Ep. 1114’s Gee, It Really is Louder skewers CNN’s satirical take on Biden-Trump classified docs—mocking Mar-a-Lago as a "white supremacist hotel" while exposing Biden’s leaks near the Chinese embassy—as Andrew Clavin frames The Daily Wire’s strategy against Stephen Crowder’s confrontational tactics. The show pivots to The Last of Us HBO adaptation, slamming its LGBTQ+ and interracial shifts as progressive propaganda, tying it to Sundance’s anti-discrimination pledges and NHL’s forced rainbow jerseys. Heritage Foundation’s Catherine Gorka links this to "cultural Marxism," tracing Gramsci’s influence through CRT and corporate woke policies, while the episode dismisses zombie media as shallow and praises The Matrix’s action depth—ending with a jab at subscribers vs. "non-paying peasants." [Automatically generated summary]
Journalists and other supporter boils on the buttocks of human degradation are insisting that the Biden classified documents scandal, in which the then vice president removed some classified documents to personal locations in a harmless frolic that could have happened to anyone, is entirely different from the Trump classified documents scandal, in which Trump removed some classified documents to personal locations in violation of the laws of God and man.
On CNN, Christiane Amapoor journalist turned to the camera and spoke directly to her audience, saying, quote, listen, Mr. Soros, there is absolutely no similarity between the Biden case and the Trump case at all.
Trump illegally stashed hundreds of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, the sort of white supremacist, luxury hotel where no BIPOC could possibly afford the price of even a simple lobster salad, which is totally racist, though the citrus vinaigrette dressing is, I admit, delicious.
Biden, on the other hand, by pure accident, left nine or ten documents safely under lock and key at the Penn Biden Center for Global Engagement, a perfectly secure and respectable Chinese Communist Front operation.
And okay, there were also a few documents in his garage.
Some in his house, a harmless page or two in the apartment of Hunter Biden's mistress, Fang Fang Jinping, and perhaps an idle scribble in the completely sealed pouch stuffed inside the hollow plastic stone that makes up part of the secret dead drop outside the Shanghai Spice Restaurant, conveniently located across the street from the Chinese embassy, in case anyone there would like some kung pao chicken with his classified documents.
What's more, whereas Trump kept his heinous crime secret from anyone who didn't happen to be looking at his social media feed, President Biden was completely transparent and immediately told the press absolutely everything as soon as the midterms were over and an anonymous source had already leaked the story to CBS.
In fact, the president was so transparent that even after he had told the press absolutely everything, he went on to tell them even more things when it turned out more documents had been found that he hadn't told anyone about when he told them absolutely everything.
The president has pledged he will continue to be transparent and tell even more things every single time it becomes impossible to avoid it, unquote.
Democrats and other supporter boils on the buttocks of journalists were also rushing to explain the differences between the two cases as quickly as they could make them up.
At a White House press conference, Biden's spokeswoman Karine Jean Identity Hire told reporters with a straight face, quote, as White House spokeswoman, let me speak plainly.
The concatenation of internal rebar has obviously unfurled the dominant carrier of Caladocius, unquote.
Ms. Jean Identity Hire then pointed behind the press corps and shouted, look over there, Prince Harry is exposing his frozen penis to that enormous Lizo woman.
Then when the journalists turned to look, Ms. Jean Identity Hire quickly ran out the door screaming in Mandarin, start the engine, FangFang, here I come.
On The View, a show that acts as a kind of marriage therapy by making husbands thank the Lord they're not married to one of the women on The View, View host and raven-voiced idiot Joy Behar said, quote, look, we all know Donald Trump is a liar, whereas Biden is as honest as any other award-winning PhD who faced down corn pop before getting arrested for marching with Martin Luther King.
So when Donald Trump takes classified documents, we know he's up to no good.
But when Biden takes classified documents, we can be absolutely certain we'll soon be in a nuclear confrontation with Russia to pay the Ukrainians back for all the sweet graft they gave to Hunter, which is only fair since Biden got 10%, unquote.
Both scandals continue to unfold as the FBI agents who raided Mar-a-Lago to seize Trump's papers at gunpoint go about filing those papers in the National Archives under T for totally unimportant.
The agents swear they will also vet Biden's papers very carefully as soon as they catch up with Fang Fang and get them back.
Trigger Warning00:03:01
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
We are back laughing our way through the zombie apocalypse.
We'll be talking a lot of zombie apocalypse today.
We'll talk about The Last of Us, which is a new show about the zombie apocalypse and the worldwide war over information, which is also a sort of zombie apocalypse.
And I think I'm going to have to start with this Stephen Crowder kerfuffle, which is a zombie apocalypse of its own.
This is a lovely time.
Beautiful weather.
The weather's nice.
It's a perfect, lovely afternoon to subscribe to the Andrew Clavin YouTube channel.
You want to go on my specific personal YouTube channel.
You will get exclusive content from me there.
And if you ring that little bell, someone you don't know will die, but you will inherit millions of dollars.
None of that is true.
Oh, but here, this is true.
If you leave a comment there and it's just absolutely morally reprehensible, we will read it on the air because it will just blend in with everything else we're doing.
This is from Craig Simmons.
He says, girl, hey, want to come over and watch a movie or something?
My parents are gone for the weekend.
Me, no, I'm watching this funny bald man play video games and talk about Prince Harry's frozen sausage.
So that's an actual exchange.
That was, you know, that's a transcript.
And I just wanted to get as many Harry frozen sausage jokes into the front end of the show.
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Jeremy's Temptation00:16:10
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no easy favourites.
All right.
You know, I was going to leave talking about Crowder off till the end of the show and just address it briefly, but it's kind of blown up and I'm only going to talk about this one time.
I didn't want anybody to think I was avoiding it, so I'm going to talk about it.
I talked about it already on the all-access a little bit.
But I do think I have to talk about it.
And, you know, I'll explain it all.
I'm really sad about it.
It has made me unhappy.
There are sexual deviants in our schools teaching children that they may be a different sex.
You know, there are people trying to destroy the First Amendment, very powerful forces out to destroy the First Amendment, out to stop the Second Amendment, without which you won't have a First Amendment.
To see people on the right fighting among themselves is absurd.
It's wrong and it's not what should be happening.
And to know that like the clowns at Media Matters are eating popcorn and watching this and enjoying this is really, really disturbing to me.
So I'm sure at this point everybody knows what happens, but Crowder, who has been a pal of mine since the PJTV days and always have loved the guy, he left the blaze and he got into a preliminary conversation with Jeremy about coming here.
And Jeremy gave him a sort of agreement document that they could start the conversation with.
It didn't work out.
They separated.
And then I think it was a couple of months later, it began to seem to Crowder that some of the clauses in this offer, which was not even an offer, just a preliminary document, were evil.
They were basically giving in to big tech and all this stuff.
And so he went on YouTube and he didn't name us, but look, this is the day of social media.
Not naming somebody is not going to last very long.
And he called us, what did he call us, big con, I guess.
So it's a big conservative, but it's also a big con.
And Jeremy responded by putting out the entire deal, the entire offer, whatever it is, whatever you want to call it, is online.
So you can judge for yourself.
And, you know, I'll let you judge for yourself.
I'm not going to get into it.
You know, Ben will probably do a great thing about going through the details of it all.
That's his bailiwick, not mine.
My attitude about this is obvious.
I don't have to work here.
I've had offers from other places.
I can do other things for money.
I work here because I love it.
I love it here.
And I have loved watching it grow from what it was, which was really just me and Ben.
Okay, there was Knowles eventually too, but we all make mistakes.
No, I mean, I've loved watching it grow.
And the reason I love working.
And listen, I literally have turned down more money than I get here to stay here because I love it and because I love what we're doing and because I think what we're doing is so important.
But the reason I love it more than anything and more than the cause, more than the stuff we're producing, although all that is incredibly gratifying, is I love the people here.
I always have.
I always have.
I've seen Ben Shapiro walk into riots to say what he wants to say.
I know I make fun of Michael Knowles.
We're a couple of New Yorkers.
We wouldn't know we loved each other if we didn't insult each other.
But I have seen Michael Knowles sacrifice very good gigs to say the things that he wanted to say.
They got him canceled.
Obviously, Matt Walsh and Candace get all kinds of hate, vicious hate.
I don't even know if they talk about it on the air, terrible things.
And as you know, if you followed me at all, I've lost almost an entire career to the things that I've wanted to say.
I still have to fight every day to get the things on into my books and that I want to say because my opinions just aren't fashionable.
You know, they obviously go against this left-wing grain.
So I'm here at a place, we're all here at a place, where guys on Twitter who don't even have the guts to put their real name on their Twitter feed call us sellouts when we say something they disagree with or say, oh, we're giving in to this one or we're being paid off by that person.
None of that is ever happening.
I tell you the honest to God truth, that is never happening.
And the things I hear them say about us, and again, these are people on Twitter.
I'm not talking about Stephen now.
There's people on Twitter who don't even put their real names on their feed.
But instead, what I see is I see people of integrity, all of whom disagree with each other a little bit.
We're all conservatives.
We all love our country.
We all love our liberty.
But we all think about different ways of saving it and come out of different directions.
And we disagree a lot behind the scenes, but also on backstage we disagree.
We argue with one another openly.
All of this is here because of Jeremy.
And I hate saying anything nice about Jeremy because picking on Jeremy is one of my favorite things to do.
But I love the guy.
And what he has done here is a beautiful thing.
It is a beautiful thing.
He has a genius for doing this.
He has a genius for bringing out the best in people on air and a genius for making us go with our strengths and bring those strengths out.
Just a brief story, when I felt that the quality of my show was falling off because I was doing too much of it, I went to him and said, you know, I don't think I can keep this up at four days a week.
It's not fun for me anymore.
And the minute I said it's not fun, he said, oh, well, then we have to change.
We have to rearrange that right away.
I mean, how many bosses have you worked for who react to your saying you're not having fun by making it sure that you can have fun doing what you do?
He is a shrewd, crafty businessman, but an honest man.
And so another, I don't have to explain what I think about these two versions of events because I would not be here if I thought this was an immoral organization.
As I say, I don't need to be here.
I can go other places.
I can go nowhere if I want to just sit at home and play video games.
But I'm here because I genuinely, genuinely love it, and I love the people here.
Jeremy at the very top of the list.
So Crowder, I love Crowder too, but Crowder is a very, very different kind of person.
And I think that the whole point to me about this is that the Daily Wire is a good thing.
It is a good thing.
It is a thing that didn't exist before.
I'm not saying we're first in the field.
I would think Fox would have to be first in the field, but we are a new, different, more culturally oriented thing with bigger plans than just Fox News.
All the stuff that I used to make speeches about to people saying, why aren't people imitating Fox News?
Why aren't they doing more?
Why aren't there Fox movies and Fox comedy and all that?
All of that stuff we're doing here.
And it's incredibly gratifying to me to be a part of it.
It's incredibly fun to me.
This is a good thing.
Now, the people, again, these fake name people on Twitter are always casting about about our purity.
None of us is, nobody's pure.
We all are people of integrity.
But of course we're not pure.
We make mistakes.
We're wrong about things.
We sometimes zig when we should zag because we're human beings.
But these are people of real integrity, of very solid integrity.
And that's an amazing thing to have that many people in one building who actually do the thing that they have to do.
And to have a guy like Jeremy who just said, who never, never once, never once comes in and says, don't say that because I disagree, or don't say that because I don't like it, or don't say that because I'll be embarrassed.
Not once, ever.
So that's the world we live in.
And the stuff that you see on YouTube or on Twitter of people saying this is why they did this.
It's almost all untrue.
It's almost all untrue.
And especially for somebody like me who lives on another planet.
I'm an artist.
I live in a world of imagination and I hope in a spiritual world.
All my life, God has sent people who will watch out for me and take care of me.
And Jeremy is one of those people who puts me in a place where I can do what I do and give to you whatever I have to give to you and make that work.
And just one more note about that, and then I'll get back to the Crowder thing.
You could bug my house.
You could put a listening device in my house.
And you would not hear me express something other than chasing my wife around the room or whatever personal things are going on.
You would not hear me express an opinion that I haven't told you.
I've told you everything and I've never hidden my opinions from anyway.
And that's just what we do here.
And it's a beautiful thing.
Now, Stephen Crowder is also a good thing.
He's a different thing.
He's a very different kind of guy.
Stephen Crowder has made me laugh sometimes till I couldn't see straight.
He's done things like, for instance, walked to a Muslim bakery's and asked them to bake a cake for a gay wedding as a joke.
That's hilarious.
I would never do that.
Not because I'm afraid, because I'm really not afraid of very much, but because I'm decorous and I do a different thing.
And we at the Daily Wire, I don't think, would do that.
I don't really think he would fit here at the Daily Wire because we are more decorous.
We do fight in different ways.
We fight, but we fight in different ways.
Jeremy is a guy with a strategy, a long-term strategy to beat the left at its own media game, right?
He's a very, very clever, brilliant guy at figuring out to beat the left at its own game.
And sometimes that means zigging, you know, sometimes that means kind of not doing it directly, kind of going around the, you know, all this talk about warriors and this is a war and all this stuff.
You know, you've got to play with strategy to win a war.
And we have come a long, long way with Jeremy guiding the ship.
So that's the way he's doing what he does.
Stephen Crowder, God bless him, you know, throws himself at the wall.
He just throws himself at the wall and he does hilarious stuff and he does different stuff.
And we need both those things.
We need both those things on the right to beat the left.
We need all kinds of things.
And I'm glad to see that it's all happening and I'm really sorry.
And I listen, I'm not saying anything to you I wouldn't say to Stephen in person and haven't just said to Stephen in person.
I think he did the wrong thing.
If he doesn't like Jeremy's business model, let him build his own business and take, you know, compete with Jeremy.
And then Jeremy will have to change and then he'll have to adapt.
If that's what he thinks, if that's what he thinks the right thing to do is, and he thinks it's possible to do it another way, and I'm sure there are other ways to do it, let Crowder do that, you know.
And then I have to just address one more thing, because this happened after I talked to Stephen.
He recorded a conversation with Jeremy.
I'm going to put this as kindly as I can out of my love for Stephen.
That's a moral error, okay?
You have to have lost touch with something to do that.
That is a moral error.
And I'm sorry he did it.
And I wish he would think that over again.
Think about that some more.
Now, I've listened to what some of the other guys are saying.
I think Matt Walsh made some really good comments on Twitter.
I didn't go on Twitter because I was annoyed with all the fake name guys.
But I saw what Candace did.
I got to admit, it made me laugh out loud.
I mean, it was so Candace.
She just ripped Crowder to pieces.
And I love her to death.
And I thought that was, it made me laugh because it was just Candace all over.
But that's not where I think this should go.
I think it's got to stop.
And I think, I hope I'm not in control of all these people.
I know Jeremy won't tell them what to do.
But I hope that we leave it alone from here on because this is not the fight I want to be in.
If you think a friend is doing something wrong, you tell him that.
And then if you think that there's a right way that you can do it, go off and do it.
And that's what I think Crowder should have done.
He should build his own business.
Let him compete with Jeremy.
And if his business model works better than Jeremy's, Jeremy will adapt it.
But I just want to tell you that Jeremy is not doing an immoral thing.
He's doing a smart, long-term thing.
He has a long-term plan.
I think he's talked about it openly in his town halls and all this.
And I think that it's important.
So I think maybe Stephen misunderstood or maybe there was something else going on in his head.
But this is not a battle between good and evil and all this and all this stuff about heroism and purity and all that.
This is not what this is.
This is a long-term fight.
It took the left 60 years to take our culture over.
60 years, okay?
This is not going to happen overnight.
We're not going to win overnight.
We're going to have to make some back off sometimes.
We're going to have to make some compromises along the way.
But we will win over time if we play it right.
You know, I don't know how to put this.
Like, money, you know, we're supposed to be capitalists.
We're supposed to want to make money.
And there's nobody faster than the right that says, you're just doing this for money.
But of course we're not just doing this for money.
I can do things, other things for more money.
You know, those avenues close to me because I do this thing.
We're not just in it for money.
But, but money always is a temptation and always offers problems.
It always offers problems because there's a tendency to want to do what you do for money.
When people say, oh, you know, Clavin didn't say that the election was stolen because he was being paid this or he was being paid.
No, I lost audience when I said that.
I knew I would lose audience.
I did it because I was telling you the truth.
On the right, money, the temptation from money is to hate people.
If you hate people, if you project hatred and fear, if you tell people that the left is destroying the country and the country's finished and that you have, you just despair, you might as well despair unless you send me 25 bucks, you will get more money.
If you tell people to hate the people who you oppose, you will make more money.
If you tell them to be afraid, you will make more money.
If you tell them that we can win this and this is a fight we're in, it's going to take time and we're going to do the right thing and we're going to be the good guys in this, you make less money.
The temptation from money is always to make people hate and fear.
It always is on the right specifically, although on the left too in some ways.
So all I want to say is be a little slow.
Be a little slow to hate people because people are getting paid to teach that to you.
But most importantly, be incredibly slow to turn us one against another.
I know it's a temptation.
I don't know what it is about the right that loves doing this, that loves getting right-wingers to fight with each other.
That's not the fight.
We have a range of ideas, a range of feelings, but they all are for freedom.
They're all for America.
They're all for the right that we are trying to protect.
If we're going to fight among ourselves, we're dead.
We're dead.
Stephen should have known this when he started out.
This was the mistake, as I told him, this is a mistake he made.
He should not have taken this big con stuff on air.
He should have just built his own business.
I hope he does, and I hope he succeeds at it.
No one will be happier than me to see Crowder succeed making his own business in another way.
But please, if you are looking at this place and thinking this is the heart, the throbbing heart of evil, you do not know what you're talking about.
This is one of the best things that has happened to this culture, really, since I've been around.
And you know that's since the Civil War.
So let us get back to the fight against the bad guys because they are really bad.
They are really doing bad things.
And we really have to stop them.
And the only way we can do that is through the culture.
And this place has made more inroads into the culture than any place else.
Art As Propaganda00:08:43
And I'm going to leave it there and not come back to it again.
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All right, in the culture segment today, I'm going to talk about the Last of Us, this HBO series, which is based on the video game about a zombie apocalypse.
But I want to start and talk a little bit about something that was on the show.
You know, I always compare the invention of the internet to the invention of the printing press.
And I sometimes talk about the fact that the printing press powered the Reformation, the rise of the Protestant churches, and it put the, by spreading the word around, so you could get, you know, you could get a Bible that you translated out to more people.
And I talk about the fact that the Catholic Church reacted to that in an attempt to hold on to a monopoly on interpretations of the Bible.
And sometimes I feel that people might mistake me for saying that the Catholic Church is the bad guy somehow there.
But no, that's not what I believe.
I believe much greatness has been given to the culture by the Catholic Church.
There's no question about it that it has been overall a force for good in Western civilization.
However, however, even if every word that comes out of the Vatican is the truth, there came a time in the history of humanity when it was time for men to make up their own minds.
It was time for men to be free to discuss and disagree and say, I'm not going to agree with what the Catholic Church says.
And people who have power, no matter who they are, Catholics, Protestant Jews, whoever they are with power, want to keep a hold of that power.
And so as the printing press began to spread information, the Catholic Church reacted.
And one of the ways they reacted was with the famous Council of Trent between 1545 and 1563.
And they talked about how they wanted to reform the Catholic Church to answer some of the accusations of the Protestants.
And one of the things that was happening is the Protestants were taking the art out of churches because they were saying it was idolatrous.
They were being iconoclast and taking the church out.
And so at the Council of Trent, they wanted to reform art that was used in Catholic churches and for Catholics.
And this is one of the things, a statement they said about art from now on.
They said, every superstition shall be removed.
Now remember, these are paintings, but paintings, the normal people couldn't read.
So paintings was where they got their information.
So they were like movies today.
I mean, this is where people got their information from paintings on the wall.
That's how they learned about the gospel.
That's how they heard the gospel stories was not from reading because they couldn't read.
They would see the paintings on the wall.
So they were talking about the paintings.
They said, every superstition shall be removed.
All filthy lucre, that's money, will be abolished.
Finally, all lasciviousness will be avoided in such wise that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust, nor the celebration of the saints, the visitation of relics be by any perverted into revelings and drunkenness, as if festivals are celebrated to the honor of the saints by luxury and wantonness.
It was like the Hayes Office reforming the movies.
The Hayes Office saying, oh, there's not going to be any sex acts.
There's not going to be any bad guys who win.
We're not going to romanticize gangsters anymore.
That was what the Hayes Office did to the American movie industry.
And they said, we're not going to have interracial marriages.
Now, this had a big effect.
The most famous result of this Council of Trent was the painting of coverings of drapery on the nudes in the Sistine Chapel.
The Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, was a scandal because he just painted so many nudes.
There were so many backsides and front sides and all this stuff.
And after it was about a year after Michelangelo died, they started painting, as you see, all these very colorful draperies on people covering up their private parts.
And this was in a reaction to the Council of Trent.
So again, it was like the Hayes office.
They were kind of cleaning stuff up a little bit.
And then there were paintings that were specifically geared to make theological points against the Protestants.
So here is a painting.
I just kind of quickly selected one of the Virgin Mary by Ludo Vico.
And you can see she's kind of floating in air, which is to represent the Immaculate Conception, which the Protestants didn't agree with.
She has two saints with her, St. Francis and St. Jerome, who were both big supporters of the Immaculate Conception idea.
And the idea of Mary as an intercessor, as an almost, not an inhuman figure, but an almost holy figure that the Protestants were dialing back.
So this was an argument they were making.
This was almost, you might say, propaganda.
At the same time, at the same time, these paintings in the Counter-Reformation were absolutely beautiful and they're absolutely compelling.
And so I'm not saying this was bad.
I'm saying it was censorship.
It was propaganda, just like the Hayes office, and just like the Hayes office produced really excellent movies from Casablanca and The Wizard of Oz.
All the great movies were made during the time of the Hayes office.
So the censorship and the propaganda didn't necessarily ruin the arts.
My point is not whether any individual work of art or any individual piece of propaganda is right or wrong, good or bad.
My point is that in an information war, when people are fighting for power, art, words become a weapon.
So let's just take a quick look at The Last of Us.
I played the original game.
I enjoyed it.
I stopped just before the ending because I got tired of shooting zombies, but I liked the game.
It's about a man learning to rediscover his father self by his daughter dies, and so he can't really become a father again, but now he has to transport this young girl across the country.
And his sense of himself as a man and a father comes back to him.
It's very, very touching.
Then I started to play the second game, and I did a video about this because it was infuriating.
It was all about lesbians and transgender people, and it had nothing to do with the original story.
All the men were treated like garbage.
They were killed in angry, hideous ways.
The sex, there were sex scenes suddenly, and the sex scenes, you couldn't even tell whether it was two men and two women.
And the guys who made the thing were saying, if you don't like this sex scene, then you've never had sex.
And I thought, well, you're talking to the wrong guy on that regard because I don't like him.
And I'm still having more sex than you guys in the video game industry are having.
So I just, I was infuriated, not because I care whether anybody is gay or not, because I truly, I know a lot of you get angry at me about it, but I truly don't care.
But because I didn't like them propagandizing and destroying what the original story was about.
Now, there's a video site on YouTube called Heavy Spoilers Clips, and the guy put together a comparison between the game and the movie.
And the game and the show, the HBO show, are very, very similar.
In fact, impressively similar.
So here's a little clip just showing the scene.
This is a scene of Joel, the hero of the story, with his original daughter.
They're sitting together, and she's had her watch repaired.
Honey, this is nice, but I think it's stuck.
It's not.
What?
No, no, no, no.
Oh, ha ha.
Did you?
What?
I don't hear anything.
Where did you get the money for this?
Where did you get the money for this?
Drugs.
I sell hardcore drugs.
Drugs.
I sell hardcore drugs.
That's better when I do.
So it's very, very close.
But there's one big difference.
One big difference.
In the game, the daughter is white.
In the show, the daughter is mixed race, probably half black, half white, because you're no longer allowed to have two white people get married.
So again, I think I actually think interracial marriage is a good thing.
I'm in one.
My wife is an English-Irish mutt, and I am Ashkenazi Jewish, so it's a mixed-race marriage.
Cultural Clash in Media00:11:58
And I think that's one of the wonderful things about America, that you don't have to have Romeo and Juliet where people kill each other.
You can just have the marriage.
Great.
But I'm just pointing out that everywhere you look now, everywhere you look, a certain group of people are trying to push propaganda on you to maintain the power that they feel is under threat from the internet, from the spread of information.
And it is under threat because the time has come.
Just like in the Reformation, whether the Catholics were right or wrong on any given point, the time had come for people to make up their own minds.
The time had come for people to think freely, to live freely, to make mistakes freely, to lose their faith freely.
All those things were part of God's plan in that moment in time.
And this moment of time, that has come again.
It is now time for every man, every person, to be able to build the life that he wants and have the thoughts that he want and express the ideas that he want.
And the people who want to stop that, what I call the clericy, this word from Coleridge, meaning the people, the opinion makers, the culture makers, the power makers, want it to stop.
And every single word that we see and every single work of art that we see has to be propaganda, has to push a certain idea.
Now, I don't like the idea they're pushing because they say that what they tell us is that it's about tolerance.
But is it?
At the Sundance Film Festival, an very powerful indie film festival, before you can buy a ticket online now, you now have to sign on to a statement saying that you commit to being inclusive and respectful of people of every race, ethnicity, gender, identity, expression, disability, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, age, physical appearance and body size, language spoken, and immigration or economic status by refraining from demeaning, discriminatory, or harassing behavior or speech.
So you cannot have an opinion.
And if you do, if you do, about, for instance, sexuality or whether somebody should be obese or not, if you do have an opinion, that will be reported to the safety and belonging team.
That doesn't sound too Orwellian, does it?
So you can't even get into the show if you don't sign on.
And if you think that they're not being small-minded, the problem is they are, because they're defending power, not tolerance, they're defending power, not tolerance, they're not being broad-minded at all.
They're not being open-minded at all.
You know, when religious people object to homosexuality, it's not because, oh, it's in the Bible, so I have to object to it.
It's because religious, certain religions have an entirely different way of looking at the body.
That's an argument that you can make.
Those are things that you can believe.
But now, if you're a cake baker in Colorado and you've refused to celebrate, not just to tolerate, but if you refuse to celebrate a gay wedding, they spend their time, a lot of their time, trying to destroy you.
Just the other day, Philadelphia Flyers, the hockey team, Ivan Provorov, his name is.
He was a defenseman.
I don't follow hockey, but they had, for some reason, they had the Gay Pride Night, and they wanted him to wear a rainbow jersey, and he said no, because he's Russian Orthodox.
And when they asked him about it, here's what he said.
I respect everybody, and I respect everybody's choices.
My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion.
That's all I'm going to say.
How do you religious beliefs?
Any, like I said, that's all I'm going to comment on that.
If you have any hockey questions, I would answer those.
If I clarify your religion, Russian Orthodox.
All right, so he respects everybody, but he also respects himself and his religion.
And so that's true inclusion.
That's true inclusion.
He's not celebrating gay homosexuality because he thinks it's wrong, and he thinks it's wrong because the Russian Orthodox religion has an entirely different approach to the body.
It's an entire philosophy.
You have to be able to live it out.
That's what freedom of religion is.
Here is a response from a Canadian news anchor, Sid, I don't know how to pronounce his name, Sexiero.
Here's his response to this when he says that's not right because hockey is for everyone, so it's not for this guy.
I just think the NHL has to do something here.
This is not good enough.
This is not good enough.
Hockey is for everyone, dot, dot, dot.
Unless you don't agree with gay rights is not the phrasing of this.
You're either in this or you're not.
And one last point.
Nothing scares me more than any human being who says, I'm not doing this because of my religious beliefs.
Because when you've looked at people's lives, you normally say that publicly, you'd throw up at what you saw.
You would throw up at what you saw.
And I have seen that a million times in a lot of different ways.
So don't give me that.
With respect.
Don't give me that because no one's perfect.
All right?
Don't feed me the religious beliefs lying.
And all of a sudden the NHL is going to back off this.
The National Hockey League today needs to find that organization a million dollars and reevaluate how they support gay rights.
That's an amazing intolerance.
And here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
I'm not saying that didacticism or censorship destroys or controlling what a work of art says destroys the work of art.
I'm saying that intolerance destroys a society.
Intolerance to protect power destroys a society.
And this is intolerance.
It doesn't bother me that there are leftist movies.
It has never bothered me that there are leftist movies.
It bothers me that there are no right-wing movies.
And if there is a right-wing movie, the entire world falls down on top of it unless it's from somebody as powerful as Clint Eastwood.
And then they just ignore it.
If it's American Sniper and it's a huge hit, they just ignore the fact that it has undermined their entire argument.
This is the battleground.
The battleground is information.
The battleground is information because of the internet and the weapons are art and news and lies, right?
And the goal, from our point of view, from my point of view, is human liberty.
The goal is not to silence the left.
The goal is not to silence the left.
It is to keep the right from being silenced, which is what is happening.
The war is being waged all around us.
And every single thing that you see, every single thing that you see, there's no reason not to hear from the left if, if you're allowed to speak your mind on the right.
And that's the problem we have now.
It's not that what they're saying, it's what they're not letting anybody else say.
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So this is a global fight, by the way.
It's at least global insofar as the West is certainly throughout the West, because in the East they don't really have the problem of letting people speak to begin with.
But our friends are in Davos.
We know that we love the folks in Davos who are always formulating plans for our betterment and to bring in, bring us to utopia by destroying us.
And this thing about misinformation, right, which is basically information that goes against the church, the church of leftism.
If it goes against the church of leftism, it's misinformation.
So they had a panel on misinformation.
I just have to mention this quickly because it cracked me up.
And the host of the panel, the guy who's moderating the panel, is Brian Stelter.
They needed an expert on misinformation, so they brought in Ms. Brian Stelter.
And he's talking to A.G. Solzenberger, the guy who turned the New York Times into the cesspool it is, or at least helped to do it.
And he asks him about misinformation.
This is what Sulzberger says.
Disinformation and the broader set of misinformation, conspiracy, propaganda, clickbait, you know, the broader mix of bad information that's corrupting the information ecosystem.
What it attacks is trust.
And once you see trust decline, what you then see is societies start to fracture.
And so you see people fracture along tribal lines.
And that immediately undermines pluralism.
And the undermining of pluralism is probably the most dangerous thing that can happen to a democracy.
So I really, I think if you're spending this week thinking about the health of democracies and democratic erosion, I think it's really important to work your way back up to where this starts.
He never asks the question whether he should be trusted or not.
Who has damaged the trust?
Is it the people who are disagreeing with him?
Even people who are putting forward phony conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories that don't pan out.
Are they the ones who have violated our trust?
Isn't he the guy who runs the newspaper that wrote the funny, phony Russian collusion story for like two and a half years or whatever it was, and then gave themselves Pulitzer Prizes to celebrate all the lies?
These are the guys who buried the story about Joe Biden throwing a woman against the wall and sticking his finger up between her legs.
They buried that story, but they played the completely unsubstantiated stories about Brett Kavanaugh for weeks on end.
They ran story saying by women saying, well, I was once assaulted, so Kavanaugh must be guilty.
I mean, genuinely saying that.
Who's destroying trust?
The prime minister of New Zealand just announced she's not running.
She's a darling of the left.
The New York Times says, oh, you know, she was so popular because she kept New Zealand open during COVID.
She did not.
She locked it down.
They're lying about her because she was a gun snatcher and a person who wanted to censor, went to the UN and said, we need to censor misinformation.
She's basically the authoritarian princess whom they love.
She's leaving because when she took away people's guns, crime in this virtually crimeless society of New Zealand skyrocketed.
It's on the climb.
And so she's losing votes and the economy is doing badly because of her lockdowns.
She's losing votes to a center-right party.
And so they're lying.
The New York Times is lying about her.
Who is violating their trust?
They're not trustworthy.
They are not trustworthy.
We've seen it again and again.
The Twitter files, which I told you, one of the most important stories because it's a story about information.
It's a story about this counter-reformation moment when the church of leftism is telling us what we can and cannot say, is telling us what every work of art must look like.
It's telling us what race every character must be.
It's in this moment, right, that that Twitter story is speaking into this moment about how bad it is, how the collusion between the FBI and the information gatherers is so deep, the collusion between the state and the press and academia, and they call themselves the resistance.
The people they're resisting are you.
The thing that they're resisting is the truth.
So as we fight this war, the enemy, I think, the main, our main opponent is cultural Marxism.
It's a really interesting and deep subject, and we have a great report on it by Catherine Gorka.
Catherine served at the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration.
She most recently was the director for civil society and the American Dialogue at the Heritage Foundation.
And she's the co-author of this very thorough report, the Heritage Foundation special report called How Cultural Marxism Threatens the United States and How Americans Can Fight It.
Cultural Marxism's Intellectual Drivers00:14:38
Catherine, it's good to have you on.
Hey, it is so good to be here.
Well, this is a terrifying report, but I think before we get to the terrifying part, I want you to explain what cultural Marxism is, why it's cultural, and why it's Marxism, and what makes it Marxism.
Okay, all super important questions and questions that we also thought were important to answer, and that's part of what we did in the paper.
So Marxism, you know, and it is something that's really hotly debated.
Is this Marxism or not?
But I think it is in the sense that it really believes it has to tear down what's here.
It has to tear down the existing society in order for it to survive.
And I think because of the way it sees the world as oppressor and oppressed, those are fundamentally Marxists.
Now, a lot of people will say, but this isn't Marxism because it doesn't focus on the economic element of life.
No, that's why we call it cultural Marxism.
And this is something that came about through the thinking of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci.
He saw in the 1930s that the workers' revolts that Marx had predicted were not happening in the industrialized societies of the West.
They weren't happening in the United States.
I mean, yes, communism got a foothold here, but it never really took off, right?
And Gramsci saw this in the United States, in Italy, in France, in Germany.
And he realized that they are not going to bring about Marxism or communism through a frontal assault of the worker on the middle class.
No, we had to have a different strategy.
And the strategy was much more subtle.
We have to take over the institutions and change the thinking through the institutions.
So, you know, in a sense, largely taking over the cultural institutions, the culture, the writing, the literature, the art, Hollywood, educational institutions.
And you really saw that transformation here in about 1960 was sort of a pivotal moment with the emergence of the new left.
And that's when there was this just tremendous explosion of, you know, Marxism, the new Marxism amongst youth and intellectuals.
And it kind of moved away from the worker and moved onto the campus.
So that's kind of what we're writing about.
So, you know, you're talking about what's often called the long march through the institutions.
And this is something that I've always wondered about.
How intentional was this?
I mean, I know that philosophers talked about the need for it and Marxists talk about the need for it, but was there like a meeting somewhere where they also were all going into the universities?
Or was that just a kind of natural place for them to go?
That is such an interesting question.
And I'm not sure that I can answer it definitively, but what I will say, I mean, what Mike and I found, and it was so interesting to dig into this, right, was to find sort of pivotal moments that kind of helped further it along.
So I'm going to say I think it was probably a little bit of both.
I think there was some discussion somewhere amongst people.
Yes, this is going to work.
But then also they saw it happening.
So, you know, one of the things that I think is really interesting there is that there's a moment in 1960 when the Columbia sociologist C. Wright Mills kind of observed, you know, he didn't plan this, but he observed the revolutionary movements around the world seem to be happening among the young intelligentsia.
So therefore, this is the new left.
Boom.
That kind of, you know, that gained traction because people already saw this.
But I think it's really interesting when you think about it.
Just the year before, Harvard University invited the young Fidel Castro to come and give a talk.
So Fidel, you know, a 32-year-old law student at that point had just, you know, brought about his own revolution in Cuba.
You know, I'm sorry, I just have to ask, what the heck were they thinking to invite him to Harvard?
But they did.
And, you know, that too sort of sparked.
And so there were so many factors, I think, that led into this.
So I'm going to say, I think in some way, I think it was probably a combination of some planning, some thought, but also some kind of spontaneous, this thing just started gaining speed.
And what exactly is the intention?
I mean, when we talk about economic Marxism, we know that the intention is kind of the workers, you know, own their own means of production and that everybody's sort of equal.
There's no economic injustice.
What is the purpose of cultural Marxism?
Well, I think it's, first of all, I think it's constantly evolving and changing.
I do think every individual Marxist has their own vision of their utopian future.
I mean, let's just take one example, and that would be sort of Black Lives Matter.
I mean, they are a perfect manifestation of this cultural Marxism, and they've told us what they want.
They want the traditional family destroyed.
They want children brought up in community.
They want basically a reverse power structure.
They want, you know, they want to be in power.
You know, or conversely, take another one, you know, the critical race theorists.
What do they want?
They want to basically do away with the United States as we know it.
I think they'd happily see the Constitution go by the wayside.
And I think this is what's really interesting about Marxism at all is the very idea that people think they're going to reach some kind of utopian future.
Whereas those of us who bother to look at history, we know where Marxism goes.
And I can guarantee you, all those people that are advocating for cultural Marxism, they will be the first ones to have their heads chopped off.
Well, why are they so effective?
I mean, let's start with schools and the academies and all this.
Why is it so, how is it possible, for instance, that all of a sudden, in what seems like 10 minutes, people suddenly believe that a man can turn into a woman?
I don't believe that anybody actually thinks that's true.
But why are they so effective at selling their bill of goods?
Why does critical race theory and anti-family information, anti-American information, why does that catch on so quickly?
Well, I don't think it does catch on quickly.
I think a part of what's happening is, and I think there are many, many factors here.
It's intellectuals driving this.
It's, you know, I think it's the Soviet Union and China feeding us with disinformation, manipulating, you know, tensions in the culture.
But I will say this.
I will point to what I think is one of the really significant factors here, and it's our foundations, our big philanthropies.
So this was another paper that Mike and I did right after we did this one.
And it was really an eye-opener for me.
They have been pumping millions, millions, tens of millions of dollars into this for years now.
And I think it's, you know, money talks.
I think it's really, they've been laying the groundwork.
They, they fund, you know, and it's, it's not just the big foundations, but let's talk about some of the NGOs as well.
But I mean, you know, Planned Parenthood with what they fund and Southern Poverty Law Center with what they fund.
It all kind of feeds into this sort of same anti-American narrative.
It is interesting as my wife and I look at places to give money.
It's very, very hard to find a charity that's not woke and is not promoting a lot of these ideas.
What about big business?
When you think about Marxism, you think about, you know, big business is the enemy, but now it seems that to some degree at least, the corporate world is on board with critical race theory and on board with gender theory and all the other culturally Marxist theories.
Why is that?
This to me is one of the biggest mysteries.
You know, you think they of anybody would understand, you know, how effective our free market system is in not just in allocating resources, but in innovating, in leading people to prosperity and, you know, and just in so many things that it really kind of baffles me.
And all I can say is I guess people get caught up in the bandwagon.
You know, that this is the woke moment.
And honestly, it truly, truly baffles me that our corporations above all have gone in this direction.
And I truly, I don't understand it.
I think they're insane and they're foolish.
And, you know, I think if anything, it's, you know, partly we have to blame the universities.
You know, this stuff has been seeping into the universities for a long time now.
And you think that, you know, every CEO went to an American university.
What were they being taught?
So I think that's part of the problem too.
You know, so if you step back now and you say, where are we?
If we want to fight back about this, which is the next question I'm going to ask you.
But before I get to that, what's the battlefield look like now?
Are we completely routed or is it 50-50 or where do you think we are?
Oh, no, we are so outnumbered.
Okay.
Battlefield's a little bit scary, but I will say this.
You know, when I think about in the long term, when I think about like it's going to be sort of the homeschooled kids up against the public school kids, I put all my money on the homeschooled kids, right?
So I say, thank God for homeschooling.
Thank God for classical education.
There are still American youth who are being educated with the right ideas, right?
And I think, you know, I'm going to put my faith in them.
And, you know, I think the other thing I have to say is the parent of two kids in their 20s.
It's been really interesting to see sort of their evolution.
I think in a lot of ways, COVID was good for us because I think it showed a lot of kids what it looks like when the government takes control of your life.
And they hated it.
You know, it was irrational.
It was controlling.
It was unjust.
They did not like that feeling that their lives were not in their own hands.
So, you know, maybe in the long run, that's going to be the thing that saves us.
Do you think it's possible to take the institutions back or do we have to start to build new?
You know, you talk about homeschooling, but and I'm very, very in favor of homeschooling, but it's sort of saying the public schools are a lost cause.
Do you think that there's any chance of winning back the Yale and Harvard or do you have to start again?
I think, again, that's a very, very important question.
I'll tell you where I put my hope is in the 100,000 plus members of Moms for Liberty and other organizations like that, all the parents that are now really putting themselves out there to fight for their children in K through 12 education.
What I think is going to happen is you've got a whole generation now of parents that have really put themselves on the line fighting for their kids.
And I think as their kids go to college, you're going to start to see the fight happening there.
I don't think it happened in my generation.
You know, we blithely sent our kids off to the schools that we respected when we were young.
I think now we know better.
But I think it's sort of this next generation.
And the only other thing I'll say is I do think, I mean, again, this is a tiny movement, but I am encouraged because I increasingly hear of colleges and universities that are fighting back.
So somebody just told me about Southern Wesleyan University, where they've got a new president who said, you know, woke comes here to die.
He is really taking a stand.
And you do have a handful of those.
But boy, I tell you, it is going to be the fight of our generation.
Interesting.
You know, one thing, I've only got like about a minute left, but a lot of people on the right talk about localism.
The localism is the answer.
We've got to start fighting on the local level.
We've got to stop worrying about what's happening at Davos and start concentrating on our communities.
You sort of recommend that in this report.
What exactly does that look like in everyday life?
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
I mean, it means everything from volunteering to be an election officer to running for a local office to supporting your local candidates, getting out and fighting for your local candidates, getting involved in your local citizen organizations.
I 100% agree that it's going to happen.
The change is going to happen locally.
So you're talking about political action.
What about cultural action?
I mean, I think that's a tougher one because I still think most of the culture is shaped out there somewhere.
It's in Hollywood.
I mean, I know this is a topic you care passionately about.
Our wealthy conservatives have to start funding movies and TV shows to push back against Hollywood.
So I think on the cultural level, I see that as that takes big money.
It takes big money.
Yeah.
Catherine Gorka, really nice talking to you.
The report is from the Heritage Foundation on Cultural Marxism.
As I say, it's not comforting, but it's interesting.
And I think we have to know it if we're going to fight back.
Thanks very much for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
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So I want to talk about The Last of Us, this new HBO series.
Got absolutely swooning reviews from both the critics and actual human beings.
This is a naughty dog PlayStation game back in 2013.
And as I say, I played it almost, I played it to the last scene, and then I just got tired of shooting.
But I got very annoyed at the sequel, which was filled with sexual deviance for no reason.
And basically, it was so preachy because it was in conflict with the themes of the original show, which was about manhood and fatherhood.
And it just seemed angry and stupid.
A lot of people hated it.
I'm sure they made money off it, but still.
So let me just give you a quick review up top because there's a lot of just other issues that I like to talk about about it because I'm interested in this genre.
I'm interested in the genre of zombie movies, first of all, but I'm also interested in the genre of movies that are made from games.
There are very few good ones for reasons I'll talk about.
But this is good.
I just saw, obviously, only the first episode is available.
It's written by Craig Mason, who wrote Chernobyl, which is unbelievably great, but also kind of comical because Mason is a lefty who didn't realize that Chernobyl is a wild condemnation of centralized government and Soviet socialism.
He didn't realize it until we started saying it.
Then he said, no, it's not.
No, it is, but not, but it was.
But he's a good writer.
And the first episode stuck very close to the game and it was fun and didn't fall into some of the real problems of video game stories.
The lead is a guy from Chile, oddly enough, named Pedro Pascal.
He does a great American accent, but he was just perfect.
I mean, he was like that.
He was like the guy from the game came to life.
He really was terrific.
Ellie, the little girl he cares for, that the story is about, is played by Bella Ramsey, who you will recognize from Game of Thrones.
She was the girl in armor.
I can't remember her name offhand.
Now, on the history of video games that I did last week, personal history of video games, I mentioned the tension between gameplay and storytelling.
Gameplay is fun when it's fast and kind of repetitive.
It's tight, where storytelling is more varied.
So a thrilling climax to a good story can be a conversation.
It can be a chase scene.
It can be a kiss.
It can be any kind of conversation, a million different kinds of conversation.
It can be a philosophical realization.
These are all ways that stories can climax.
The wonderful, wonderful Alfred Hitchcock movie Notorious ends with a walk down a flight of stairs.
It's one of the greatest scenes in all of movies.
So a story can have a million kinds of climaxes.
But in games, the climax is almost always going to be a fight.
In most video games, in most popular platform video games, the story is going to be a fight, which is limiting story-wise.
It generally means, not all the time, but it generally means that story video game storytelling is stuck in the form of an action movie.
Plot development, action, plot development, car chase, plot development, action, everything resolving itself through action.
And that can be great.
I love action movies.
I watch them all the time.
They don't obviously achieve the level of art most of the time.
Most of the time they're just kind of fun and brainless.
And being a fun, brainless kind of person, I enjoy them.
But they can be elevated to really good stuff like The Matrix or Die Hard, which are both action movies.
If the characters are well drawn, if the idea is really original, if the stakes are high, and if the action, and this is the most important one, is varied and creative.
So if you remember The Matrix, it had wonderfully new special effects, the slow-motion action.
The action meant something.
The fact that people could do certain things had really resonant meaning.
As one of, I think, one of the best prose action writers in the country, I know that if you can make action have emotional resonance, it's just much better than just a lot of punching and hitting.
And Die Hard the same way.
Die Hard Way is one of the greatest action sequences I've ever seen, the one that ends with him jumping off the building with the fire hose, or at least that's in the middle of it.
It's just an amazing, amazing sequence of varied action.
That's going to be really spectacular.
But most video games haven't risen to that level.
Probably because of the technology.
It's just easier to do the same things over and over again.
But Gears of War is one I remember that has really good, varied action, really interesting.
The Hitman games turn the action into a puzzle, and that's interesting.
Assassin's Creed games are kind of a blend of puzzle and action.
So it can be done, but most of the time, it is just repetitive.
Like even, you know, the guy who did Last of Us, Neil Druckman, he was the guy who created or co-created the game at Naughty Dog.
He also did one of my favorite game series, Uncharted.
And one of the things I used to hate about Uncharted is it's famous for these endless gun battles.
It's on and on and on.
I always said it at the lowest level, not just because I got so bored of the gunfights.
But that happens a lot in video games, that the action is kind of repetitive, and that plays over into the movies, and the movies become repetitive and silly and not very interesting.
In zombie stories, there is a lot of zombie shooting, a lot of shooting zombies.
And that was true in the game The Last of Us as well.
Now, there's one other thing I should say before I talk more about it.
I don't like zombie movies.
The only zombie movie I ever liked was The Night of the Living Dead.
Their popularity, I think, reflects something in our culture that is the rise of materialism.
And if you take materialism to its further level, where all ideas ultimately go, we're just food.
And so why shouldn't we have zombies?
Why shouldn't we eat each other?
If you haven't got a soul, what's the problem with my eating you if I happen to be hungry?
So zombie movies are the ultimate horror movie about materialism.
And so that's purely personal, that I find them very repetitive, right?
And I find them unpleasant.
I watched the opening of The Walking Dead when it first came out.
I watched the first episode of The Walking Dead, and I thought, wow, that is really well written, really well plotted.
I am never watching that again.
Why?
Because I watched TV at night most of the time.
I didn't want to go to bed after watching a guy who'd been half-eaten crawl across the grass to eat somebody else.
I just thought, that's not the image I want to take to bed with me.
So I just, you know, there are other great things to watch, so I did.
But also, there's a kind of sameness to zombie stories in the same way there's a sameness to all superhero stories.
And you can say that there's a sameness to all stories, right?
All stories follow certain kinds of rules.
But it's a question of degree.
Pick up an anthology of vampire stories.
There's a great one called The Dracula Book of Vampire Stories.
By the third one, you just get tired of like, yeah, the beautiful girl is losing energy and what's the matter with her and she's pale and what are those two marks on her neck?
It's just the same kind of thing over and over again.
One of my, to just show you what I mean, but also to sort of talk more about The Last of Us, one of my favorite scenes in all scary movies, one of the scariest movies I ever saw is The Night of the Living Dead, made for a dime.
You know, it's like has kind of second-rate actors in it.
It's all very, very much, you know, it's on the cheap.
It's on the arm.
But the opening sequence is a brother and sister go to visit their mother's grave.
And in the background, who don't know anything is wrong with the world.
It's a zombie apocalypse, but they don't know it yet.
In the background, there's a guy, a spooky-looking guy, walking around.
Here's the scene.
Well, you used to really be scared here.
Johnny.
You're still afraid.
Stop it now.
I mean it.
They're coming to get you, Barbara.
Stop it.
You're ignorant.
They're coming for you, Barbara.
Stop it.
You're acting like a child.
They're coming for you.
Look, there comes one of them now.
He'll hear you.
Here he comes now.
I'm getting out of here.
So he's really coming together, but it's so good that he's just wandering around in the back, just this shambling character, and the whole world is coming to an end.
That has become a standard in zombie apocalypse stories.
They always love that moment when something happens in the background because we know the world is coming to an end.
We bought our ticket because that's what we came to see.
And something goes, something just is a little off in the background.
And this one, I have to say, The Last of Us, they do this scene really great.
There is a woman who is an old woman that the young girl goes to see in the beginning, and she is deaf and paralyzed and just sitting in a wheelchair staring.
And here's the scene.
I'll keep talking because there's no dialogue in it, but go ahead.
She's completely deaf.
She's sitting in the background, out of focus, like in Night of the Living Dead.
The character that is scaring you is out of focus, which is scary in itself, by the way.
The young girl gets up and she's looking around and she's kind of a smart girl.
So she starts to first she looks at the lady in the wheelchair and we get to see she is frozen solid.
She is just catatonic, right?
She cannot move.
She cannot talk.
She cannot hear.
She is gone.
And the girl starts looking at the movies.
Spirit there.
And she's taking one down.
And in the background, the old lady starts to twitch.
And that was a good scare.
That was, I mean, because it's not a jump scare.
I hate jump scares.
They're cheap.
She starts to twitch and her mouth opens and she's like, no, she's tearing into a zombie.
That's scary stuff.
It's really good.
And it's really, that's, you know, it takes a lot.
It's not easy.
I have been in searches for directors for scary movies.
It's not easy to scare people.
So this is a story, an Odyssey story.
It's a story of a journey that has to be taken.
And that gives a fresh feeling to the story.
They have a reason to move.
I don't want to give too much away.
Probably most of you who are going to watch it already know the story, but still, I don't want to give too much away.
But Joel, the hero who is grieving, his lost daughter has to take a young girl on a trip.
And the story from the game is strong.
I get really tired of the feminism.
I really do.
Again, and it's not because, well, it is sort of.
It's because it's so unrealistic and it's so in your face and it's so preachy.
You know, there's a group of revolutionaries because the world has become locked down and they're called the Fireflies.
And they're all these really tough women, all the soldiers of these tough women.
And I just don't buy it.
Who's watching action movies?
Who's playing video games?
I know there are girls who do, but it's mostly guys.
Why can't guys have stories where they rescue women from danger?
It is good to train men to imagine rescuing women from danger because women are going to need them one day and you want guys who want to do that.
So here's a scene of the fireflies.
They're all girls.
The team in place at Southeast 3.
I held them back.
I have some questions.
Okay.
We've been blowing up meaningless Fedra targets spread out all over the QZ for two weeks.
We've already lost four people and we're.
What's the point of this?
Is that your question?
That's one of them.
My answer is to follow fing orders.
And why do you have some random girl locked in a room and the guys you have guarding her won't tell me shit?
Our people are asking what's going on and I don't know what to tell them.
Tell them to follow fing orders.
You two, go to Southeast three, now.
Kim.
Marlene, we are in a war against a military dictatorship to restore democracy and freedom.
Does that sound about right?
Yes.
Are we winning?
Are we beating Fedra here?
Are the Fireflies being Fedra anywhere?
Rebellion takes time.
Be five or 20 years and you get nowhere.
You're not a rebellion.
Just spray paint.
So, you know, when Matt Walsh says there shouldn't be women announcers in football, and he's being terribly small-minded and bigoted, and I completely agree with him.
And I just don't think, and I also likewise think that I get very tired of women warriors in action films.
Action films are mostly for guys, but they should really be about guys.
They should put people who are going to really be there.
If there's a revolutionary force, it's going to be a bunch of guys.
And I just don't like being preached to, and I don't like being preached to something that's not real.
Anyway, the story, I remember the rest of the story.
It's fun, it's intense, it's an interesting.
People overrate how great the story is.
It's not a great story, but it is a good, solid story.
And for video games, it's a really top-notch story.
The relationship between Ellie, the girl, and Joel is at the center of it.
Here's a really good scene where Ellie finds a radio that uses song from different decades as codes, but she can't figure out what the 80s songs, what the code mean in the code, and she weasels it out of him.
Here's that scene.
You guys go out there a lot?
I guess.
When was the last time?
Maybe a year.
What's it matter?
But you know where to go.
So we're going to be okay?
Yeah.
So what's the deal with you anyway?
You some kind of bigwig's daughter or something?
Something like that.
Oh, the radio came on when you were sleeping.
What?
What was the song?
They kept saying, like, wake me up before you go-go.
Gotcha.
80s means trouble.
It's a good scene.
It's charming.
charming.
It plays back to the original scene with his daughter and the watch that we played before.
It's a father trying to break out of a shell of grief.
If you love the game, you're going to love the movie.
I think this love this show.
Funny Person Dilemma00:06:29
It's well done, well acted, silly feminist propaganda, but it's the small-minded counter-reformation world we are in.
And I can't wait for the lesbian sequel to ruin the whole thing.
But enjoy it while you can.
It looks like it's going to be really good.
So if you are not a subscriber to Daily Wire, Daily Wire Plus, it's almost like walking on a wire without a net because when the wire falls, as indeed it must, as all things fall in the end and you are plunged into the Clavenless Week, you are missing this extra 10 minutes of member block in which we will talk about drag queens and you just hit the clavenless, eternal clavenless week,
all the earlier.
However, just to show you that we care about you even when you don't subscribe, we will solve all your problems first with the mailbag.
600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth.
Yeah!
Alvin Gore.
Losing elections just drives these guys crazy.
All right, from Bradley, dear Clavin, the only man funnier than the lunatics on libs of TikTok, I am trying to decide whether or not to pursue this girl romantically before I move away for school.
We have been exceptionally good friends for nearly three years now, and recently we both have realized that all our mutual friends and our parents, to a slight extent, have been trying to match us together.
In a brief conversation about it, we kind of laughed it off and agreed it wouldn't make sense for the main reason that I would be moving away relatively soon, about eight months in the future.
However, since that conversation, I haven't been able to stop thinking that maybe I should pursue her.
She is a lovely, incredibly feminine and Christian woman who exudes life and joy everywhere she goes.
Many of the qualities I have found to be lacking in other girls I find her to have in spades, a conservative worldview, an incredibly tender heart, a deep yearning to be a mother.
The list goes on.
I've known her long enough to know that if I were to date her for a short period, I'm confident I would know if she was the one for me to marry or not.
It would not take years of dating.
The risk in pursuing her now is potentially damaging a truly meaningful friendship with her and her family as well.
So Mr. Clavin, the one who truly deserves the title of lowercase G, lowercase K, God King of the Daily Wire, any advice or guidance is very much appreciated.
Let me ask you a question, Bradley.
Are you out of your mind?
Are you crazy?
Wait, let me just read this again.
She's lovely, incredibly feminine, and Christian woman who exudes life and joy everywhere she goes, tender heart, a deep yearning to be a mother.
What's wrong with you?
Of course you should pursue her.
Do I have to do everything for you?
I mean, of course.
What are you thinking?
What do you think?
And you're her friend.
You know, you're going to sit around and go, well, what if this?
What if that?
You're right.
All those things could happen.
It could ruin your relationship.
It could ruin your relationship with her family.
It could end your friendship.
But dude, the game is worth the candle.
Yes, pursue her.
Go after her.
You know, find out if you want to marry her.
If you want to marry her, then marry her.
Yeah, she sounds great.
She sounds great.
If you don't, guess what?
Somebody else will.
So go ahead now.
But don't even listen to the rest of the mailbag.
Go ahead.
Call her up.
I like the easy questions.
From Julia, I have a dating question for you and would love your male wisdom.
My mother has joked with me to be less myself, less myself early on with dating and has made me wonder if maybe I'm a little too transparent early on or if I show my personality too much on first, second dates.
I think I have a good sense of humor, but also these days it doesn't seem like guys even care about that anyway.
And maybe I come off as too much.
Is there any merit from your perspective in being yourself a little less and playing the game early on?
Thanks so much.
Sincerely, clearly not my mother's favorite job.
No, I mean, I think there is something to think about here, but no, it's not a good thing to not show a guy yourself because if he falls in love with somebody else, it's not going to work out, right?
It's going to go bad because you weren't honest with him.
You know, he's going to be blindsided and he's going to be unhappy with it.
And you are, I'm sure you sound from your letter lovable.
I'm sure you are lovable.
But there is something to think about.
It's not you.
If you meet a guy who doesn't want to laugh and you're a funny person, then that's not the right guy.
You know, you want a guy who wants a funny person, if that's who you are.
You know, if it's important to you that you are witty and have a take on life, you want somebody who's charmed by that and delighted by it.
And I'm sure that somebody exists, and I'm sure probably multiple somebodies like that exist.
But you do want to ask yourself if something, if a mechanism is happening that is maybe not positive for you if your dating life is not going well.
Let me suggest a possible mechanism.
Let's say you feel that you don't like yourself, if you feel that you are not a good deal, and therefore you're kind of hiding yourself from a guy, but at the same time, you're getting angry at him for the fact that you feel like you have to hide yourself.
And then it's possible that some of your jokes are aggressive or unkind or unmanning, you know, or undercutting him, because that's not the kind of humor that anybody likes.
They like when you do it to somebody else, but nobody wants to be with a girl who cuts the rug out from under him with her sense of humor.
You want to laugh.
My wife is one of the very few people who can make me laugh on command, essentially.
But she doesn't do it by tearing me apart.
So I do have to wonder if your own sense of self is making you hide yourself and then making you angry at the guy because you're assuming he's not going to like you because you don't like you.
So if the problem is that you don't like you, that may be more of the problem than the fact that you're showing yourself, because then your humor can be unkind and retaliatory, and maybe that chases, and that definitely would chase guys away.
So that's the problem you want to solve almost always in dating, almost always in dating, if you're having a hard time, the problem you want to solve is liking yourself because you want to be a person that you like and then other people will like you as well.
And I'm sure, and it's not that hard to do, especially, you're not a villain, you're probably a lovely, sweet person.
So maybe find out why you don't like yourself.
And if that takes help, get help.
From Caleb, I love your video game segment this week and appreciated your perspective that it's how we choose to experience art that determines edification.
Best Writer's Puzzle Games00:03:47
You mentioned, though, that you thought most in-game stories were repetitive and simplified.
I was curious if there was any franchise you found interesting.
The Resident Evil series had a great deal of big pharma vibes to it and even had a full series of novels written to go with it.
As a larger question, is it difficult to enjoy stories as an older person when everything reminds you of something you've read before?
That's actually an interesting question.
You know, I've read so much that I do recognize patterns very quickly.
I do know in a story, because I do it for a living.
For instance, after watching five episodes of Lost, I turned to my wife and said, they can't get out of this in an honest way.
I'm not watching anymore.
And I was right.
They couldn't get out of it in an honest way.
I just knew that they had paid too heavy a price for their special effects.
By special effects, I mean, oh, we just found a door in the middle of the jungle.
You can do that once.
You do it seven times in one episode.
You're not going to be able to explain it, except if it's a dream or you're dead, which was really the story of loss that they didn't want to tell.
So yeah, I get bored very quickly.
So when I've seen things before, when I figure out what's going on, I no longer want to watch.
Video games are not that complex story-wise.
That's why the ones that I like are the puzzle ones that are more suggestive and haunting and kind of don't really tell you what the story is about all the way and really have to be unfolded.
But also something else happened.
In the period, almost always, the first period that an art form starts out in is the most creative because there's things that haven't been done before.
There's so many things that haven't been done before.
So, you know, when English drama really took off in Elizabethan England, that was its great moment.
It doesn't mean that it didn't have great moments again, but that early time when no one's done anything before, when you're inventing the form essentially, the novel form, you know, which comes in, you know, kind of late in the 18th century, you know, just so many things to do with the novel.
By the time you get to Ulysses, there's not that much left to do with it, and so it dies off for a while and maybe goes into other forms.
So that was what happened with video games because no one had done it before.
It was so creative in the early days.
Myst and Diablo and Realms of the Haunted, everything was just a new, powerful game.
And so the form itself has gotten tired out and has reached the end of its first really productive, really creative period.
But that doesn't mean there won't be more productive periods ahead and more creative periods ahead.
And it doesn't mean that in even an unproductive period, great work won't be done.
That's the thing.
There can always be, as I constantly say, the best writer of the last generation was Tom Stoppard, a playwright.
And there's a form that has been done to death and has been dead forever.
But still, Stoppard is the best writer going in his time.
And so that comes back.
You know, yeah, I've seen a lot of stuff.
I don't have to experience ugliness anymore if I don't want to.
I don't have to experience things that just make your nerves jangle if I don't want to, unless it's really well done, because I've seen it all before.
So that's kind of a relief.
But on the other hand, when something really reaches me, when something touches me, it touches me more deeply than anything ever has before because there's all those other things that have gone into it.
And because as you grow older, if you pay attention, you become a deeper person.
There's more places for a story to go inside you and to move inside you.
And it's really a wonderful experience.
You get, you know, with old age, with aging, the thing is you lose stuff, but you also gain stuff.
It's a very, very interesting and powerful period of life.
And actually kind of great, except for the fact that there's a wall up ahead.