Andrew Clavin’s Hollywood is Trash dissects the cultural rot of progressive elites, mocking Biden’s bioweapon threats and Kamala Harris’ policies as national security failures while praising GOP resistance to globalism. He frames Hollywood—from Disney’s LGBTQ push in kids’ media to Will Smith’s insincere Oscar slap—as promoting "trash values," contrasting it with conservative traditions like monogamy and parental rights. Nelson Schwartz’s Velvet Rope Economy exposes tiered inequality (e.g., airport VIP lines, elite healthcare), warning that unchecked segmentation fuels societal division, while Clavin ties this to government overreach, like Ketanji Brown Jackson’s legal evasions. The episode ends with parenting advice—raising kids in moral consistency—noting how cultural decay mirrors Hollywood’s abandonment of shared American values. [Automatically generated summary]
President and venal houseplant Joe Biden has developed a new geopolitical strategy for responding to the war in Ukraine, which largely consists of saying incredibly stupid things that could get us all killed.
Some in the administration have questioned the new strategy, fearing that if everyone on earth is killed, there'll be no one left to institute the Green New Deal, and climate change will destroy life on Earth as we knew it before it was destroyed by Biden's incredibly stupid remarks.
Biden began to implement his new strategy last week when he said, quote, if Putin uses illegal bioweapons, well, by golly, I'll just have Fauci call his friends in Wuhan and get us some bioweapons of our own, unquote.
White House spokeswoman Jen Pesaki immediately issued a clarifying piss statement saying, quote, pasuffering pesakatash, this job sucks.
What the p-Sam Hill is that pes stupid pisson of a second-rate pasimpleton pissaying now, unquote.
Vice President Kamala Harris immediately issued a statement clarifying Pesaki's clarifying statement, saying, quote, there is great significance to the passage of time, unquote.
Russian President Vladimir Putin clarified Biden's statement by spraying Hungary with anthrax.
Next, in a speech to U.S. soldiers ordered to pretend to be listening to the man pretending to be their commander-in-chief, President Houseplant said, quote, Putin cannot remain in power, and I'm sending American troops to take him out like I took out corn pop, except with a real person, and it won't just be happening in my imagination, unquote.
White House spokeswoman Jen Pesaki immediately issued a clarifying piss statement, saying, quote, piss someone peshoot me.
Now this pasilly pesherthead is going to start a nuclear pisslaughter, unquote.
Bill Kristol, however, at his website, protect Israel by killing everyone else.com, issued his own clarifying statement saying, quote, the president is exactly right.
America must invade every country on earth, hang around there for 20 years killing people and dying, and then retreat in humiliation and disgrace without achieving any of its goals, which no one even knows what they are.
This is my dream, my quest.
I'm literally insane.
Someone help me, unquote.
Vladimir Putin responded to Biden's statement by laughing heartily in Russian, then firing his entire nuclear arsenal at Los Angeles, where those few residents who hadn't yet moved to Nashville awaited the attack with eager anticipation, hoping to at last be put out of their misery.
Having lost Hungary in LA, Biden now seems to be signaling that he might reconsider his incredibly stupid statement strategy and instead start reading all his comments off a cheat card containing simple sentences of short words written in crayon by his staff.
Recently, when Fox News's Peter Ducey asked the president to clarify his clarified remarks, Biden read off the card, quote, please don't ask me that question.
I might say something incredibly stupid and get us all killed, unquote.
Former comedian turned sleazy corporate shill Stephen Colbert immediately issued a clarifying statement saying, quote, journalists should not ask questions when Democrats are president.
So now I will make jokes about Docey's haircut as if that were funny and I was still a comedian.
Please follow the instructions on the applause sign carefully, unquote.
Kamala Harris clarified Colbert's remarks by performing an interpretive modern dance entitled, The Great Significance of the Passage of Time.
Jen Pesaki simply passabbed.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Oh, honky-donky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, honky-donky-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped, ipsy-topsy, the world is a-biddy-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, the vast right-wing conspiracy known as Clavinon continues.
You know, if there is a symbol of the Democrat Party today, it is Mickey Mouse trying to groom your kids.
I've said this a million times.
Leftists are like the alien in Men in Black who kills the farmer.
Remember, he kills the farmer and he takes his skin and he dresses up as the farmer.
This is what they do.
They take over institutions, they destroy them, then they wear that institution as if they were still that institution and expect us to treat them like that.
So they kill Yale, they kill the New York Times, then they dress up in the body of Yale in the New York Times, and we're supposed to still treat them like a great university, a great newspaper.
It's just amazing.
Now they've killed Snow White and Mickey Mouse, and they're dressed up as them, and we will talk about that.
And yes, we will talk about Will Smith and say, I just want to say that these people are all of them trailer trash, except I wouldn't say that because there are some very nice people who live in trailers.
The Truth and Beauty, my new book, comes out.
Here it is.
The Truth and Beauty, how the lives and works of England's greatest poets point the way to a deeper understanding of the words of Jesus, comes out next week.
And you guys have been great in pre-ordering it.
It has made a huge difference for me with the publisher.
And I hope you will come out and buy it.
If you haven't bought it yet, I hope you'll buy it now.
You know, some people are already receiving copies, so I don't even know if it counts as a pre-order anymore.
Listen, you guys told me that I should promote my books more, and I am doing it.
And this book is particularly important to me.
I get a lot of letters, obviously, about religion.
A lot of people kind of question my stances on religion, but my approach is pretty simple, right?
I don't care about the end of days.
I think that is God's job to take care of that.
And I have a suspicion he's going to do it absolutely perfectly.
I don't care.
I don't put any time into judging other people.
That is also God's job.
What I want to know is what does God want of me, my life today?
And the reason I want to know that is because whenever I figure it out, I live in joy.
I have a better life.
I have a fuller life.
I have a life that is really hooked in to the world.
And that's what this book is about.
I know it's about poetry, and you might not like poetry, but it won't matter.
You will see.
It doesn't make a difference.
It is about following what Jesus said so that you know what you're doing here and what you're supposed to do with your life.
Please go and pre-order it.
It would mean a lot to me.
And if we put this book on the bestseller list, so help me, it will count as a miracle.
They will have to go back and post-edit the Bible to put it in that you guys put this book on the bestseller list because, you know, it's a little, it's me, so it's a little eccentric, but I think you will love it and I think it will change your life for the better.
Also, you want to subscribe to this podcast wherever podcasts are available.
Leave us a five-stair star review.
That is also tremendously helpful.
Go on YouTube and subscribe to the Andrew Clavin, my personal channel, the Andrew Clavin channel.
We're constantly putting fresh content there.
Some of that content does not appear on the show, so you're getting exclusive content.
If you ring that little bell, every time we put out a new piece of content, an angel gets his wings and will appear at your doorstep with a flaming sword, depending on how you've behaved.
The rest is up to you.
If you leave a comment and the comment is disgusting, morally repugnant, we will read it on the show because it'll just blend in with the rest of what we're doing.
Today's comment is from In Fantasy I Die.
Why We Need More Oil Supply00:10:19
He says, hey, Drew, did you hear about a Russian general who was attacked outside the Kremlin?
Two Germans threw beer and sauerkraut at him and yelled, this is NATO country.
The general has been identified as Yusuvian Smallniette.
All right.
That is all.
I don't know about you, but I find cryptocurrency kind of confusing, kind of hard to understand.
I definitely believe it represents the future of money.
I don't think there's any question about that.
It's one of the most exciting investment opportunities come around for quite some time.
But how does it work and what effect is it going to have on your taxes?
With an alto crypto IRA, you can trade crypto like Bitcoin and avoid or defer the taxes.
You can get into investing in crypto and do it in a tax-advantaged retirement account.
Auto Crypto IRA is the easy way to get crypto into an IRA.
Trade all you want without the tax headache.
Create an account in just a few minutes and invest with as little as 10 bucks with no setup charges.
Get secure trading 24-7 through Aalto's integration with Coinbase.
There are 80-plus coins available, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and CarDano.
Open an AutoCrypto IRA account with as little as $10.
Just go to autoira.com/slash Andrew.
That's A-L-T-O-I-R-A.com slash Andrew.
Start investing in cryptocurrency today.
Go to autoira.com/slash Andrew.
So listen, we have to respond to a comment by Whoopi Goldberg.
I just want to say, Paris elite stuff because, you know, a lot of us work for a living.
We work, we collect a check, we got families, we try to do the same thing, the good stuff that everybody else tries to do.
And it really pisses me off when people start to talk about people who work in Hollywood, just not just actors, but all the other folks.
So please, when you're talking about actors, be specific.
If you're pissed off about somebody or how they act, don't put it on all of us because that's like saying all black people like chicken.
I don't know of all black people.
I like chicken.
I think most people like chicken, but I don't think that's the point.
I think it's a little easier to generalize about the Hollywood elite because they are trash.
They are trash people.
Their values are trash.
Their behavior is trash.
And they are selling trash to people in the guise of entertainment.
And we are going to be talking a lot about that.
But first, there's a couple of other things I want to talk about first.
We're going to be getting to all the Hollywood stuff you want to hear about.
But first, I want to talk about an angry letter I got from a lady physician who felt my terrible sexism insults her because I think so highly of homemakers.
I wrote her back.
I'm not sure she got my response because there seemed to be something wrong with her email address.
But before I talk about any of this, I want to talk about why I am saying this.
The reason I'm saying this is I am telling you right now, while there's many a slip between the cup and the lip, many things can go wrong.
The future can change according to what happens in the present.
But as I look at the culture right now, as I look at politics right now, the tide is turning.
It is turning in our direction.
You know, Republicans get voted out of office when they don't deliver on their promises.
Democrats get voted out of office when they do deliver on their promises, when they actually do what they believe.
That is when we start to get rid of them.
We don't want to be socialist slaves.
We want to be independent capitalists who make our own way in the world.
We don't want our children groomed for abnormal sex.
We don't want the government to make our decisions for us.
The Democrats, you know, always, they always lie about who they are.
They always say they're moderates.
Oh, it's lunch bucket Joe.
And then they turn leftist the minute they get power.
That's what's happened again.
We don't want it.
We don't want any of it.
They tell us there's a crisis.
Racism is a crisis.
Sunshine is a crisis.
Boys not wearing dresses is a crisis.
Everything's a crisis and the government has to take care of it.
They can get bent.
And we know it.
People are saying this.
It is coming out.
When Bill Maher is appearing on Ben Shapiro's show, you know that people are waking up.
They don't know our lives.
They can't do our work.
They're wrong about everything.
Their values stink.
They're locusts.
They've inherited a great country and they destroy everything, every single thing that they touch.
This administration is in free fall.
And I don't mean politically it is in free fall.
There was a new poll out that says that Biden's support is now down to, I think, three child molesters and Bill Crystal.
But more than that, more than that, the Green New Deal is done.
We see now, because of Ukraine, we see now that it makes us weak.
It makes us weak to stop producing what we can produce.
Europe wants to free itself of Russian oil.
Our gas costs are $6 and plus in some places.
Biden is crawling to tyrants, asking them for the oil that we could be producing.
Yesterday, he announced that he's going to tap into the strategic oil reserves, trying desperately to bring down prices.
That's not going to work.
He made this speech.
He did it again today, where he blamed the high prices on oil on Trump.
He blamed it on COVID.
He blamed it on Putin.
He's the guy.
You know, he shut down drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.
He shut down the permits for the Keystone XL pipeline.
He told the industry that he was going to hunt them from pillar to post, and so they don't want to take chances if they're going to get shut down.
And then they blame them.
It's really gaslighting.
They blame the oil industry.
He promised to do all this stuff.
And now, and now we see the world needs American oil.
It needs American energy.
Here is his own, Putin, Biden's own economic advisor, Brian Deese, cut 11.
We need more supply of oil in the short term so that we can bring down prices because it is the case that the gas is up about a dollar because we have shut off access to Russian oil to the global market.
We've done that.
It's the right thing to do.
Democrats and Republicans alike supported that effort to end imports of Russian oil.
And now we have to bring more supply on.
That's about U.S. production.
It's also about using our reserves and working with producing countries around the world.
That's exactly what we're doing.
It has not.
But still, at least they're talking about it because the Green New Deal is done.
They're not going to get elected on the Green New Deal again.
Defund the police is gone is done.
Crime is skyrocketing.
Even the insane governor of New York is thinking of rescinding their horrible bail reform that is letting people back out on the street.
Globalism is done.
We now know that China and Russia are acting in concert.
They said so.
It's now impossible to ignore the statement they put out before the Olympics where they said we are going to basically take the world back from the United States.
North Korea and Iran are on their team.
Globalism is not a thing.
There is no such thing as international law.
There is no such thing as all the countries just being the same and just dealing in trade.
That's not the way the world works.
Now we remember there's a battle of cultures and we have to fight our culture.
You know, they can keep winning on the American, America is racist meme as long as black people go along.
But I don't know how long that's going to go.
Every time I look around, I see that people, anywhere there's not leftists, activists, people in America get along.
They intermarry.
They like each other.
They're friends together.
You see it all the time.
Only the Democrats think that we have to hate each other because it's another crisis that gives them more power.
And most importantly, and I think it's most important because it is deepest in human nature, this perverse, dishonest, destructive, hellish idea of human sexuality has been exposed and it's done.
Mommy came home.
She is not going to be chased off.
She's not going to be terrorized by the FBI.
She's going to protect her children like moms do.
You cannot stop her.
And the fact that they have made an enemy of parents is going to bring them down.
So look, it not just looks like we're going to win the midterm election.
I hope.
I hope that's going to happen.
But this is a unique, probably once-in-a-generation chance to turn back the culture.
And I'm not talking about turning back the culture to the 1940s.
I'm talking about turning it back to the future, of remembering what we're about so we can go into the future in accordance with our traditions.
A future, you know, freedom is tolerant of difference.
That is true.
The left says that.
That is true.
We should be tolerant of difference.
All kinds of differences, cultural differences.
But that tolerance depends on a core, a solid core, maybe even a majority core of God-fearing, moral mom and dad families, because that's what tradition created.
That's how we got freedom in the first place, right?
And by the way, that's also a good life instead of the bad life that the left wants us to lead.
So this is our moment.
We are on the march.
I'm going to talk about Jeremy the God King, his announcement that we're going to start doing stuff for kids in response to what Disney is doing.
I'll talk more about that as the show goes on because this is an important part of it, this culture stuff.
But if we're going to do that, we have to know if we're going to start producing content, if we're going to start putting forward a culture, if we're going to start governing and not having this usual thing where the Republicans win and they keep telling us, oh no, we can't do anything because we don't have the presidency, we don't have the Senate, we don't have the House, oh, we have all those things, we still can't do anything.
If we don't want to do that, we have to know what we are for.
It is a lot of fun and addictive to attack the left because they're disgusting, but it's too easy.
We have to remember what we are about.
If all we are is a reaction to what they are, they win because they're defining us, right?
They define us if we just react to them.
If they tell us that men should be pansies and we respond by having men become promiscuous brutes, they win.
They won.
That's it.
They've defined us.
If they riot in the name of Black Lives Matter and we answer that by becoming racist, they have won because they have defined us.
If they bring on moral chaos, which is what they're trying to do, in order to take power, and we respond by elevating thugs and villains like Vladimir Putin, who make a big show of morality and religion while bombing maternity hospitals, then they have won and they define us.
We have to define ourselves.
We cannot and we can't despair.
You know, we can't have this thing of this despair.
I hate this thing that conservatives do where they say, it's over, it's done.
I'm just, the ship is sinking.
Get off the ship.
Defining Ourselves00:02:01
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
We have to remember what we're for.
And that's why I'm talking about the stuff that I'm going to be talking about today.
You know, I've said this before.
I will say it again.
I'm not in despair.
I'm actually more hopeful at this moment than I have been in years.
This has been a bad period.
But right now, I'm incredibly hopeful that the tide is turning.
I think we can win back our country.
And if we lose, if we sink into the mud, the last thing you are going to see is my fist because I am not giving up on this country for a second.
I think we can win back the country.
We can lose that fight, but again, we can't win a surrender.
So for a while, I was breaking the news that Ring does not just make a doorbell anymore, that great video doorbell where you can talk to anybody who comes to your door, no matter where you are on an app.
But now they make an alarm, and now they've gone even further.
They have gone pro with Ring Alarm Pro.
Ring Alarm Pro is a next-level security system.
CNET calls Ring Alarm Pro a giant leap for home security.
After using it, you will see they are totally right.
Ring Alarm Pro helps protect your entire home and the Wi-Fi it runs on.
With Ring Alarm Pro, Ring combined a home security system and a Wi-Fi router.
So now, when you're out traveling, you know everything at home is protected and connected and it will stay that way.
With a Ring Protect Pro subscription, which is an amazing deal, by the way, you can get professional monitoring for the ultimate peace of mind.
If anything happens, professional monitoring will call and can request emergency services.
You may not have known, but it's true.
Ring has an award-winning alarm.
That's why I've teamed up to tell you about Ring and gone pro with Ring Alarm Pro.
To learn more, go to ring.com forward slash clavin.
That's ring.com forward slash clavin.
You have to be a pro to know how to spell clavin.
It's k-l-a-v-a-n.
Gender Generalizations00:14:28
So I want to talk briefly about this angry letter I got from this nice lady doctor.
And the reason is almost all, I think all the letters I get, the vast numbers of letters I get from women are very positive, extremely positive.
Women are refreshed by my celebration of who they actually are instead of who they're told they're supposed to be.
And like my wife, they're usually patient with my silly sexist jokes because the differences between us are funny.
So, but this is not, and sometimes I get letters from leftists, but I don't care what they think.
So, this is a woman who's not a leftist, and she's a nice lady.
She's a doctor, and this is what she said.
You listen to the show, and she said, What you said is that it is the left that wants mom out of the home so they can pervert children and take away the power of the family, and that women flooding the workforce have cut their husbands' salaries in half.
And yes, that is exactly what I said.
She goes on, I spent the rest of last evening after I heard this fuming, incredulous of just how out of touch you are with the world and how you can get away with spewing this nonsense to your listeners.
You're just a couple of years older than me, yet your idea of family values is right out of the 1940s before you were even born.
I think you managed to insult at least half of the adult women in this country who work for a living.
They are trying their best for their families, and whether working for them is a dream or a necessity, they deserve the same respect as women who choose to stay home and are able to do it.
So, yes, I do think that the left wants mothers out of the house.
You notice that whenever they say we need to help working women, they never say we could help working women by raising their husbands' salaries so they can stay home.
They always say we should give them government daycare, and we know what they want to do in government daycare.
Just yesterday, I think it was, Biden released his new pro-transgender agenda, which is something we're all waiting for, saying we've got to have hormone blockers for young people and surgery for young people, none of which is based in any kind of science whatsoever.
It's incredibly destructive to a person's life, and it's permanently destructive, and it's quite wicked.
So, we know this is what they want to do.
And yes, I think it's fair to say that when you increase the workforce, double the potential workforce, you're going to make it easier to have wages stagnate, which is what they've been doing ever since feminism came on the side.
So, that's what I said, yes.
But I also said something else, and maybe she didn't hear this part, it was in the mailbag section.
I talked about the fact that femininity, the quote, the traits that are femininity, they're not some magic little, you know, sparkly princess cloud thing.
It's a collection of traits shared by women, each of whom is an individual with different traits, with a different way of expressing that femininity.
Some of whom, as I said on the show, don't have any kind of homemaking instinct at all or don't want to do that.
And I, you know, I'm totally on board with the fact that people make different decisions.
They have their own life.
They have their own person who God has meant them to be.
And I respect their decisions.
And I respect their right to make those decisions.
However, I will say this.
If there were no lady physicians, the world would get by.
But if there were no homemaking mothers, the world would fall apart and we would all become slaves.
And by the way, I think the same thing about people like me.
If there were no male artists, no male novelists, the world could get by.
If there were no male soldiers and police, the world would not get by.
I work for them.
This is going to be a theme of the show.
I'm here to entertain and enlighten and encourage anything that I can do with any talent God gave me.
I'm here to enlighten the homemakers and the soldiers and the police and all the working people and all the people who do the things that make the country run.
I work for them and I never forget that and I never have.
Even when I was starting out, I knew this was true.
But here's the important part of this.
You've got to understand the left is not working to build anything except some pie in the sky paradise that's just failed every time they've tried it.
They're working to destroy all the things that get in the way of that, that get in the way of them manipulating the world into perfection.
They're trying to destroy the family, marriage, manhood, womanhood, patriotism, the Constitution, honest judging, criminality science.
But one of the most important things they're attacking is reason, our capacity to reason, the way that we think, right?
You've noticed, I'm sure, that nothing they say makes sense.
They say, men and women are exactly the same, but a man can become a woman.
Well, what would the difference be?
If they're exactly the same, how can a man become a woman?
It doesn't make any sense.
Some men are born and they're attracted to other men, and that's perfectly natural, unless that other man is a woman, and then they're a man who likes a woman, but he's a man who's a woman.
It never makes sense.
It's not supposed to make sense.
It is supposed to get to the point where the only way that words mean anything is if they mean what the left says they mean.
And the logic, the only logic there is, is the logic that the left says there is.
And this is one of the things that I have noticed in letters that I get from people.
One of the things you have to do in order to think is you have to be able to generalize, right?
This is an important thing.
You have to say there are species of things.
Certain things are like other things.
They may not be exactly like other things.
They may have different traits, but there are certain things that bring us together.
You can't do science without generalization.
I walked into a doctor once and I said, you know, I have this little thing right here.
He said, oh, that's shingles.
I said, I haven't even finished my sentence.
Yeah, it's shingles.
I said, are you going to look at it?
He said, of course I'm going to look at it.
I could be wrong.
But that's what it is.
Of course, because he knows what the symptoms are.
He generalizes.
If you have certain symptoms, you have this disease, right?
And then he checks to make sure he's right, because sometimes the generalization is not true.
You can't make laws that cover everybody if you don't generalize about what everybody needs, right?
Like things are like, and they share a form.
So what the left has done is taught people to regard generalizations as personal insults.
So if I say a human being is a two-legged creature, I will get a letter from somebody who says, my beloved son was born with one leg.
Is he not a human being?
Yes, he's a human being, but a human being is still a two-legged creature.
If I say men are stronger than physically stronger than women, I get, you know, my sister Bertha can bench press a thousand pounds.
Can you?
No, men are still physically stronger than women, right?
We know there are certain generalizations they can make.
Just, I want you to watch a Steve Crowder video.
Now, obviously, Crowder must have been released from the institution on a work release program of some kind because he's out there again doing this brilliant thing he does, change my mind, right?
And what he says is men shouldn't play women's sports.
Change my mind.
This guy, this idiot journalist, sits down.
He looks like the guy from Curious George.
Remember the man with the yellow hat?
The way he's dressed.
He just looks like him.
And Crowder, and they have this discussion.
Should men be allowed to play women's sports?
I don't believe that biological males should be allowed to compete with women, biological females in women's sports.
If you disagree with me, I'm more than happy to hear your case and let you change my mind.
So I guess before we get into it, what is your definition of the term biological female?
Is that something that would include people who are assigned female at birth that were born intersex?
So Crowder tears this guy to pieces.
I mean, he just gets him on the facts.
He gets him every which way.
The guy gets so distracted that Curious George actually escapes and gets into all kinds of mischief.
It was hilarious.
But Crowder doesn't address the one thing that I was kind of interested in was just the strategy of the guy.
I mean, he gets him on all the right points, but he doesn't address the strategy.
What difference does it make if a very small number of people are in fact born with two different sex organs, you know, or different sex traits?
That happens to a small number of people.
It's a deformity, essentially, that usually has to be fixed by surgery and is sad and there's a lot of sad things in the world, but it doesn't change the fact, just like a person being born with one leg doesn't change the fact that man is a two-legged animal, right?
In the same way, we know there are men and women and men and women have different traits biologically and different traits emotionally and different traits in all kinds of different ways, right?
By stopping you from generalizing, by making a generalization an insult, what they're essentially saying is every single person has to be treated differently.
Every single person is a different category of person.
We can't have laws.
We can't have traditions.
We can't have a core society.
That's what they're trying to get at, right?
And they're trying to make it, what they do is they reverse it.
What they say is the exception is the rule.
So one cop kills a guy in some city and suddenly, oh, the cops are killers.
The cops who save more lives of every color, and especially black lives, by the way, are suddenly the enemies of black people, right?
Because this one guy did it.
So they generalize off exceptions and they say the generalizations, true generalizations, aren't true because of the exceptions.
So that ends up destroying both our traditions.
The things we say are generally the right thing for people to do, have families, marry, men and women marry, be monogamous, be faithful in your monogamy, give your child both a mother and a father.
These are generally the good things to do.
These are traditions that have built up over time by observing the way people behave.
Traditions aren't just, oh, this is the way we always do it.
It's not just, you know, this is the way we always do it.
It's the wisdom of the dead.
It is the compiled wisdom of the dead, so we don't have to reinvent the wheel in each new generation.
That's what a tradition is.
So we change, but we change in accordance with our traditions.
That is the conservative way forward instead of the radical way forward that destroys things.
You listen, Jon Stewart, going from a great comedian Crowder to Jon Stewart, mark downward progression.
He's got this new podcast and he goes off attacking white people.
And the stuff he says about America is taking basically the exceptions and making them the rule.
Cut 8.
For however sincerely we want to reckon and listen, the truth is America has always prioritized white comfort over black survival.
Black people have had to fight so hard for equality that they've been irreparably set back in the pursuit of equity.
It's not even good reasoning.
First of all, when blacks were slaves in America, Africans were slaves everywhere, including Africa.
Just go back and read some of the white explorers who visited Africa and were shocked at the level of slavery, how many people were being held slaves in Africa by Africans who then sold those slaves to Europeans and to Americans.
This was a universal trait.
So it's not, first of all, a comment on America.
And yes, the journey up from that era has been a long one and it is a noble one and it's part of the American story and that is great.
But Andrew Sullivan, who's not exactly the most left-wing, left-winger, comes on and just rips him apart with the simple observational truth.
Here's Andrew Sullivan.
It's very hard to agree with some of the very premises that are being expressed tonight.
As if everything is already settled, we know this country is, for example, a white supremacy.
Well, I don't believe that.
I think it's possibly the most absurd hyperbole I've ever heard.
I come from, I'm an immigrant, so I have a slightly different view of this.
I can tell you, America in 2022 is the most multiracial, multicultural, tolerant, diverse melting pot that has ever existed on planet Earth, and there is no other place on Earth even like it.
That is an obvious truth.
Anybody who's lived, he says he's an immigrant, but anybody who's lived anywhere else, and I lived out of the country for seven years, you understand that this is the gold standard when it comes for multi-ethnic culture.
When you lose your traditions, you become stupid in another way, and this is what Stewart doesn't understand.
Your traditions are what make you understand the right from the wrong.
We know to dislike slavery because there's an America.
Jon Stewart knows that inequality is wrong because there's an America.
You tear down a Jefferson, a Thomas Jefferson statue, as in New York, you take it out of town hall because he owned slaves and slept with a slave.
You are taking down the statue of the men who taught you that that is wrong.
He's the guy.
He is the guy who said, you know what, this can't happen.
Nothing is so surely written in the hand of God that these people must be free.
We understand people as equal, not outside of religion, only within religion, because we know they're not actually equal.
We know two people are not, no two people are equal, and some people are superior to others in a million different ways.
Some people are superior to others in every way, and yet they are equal in the eyes of God.
That is where they're equal.
It is basically what the Declaration is saying.
You get rid of God, you get rid of the tradition of God that we understand.
You have lost that equality.
You have lost all of that.
Jon Stewart is standing on the shoulders of the people he condemns.
The view he has, the view he has is from the top of a tower of better men than him.
And he's looking down at them only because he's standing on the wisdom that they created.
He calls America racist, but the reason he knows is because all of those races he's condemning taught him that truth.
What Sullivan says is not a generalization.
It is simply the simple truth.
You don't have to say every time you say this is a great country.
You don't have to say we're not perfect.
That's so obvious it doesn't have to be said.
It is a great country because of what it has brought to the world and what it has achieved in the world.
And the left wants to destroy that.
And in order to do that, they have to destroy reason itself.
You know, there are now so many makes and models of cars that no one's storefront can stock them all, right?
So if something goes wrong with your car, you may find yourself facing some intimidating guy who's standing there making you feel like an idiot because you don't know what kind of parts you need for your car.
Instead, go to rockauto.com because you know why?
Because just saying rockauto.com will make you feel like no one will ever intimidate you again.
When you say rockauto.com, people will stand aside to let you walk to your computer where you can get all the parts you need right there at a great, great price on rockauto.com's fantastic catalog.
It really is an easy-to-use catalog.
The prices are good.
You can get anything you need.
Your car will run and you'll be able to say, hey, honey, I went to rockauto.com.
Challenging Politicians' Posturing00:13:48
Wait till you see the reaction.
Go to rockauto.com right now and see all the parts available for your car or truck.
Write Clavin in there out of his box so they know I sent you.
And you got to say it the same way.
Clavin, don't let that slip.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So all of this brings me, finally, to Hollywood and the role they're playing in our culture and how it comes about and what it means.
You know, we're going to go from Stephen Crowder, though I make fun of him constantly.
He's a very, very funny comedian, to Jon Stewart, who is occasionally amusing.
And we're going to end up at Stephen Colbert, so he'll hit bottom.
You'll just hear a loud thunk as we hit Stephen Colbert.
You know, I opened in my opening, I was making these jokes about Joe Biden making these clearly dementia-induced statements about the war in Ukraine and how we were going to deal with it.
And Peter Doocy from Fox News, I talked about this in the opening as a joke, but now I want to talk about it seriously.
He challenged him because every time he makes these statements, his handlers come out and clarify them.
So he challenged them to say what they mean.
This is cut forward.
It sounded like you told U.S. troops they were going to Ukraine.
It sounded like you said it was possible the U.S. would use a chemical weapon, and it sounded like you were calling for regime change in Russia.
And we know none of the three occurred.
None of the three.
None of the three.
Okay, so that's just a stone.
You know, he's just a lying dogface pony soldier, as he himself might say.
That is a stone lie.
Here is video of Biden making all those statements and then his handlers clearing them up.
Cut five.
For God's sake, this man cannot remain.
Wow, the White House trying to make clear in the aftermath or making very clear in the aftermath.
He was not, in fact, calling for regime change.
And you're going to see when you're there, some time you've been there, you're going to see, you're going to see women, young people stand in the middle of the front of a damn tank.
White House officials are telling us that President Biden does not intend to send U.S. troops into Ukraine.
If chemical weapons were used in Ukraine, would that trigger a military response from NATO?
It would trigger a response in kind.
The United States has no intention of using chemical weapons, period, under any circumstances.
Okay.
So the guy lies, makes a lot of stupid statements because he's clearly not fully cognizant.
Then his handlers cover it up.
Then he just lies flat out to Peter Doocy.
Now, Stephen Colbert, now Stephen Colbert once went to the, what was it called, that White House correspondence dinner and did a whole routine pretending to be a conservative.
George W. Bush was president at the time.
So he did a whole routine pretending to be a kind of belligerent O'Reilly style, in-your-face conservative, making fun of the journalists in the room for not asking tough questions, for just basically typing.
He made fun of them for just typing what the president says and just printing it.
As he kind of put it in this routine, he was saying everything backwards because he was pretending to be a conservative, but still he was making fun of them for being sheep and not asking tough questions.
Now Peter Doocy asks a completely fair, completely legitimate question.
And first what Colbert does, as I made fun of, he makes fun of the way Peter Doocy looks, his suit or whatever.
And then he says this, cut six.
Remember how on last night's show I said that slapping is never, ever the answer?
I'd like to file a one-time exemption on behalf of the president of the United States.
Right.
So he says that basically Doocy should be slapped.
He's obviously joking.
He's not calling for violence, but still he's making fun of Doocy instead of making fun of the guy you should be making fun of.
Now think about this for just a second, what it means.
You know, when I was a kid and there were guys like Johnny Carson and things like that, they made jokes every night about all politicians, both sides.
They would hit both sides.
Carson was a lifelong liberal, lifelong Democrat, but he always hit both sides.
My dad was a comedian.
He was always very fair, always went after.
He too was a liberal, but he always went after everybody.
Both sides, because politicians are funny.
Politicians lie.
They try to be grave.
They try to be statesmanlike, but they lie and they get caught and they do stupid things and they chase their interns around the desk.
And that's funny.
That is just funny.
And you can make fun of all of them.
All of their ideas generally blow up in their faces.
Whatever government does, it doesn't work.
You make fun of everybody.
If you just make fun of one side, if you are a comedian, right?
I mean, because I'm doing political satire for the right, but he's not.
He is a comedian.
And you are doing a late-night show, which is supposed to be for everybody, and you're only making fun of one side.
What you're saying, the underlying message is that you have a high moral stance where you see better than the audience.
You're putting yourself above the audience.
You're not there to amuse them.
You're there to instruct them.
And that's what I want to talk about.
Does Colbert, does anyone in Hollywood, is there any single person in Hollywood, even if you agree with them, who has the kind of moral authority that they should be preaching to us?
Remember, it used to be in Shakespeare's day when actors came to town, you locked up your daughters.
Now we ask them their opinion.
I think that the Shakespeare people were right.
Now, obviously, this brings us to the slap.
The slap that Colbert is referring to is this moment at the Oscars.
The Oscars, when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock because Rock made a joke about his wife, Jota Pinka Smith.
She's kind of bald.
She's got her hair cut short because she has some kind of condition.
And Chris Rock said, oh, she's going to be in G.I. Jane 2, which I thought was a very mild, you know, kind of ribbet-friendly thing that you might say to somebody that you knew and liked.
And here, of course, is the famous, now famous and infamous Reaction 26.
Jada, I love you.
G.I. Jane 2, can't wait to see it.
All right?
That was a, that was a That was a nice one.
Okay.
I'm out here.
Uh-oh, Richard.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
Will Smith just smacked the shit out of me.
Nick Mike's name out your f ⁇ ing mouth.
Wow, dude.
It was a G.I. Jane jump.
Keep my wife's name out your f ⁇ mouth.
I'm going to, okay?
All right.
Now, some people tried to make this issue about the fact that these guys are black, but Will Smith and Chris Rock did not become worth, Will Smith is worth something like $350 million.
It was not because his audience was all black.
That is because he was an icon to everybody.
He was really the last movie star.
He was the last guy who could open a movie.
Everybody went to his movies.
He was the star of major, major films like Independence Day.
He was a beloved movie star.
He was royalty in this country.
So this has nothing to do with the color of his skin.
It has to do with his behavior, which was trash.
You know, this is the generation, this generation, these two guys are in the generation that oversaw the destruction of the movie business, the relevance of the movies.
The movies were the dominant form of the arts throughout the 20th century.
It was the way America advertised itself to the world.
It's why the rest of the world wanted to be America, wanted to come to America, wanted to be like America because they saw what we were in the movies, which were generally positive about America.
These are the guys who presided over that art form becoming utterly irrelevant.
Remember, the Oscars used to be watched by over 50 million people when the population of the country was smaller.
This was the second lowest rated Oscar in the history of the Oscars.
It was around 15, 16 million.
Last year during the pandemic, it was like 10 million.
So they're irrelevant.
This is the generation that made them irrelevant.
This is a picture.
Put that picture up, picture seven.
This is what the Oscars used to look like in 1954.
This is Audrey Hepurn, and the first woman I ever loved, Grace Kelly, the first woman I ever had a genuine king-size crush on, was Grace Kelly.
Incredibly glamorous, incredibly elegant.
And let's be clear about this.
I'm not being nostalgic.
These guys, some of them, were no better than the people now.
Some of the people now are good.
Some of the people then were bad.
That's not the point.
The point is that then the business people were in charge and they wanted to appeal to everybody.
They were responsible to the audience.
They were there to entertain the audience.
So if a guy did something wrong, if he cheated on his wife, if he was homosexual, if he was not behaving well, the boss called him in and said, hey, clean up your act and we will get the press to cover for you because we want you to be people who the public like, who the public aspire to be.
We want you, when people go to the movies, we want them to dream their way into your life so you can't act like trash.
The business respected, because they were businesses and because they were dependent on American money, they respected the values of the country.
Now, this guy, Will Smith, you know, his wife had an affair.
She talked about it on a podcast.
And some people say she slept with Chris Rock.
So we're not, you know, and then he went out and said, well, she said we were on a break when I had this affair.
He called it an entanglement and said, we're not monogamous.
We have an open relationship.
We went through a period when we had an open relationship.
And so you can't say, you heard him screaming, keep my wife's name out of your effing mouth.
Well, you can't say that to a guy if you're letting her sleep around.
You can't say, keep my wife's name out of your effing mouth, but you can put certain intimate parts of her body in your effing mouth.
No, that is not chivalry.
It's also not chivalry when you know, first of all, he's attacking a guy who's not as big as he is.
And also, you know, there's not going to be any consequences.
The Oscars say they're studying whether they should take back their Oscar.
Let's see if they do that.
Let us see if they do that.
I don't believe they will.
And then on top of this, he gets up and makes this weepy speech, this is Cut 27.
I want to apologize to the Academy.
I want to apologize to all my fellow nominees.
This is a beautiful moment.
And I'm not crying for winning an award.
It's not about winning an award for me.
It's about being able to shine light on all of the people, Tim and Trevor and Zach and Sinaya and Demi and Anjanu and the entire cast and crew of King Richard and Venus and Serena, the entire Williams family.
Love will make you do crazy things.
Well, yeah.
I mean, first of all, he's crying.
He's not the guy who got smacked in the middle of the show in front of everybody.
There's a comedian on stage trying to do a show, which is another thing.
He sucker punched him because if you're doing a show, you're not thinking about it.
You know, in the 90s, when I was living in London, movies would come out and you wouldn't really know whether they were causing excitement in America.
They would just come out and you'd kind of say, I want to go to the movies and you go to whatever was playing.
I saw a picture called Intersection, a very bad picture, with Richard Gere, Sharon Stone, and Lola Davidovich.
And it's about a guy who is in a car crash.
And in the last moments before the car crash, he flashes back on his life having these two women in his life, his beautiful wife, Sharon Stone, but his cute and kind of lovable wife, Lola Davidovich.
And I'm watching this film, and it's well, let's play a little clip of this where he basically comes clean to his wife.
You must have known something was going on.
Yes.
I thought you were working with.
Are you in love with her?
I'm sorry.
Isn't that the traditional question?
I say, are you in love with her?
And then you say, well, I don't know.
I'm very confused.
I need some time.
And then I respond.
Look, I didn't plan this.
I believe that.
What does that mean?
I'm the planner.
You're the creative one.
Isn't that the deal?
Isn't that what this whole relationship is based on?
I'm going to a hotel.
Really?
Now, just when we're finally really getting to know each other.
So the dialogue is so stilted that you know that this is a remake of a French film, but you know that somewhere along the line, this is a true story.
And so I was watching it.
I was thinking to myself, and this is actually what I thought.
This is actually the name that came into my mind.
If Richard Gere were a little fat man like Harvey Weinstein, you would see how sleazy this story is, how common it is.
But because he's a great-looking guy and Sharon Stone couldn't be any more beautiful and Lola Davidovich is adorable, you don't realize how sleazy it is.
And when I start to look back, and a lot of movies are like that, they are projecting terrible behavior, terrible values, and they're telling you that they're good simply by seeing these genetic jackpots play out these parts.
Last week, I was talking about how the visual arts make you stupid, and a couple of people wrote to me and said, well, during the Renaissance, the visual arts were great.
I wasn't hitting the visual arts.
I was hitting the fact that when the visual arts become your main source of artistic experience, a culture becomes stupid.
The Renaissance started when a poet, Petrarch, discovered the letters of Cicero.
And when that kind of information was spread around through the printing press, it was a word-induced event, even though it did, of course, create such beautiful, beautiful art.
Let's just watch a little bit more of Will Smith's speech.
He won the Oscar.
Shout Out: DeSantis and Gay Content Controversy00:12:53
This is funny.
Denzel Washington told him, watch out when you hit the top because that's when the devil comes after you.
And that's exactly what happened because now this guy is, everybody sees that he's trash.
Everybody sees that his behavior was trash.
They will try and reinstate him, but he will never achieve that kind of beloved star status that he had before.
But here's what he said.
He won it for playing Richard Williams, the guy who, the father of Serena and Venus Williams, who was their coach as well.
And here's what he said, Cut 31.
Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family.
In this time in my life, in this moment, I am overwhelmed by what God is calling on me to do and be in this world.
I'm being called on in my life to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people.
So when he's comparing his defending his wife by slapping Chris Rock for a fairly mild joke, I thought, he's comparing that to Richards Williams, a fierce defender of his family.
Richard Williams had five children with a woman, with his wife, left them to marry the woman who became the mother of Serena and Venus Williams, left her to marry another woman and have children with her, and also had a child out of wedlock.
He wasn't a defender of any damn thing.
He wasn't defending his family.
And this guy, too, who has let his family devolve into this open marriage, which is never a good thing, is never, ever a happy thing.
I mean, believe me, this is something I've seen.
You know, in other words, this is just a representation by beautiful people, successful people, talented people of trash values.
And so these are the same people.
And, you know, this is the way they reacted to this law in Florida.
There's one now in Arizona too.
This is the way they reacted to this law that makes teachers responsible to parents for the things they teach them.
It says, I'm just going to read a little bit of the language of the law.
School personnel may withhold, I'm sorry, classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade three or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
This is the one, the law that the left calls don't say gay, and this was the reaction at the Oscars.
We're going to have a great night tonight.
And for you people in Florida, we're going to have a gay night.
Gay, gay, gay, gay, so children, but beautiful children, selling these trash values, DeSantis, who was a boss, signed the bill into law, and he had this mom, January Little John, tell her story of why this law was important to her as CUT 19.
In September of 2020, my daughter told me after school she had a meeting with school officials that was held behind closed doors where they asked her which restroom she wanted to use.
I immediately contacted the school, was told by the guidance counselor and assistant principal that I could not be given any information regarding the meeting and that by law, my daughter had to be the one to authorize my notification of the meeting or attendance to the meeting.
In other words, school officials asked my 13-year-old child her permission as to whether or not my parental rights would be honored.
When parents are excluded from critical decisions affecting their child's health and well-being at school, it sends the message to children that their parents' input and authority are no longer important.
This created a huge wedge between our daughter and us because it sent the message that she needed to be protected from us, not by us.
So a teacher goes on MSNBC and says this is CUT 12.
It scares me to death that I am not going to be able to have these conversations with my children because they're going to ask me what I did on the weekend.
I don't want to have to hide that my partner and I went paddleboarding this weekend because then they ask, well, what does partner mean, Mr. Bernard?
And, you know, I'm worried.
Can I tell them what it means?
Because it opens up for parents to really take some legal action against the schools and teachers.
And I am afraid for myself, my colleagues, and my students.
You know, so what I want to just put in your head here for a minute, if I may, is not forget the sex for a minute.
Forget the sex issue.
Just the entitlement of these people.
These are not their kids.
That's what the mom is saying.
They're protecting their kids from their mother.
They're telling them that their authority supersedes their mother.
And of course, that's what this is all about.
He doesn't have to talk to these kids about his.
How about talking to them about math?
How about talking to them about how to read, which is, by the way, America is not doing very well in.
So this is DeSantis' reaction to Hollywood, which I just loved, Cut 21.
If the people who held up degenerates like Harvey Weinstein up as exemplars and as heroes and as all that, if those are the types of people that are opposing us on parents' rights, I wear that like a badge of honor.
Well, God bless him.
And I don't want to hit him because I love the guy, but he didn't go far enough.
Because remember, Harvey Weinstein, when he was still out of prison, led a petition drive to free Roman Polanski, who had been arrested after skipping the country years and years and years ago, was arrested, I think, in Switzerland.
And Woody Allen signed the petition.
All these big stars and directors signed the petition saying he should be free.
Roman Polanski, who was accused by six women of brutal rape, who we know drugged and sodomized a 13-year-old girl.
And these are the people these people are defending.
So now Disney, right, Disney is out telling us, you know, that this is a terrible law and they're standing up against this law.
And Chris Ruffo, another guy who's a boss from the Manhattan Institute, great guy and doing great work.
He gets an all-hands meeting.
He gets video from an all-hands meeting where the Disney people tell you that they basically are trying to spread more gay content to children, sell more gay content to children to the extent that they think 50%, 50% of the characters in their children's movies should be some kind of LGBTQ.
Let's just take one of these.
We'll take Disney corporate president Carrie Burke's Cut 17.
I'm here as a mother of two queer children, actually, one transgender child and one pansexual child.
And also as a leader, one of our execs stood up and said, you know, we only have a handful of queer leads in our content.
And I went, what?
That can't be true.
And I realized, oh, it actually is true.
We have many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories.
And yet we don't have enough leads.
Time's up, you creeps.
Time's up.
Listen, you know, I said at the beginning that the tide is turning, that this is a generational moment to seize back the culture.
I talked about DeSantis being a boss.
And here is the boss, the God King, Jeremy Boring, who runs the Daily Wire, who made, answered these videos from Disney with this announcement as cut one.
Because of the great reporting of Chris Ruffo, we got to see leaked footage from inside Disney of high-up Disney employees saying things like, we have a not-so-secret gay agenda.
Saying things like, we insert, we, we, uh, make sure I get this quote right.
We're adding in queerness wherever we can, and that, quote, no one is trying to stop the producer who is doing so.
Another executive within the company said, if anything, we don't have enough LGBTQIA representation in content made for very small children.
So what are we going to do about it?
Well, we're going to do the same thing we always do.
We're going to build alternatives.
Americans have enormous economic might.
They just don't have any alternatives.
The Daily Wire is building those alternatives.
And today I'm proud to tell you that we will be launching Daily Wire Kids.
Well, I hope the Capital G God blesses the little G God King in this endeavor.
It is the most important thing we can do.
We've already hired.
They're going to pour, I think, 100 million bucks into this over the next three years.
They've hired the Veggie Tales writers to help create first two children's shows.
And like I said, they're going to pour in a lot of money.
You can help.
I want to add an advertisement here because I think this is important.
You can help.
You can be part of this.
Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe and use code BuildTheFuture for 45% off your membership.
This is a big deal and it's part of what we're doing.
We can't do it without you.
You're the people where the money comes from.
You support the culture.
We give you the culture.
And here's the thing.
We are not here to take apart your life.
We are here to entertain and inform you.
We work for you and we know it.
And everybody in this place knows it.
Everybody in this place, including the God King, knows that we serve you.
We're not here to destroy what you've built.
We are here to enhance what you've built.
This is the moment.
This is the moment.
It is going to turn.
They have left the field open.
It's up to us whether we are going to take back this culture.
Well, we had Stephen Crowder.
We showed you a Stephen Crowder video earlier on.
How would you like Stephen Crowder to call you up on your phone?
Don't wait.
Don't move away.
Don't move away.
This is a great service.
This is called Shout Out.
If you've ever wanted to send your uncle a birthday greeting from one of his favorite conservative celebrities or have your favorite freedom-loving comedian roast that one liberal cousin no one likes in the family, there's only one place to make that a reality.
It's a new app called Shout Out.
The most popular personalities on the right are ready to make someone's day with a personalized video.
Download Shout Out Now on the App Store and Google Play and get 20% off your first customized shout out video.
You get them from the likes of Steven Crowder.
Okay, but there are nice people on there too.
Crowder's going to show up here and he's much, much bigger than I have.
There's JP Sears, Jason Whitlock, Alex Jones, many more of your conservative favorites.
Download the Shout Out app today.
Give Crowder something to do because otherwise he just wanders around and makes trouble.
I'm tremendously excited to let you know that Tuesday is the pub date for my new book, The Truth and Beauty, How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus.
This is a story of my attempt to get to know Jesus as a man, how he saw the world and how he wanted us to see it and what he wants each of us to do with our lives.
I found new meaning in those words through the work of poets who have been immortal in the beauty and truth of their poetry.
The words of Jesus and the words of these poets speak back and forth to one another, and each illuminates the other.
And I try to show how that happens.
If you are somebody who wants to know Jesus better, who wants to know what God wants from you and your life, please pick up a copy of The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus.
It will change your life and it will change your life for the better.
So head to Amazon and order your copy of The Truth and Beauty today.
You may have seen Matt announce his newest film project, What is a Woman?
I can't say much about that, but I am pleased to announce his newest venture as a best-selling LGBT author.
The book is called What is a Woman and is now available for pre-order at whatisAwoman.com and also on Amazon, where it just hit number one on the bestseller charts in the women's studies category.
Seriously, it did.
Matt has been chasing this question for over a year, not because he doesn't know what a woman is, but because it is of utmost importance to him to show the world how easy this question should be.
You can help him find an answer when you pre-order his book, What is a Woman, at whatisawoman.com or on Amazon.
So there's a book that's been around for a little while, but it's actually an idea that's kind of seeping into the culture because a lot of people have been asking me about this now.
Why Define Gender?00:15:15
It's a book called The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business.
It's by Nelson D. Schwartz.
He has more than 25 years experience as a business journalist at Fortune and the New York Times, covering everything from energy and economics to inequality in America and business in Europe.
He now works as a communications and strategy consultant.
Welcome, Nelson D. Schwartz.
Thank you for coming on.
Great to be here.
Thank you for having me and discussing one of my favorite topics.
Let's start with the title.
What is the Velvet Rope Economy?
The Velvet Rope Economy is this idea that there's tiering everywhere and kind of a new sort of caste system emerging in American society for us as consumers.
So that could be nine different lines to board a plane.
It could be paying to skip the line at Disney.
It could be a separate entrance at the ballpark or the football game.
It could be seeing a concierge doctor that enables you to skip the weight for a specialist.
It could be kind of a fast lane for college admissions, which everyone thinks of as, you know, somewhat meritocratic.
I mean, you know, I think there's been some even criminal cases with college admissions, you know, just as I was finishing the book.
But all of these areas that at least there was a pretension to fairness, or at least you might get better service if you paid more, but everyone would be treated decently.
That began to kind of break down.
And we got this emergence of, yeah, of what I call a velvet rope economy, where some people are waiting behind the velvet rope and some are flying by.
When do you see this as having begun?
When did this start happening?
You know, you know, in fairness, some people said to me, well, hasn't it always been this way?
Well, that is a good question.
You know, but the truth is, you know, obviously, you know, first and second class and third class existed on the Titanic more than 100 years ago.
And, you know, the rich in the Great Depression, you know, the movies were living lives like in the clouds.
And, you know, so obviously class differences aren't new.
But I think, you know, beginning in the 1980s, there was a greater comfort with segregating consumers.
And you began to see sort of much more defined groupings and barriers.
I mean, when I went to Six Flags in New Jersey as a kid in the 1980s, everyone waited on the line.
And now you can pay and go right to the front.
And even in the, if you watch the love boat, basically some people had bigger rooms than others on the boat or, you know, portholes, but everybody kind of interacted together on cruise ships in the 60s and 70s.
Now you have ships within a ship on these, on the big cruise lines.
You have areas where if you don't have a gold card, you can't go.
And, you know, that's new.
And same with ball games at Yankee Stadium.
I write about this in the book.
When I went with my grandfather as a kid in the Bronx in the 70s or 80s, you could walk down to the field to get autographs from the players before the game or after the game.
You can't do that now.
There's the legends section at Yankee Stadium and the access to the field is only for elite ticket holders.
So those are all new examples.
And like I said, I think it began sort of in the 80s and technology, which we can talk about, has only made it easier to kind of segregate and tier markets as consumer types like to say.
You say inequality became big business.
Yeah.
The idea, I guess, is that this is a way that you can give people something for their money to get more money.
Is that the basic?
Yes, yes.
I mean, the margins are better and a lot of the growth has occurred in people who have money to spend and people with more disposable income, by definition, have more money to spend.
And that's where a lot of the growth has been in the economy, you know, at the high end.
And you see that in the market for luxury goods, in the market for luxury homes, you know, just in sort of people who are, you know, dependent, you know, on the stock market for big, you know, gains in wealth.
They've got the money in this economy and companies want to go after that.
And segregating their markets and tiering their markets is the way to do it.
So, you know, as you said, people are going to say, well, the rich have always been rich and the poor have always been poor.
And there's always been this kind of separation.
What's the problem?
Why is this a problem or is it a problem?
Well, you know, the book is not a Bernie Sanders kind of like screed against capitalism.
You know, I'm not against capitalism.
And I actually, you know, what made the book better is that a lot of companies kind of opened up to me and they, you know, sort of how they thread the needle and how they walk the balance.
And companies are sensitive to providing a decent experience to everyone and maybe a sort of a richer experience to some whilst making sure it's still reasonable for everyone.
And, you know, that's something I write about.
I think the issue is for us as a society, when we don't come into contact with one another and we're so, you know, segregated from one another by class and we don't have shared experiences like all going to a baseball game or all playing for the sports team in our public schools.
You know, now there are a lot of these travel teams or club teams, which are private for certain sports that, you know, it's not like everybody in the town gathers on Friday night for the football game.
And, you know, you lose these common experiences or, you know, you don't even come into contact with the people who board the plane before you and you're so mad by the time you get on, you're like the eighth or ninth group to board and there's no room for your luggage.
I feel like that contributes to some of the divisiveness and partisanship and just venom in our public dialogue and debate.
So, you know, I feel like it's a loss when there aren't more shared experiences.
That's my concern.
You know, it's a funny thing.
I mean, this is a conservative site.
On the right, people have this kind of dual feeling about things like this, because on the one hand, we're kind of sick and tired of elites basically setting the agenda.
The idea of guys from the World Economic Forum flying around on private jets to tell us how much gas we can put in our Toyotas really sticks in our core.
But at the same time, every time we hear words like inequality, we immediately think the government is coming after our paycheck.
We immediately think the government is going to seize on inequality and seize on anger to take more control of the economy.
Is that what you're looking for, or do you have some other?
No, I mean, I do think, you know, government investment in certain areas like aid for education, you know, infrastructure, you know, would help some of these issues.
But, you know, even look, I went to the University of Chicago, which is sort of a undergrad, not for economics, but is a bastion of conservative economic thinking.
And, you know, even for conservatives, there are issues of how capitalism and unfettered capitalism affects traditions and affects sort of how we live in this sort of society.
And I think even conservatives worry that if we don't have a sense of common things in the common wheel, something's lost.
And that fairness and the perception that everyone has a fair shot is important for a functioning society.
I think conservatives get that, you know, as well as liberals.
So, yeah.
No, I mean, I think you're absolutely right.
And obviously, you know, if you have too much inequality and it's too flagrant, that causes anger on both sides.
You talk in the book about how this makes socialism appealing to people, that people think that socialism is going to even things out.
I'm always interested in the fact that all of the socialists who are in government are supported by some of the richest corporations in the country.
I'm not sure you can illuminate why that happens, but I'm interested in why socialism becomes appealing to people and why corporations basically sign on to that.
Well, I don't know if corporations are signing on to socialism.
I think when there's a sense that the playing field isn't level and you don't have a fair shot at things, you're supposed to have a fair shot, like healthcare.
By that, I mean, if you have one of these concierge docs and you get to see the heart surgeon and I have these examples in my book, if you get to see the cardiologist in two days and other people are waiting two months or the oncologist or these kind of specialists, I think that really offends people's basic sense of fairness.
Same, and even the college or the high school sports things or the college admissions, these are, conservatives sort of see these kind of traditions and activities and kind of social bonds.
Social bonds are important in a functioning democracy.
I studied Russian history in college and you don't want a situation like before the Russian Revolution where the elites and the ruling classes had no legitimacy.
And I think we run this risk if the elites in our country and the wealthy are so cut off and they're kind of in the fast lane that it runs a real risk of the rest of the population kind of being embittered.
Yeah, no, I agree.
I think if you just go too far.
Has COVID, and this book came out just before COVID or just as COVID was, has that made it worse or better?
You know, I think it's kind of made it worse.
You know, there were cases where people used connections to get shots ahead of the rest, but I think it's an issue because if you're a knowledge worker, a white collar worker, you know, upper middle class, you can just take your laptop and work from home and abandon the city, move to the country, you know, all that kind of thing.
If you're a working class person, you're a truck driver, you're a restaurant worker, you know, you're in a customer service-facing position, you can't do that.
You have to show up at work.
So you were at risk.
And I think, you know, a lot of the restrictions on activity fell harder on working class people because they didn't have the option of working remotely.
And what about, you know, one of the things that you say this starts vaguely in the 80s.
The 80s is when the internet really starts to come into its own.
I mean, I feel the internet is the biggest thing since the invention of the printing press.
And I feel that this is big.
Yeah, it's big.
So what effect has that had on this?
You know, I think it makes it much easier to segment your markets and to do tiering.
I mean, just, you know, the speed at which you can gather data and things like when you call the bank or call the insurance company, they know what kind of customer you are.
I mean, they know what your balance is.
And if you're a high wealth, you know, high net worth individual or you have a more elite account, you'll get service faster and you can do all this kind of stuff.
And even since the book came out, Disney, which I write about, you know, Walt Disney kind of envisioned everybody being the same in the park.
You know, class differences were something that existed outside this fantasy land.
And even since the book came out, Disney has moved in the direction of doing more kind of fast pass type segmentation and skipping the line.
And it's very easy to do with apps and phones and technology and all that, much easier than when you were literally had two or three lines.
You can camouflage people cutting much more easily with technology.
So we're talking about the book, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality Became Big Business by Nelson D. Schwartz.
So it seems that all the motivating factors are on the side of inequality.
They're on the side of this kind of privilege.
I know that, you know, being on the lower end of the privilege scale, I enjoy getting on the plane first.
I enjoy being in the first class, especially because I feel that flying has become so much worse for everybody than it used to be.
Yeah.
How do you motivate business without government becoming just obnoxiously powerful?
How do you motivate business to bring us together?
I think there are social rituals which come into play and culture.
And in certain parts of the country, I think there's more of an ethic of everyone in it together and not being quite so separated.
For example, in Minnesota and Wisconsin and those kind of states, there's more of this sense, maybe it's the Scandinavian roots of some of the society, but there's a sense of kind of equality, a sense of populism and equality.
And the Green Bay Packers actually are fan-owned and they've sort of designed the stadium.
They have boxes and they have more elite areas, but Scandinavia has a socialist tradition.
That's why I mentioned it.
So I'm not saying it's socialist in those parts of the country, that part of the country.
But in Green Bay, the stadium, when they remodeled it, they made sure that like a lot of the regular seats were good ones.
And it wasn't such a kind of dystopian, you know, some people way up in the bleachers and some people enjoying over-the-top luxury boxes.
So, and you know, that's there are examples where the culture kind of influences things.
I also think, you know, there's companies that have really emphasized more of an egalitarian kind of approach, like Southwest.
Southwest doesn't have, you know, first class.
And Southwest has done extremely well.
I mean, it's one of the only airlines that never went bankrupt and has consistently made profits.
So you can do well.
I think the culture informs this as much as the government does.
You know, during the Great Recession after 2008, a lot of these businesses, these incredibly big businesses were bailed out by the government.
Culture Over Government00:09:48
Some of them were forced to be bailed out by the government to take government aid that they didn't necessarily want.
And it did seem, it seemed to me that the same people who might complain about the welfare state and people who are out of work getting government funds were actually taking government funds to keep these tremendous businesses alive.
I can't help but feel that everything the government touches becomes more unequal.
That, for instance, a television set, no, the government doesn't give you a television set.
One day a TV comes out and it costs $10,000.
The next year, that same TV costs $600.
Is there some way that the government has kind of fed inequality by getting involved?
You know, that's a tough one.
I mean, I think I would say, you know, one issue is when the government intervenes in the market, you can get huge distortions.
So let's say the government decided tomorrow to radically increase, you know, aid for education and college students.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised to see college tuition go up a lot.
You know, so, I mean, I think that's the danger.
And I think, you know, if we went to a nationalized healthcare service, you'd probably have even more demand for elite concierge care.
You know, so though, I mean, everything cuts both ways, I think, you know, when the government intervenes.
Doesn't mean there's not a place for government, but I think that's a danger that sometimes people don't recognize when they're, you know, planning these kind of programs.
Yeah, yeah, good point.
The Velvet Rope Economy, How Inequality Became Big Business by Nelson D. Schwartz, a really interesting subject and a very fair take on it.
I really appreciate your coming on.
Yeah, no, it's nice talking to you.
I hope you'll come back.
Great.
Good luck.
Please keep in touch and happy to come on anytime.
Thanks very much.
All right.
I am running a little bit late, so I have to get right into the mailbag.
Keep my butt name.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'm glad that McKenna included this question because I got this email a lot.
This is from So Angry I Could Slap Someone.
Mr. Claven, I'm an avid listener of your show.
At times I disagree with you, but I'm able to see both sides on this issue.
I just can't.
In the groomers episode, you try to say a person who is in possession of childborn is not as bad as the child molesters themselves.
I cannot believe you truly believe that.
There are two things I think you have not thought of.
One, they're buying, trading, downloading images of children being molested.
And two, this is often the starting point of pedophiles.
And she goes on to tell a story of her own abuse and the abuse of horrible abuse of children being sold as imagery.
So a lot of people said this.
And I have to answer, I think there are a couple of things about this.
One, obviously we're talking about evil, but what I was talking about was the law and the law has to distinguish about levels of evil.
It always has to do this.
If you buy drugs, you are the reason there is a cartel that murders and tortures people, but you are not the cartel.
And so the law makes a distinction between you.
And the same way, I mean, you can kind of feel it in your own heart.
If you saw somebody doing something to a real living child, you would probably, if you were capable of it, commit an act of violence against that person.
I think I would.
At the very least, you would make sure that somebody took care of them.
If you saw somebody looking at something, I don't think you would.
I don't think you would punch somebody for just looking at something.
Of course it's all evil.
I was just saying the law does have to make these difficult distinctions, and it does.
And that made it bad strategy to challenge her where she could have an answer.
By the way, I should add, too, that I think Katanji, now I've forgotten her name, Brown, right?
Yeah, Katanji Brown is soft on child porn and is soft on drug offenders.
I just didn't think they got her because they kept it at a legal level and she was able to argue these difficult distinctions that the law does make.
So I was talking about strategy.
And again, she's going to get confirmed.
And that kind of proves my point.
I don't think they got her on it.
I don't think they laid a glove on her.
And that's what I was talking about.
Look, you don't, you know, it's kind of dopey to talk about, well, this is more evil than this.
Evil is evil.
But still, still, these are distinctions that the law makes and our hearts make.
And it's, of course, it's ugly and disgusting.
And I'm not trying to, obviously, not trying to defend anything.
From Anonymous, Dear Supreme Bald Wizard of the Multiverse, I'm 20 years old, a sophomore in college, planning to go to grad school for occupational therapy.
I have a girlfriend of almost a year and a half, strong Christian woman.
We share values and would love to spend the rest of our life together.
We're both Christians who value the sanctity of marriage and believe that that is the right place for sex.
We've been successful in having a healthy relationship until about a month ago.
And in that moment, logic seemed to be thrown out the window.
We've been in a strange cycle of justifying certain sexual activities.
My girlfriend is also pursuing a medical degree and will push marriage back further due to the financial impracticality.
As two Christians who want to pursue a godly relationship, how do you recommend we proceed?
I recommend you get married.
Get married.
You know, people get married and work together all the time.
Why does that make it harder financially to be together?
You know, if you definitely want to keep sex within marriage, if you are becoming intimate with one another and you love one another and you're going to be together, get married and help her get through medical school and she can help you get through grad school and you live your life together.
I mean, my wife and I ate spaghetti many, many a day in a row and lived very hard until I started to make it.
And, you know, those are the challenges that face you, but better to face them together.
Let's see.
Yeah, I have time for a little bit more from Matt.
I'm a dad blessed with two very young sons, one more in utero.
I not only enjoyed but admired the interview segments you've had with your son, Spencer Clavin, No Relation.
The two of you have a palpable respect and admiration for one another's work and thought, and I find it just as captivating as the content of the discussion itself.
That mutual respect between parent and adult children seems rare in our day.
Can you describe how you built a foundation, especially during childhood and adolescence, for the mutual intellectual respect you and Spencer, No Relation, have for one another, sincerely a dad who wants to get it right.
You know, I should say that I was on Spencer's.
I taped an episode of Spencer's podcast, Young Heretics, about the truth and beauty, which is going to come out, which I hope you've already pre-ordered, but I hope you order now is about to come out.
But anyway, we jointly answered a mailbag question, and that was the question.
What was it about our relationship that worked?
And I can't give you the extensive answer that we both gave, which I think was really interesting conversation for us both to be there talking about it.
But I can say that from my point of view, I considered my children a gift from God, but I didn't consider it a gift he was giving me.
I considered it an honor to be someone who was passing that gift on to the world.
I wanted them, both my children, who I'm so proud of both of them, I cannot even begin to tell you.
I wanted both of them to be themselves.
I wanted them to be the person God made them to be.
And that meant not the person that I wanted them to be, not living my life for me, not making up, you know, not killing my enemies or ending my resentments or achieving things that I didn't achieve or putting bomb on my disappointments.
I wanted them to do what they wanted to do.
And I considered, you know, just like in the Bible, I considered the moral part of that a way to keep them from going off the rails, not necessarily, oh, you have to do this because it's the way things are done or you have to do this because it's good for society, but a way for them to be focused on the things that mattered to them in life, the creative, beautiful things that they could do and have done and are doing.
And I think that fully understanding, fully understanding that your children are made by God to be the persons that they are.
And that doesn't mean that you don't tell them, you know, yeah, you're going the wrong direction.
You're going down the wrong road.
Don't do this.
And in order to do that, by the way, you have to have the moral authority to do it.
And I was glad that I could always say to my children that I was who I said I was, that I would do what I said I would do.
I wasn't hiding anything from them.
I wasn't cheating on anybody.
I wasn't lying to anybody.
So they knew when I said, you know, I think you're doing something wrong.
They knew that that mattered.
And it's funny, like, I never laid a hand on either of them.
I never had to.
But when I said, look, you know, this is the wrong thing, it mattered to them.
And they knew, they knew I wasn't telling them that because I wanted them to do what I said.
They knew I was telling them that because it was wrong and it was bad for them.
So I think that respect for who they are gives them respect for who you are and what you're trying to do.
Remember, you are, in this case, the representative of God's male nature on earth when you are dealing with your children.
And so you want to love them the way God loves you and the way he accepts you with all your foibles, all your faults, and the way God wants you to become the person, the man that you are.
And so you have to kind of translate that into human action with your flaws.
You're going to make mistakes.
You're going to bang your head against the wall.
You know, you're not going to be perfect.
That's just not on the table.
That is not in the cards.
But if you know what you're doing, if you know you're representing that aspect of God to them and that they are gifts of God that travel through you into the world, I think you can do a better job with them.
I really do.
Got to stop there.
That means the Clavenless weekend is upon you.
If you thought talking about Hollywood was trash and awful and ugly, wait till you see what happens during the Clavenless Week that is coming.
It is darkness.
It is flames.
It is broken glass, wailing, gnashing teeth.
They're all there.
Will you survive?
No.
Spotify wherever00:01:13
But if you do, we'll be back next Friday with the Andrew Claven Show.
I'm Andrew Claver.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, basically wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, remember to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thank you for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Lisa Bacon, executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Our supervising producers Mathis Glover.
Production manager, Pavel Wadowski, editor and associate producer Danny D'Amico.
Our audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Hair and makeup is done by Cherokee Hart.
Our production coordinator is McKenna Waters.
And our production assistant is Jacob Falash.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2022.
Joe Biden's energy policy gets even dumber amid record gas prices.
Fox News hires a transsexual commentator, and the White House endorses trans surgery for kids.