no, no, Don.
I want you a story from the beginning.
Dora, not in front of all these people.
The story of your success is an inspiration to young people all over the world.
Please.
Well, to begin with, any story of my career would have to include my lifelong friend, Cosmo Brown.
We were kids together, grew up together, worked together.
Yes!
Well, Dora, I've had one motto which I've always lived by.
Dignity.
Always dignity.
This was instilled in me by mom and dad from the very beginning.
They sent me to the finest schools, including dancing school.
That's where I first met Cosmo.
And with him, I used to perform for all of mom and dad's society friends.
He's dancing in a pool room where he gets thrown out.
They have this incredible low life.
They're two song and dance men who work their way up through vaudeville and finally luck out into getting into the movies.
Gene Kelly lucks out and getting into the movies and he keeps saying, dignity, always dignity.
In other words, he's a complete fraud.
And the thing that makes Gene Kelly's character endearing is that he knows he's a fraud.
And that's what makes you like him, where his co-star, Gene Hagen, thinks she is the greatest.
And when talkies come, she's got a voice like this, so she can't be in the talkies.
So they have to dub her with the virginal and lovely Debbie Reynolds.
What's amazing about the movie, two things are amazing.
It's like Castle Blanca.
It kind of came together in this kind of shambolic way.
And yet it works as a work of art.
It actually is as if it had been created by one person and was a work of art.
The thing that makes it a work of art is that it shows you that these people are frauds.
The opening sequence is hilarious if you're watching it carefully.
It's got the young actress who's now married an 80-year-old wealthy person.
The woman says, I hope this time it's love.
You know, it's obviously just an arrangement where he gets sex and she gets money.
And they're such frauds.
The whole thing, the whole thing about them is they're frauds.
And yet, and yet, the images that they represent are images that are in the dreams of human beings.
They're part of the makeup of human beings.
And so that even after you know they're frauds, the dreams survive.
And that is the thing that makes the movie remarkable, is that it shows you how corrupt the business is.
It really does.
It really does mock show business.
But it also shows you that the factory of dreams is actually creating dreams that earn people's heart.
And I couldn't help noticing as I was watching that we now know, because of Carrie Fisher, who was the princess in Star Wars, we now know that Debbie Reynolds had this kind of dysfunctional relationship.
And Debbie Reynolds plays this virginal good girl who always tells the truth and always gets things right.
So even as we're watching it, we're watching a dream be created of a kind of woman that we admire, a spunky good girl, and yet we know it's being played by somebody who maybe didn't live her life as expertly as we would have liked, right?
So we know that our dreams survive, even the truth, and sometimes we don't even know what the truth is.
It's a wonderful, wonderful movie.
And of course, the musical numbers are just absolutely spectacular.
And the dancing is great.
Which brings me to another film that I'm very, very fond of is Angels with Dirty Faces.
And I'm really going back in time because I think people should see some of these old pictures with the spectacular James Cagney, one of the movie's greatest, greatest actors.
This is from 1938.
This is a real old movie.
He plays a gangster who they the dead end kids, who were these kind of comical group of street kids, they pick his pocket and he follows them to their hideout to get his wallet back.
The gangster follows him, and this is that scene.
Next time you roll a guy's book, make sure you don't know your hideout.
How'd you know?
Come here, suckers.
Hey, how do you know this plays so good?
Yeah, I don't know.
Let me show you.
Here.
How about this?
Oh, Rex.
Hey, you ain't, you ain't Rocky Sullivan.
Rocky Sullivan.
Wow.
Hey, did you get that?
It's Rocky Sullivan.
And we tried to hook you.
What a boner.
Yeah, I guess somebody you saw stuck down the alley.
You knew he was heading for the hideout.
Yeah, I took the old shortcut.
See, and the reason I connect this to Singing in the Rain is it's also about admiration.
It's also about hero worship of somebody who doesn't deserve your hero worship.
These kids were poor kids.
They're street kids.
They worship Rocky Sullivan, who is this really bad gangster.
Meanwhile, Rocky's childhood friend is a priest, as always happens in the movies, Pat O'Brien, Father Jerry Connolly.
And he's trying to win back the kids, obviously, for a good life and for a straight life and for a Christian life.
And he has to fight the influence of Rocky Sullivan.
And once again, we see that something in Sullivan appeals to the dreams that these kids have.
And something about him, about his freedom, about his violence, about his manhood, entices them and is a dream that is already in their head that he embodies.
And it's about how that suckers these kids into following a gangster.
I don't want to give anything away.
I don't want to give the movie away because it has one of the greatest endings ever.
It has an ending that is absolutely shocking.
You have to watch it very carefully.
It's an ending with a lot of gray areas, but it's an ending where in the climax, the father Jerry Connolly, played by Pat O'Brien and James Cagney, barter for the lives of these kids and barter for who these kids are going to follow, whether they're going to follow Christ or a gangster.
And the negotiation is amazing.
And the final scene is, it's really, there's nothing as complex as this in a modern movie.
And it really is amazing.
So those are a couple of movies that I think are really worth watching.
A couple of films that I think just talk about important ideas.
Goodfellows, the Martin Scorsese film, also takes up the admiration of gangsters and how it leads people down the wrong road.
And it's something that show business should be talking about because show business is in the business of selling dreams.
You know, a final reflection about this.
The thing that these stories tell us, the fact that we follow movie stars with admiration.
And, you know, some of us on the right say, oh, I don't care about movie stars and all this stuff.
But then the minute a movie star says something that we admire, that we like, if it's a Clint Eastwood or somebody like that, we do admire them.
We do look up to them and we say, you know, this guy represents something that we want to be.
And we know, you know, the word persona means mask.
We know we're following a mask of a person, not the person himself.
But we forget that because the heart is a natural idolater.
The heart takes the representative of things and worships them.
That's why in the Bible, they don't want you to make models of God because they know you'll wind up worshiping the idol and not worshiping God.
That's why it's called idolatry.
And that is what the human heart does.
And so right now, you know, what we're really looking at when we look at things we admire is we're looking at things that represent something real.
When we look at movie stars and we see of Debbie Reynolds playing a virginal spunky girl, that's something that is in our heart to admire.
It's already there.
When we look at an idol and we worship God, God is already in our heart.
We know to worship him and we make the idol as a symbol.
We make money as a symbol of worth and we come to worship the money.
That's how idolatry works.
We come to worship the money instead of the worth.
And that's why the love of money is the root of all evil, not money itself.
When you start to admire these people, it is a good thing.
It is a good thing, I think, to remember that you're admiring something that is in yourself, a template that is in yourself.
It's not the gangster that you admire.
It's the manhood and the freedom and the independence that you admire.
And those are things that you can continue to admire.
It is not the, it's not Debbie Reynolds, the flawed individual that you admire.
It is the good girl that she represents, the girl who stands up for herself, but is also protective of her own, of her body and of her dignity and of her love and doesn't give it away cheap.
Those are the things that matter.
And what the left has tried to do, and this is an actual theory that they have, and it's one of the reasons I'm happy to hear them talk.
It's just I think they should be challenged.
This is a theory that they have, is that all those things that are inside you, all those templates that are inside you, all those things that are part of human nature, they believe, they believe that they are a false consciousness.
This is the Marxist phrase for it, that can be deconstructed and taken apart.
And what we're fighting for is what we on the right are fighting for is we say, no, you know, those things are real.
It is true that things, that work has value, the money represents that value.
It is true that being a virginal girl, a girl who protects the dignity of her body and protects the dignity of her love, is a good thing.
These are not things to be taken apart.
These are not just constructs created by the powerful.
So in other words, what I'm saying is the admiration that we have for things, there is a reality underneath that.
And it's the reality underneath that that the left is trying to disassemble and they're trying to replace it with idolatry.
They're trying to tell you that your work as a mom isn't worth anything unless you get money for it because they worship the money.
They're trying to tell you that your freedom isn't worth anything because you don't have as much money as the guy next to you.
And what I'm saying is, and I think the right is basically saying, is no, the human heart knows what's good.
It simply has to throw away the idols and find those things that are good again.
You know, this crisis has been obviously tough on all of us.
It's about to get so much tougher because the Clavenless weekend is about to begin.
I can't tell you now what the death rate for that will be, but very few of you will survive.
But those of you who make it, I'll be back on Monday.
Survivors Gather Monday00:01:40
Those of you who are subscribers can tune in at 5 Pacific, 8 Eastern tonight, and I will be on all access for the rest of you.
Into the maelstrom of the Clavenless Weekend You Go.
Survivors, gather here on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
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