Ep. 1131 – We Can Beat Them mocks Hollywood’s strike chaos—imagining Superman charged by DA Alvin Bragg and a Lord of the Rings reboot where George Soros becomes a "twisted blue creature"—before pivoting to the Durham Report, where Andy McCarthy exposes FBI corruption tied to 2016 election meddling. The FBI’s shift from police to intelligence agency post-1993, unchecked FISA abuses, and partisan weaponization of power underscore systemic rot, while Biden’s "race-baiting" policies and media complicity deepen cultural divides. Conservatives must counter leftist anti-hierarchy dogma with faith-based values, strategic boycotts (e.g., woke corporate metrics), and long-term resistance—like Jesus’ "sheep among wolves"—while leveraging capitalism to outmaneuver progressive agendas. Meanwhile, Donkey Kong’s 1981 subversion of hero tropes (a plumber rescuing a princess) proves games thrive as immersive art, not just storytelling, setting the stage for VR’s next revolution. [Automatically generated summary]
As you know, we Hollywood writers are on strike right now, and you may be saying to yourself, oh no, who will take our favorite childhood cartoon characters and transform them into sexually deviant groomers so that the minds and lives of our own children can be destroyed by the very franchises we had come to love and trust?
And yes, that is a problem.
But the fact is the corrupt, greedy industry moguls who have been pumping toxic and immoral sludge into our culture for the last 60 years aren't paying us enough to write the scripts.
Now, If the strike continues too long, screen content may start to dry up and some of you may be forced to seek your entertainment elsewhere, like in great novels or conversation with your friends or classic old films on TCM or even just quietly reading the Bible to yourself until you never want to watch another morally repugnant modern movie ever again and may even be inspired to hunt down every Hollywood content creator of any kind whatsoever and tie his shoelaces together while he's napping so that when he wakes up and gets to his feet,
he falls over and cracks his head open and gets to feel what it's like for the rest of us to watch a modern American movie.
In order to prevent that from happening, I personally would like to ban the Bible before you find out what's in it.
But there's just too many damn copies out there, so instead, I'll try to divert your attention by giving you a rundown of the great, great content we're just waiting to write for you as soon as we can get the miserable capitalist pigs who are destroying our culture to pay us fairly for helping them.
One upcoming movie we have in the pipeline is the latest entry in the most popular DC franchise, Superman.
In this sequel, the man of steel rushes to Metropolis to destroy a swarm of murderous invaders and is then charged with first-degree manslaughter by Metropolis District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
We're also planning a modern take on the 1970s Watergate blockbuster All the President's Men, in which once again, a sleazy and untrustworthy presidential candidate is exposed, dragging our government agencies into a series of despicable, dirty campaign tricks until the intrepid reporters of the Washington Post cover the story up.
Then, we're rebooting the Great Lord of the Rings trilogy.
In film one, Frodo fights through orcs to reach Mount Doom until he's charged with first-degree manslaughter by Mordor district attorney Alvin Bragg.
In the sequel, George Soros mysteriously becomes invisible, then later turns up as a corrupt, twisted, deformed blue creature of darkness who contributes to Bragg's re-election campaign.
The final film details the war between Soros and an army of conservatives who want to destroy the corrupt, twisted, deformed creature of darkness because they just don't like bluish people.
In the Houdana genre, we'll be rolling out Moonlight 2, in which a homosexual black detective tries to solve the mystery of how a film can win an Oscar when literally no one has ever seen it.
Unfortunately, Anthony Hopkins has grown too old to play Hannibal Lecter, but we have attached Denzel Washington to star as the cannibal serial killer who cooks and eats a census taker's liver with fava beans and a fine Chianti and is then charged by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg with cooking over an open flame without a permit.
It's a complicated joke, I'll give you a minute.
The Marvel universe will continue to expand with Native American Panther.
In this brilliant epic of virtue signaling and racial pandering, history is rewritten when Native Americans develop the world's greatest culture after a space rock falls on them and magically turns them into Europeans.
Belief Hierarchy Clash00:12:36
Superhero Native American Panther then sets out to spread the gift to the world until he realizes that Native Americans never invented the wheel, so he can't go anywhere.
And finally, in a real-life sequel to 2011's pandemic thriller Contagion, a fast-spreading flu virus threatens to kill 80-year-olds until heroic government doctor Anthony Fauci destroys the economy, strips Americans of their civil rights, ruins the lives of children, and then sets out to try to solve the mystery of why the disease caused so much damage to society.
So there are great films coming your way as soon as we can get back to work in the movie industry.
Meanwhile, stop reading the Bible or there won't be a movie industry.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped, hip-sy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray.
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, we're back laughing our way through the fall of the Republic.
And yes, I know it's Nathan, not Nehemiah.
I always get those two wrong.
I always mix them up.
I have done this all my life, but I do know that.
And I just want to add to that opening.
I do actually support the writers in their strike.
It's hard to describe how greedy and nasty and dishonest the people who make movies are.
And the writers are really at the bottom of the totem pole.
And they really do get crushed.
So I'm teasing them about their content, but they really do deserve to get better pay for their work.
I hope you are using the new Clavin clapbacks at dailywire.com mailbox.
That's clapback spelled with a K.
So it's K-L-A-V-A-N, K-L-A-P-B-A-C-K-S at dailywire.com.
Anybody can send in questions and comments about the show.
We'd love to hear you.
We're changing the format of the show in a couple of weeks.
What we're going to do is we're going to do about an hour on Fridays, and then we're going to put the interview out later in the week.
And hopefully that will, the reason we're doing this is you may have read in the paper that suicides are up.
We attribute that to the Clavenless Week.
And so this way more content will be coming up at different times.
We hope to hear from you and let us know how you like it when it finally comes up.
Today we're going to talk with Andy McCarthy about the Durham Report.
We're going to talk about why Republicans are losing when everybody hates the Democrats and what I learned from the new Super Mario Brothers movie.
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And if you leave a comment and the comment just offends every possible human being, especially the weak and the halt and the lame, we will read that comment on the air because it fits in perfectly with the rest of our content.
Today's comment is from Steve Kay 917.
He said, somebody did something to me sometime in the 90s.
It must have been Trump.
Thanks, Steve.
Your $5 million check is in the mail.
So Barack Obama was fawned over on yet another fawning interview at CBS Mornings.
And he said something this week that was both sinister, but also partly true.
It's cut one.
Today, what I'm most concerned about is the fact that because of the splintering of the media, we almost occupy different realities.
If something happens, in the past, everybody could say, all right, we may disagree on how to solve it, but at least we all agree that, yeah, that's an issue.
Now, people will say, well, that didn't happen.
Or I don't believe that.
And one of, I think, the goals of the Obama Foundation and one of the goals of my post-presidency is how do we return to that common conversation?
So he says we don't get the facts.
We don't agree on the facts.
But we all know what his solution to that is.
We saw it on the Twitter files where the dark forces of the deep state bullied, tricked, and colluded with social media to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story, silence valid data about the COVID vaccine, lie about the America hating violence of BLM, and Antifa overblow white supremacy, choke off the conversation about the validity of the last presidential election.
So we know that the last person we're going to address with this is the Barack Obama Foundation.
But it's not even the real issue about the facts.
And here's why I say this.
You get the facts by hearing various viewpoints and letting them debate.
And that's how you get the facts.
You don't get it from Barack Obama silencing people and telling us what he thinks.
This is what the left's afraid of, that we'll get the facts.
But even when we agree on the facts, we see two different realities.
Obama's right about that.
This was nowhere more obvious than with the release of the Durham report after four years.
But it confirmed everything that conservatives had said about the Russian collusion hoax.
It was all true.
They had no reason to open an investigation.
They briefed Hillary about things that were going on about her.
They didn't brief Trump.
They dropped investigations against Hillary.
They started investigations against Trump with no cause.
The power was taken away from the agents.
It was taken over by Comey and McCabe and what they call the seventh floor.
They lied on the Pfizer report.
All this stuff comes out.
Here's the way.
And nobody's denying it.
I mean, nobody's saying these things are untrue.
Here's the way it was reported in two different venues.
Here's typical of leftist media coverage.
It's Ken Dillion at NBC, which is NBC, as you know, where they covered up the Harvey Weinstein story while they were covering up the Matt Lauer story.
Here was Ken Dillion, his reaction to this report.
Critics say Durham's investigation ultimately fell flat, even though it lasted more than a year longer than the actual Russia investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Durham brought just two criminal cases that ended in acquittals, and his report called for no major changes.
So that's typical of left-wing, very typical of the left-wing reporting.
Typical of conservative coverage is the actual truth from Ben Shapiro, who said the report is an astounding expose of corruption and collusion, not between Trump and Russia, but between the Hillary Clinton campaign, friendlies at the FBI, and top officials at the Obama administration.
As it turns out, CrossFire Hurricane was initiated based on sheer conjecture.
That conjecture was trafficked by Hillary's 2016 campaign, and the conjecture served as the basis for a four-year-long witch hunt into a bevy of allegations that ultimately came to nothing.
So that is two different realities.
One, it's nothing new.
We don't nothing to see here, nothing going on.
And the other, no.
This is an amazing, amazing piece of corruption by a major and dangerous agency, named the FBI.
And as I say, we'll be talking to Andy McCarthy about it in the next segment.
These different realities we live in are not different factual realities.
They're different moral realities.
And at the center of that difference is something called hierarchy.
And hierarchy comes from, it's come to mean any order of things where one thing ranks higher than another, but it comes from a Latin root meaning sacred, holy, and it's really an order of sacred things.
It's what is more sacred and less sacred.
Leftism doesn't believe in hierarchy because it doesn't believe in God.
There is no God in leftism.
It is a materialist philosophy.
So there's literally nothing sacred.
And that means there's no such thing as real value, real moral value, except for things that are constructed by powerful people to keep lesser people down, because who would make a social construct except for the powerful people?
So the only good there is is destroying hierarchy.
There should be no differences between us.
Those differences should have no values.
And so it's unfair one thing should be considered more sacred than another.
Merit, talent, motherhood, respect for the law, nothing is sacred.
So all hierarchy should be destroyed and there should be equity.
Obviously on the right, we believe in hierarchy because we believe nature is a created thing.
And even conservative atheists who pretend they don't believe it do believe it.
They just think it's uncool to admit it.
If they didn't believe it, they wouldn't believe in the things they believe.
We believe, we don't just believe that there are natural differences between men and women because there are all kinds of things in nature we don't like.
We believe that's a good thing.
That was a created gift to us, the differences between men and women.
We believe in objective truth, not just scientific truth, but objective moral truth because it's in relation to God.
Abortion is wrong for the same reason.
The mom and dad family is best because that's what we're created for and so on.
There is a snag in the right-wing point of view.
And here's why the left makes inroads on this argument.
Even though we believe in a created sacred order of things, we believe that the world is broken.
It's fallen.
It's not what God intended.
So people abuse the hierarchy.
And so laws can't always enforce the hierarchy.
I believe all things being equal, for instance, the husband should be the head of a family.
But God didn't make women to be oppressed and bullied and abused and stifled.
That was not his purpose in creating the female of the species.
So that hierarchy can only be rightly lived in love.
It is one thing for a husband and wife who love one another to make the husband the head of the family because then he's going to be a servant leader, right?
But since people are fallen and they abuse, the strong abuse the weak, we have to insist that men and women have equal rights by law.
So the law doesn't reflect the hierarchy, but we in love can act out that hierarchy.
Parents are in charge of children, but parents can be abusive to children.
And so we admit that the law can sometimes take them away.
I believe in democracy, right?
I believe that everybody should have a vote in democracy, not because I believe in the goodness of people, but because I believe there's nobody good enough to lead without limitations on his power.
The natural order is broken, so our laws have to keep power out of people's hands, even though there is a natural hierarchy.
So this has ramifications, right?
It means that the law should be equal for all, but it shouldn't make all people equal, right?
That's what the left wants to do because they don't believe in hierarchy.
We believe in hierarchy, but we just believe the law should be equal for all because that's the only fair thing to do.
I believe some things are true and some things are false, but I believe in free speech because I'm humble enough to know that no one person has a monopoly on the truth.
I mean, I come close, but still I have to let other people talk sometimes.
I believe Jesus Christ is Lord.
I believe that's the truth of God.
But I believe in freedom of religion because I know that religious people, just like anybody else, abuse power if they have too much of it.
So that means that some things have to be accomplished through law, like justice and freedom and equality, under the law, and some things have to be accomplished through culture, like hierarchy, moral truth, respect for others.
These have to be taught in families and in churches and in schools because nothing matters if the human heart is full of darkness, if our culture creates dark people who do not understand the moral hierarchy.
The most damning thing in this Durham report was the FBI's response to the Durham report.
Here's what they said.
They said the conduct in 2016 and 2017 that special counsel Durham examined was the reason that current FBI leadership already implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have now been in place for some time.
Had those reforms been in place in 2016, the missteps identified in the report could have been prevented.
But that's not what Durham said.
What he actually said is this, quote, the answer is not the creation of new rules, but a renewed fidelity to the old.
The promulgation of additional rules and regulations to be learned in yet more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI's guiding principles of fidelity, bravery, and integrity are not ingrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI's mission of protecting the American people and upholding the Constitution of the United States.
In other words, these guys were dirty.
It wasn't the regulations that were wrong.
It was the people.
It was Comey.
It was McCabe.
It was Strzok.
It was the people who took this thing over and took it out of the hands of ordinary agents who were complaining about it.
Even in the report, it says that.
The attempt to rid the world of its natural sacred hierarchy has taught the left that they can do anything they want.
They can lie because their narrative is true.
And since all truths are narratives, their narrative is true.
They can lie to enforce it.
They can be racist against white people because that will solve the fact that black people are down further in the social scale than white people, as long as they're fixing that fact.
People Complaining About It00:02:08
But we, the job we have is to teach our children and convince our leaders that moral hierarchy is created, it's beautiful, it's good when it's lived in love.
And we have to start making that argument and stop mucking around with the stuff we're saying now.
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One of the things that is particularly galling about the left-wing press, which is the press, the media, reaction to the Durham report is this meme, oh, it's nothing new.
Fisa Court Discretion Concerns00:14:52
We knew all this already.
And that's true.
It is nothing new in some ways.
But you would never have found it out if you've been listening to them.
If you've been reading the New York Times, if you've been watching NBC, you would never have heard the level of corruption that was going on.
Instead, what you heard was that essentially Trump was, you know, they were closing in, the walls were closing in, the end was near, there's the beginning of the end.
Trump is colluding with Russia.
The way you would have known about it, however, is if you had read a book called Ball of Collusion, The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, which was written in 2019 by the great Andrew C. McCarthy, who is a former federal prosecutor, best-selling author, and contributing editor at National Review.
So just to give somebody a chance to say, I told you so, who actually reported on the story, I thought we would have Andy on.
Andy, it's good to see you.
How are you doing?
Drew, it's great to see you.
And I appreciate the kind words, especially since I actually wrote the book because I felt like I was really angry about being wrong about, you know, when people came to me and told me the FBI would take a screed of unproven, uncorroborated, unverified opposition research, slap a caption on it, and swear to it under oath in the FISA court, I said, you guys are crazy.
And that's what turned out to happen.
Well, this is one of the things that I want to talk to you about.
I mean, this is a change, right?
This has not always been the case.
And in fact, in the report, there are many good agents who were being driven insane by the fact that essentially Comey and McCabe had taken this thing over.
Yeah.
The reason I was wrong, and I think this gets to the point that you're making here.
You know, back in the 90s when I was doing counterterrorism cases at the Justice Department and the Clinton Justice Department put in these regulations that infamously became known as the law, which prevented the counterintelligence side of the FBI's house, which has the domestic security mission, prevented them from sharing information with the criminal investigators and prosecutors,
which was a crazy way to go about business and actually caused at least part of 9-11 to happen.
I'm not saying that I blamed, obviously it's the jihad that's made it happen, but you understand my point.
We could have detected him if it wasn't for these way we hamstrung ourselves.
And I remember arguing at the time that that was a nutty way to go about things in part because if you assumed a rogue agent, it would be much easier to lie to get the basis for a criminal investigation,
which is not that hard to do, than lie so that you would have a national security angle that would let you go the FISA route, because that had so many tripwires and rungs of approval, it would be much easier to be detected doing misconduct just going the criminal route rather than FISA.
So I argued back when the Clinton people were putting these restrictions in on this hypothesis that the FBI might rely on its counterintelligence powers as a pretext when it didn't have enough evidence for a criminal investigation, but felt like if they sat on somebody long enough, the investigation would yield something and then they would pounce, right?
So I used to argue that that would never happen.
And then it obviously did happen with Trump.
So part of what drove me to write the book was, why was I so wrong about that?
And I think what I didn't factor in was what would happen if headquarters decided to take over an investigation itself.
Because all those tripwires I refer to, all those places where you think that somebody who is up to no good will get found out and prevented from abusing power.
That assumes supervisors who act as supervisors, who tell agents who are investigating cases, no, we don't take uncorroborated information that we think may be wrong and swear to it under oath in the Pfizer court.
That's like one of those things we don't do.
But it turns out that when headquarters itself takes over an investigation, it's vulnerable to all of the incentives that a line agent is to think that your bad guys are the worst bad guys in history, except when headquarters takes over the investigation, there's no one there to tell them no.
Stop here.
And that's what happened here.
Did you look at the Durham report and find things that surprised you that you didn't already know?
Not really factually things that I didn't know.
And it's because I've obviously followed this closely all along.
And before the Durham report, we got a report from Mueller, and then we got a few reports from the Inspector General at the Justice Department.
So you could tell the general trajectory that things were headed in.
What did surprise me, Drew, was I told people that I wouldn't expect Durham to file any big conspiracy type, racketeering type cases, because when you're dealing with people at a high level of law enforcement and intelligence, they have so much discretion to act.
It's very hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they acted corruptly, especially if there are alternative reasons that they, you know, they're allowed to be wrong, right?
So just because they do something that seems galactically off the charts bad doesn't necessarily mean they're doing it for a corrupt reason.
So those cases are very hard to make.
And I told people I wouldn't expect to see that out of Durham.
What does surprise me is he actually did find crimes, which I didn't think he was going to do.
But then in a, to me, a very unsatisfying way, and I say this as someone who likes the report and likes Durham, but I'm annoyed that he says, for example, a fraud was pulled off on the Pfizer court.
People lied to the Pfizer court.
Now, that's a crime.
That's not like a hard one to prove, right?
You're not talking about, oh, well, they had so much discretion.
You lie to the court or not, right?
And where he comes out in the end is, well, the headquarters guys say this is what they were thinking.
And the guys who were dealing with the actual informants, meaning Steele and Igor Danchenko, this is what they say.
And we can't square those two things.
But we weren't able to interview Steele because he's a Brit and he didn't have to cooperate with us.
And we weren't able to interview Danchenko for Fifth Amendment reasons and otherwise.
So at the end of four years, our conclusion is we can't really figure out who lied.
And to me, you know, first of all, four years, you got to figure out who the hell lied, right?
And I think that if the FBI was investigating another agency, and mind you, you know, Durham is being assisted in the investigation by the FBI, right?
I have a feeling if the FBI investigated another agency, we'd have found out who did it.
Right.
So he gets to this conclusion.
He says, you know, we can't bring charges because we can't make it stick beyond a reasonable doubt because we can't really figure out based on people's failed recollections and the unavailability of certain witnesses, we can't get to the bottom of it.
And I'm thinking, you know, I was a prosecutor for a long time.
Durham is too.
I have a lot of respect for him.
But, you know, you don't get to interview the defendant in most cases.
Like the most important witness in most cases is the defendant.
You often do not get to interview the defendant.
You still make the case.
So to me, what that means at the end, and this is what I think gets people very angry, is how do you hold these guys accountable?
If you get to the end, you say, there was a crime here, but we just can't figure it out.
When you see yesterday, the House had a bunch of FBI whistleblowers come on.
One of them we had on the show, a friend, I think his name was, and they come in and say, we can't, if you talk to anybody, the FBI will crush you.
The FBI will take you out.
They will destroy your career.
They'll come after your family.
Yesterday or the day before, we saw two female FBI agents show up at the house of an anti-abortion activist and sort of harass her, her mother.
Does this surprise you?
Is this something you feel, yeah, this is the kind of thing that the FBI does?
I don't see how you could push back against that because we have too much indication of it over the years.
Now, I wouldn't want to generalize and say that it's typical behavior, but at the same time, I'd be uncomfortable calling it atypical.
I know I sound like a weasel saying that, but I think they have a significant problem, Drew.
And it goes to what I just said, which is that no one ever gets held accountable for anything.
You know, when you ask Chris Ray about the Durham report, what he says is two things.
He says, well, you know, all those guys who were running that investigation, they ain't around anymore.
We removed all those guys.
Well, they did that awfully quietly, didn't they?
I mean, did you get the feeling that there was a lot of accountability here?
I sure did.
You know, when that happened, I came on my show and I said if they were reporting the number of people who've been fired, this would be a massive scandal.
It would be like an actual house cleaning, but nobody said anything.
It just got, they just kind of faded away into the distance.
So yeah, it was very quietly done.
Nobody feel, you know, Strzok is on TV.
He's a commentator somewhere.
It's remarkable.
So this is another thing.
These are people you knew, some of them, Merrick Garland, James Comey.
These are not strangers to you.
And you respected them.
Many people respect them and not just you.
And you've said that after 9-11, the domestic agencies got too much anti-terrorism power.
But is something else happening?
I mean, conservatives are so naturally paranoid that the country is being taken over, but it does feel like something really terrible is happening in the government.
Yeah, well, I do think something terrible is happening.
And there's two points I'd make about it.
One is pivoting off the point you just made about the whistleblower guys, one of who, you know, you said you had friend on.
Yeah.
So I have a piece that just came out at National Review.
They have been making the FBI, Democrats have been trying to get the FBI to cook its books for four years to inflate the number of domestic terrorism cases so that they can create the misimpression that there's a white supremacy domestic terrorism threat that pervades this country and could erupt at any moment in mass murder attacks.
And in point of fact, the way they've done this is, first of all, they regard the Capitol riot as a terrorist attack, which it was not.
I don't carry a brief for the Capitol riot, but to say that a riot is not a terrorist attack is like saying a murder is not a terrorist attack.
You know, it's a terrible thing, but it's a different thing, right?
So they have used the 1,100 people that they have arrested in connection with the Capitol riot.
And instead of just sending out to other offices leads, like when I ran the Blind Shea case in the 90s, the case was in New York.
It was one case, and we may have sent out 1,000 leads, but they return everything to New York, right?
In this case, what the Washington Field Office does, instead of sending out leads, they tell the offices around the country, open an investigation, and then produce this evidence.
And what they then do from that is they tell Congress, we now have domestic terrorism investigations in every state in the United States.
When in point of fact, what they have is like somebody from Minnesota took a bus to the Capitol and then like a schmuck walked through the Capitol, but like didn't break a window, didn't hit a cop, didn't do anything.
And that case is opened as a domestic terrorism case in Minnesota.
Right.
So they're trying to create the impression to feed a political narrative.
There's no other reason for this.
It's completely a political narrative.
So they're absolutely being abused to do that in the service of politics.
And I think the greater point is that the FBI is part of the administrative state, and they are the service of the party of government.
It just simply is the case.
And they are much more responsive to Democrats than they are to Republicans.
And it's a totally new world because I think up until around 1993 and certainly up until 9-11, the FBI was principally a police organization.
And since then, they've become an intelligence agency.
And it's a very different discipline.
It's got a lot more cloak and dagger to it.
It's much less deferential to people's civil rights.
It's just, it's not the way a police agency works.
And when you're doing police work, Drew, everybody goes about their business expecting there's going to be an indictment, which will mean there's discovery.
And everything that the FBI represented to a court is going to be poured over by defense lawyers who are incentivized to highlight any misconduct.
On the national security side, on the FISA side, everything's classified.
The only due process any of us ever gets is if they don't lie and they follow the rules when they're in the FISA court because no one's represented.
There's never going to be discovery.
Lies Under The Cone00:14:03
It's all under the cone.
And what I think it's proven is it's too tempting for them to bend the rules because we can see they've bent the rules.
It's not just against Trump.
There's like massively, they've made misstatements and misrepresentations to the FISA court across the board.
Yeah, really frightening stuff.
Andy McCarthy, thanks so much for coming on, former federal prosecutor, contributing editor at National Review, and his book, Ball of Collusion, The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, could have come out yesterday, basically.
Thanks very much for coming on, Andy.
It's good talking to you.
Thanks, my friend.
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So one of the biggest, obviously the biggest areas where this hierarchy argument is going on is race.
And what I think what the Biden administration is doing is as disgusting as anything I've seen, except it is in keeping with Biden's entire career.
He has always been a race-baiting, bigoted, nasty little man and a liar.
He has always been this guy.
But the thing is, there's only one reason not to believe in racism, only one, and that is because we're all made in the image of God.
Otherwise, you know, I can, cultures are different.
Races are different.
Different can be better or worse.
Why not dislike other people if you don't like them?
You can dislike Italians.
The Italians dislike the British.
The British dislike the Irish.
The Irish dislike the British.
Why not?
What's wrong with that?
Unless we acknowledge that we're all made in the image of God and therefore we have to all pay respects to one another.
They don't believe that.
The left doesn't believe that, that we're made in the image of God, because they got no God for us to be made in the image of.
So the only thing they're left with is that black people are not doing as well socially as white people, and therefore that's wrong.
That's got to be wrong because we're all, you know, hierarchy is always wrong.
It is always a creation of human beings and of the powerful.
It's not true.
That's just not true, but there we are.
So Biden made a speech.
It's just another one of his disgusting speeches he has made all his life.
Disgusting against black people and for black people.
He said bussing was wrong because it would turn his school, his neighborhood into a racial jungle.
But then he also said, you know, the white people want to put you all back in chains.
This man is an empty man.
He is an empty man.
And he went to a graduation at a black university, Howard University.
They now call them traditionally black universities, Howard University.
And he made this speech.
And here is what he said in part.
This is a cut four.
Racism has long torn us apart.
It's a battle.
It's never really over.
But on the best days, enough of us have the guts and the hearts to stand up for the best in us.
To choose love over hate, unity over disunion, progress over retreat, to stand up against the poison white supremacy, as I did my inaugural address to single out as the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland, is white supremacy.
I'm not saying this because I'm not a black HBCU.
I say it wherever I go.
I say it because I'm a pandering racist, was the way he was supposed to say, but he athletes.
You just heard Andy McCarthy say that the FBI has been doing everything it can to jigger the statistics so it looks like there is more homegrown white terrorism than there actually is.
And they have to work very hard at it because there's just not.
There is just not.
And to say this to a group of kids who are graduating, who have all the world before them, who should be dedicating themselves to excellence, who are going to be received favorably in a society that has, except for the Democrats, except for the fact that the Democrats keep stirring this up.
This is a society that elected a white majority society that elected a black president twice.
Show me another society that's done that.
You can't do it.
So what's he talking about?
Why isn't he not inspiring them?
Everything he says is rank with anger and resentment and envy and bullying.
And it's all lies.
Here's what he said.
He was listing things.
Here's what he said about Donald Trump cut number five.
Accompanied by Klansmen, the white supremacists, emerging from dark rooms of remote fields and the anonymity of the internet, confronting decent Americans of all backgrounds, standing in their way into the bright light of day.
And a young woman, objecting to their presence, was killed.
What did you hear?
That famous quote when asked about what happened.
That famous quote.
There are very fine people on both sides.
Here's the famous quote.
Here's what Trump said seconds after he said there were very fine people on both sides.
He was talking about the people who were arguing over the statue, and then he added this, cut eight.
You had people, and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.
But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?
See, and he was trying to point out the fact that some of these guys arrived and black blocked the Antifa people.
The riots, the Antifa people and the Black Lives Matter people put out killed tens of people, far more than any white supremacist has done, except maybe that one attack.
But still, still, there's been plenty of violence from Black Lives Matter and Antifa.
White supremacists, whenever they have a national meeting, like seven people show up.
Biden talked about what happened here in Nashville where two legislators were expelled from Congress.
Here's what he said on that.
To stand with leaders of your generation who give voice to the people demanding action on gun violence, only to be expelled from state legislative bodies.
They weren't expelled for that.
That's just a lie.
It's another lie.
Justin Jones, Justin Peterson took control of the House floor with a bullhorn.
They took over the legislative session.
They were screaming and chanting, gun control now and no action, no peace.
You know how AOC says, this is what democracy looks like?
That's not what democracy looks like.
Democracy looks like debate and voting.
This was disrupting democracy.
Here's another Biden lie.
This is Cut Seven.
To confront the ongoing assault to subvert our elections, suppress our right to vote.
That assault chain.
Just as you cast your first ballots in 2022, record turnouts.
You delivered historic progress.
He's such a liar.
This stuff about Jim Crow.
I mean, it's almost hilarious.
And there's no one to call him out because the same people who let the FBI corruptly collude with Hillary Clinton's campaign to try and get at Donald Trump, the same New York Times, the same Kendillion, the same networks, the same people are covering these speeches where he just spews these lies.
Remember how whatever Trump said, it was counted as a lie?
Who was it?
The Washington Post, I think, who has kept track of the lie and the lie would be if Trump came out and said good morning and said, that is not a good morning.
What is he talking?
How can it be a good morning when Trump is president?
That's another lie.
We counted 320 lies in the last 20 minutes.
These are real lies.
These are lies that matter.
This is the real deal.
All these dialing back of so-called emergency measures that increased voting security, which is a good thing, they didn't hamper black people from turning up.
Black people have been turning up to vote in record numbers in every election.
And polls show they support voting security.
Of course they do.
Why wouldn't they?
Well, you know, the idea on the left is always these black people are so helpless, they can't get ID.
They can't get ID.
ID is this.
It's just too complicated for them.
It's nonsense.
We all should, of course you have to show ID, you have to show ID to buy liquor.
They ID me in Tennessee.
They actually take my ID when I want to buy a drink.
They're trying to make sure I'm still alive.
But you have to have an ID to get on a plane, all these things.
Of course you should.
The guy has always been like this.
He has always pandered to black people and he's pandered to white people.
Remember, he hung out with a lot of white supremacists in the South and pandered to them when he thought that served him.
And the press often supports him in his lies.
They don't need facts because they're here to tell you the truth.
But, you know, the way you abolish racism, obviously, is by not being racist, by calling it off and by calling it off with a purpose, with a reason.
The reason is that we are made in the image of God.
I've never known, I've never known why leftists complain about racism.
I've always wondered, like, what are you complaining about?
You know, you don't believe there's a God.
Obviously, races are different.
Maybe people don't like black people.
Why shouldn't they?
Why should they not like different races?
Why should they like different races?
They're different.
Maybe they just don't like them.
There's only one reason.
There is only one reason, and that is that we were made in the image of God, and that gives us certain natural rights by natural law.
We have natural rights and a natural responsibility to love one another.
That's the only reason.
He has been playing this race card forever.
But all I'm trying to point out is that the people who let him do this, I mean, he's an ugly, empty, venal, angry little man.
I've always disliked him.
But still, the people who let him do it, they're the important ones.
The Congress that backs him up.
The newspapers and the TV programs and the networks that back him up.
Those are the people that you wonder about.
And what I'm saying to you is they have a reason.
They have a reason.
As long as there are inequities, which there will always be, as long as there are inequities, they think that something is wrong.
But that's not necessarily true.
It's simply the difference in the way we are made.
We are fine with that.
We can live with that because we believe we are made.
We believe that we are created entities.
So the fact that some of us are more talented than others is obviously part of the plan.
The fact that some of us work harder, smarter, you know, luckier, all of those things, these are things that we accept because they're part of life.
And in order to crush them, in order to crush them, you have to crush life.
You have to crush freedom.
The only people who are equal are the dead.
And that's basically where the left wants to take us.
They want to take us to an immobile, flaccid, you know, passive society that doesn't build things because there's no reason to build things because he can't get ahead.
We now need to take these people on because we are starting to lose elections that actually matter.
And we need to start thinking about this a lot more seriously and a lot less passionately.
I think we need to get rid of some of our passion, be dispassionate, and figure out a way to beat these clowns at their own game.
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Now, when we start to think about how to beat these guys, first, as I keep saying, we need an argument.
You know, they can say, this is the solution to this problem.
Stop, if too many black people are being arrested, stop arresting black people.
That's their solution.
And we say, like, no.
You know, it doesn't matter what color you are.
It's the crime.
The obvious non-racist thing to do.
The non-racist, not anti-racist, which is just racism by another name.
The non-racist thing to do is to arrest people when they commit a crime, no matter who they are.
That is the right thing to do.
But they have a way of going to companies, going to people and saying, this is what we want.
It's very specific.
Whereas we, too often, just want to keep things the way they were and nothing stays the way it is.
There's always change.
So right now, there's some warning signs that things are not going that well.
Fighting Philosophically00:14:57
Obviously, the fact that Donald Trump is so far ahead in the primary polls doesn't mean anything really so far.
But he's not so far ahead in the national polls with Biden.
latest one actually.
He was quite far behind.
And the Republicans have been disappointed recently on election nights.
They lost recently in Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Florida.
They're losing the suburbs.
They're losing votes in the suburbs.
And we've had some victories legislatively.
There have been good gun laws passed.
That's a big victory.
There's been good abortion laws.
DeSantis taking on DEI, I think, is a good law.
But right now, it just feels like we're not appealing.
We haven't found anybody yet who appeals to the electorate.
And I'm sorry, but that's what you've got to do.
Now, there was an evangelical dust-up this week that was really interesting to me.
John MacArthur, who I really respect.
He's in California.
He's the guy who just fought the state when they tried to shake him down, to shut him down.
All the other churches shut down.
Catholic churches, where they're responsible for bringing the body and blood to their parishioners, shut down.
MacArthur would not budge.
He came on the show and he was great.
He actually explained himself, very well respected as a theologian and as a pastor.
And he said this this week.
This is cut nine.
Yeah, our nation is going the way of Satan, but what else would it do?
It's in his kingdom.
Satan has power.
The flesh is fiercely wicked.
Oh, guess what?
We don't win down here.
We lose.
You ready for that?
Oh, you, oh, you were a post-millennialist.
You thought we were just going to go waltzing into the kingdom as you took over the world.
No, we lose here.
Get it.
They killed Jesus.
They killed all the apostles.
We're all going to be persecuted.
So this became an evangelical firestorm with very obscure theology going back and forth.
I actually had to email Megan Bashram because she really understands this stuff.
I said to her, you know, I heard something about how you have to immunitize the escaton, which sounds like a 1950s dance craze, like do the continental and immunitize the escaton.
And she explains it to me, but I'm not going to go into it here because I'm not a theologian.
I'm not going to be able to sort it out.
But the way I have always read the Bible is, yeah, we're going to be persecuted here.
There will be trouble here, but that doesn't mean we don't fight.
And MacArthur was very clear.
We do have to fight.
We're supposed to fight even if we lose.
But we fight until Jesus comes back.
What we're trying to do is win souls.
We are trying to bring souls over to the right side because the world is going to continue to be the world.
So when we look at the situation now, this is something I get really annoyed with my fellow conservatives about, is this, it's over, it's done.
We can't, there's nothing we can do.
It's the end of days.
It's Satan as well.
You know, that's not supposed to be our attitude.
We're supposed to be more like doctors.
You fight for life knowing that your patient will die.
You fight for life knowing that your patient will die.
And you fight for every soul and you fight for every day.
And every day of freedom is another day.
Every lifetime that goes by in a free country is another lifetime that has been lived in a free country.
You fight to get what you can each day because that is what makes you.
That is what makes you a good person, an ethical person.
It is doing the right thing that creates the habit of righteousness.
Jesus had a strategy for this.
He sent out his disciples and he said, I'm sending you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves, right?
That's not a good odds on that fight, right?
Sheep and wolves, you know, if I'm a betting man, I'm betting on the wolves.
And I think that's what MacArthur is saying.
But Jesus says, be therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves.
And a lot of people on the right, I think, are so angry.
And listen, I don't blame anybody for being angry.
I just tell you that it's the devil's cocaine because it is.
It destroys you.
But I don't blame you for being angry.
I understand why people are angry.
But they hear that and they think, well, how are you going to win if you're harmless as doves, right?
You just have to remember that Jesus was a nobody.
He was a nothing, nobody peasant carpenter in an outlying province of Rome, and he brought the Roman Empire down, okay?
After they killed him, they killed him, and he still brought the Roman Empire down.
So there's something to be said for his strategy here, that it wins over time in the long run.
And I'm sure MacArthur would agree with that as well.
Over the long run, it wins.
So he said, be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.
So I take that to mean the world has fallen.
You can't win everything.
Strategy matters.
Be as wise as serpents, as shrewd as serpents, right?
And how do you do that?
Well, there were two wonderful articles this week, really wonky articles, but they're important articles.
One of them was in RCP Real Clear Politics by a professor of political science at SUNY Buffalo, James Campbell.
And he talks about why didn't the red wave appear?
Remember the midterm, we were going to have this red wave and everybody had this sort of instant analysis where they said, oh, it was because of Donald Trump or it was this or it was that.
And this guy, Campbell, does a really, really deep dive into it.
And I'm abridging this.
The article goes on forever.
I read the whole thing, but it's hugely long.
But he says, basically, the red wave should have been there.
All the indications were it was there.
It was not an illusion.
It was not a polling error.
People were really unhappy with the way the country was going, and there should have been a red wave.
So he doesn't say it was the poll's fault.
It was an illusion.
He said that where it seems to have been stopped was in eight very blue states, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin.
And the Democrats did several things to build what he calls a breakwater against the red wave.
One is they outspent the Republicans hugely in those states because they knew that that was where they could keep the Senate.
And if they won the Senate in those states, people lower down on the ballot would also get elected.
And that turned out to be the case.
They thought the House was going to be lost, but they thought they could keep the Senate, and they did it doing that.
And of course, they used this early mail-in voting.
And, you know, people always say that they cheat, and it's true that they cheat, but it's also true that mail-in voting is great for city parties.
City parties can make machines because all their people are close together.
If you pour money into that area, then you're going to be able to go to all these houses and make sure that people who don't usually vote hand you the envelope and you harvest the envelope.
So these are things that can be imitated and they can be beaten.
But all I'm saying is there's a strategy here.
They're not winning on points.
They're not winning the argument.
They're winning the ground game.
And in fact, the Republicans didn't work to tighten these laws.
They have to do that.
And they didn't defend these states with candidates who could win and they didn't spend the money they needed in those places.
And of course, Donald Trump made the awful decision of carrying his fight for his election into Georgia, which cost us the rush.
But it cost us the majority in the Senate.
The other place where they're winning is in this weird, weird zombie takeover of businesses so that they're fighting for wokeness.
Miller Light, Miller At-Light put out a new woke ad.
It's like Hold My Beer after Anheuser-Busch got slammed and boycotted and really damaged.
It was a very successful.
It still is.
Successful boycott when they put Dylan Mulvaney on one of their cans.
Now Miller puts out this stupid feminist ad for what it's one of those Women's History Months or something like that.
But here's a bit of that ad.
Here's a little known fact.
Women were among the very first to brew beer ever.
Centuries later, how did the industry pay homage to the founding mothers of beer?
They put us in bikinis.
Wow.
Look at this.
Wild.
It's time beer made it up to women.
So today, Miller Light is on a mission to clean up not just their shit, but the whole beer industry's shit.
Miller Light has been scouring the internet for all this shit and buying it back.
I don't think beer has anything to make up to women.
Beer has been making ugly women beautiful for years.
And what a terrible thing to say.
I'm terribly sorry I would say such a thing, but it was funny.
But you say, well, why are these guys doing this?
It's bad for business.
Why are they doing it?
And they're doing it for a perfectly good reason.
Money.
The left has organized a way of pressuring them into taking on woke culture.
They have things like, for instance, the Corporate Equality Index, which comes out by the far-left homosexual George Soros-funded human rights campaign.
And this thing gives you points if you are woke enough, basically.
And it takes points away from you.
And these points are used.
Major investment banks like BlackRock and Vanguard.
Megan actually reported on that for us a while back.
They would say, if you're not fulfilling these points, then you're not going to get the investment dollars.
Banks will not support you.
And now the right is finally fighting back on this.
The Attorneys General of 19 states have sent a letter to J.P. Morgan Chase, the nation's largest bank, accusing it of discrimination against conservative religious groups.
But my point is this.
They're winning on strategy.
They're not winning on points.
They're not winning on ideas.
And strategy can be matched and outdone.
We can out-strategize them.
The thing we have to stop listening to, and I enjoy the Wall Street Journal.
I think there are a lot of great writers on the Wall Street Journal, but this business idea that, you know, the old, was it Calvin Coolidge, I think, who said the business of America is business?
No, we are in a fight for our culture.
We have ignored this culture long enough.
You can be grotesque in fighting for the culture.
You can overdo it in fighting for the culture.
You can be loudmouthed and condemnatory and make people feel that you're excluding them.
But you can also stand up for the things that are right.
And this is why I started out by talking about hierarchy.
We don't have to go in and say, we hate these people, we hate that people, or we hate this.
We have to go in and say, look, there is a way in which people were made to thrive.
It is in mother and father families.
We can prove it by the statistics.
It's not just beating the Bible.
This is a fact.
This is the way that people thrive, and we should be supporting that.
We know religion makes people happier.
It does.
We know this.
And people are incredibly depressed.
People, you know, the depression that's going on in this country, the loss of life by despair, the deaths by despair, are skyrocketing.
Children are skyrocketing.
Religion makes people happier.
You should be supporting that because it's what we are made for.
It is the way we are made.
These are all arguments that can be made, but we can't just go in and say, don't do that.
This is the thing.
You're being unfair to conservatives.
Okay, that's a fair legal argument, but we need to do something better than that.
We need to give them a mission.
The left has given them a mission, the mission to destroy hierarchy.
We want to give them a mission to build hierarchy and love the way it's supposed to be.
Remember, hierarchy was given to us in Eden, but Eden, we're not in Eden anymore, right?
So we have to be careful about how we use how we use the even the things that we believe in.
We have to put forward a message of philosophical positivity because some things are going to be one in the culture, some things are going to be won in politics.
But we can do this.
They're just using strategy.
They're just using capitalism against us.
You know, that's smart.
That's a smart thing to do.
They do that when they put out a piece of left-wing agit prop like Avatar and all of us go out and spend $200 million.
We hand them the money because that's capitalism.
They won because the movie was entertaining.
We've got to do that back.
Are these banks feeling pressure?
Are these businesses feeling pressure?
They should feel pressure from us.
They should feel it individually as we boycott them.
We should also form groups to tell them what we want them to support.
The family, moms and dads, churches, communities, the things that make people happy because they're what we were made for by the person who made us.
We can win that fight.
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A Journey Through Video Game Art00:15:35
So speaking of hierarchies, the greatest video game ever made is Super Mario Brothers in all of its platform forms.
Not necessarily once it got to be three-dimensional, but when it was in its platform.
And we talk a lot about video games here because there's a question of whether they're art or not.
And as I've said before, I think there is a developing art in video games.
But remember, you have to use art as art, right?
If you take an aspirin and you stick it on your forehead, it's not medicine.
If you sit and play a game for 12 hours until your brain melts, that's not using it as art.
So it's interesting to think about what kind of art are games going to be or are they becoming?
And I learned a lot from going to see the Super Mario Brothers movie with my grandson.
He was seeing it for the third time.
I was only seeing it for the first.
And the game, the movie is a smash success.
It's just huge.
Mario is a great game.
Video games, like I said, are still in their early phases, but this was one of the earliest great games.
I think it probably was the first truly great game.
It started in 1981.
Mario was introduced in the game Donkey Kong, which was made by Nintendo to compete with the success of Pac-Man.
Shigeru Miyamoto was the designer.
This was his first game, but he became famous off of that.
And Donkey Kong was set on a construction site in New York City.
The donkey was the monkey, the gorilla named Donkey Kong, was the bad guy.
He stole the girl, and the hero was at first named Jumpman.
He was a carpenter on a construction site, and he had to climb up the rigging to get to Donkey Kong.
And Donkey Kong would throw stuff at him and try to knock him down and kill him.
And then there's a story that a landlord named Mario barged in on Nintendo of America and demanded rent.
And so they decided to name Jumpman Mario after him.
The girl who was stolen was originally named, she was originally named Lady, but she became Pauline.
And that's a reference.
I assume you've heard of the Perils of Pauline.
The Perils of Pauline were a series of silent films.
They are famously remembered for Pauline being tied to a railroad track screaming, help, help, you know.
But that never happened.
There was some films where women were tied to railroad tracks, but it was not Pauline.
Pauline was actually kind of a spunky heroine.
She was an heiress, and she wanted to have adventures before she got married.
And so she would go off and have adventures, but there was a guy who was always chasing her, trying to steal her money.
And she would sometimes be rescued by her patient waiting to be married fiancé, but sometimes she'd get away on her own.
And that's why this woman was called Pauline.
So Mario would climb up to rescue Pauline.
And that's where you got the first really woman in peril damsel in distress in video games.
And the developers finally started a sequel, and that involved creatures coming up through the pipes in New York City's sewer system.
So they changed Mario to a plumber, and they gave him his brother, Luigi, as well.
And at one point, the designer said that Mario was too big, so he had to shrink him.
And we thought, how do you shrink somebody?
And they thought, of course, of Alice in Wonderland and her mushrooms.
And that's where you get these mushrooms.
Okay.
So here's the thing.
When I saw video games, I've told you this before, I just loved them so much.
From Pong on, the minute I saw Pong, I thought this is great.
I've told you I injured myself playing Space Invaders.
I played it so much.
But when this thing came into my house, I was just gobsmacked.
I mean, I sat there and my mouth opened.
I thought an Italian plumber, because I didn't really know, I wasn't following this stuff.
I wasn't following Donkey Kong or any of that.
And I thought an Italian plumber stomping on mushrooms to rescue a princess from a gigantic turtle.
They put the turtle in because they wanted Mario to be able to hit from below and the turtle would be vulnerable from below.
I thought, this is like a drug dream, but it's so creative and it speaks to me somehow.
I couldn't really put it into words how it spoke to me, but it did speak to me.
I understood there was something about this that was incredibly compelling, not just as a game, though it was a wonderful game from the get-go, but something about this as a story was amazing and original and different.
And it did have, if you think about it, it had this kind of theme of a working class guy taking on the role of the Knight in Shining Armor to rescue the princess, which is a very, very American theme, right?
An Italian plumber taking on the role of the Knight in Shining Armor to rescue the kidnapped princess.
That's a very American theme.
So it did speak to something in me.
And it's incredible.
This thing was so popular.
They tried a million ways to capitalize on this in other ways.
One of my favorite parts of going to watch this movie with my grandson was before the movie came on, they played a series of some of these shows where they tried to make Mario into a television show, and they were so, so bad.
One of them was a cartoon show that began with a live action segment, and Mario was played by Hall of Fame wrestler Lou Albano.
And so here's just, and they would have these celebrities who are obviously like on children's shows who have no idea who they are.
Some pretty blonde girl comes in.
Just take a look at this for just a little bit.
It's really funny.
It says right here that you two are the best plumbers in Brooklyn and quite possibly the world.
Yes, that is absolutely true.
Not only that, but we are also very, very meek and clean.
In fact, what do we always say, Mario?
Hey, you slop.
That's my pizza.
Meekness counts.
Oh, yeah.
Good.
I need my kitchen sink fast.
Certainly come to the right place.
We'll demonstrate right now just how good we are with absolutely no obligation.
There are all these jokes about Italian food, pizza, and everything like that that makes them sound pieces.
So then there'd be a cartoon, and the cartoon was just awful, like all of these cartoons from that time.
They're just all of them are terrible.
I'll play just a little bit of it.
Here's Mario and one other princess.
Please, Mario, Toad saved my life a hundred times.
We've got to save his.
Don't worry, princess.
Luigi and Neo climbed that mountain before you could say spaghetti and meatballs.
I can't.
I'm allergic to mountains.
My favorite part of the show, my favorite part of the show was the end song.
You got to hear this.
Do the Mario swing your arms from side to side.
Come on, it's time to go.
Do the Mario.
Take one step and then again.
Let's do the Mario all together now.
This song was so bad.
They actually did a parody of it on SpongeBob SquarePants once.
So this show lasted for three months and then went off the air.
And the next year they tried again, three months, went off the air.
The next year they tried again, three months, off the air.
These things just sucked.
And finally, they made a, in 1993, they made this unwatchable live action.
Listen to the cast of this, right?
This is how much money went into this.
Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamu, Dennis Hopper, Fiona Shaw, one of the great ladies of the British stage.
This movie, it is so bad.
Here's a little bit of the, I think this is the trailer.
They're brothers, they're plumbers.
On a magnet.
They're on the trail of a kidnapped princess and a mystical meteorite.
It's incredible.
That gives anyone who possesses it the power of the universe to rescue the princess.
And make it safely back later.
Alligators to our world.
Fiona Shaw must wake up screaming when she remembers that.
Just awful.
So why does this new film work?
Why does it work?
Well, first of all, it's funny.
We were talking about the writers early on, the Writers on Strike.
It's really well written, and it's well written because it gives Mario legit opportunities to be in the game world that all the kids love, right?
So for instance, there's a scene where to prove himself the Princess Peach, he has to go through an obstacle course.
And of course, the obstacle course is just a level from the game.
if I'm sure you've played, if you like games at all, that's really clever.
That is really clever writing.
You know, there's another thing where he's in a gladiator fight with Donkey Kong.
And it's, again, it's a level from the game.
So that's just clever writing because you're watching the show and here's a character that you know and love.
And if you like the game, you'll like the movie.
So that's good.
It's funny.
It's got a couple of jokes in there for adults that are pretty funny.
But it does do the same thing as the other versions in that they have this idea.
And this was an idea that was in the original development phase of the Mario games.
There were games in which he was a plumber in New Jersey, in Brooklyn.
Sorry, he was a plumber in Brooklyn and went through a magic pipe and the pipe took him into this magical world.
And so that's what happens in the show.
They give him that origin story.
It wonderfully just accepts all the rules of video games without explaining them.
So at one point, somebody says, I need a power-up.
It's like, I don't play video games.
No, what's a power-up?
But it doesn't matter.
They just know who their audience is and they do it.
And they do these other things, which is they humanize Mario and Luigi in ways that Hollywood now does by rote.
I watch a lot of thrillers on Netflix.
A lot of times in the gym, I'll put them on while I'm on the elliptical or something like that.
And one of the things they now do by rote is they give people a backstory that explains their actions.
My mother never loved me, so now I have to go and kill this girl.
Or, you know, my father was arrested and unfairly, so now I have to prove that I'm an honest man and prove his innocence.
So they always give him these backstories, and they do that with Mario and Luigi.
His father doesn't believe in them.
Their father doesn't believe in them.
Their business is not doing that well, and they're trying to get their business going, that they don't have confidence.
They feel they have greatness in them.
You know, it's all this stuff.
And what struck me as interesting about that is the whole thing about the game is Mario doesn't have a character.
He has the aura of a character.
He's more like a figure in a myth, you know, like Oedipus has a kind of a character.
You know, Psyche has kind of a character, but not really.
They kind of represent something.
And Mario is like that too.
He's cheerful.
He's intrepid.
He's Italian in a funny way.
Let's go, you know.
But he really just represents something, which is a working class guy in a King Arthur fable, right?
That's basically what he represents.
And that's why he's so lovable, the kind of working man immigrant.
And so it's kind of King Arthur Americanized, but you don't really know him.
You don't really want to know anything about him.
And it works in the movie, sort of, but the more they do it, the less it's like the game, which tells you something about games.
It tells you something about the way they can tell stories and the way they can't.
People are always telling me, oh, this is a great story, and this has great characters.
I've never found that to be true.
I find game stories very repetitive.
They're limited by gameplay, except for some of the puzzle games, like inside, which can be quite creative.
But the gameplay draws you in to a visual world.
And this is the thing I think games are moving toward.
You know, I've talked about this before.
Movies used to be much longer.
The scripts for movies used to be much longer.
An old-time script, because it was based on plays, stage plays, were like 250 pages long because they had all this dialogue.
Then Alfred Hitchcock and others, but primarily Hitchcock, came along and what they said was, no, this is actually a visual medium.
It is literally moving pictures that tell a story.
And Hitchcock would have in Vertigo, there's like 30 minutes without any dialogue in it.
He didn't care for dialogue.
He didn't like sound.
He just wanted to tell his story with images.
And that's basically what movies have become.
They become a series of images that tell a story with some iconic lines.
Make him an offer he can't refuse.
You know, play it again sam, whatever the line is that you remember.
But really, what you're seeing is visuals, faces, big faces coming together, beautiful faces kissing each other.
That's really what you're seeing in the movies, and I think what games do is they invite you in to a world, a visual world, in a way that no art form has ever been able to do before.
The game is a tool for engaging you in that world, but it's the world that matters, and what I think is happening to games ultimately uh, is that they will become three-dimensional.
You'll be wearing an oculus or something like that and you will just be bathed in this story, surrounded in this story, and you will be in the story through the gameplay, and they're moving toward that now.
It's not a question of choose your own adventure.
The story can be just as rigid as any story, but you will actually be physically in it, and I think that that is going to be awesome.
I don't think it's happened yet.
I think games have plateaued.
I don't think they're getting any better right now, but I think they're going to have need new technology and to use the oculus technology more.
But this kind of pointed out to me that a movie is different, a book is different than a game.
There they're art forms, but they're different kinds of art forms.
I do not think really that this is a storytelling art form.
I think it's an immersion art form.
It's something that immerses you, that immerses you in the visual world through gameplay.
As Hamlet said, the game's the thing.
No, he didn't say that, but he would have said it if he had ever played Supermari.
Now, although I do believe we can beat the left, many of you will not live to see it because the Clavenless Week will destroy you.
We're trying to, we're working on the Clavenless week.
We're trying to, you know can, spread the show out a little bit.
As I told you.
Uh remember, we're changing the place where you can send your comments.
All you have to do is write to Clavenclapbacks at Dailywire.com k-l-a-p-b-a-c-k-s.
Uh, you don't have to be a member, but you do have to be a member if you want to hear the member block, which will save you a little bit of time, which will save you a little bit of time before you are plunged into despair and death.
Um, so we will now plunge you there, except before we do, we will take time out to solve all your problems with the mailbag, let's go do the Mario Uh from Laura.
Your amusing and themes on the roles of men and women have affected me deeply.
I thank you.
While the shape of the wife and mother i'm meant to be is in my heart and ever eludes me, I press on as this is where Gove me.
All our perfect shapes elude all of us.
My question for you is about my 10-year-old son.
Protecting Emotional Stories00:07:32
He's incredibly sharp and creative.
He loves to write stories and screenplays, draw comic books and create games.
He can play with his friends.
Not an introvert, he's funny and well liked.
Unfortunately, he cares nothing for academic pursuits, including writing, if it's not fiction.
This school year has been incredibly difficult and recently came to a head when we had to rebuke him for spending time on writing stories, where his numerous school assignments were done very poorly and testra failed.
Being a very emotional child as well, he did not take it well, ripped up his story in a crying rage, vowed to never write another story again.
Um, that's how upset he was.
My husband and I recognize his creativity.
Creativity is a gift.
I want to nurture it.
However, we also know how smart he is and doing poor work at school is not acceptable.
As a creative yourself, do you have any advice for us?
Yeah, he sounds exactly like me when I was a kid.
I never did any schoolwork.
I did love to write stories and create games and all of that stuff.
And it's a special thing.
To be an artist is a real thing, and you don't want to be in opposition to that because then he has to do what I had to do, which is protect himself from you.
And you have to close yourself off so that your parents can't hurt you because you love them, but you don't want them to hurt this gift that you know you have.
It's just a very powerful thing.
I don't know if artists are actually more sensitive than other people.
What they do have is they are receiving more emotional information than other people.
I believe this is why a lot of male writers are alcoholics because we have basically the emotional receptors of women, but we're not women.
It's very difficult.
We get a lot of information, a lot of emotional information when we walk into a room.
We see a lot of things.
We can read minds.
It's very, very weird.
It is a different experience than everybody else is having.
And so that's why he gets upset when you're threatening this thing that he knows he was made to do.
I can't promise you that I can give you the magical advice that will help you.
He's going to be a dynamic kid with a lot of emotional ups and downs.
I can tell you this, though.
This thing is his thing.
And you're absolutely right.
He shouldn't throw his brains away.
He shouldn't fail at school.
But it's possible he's 10 years old, so he's smart.
And he's smart enough to understand stuff.
It's possible you can explain it to him in an honest way that he might actually listen to.
The thing about writing, the thing about being a storyteller is the more you know, the better you become.
The more you know about how life works, the more you can create characters.
If you want to write a story about a submarine, it helps to know about submarines.
If you want to know, write a story that might involve numbers, it helps to know some math.
I don't think any information goes to waste if you're a storyteller.
It's like feeding the machine.
You don't send a car out without gas.
You don't send a construction machine out, an assembly line machine out without parts.
A writer has to have stuff inside him to write about.
And if he can learn some stuff, that will actually make his stories better.
You want to be on his side with this because this is who he is.
I suspect.
I don't know him, but from your letter, this is who he is.
So you want to explain to him that, yes, you know, what my father would always say was, I was going to starve, which was perfectly valid.
But, you know, I mean, it made me just feel like, get away from me.
Just stay away from me because this is my thing.
This is my thing.
You cannot hurt my thing.
And I really did do everything I could to protect it from him and it worked.
But it was difficult and it made me estrange from my own family.
So you don't want that to happen.
You want to take care, help him take care of this precious thing.
And explain to him, you're not trying to punish him.
You're not trying to hurt him for writing stories.
You're trying to help him write better stories.
This is part of the path of a writer, is education.
I always thought it wasn't.
I always thought I just wanted to have experiences.
I just want to roam around the country.
I just want to meet girls and do all these different things that will go into my stories.
And then I realized, no, I have to know stuff.
I have to read other people's stories.
I have to read about nonfiction things too, so I know stuff so I can write about stuff.
It's important.
So maybe if you explain it to him that way, he will see the point.
He should know that you're on his side.
And the way you approached him before, I'm just telling you, if it had been me, I'd have felt exactly the same way.
I would not have said, I'll never write stories again.
I just would have shut down.
I just would have said, no, don't, you know, you're not my friend.
You are not on my side.
This is his thing.
Help him with this thing, protect his thing, nurture and love his thing.
Part of that can be understanding that learning is part of being a writer.
It's one of the best things about it.
You will burn out if you do not have information coming in all the time.
I hope that's helpful.
I can't promise it is, but I hope so.
Let me know how it goes.
From Nick, thank you so much for all you do.
I've listened to you for years, and my wife and I are actually naming our first son after you after she suggested naming him after my favorite author.
I'm very touched.
Thank you.
Thanks very much.
But be nice to him.
My question is: do you believe dogs go to heaven?
The other hosts of Daily Wire seem very anti-dog.
The guys are monsters.
They're savages.
I remember you explaining the only ghost-like experience you had was when you believed the spirit of your dog moved the doggy door to say goodbye.
It was really wild.
I've had many dogs in my life.
I love them very dearly.
While I understand people's annoyance with the dog-parent attitude, I just cannot look at my dogs and think they do not have souls.
I believe God made them to be our companions.
What do you think?
I read this once, I think in C.S. Lewis, I believe it was, who said basically dogs don't have souls of their own, but they become part of our souls.
And that made perfect sense to me.
I do believe I'll see my dog again.
I love that animal.
I don't think love dies.
And I think she did become part of me.
And I think we're connected forever.
And I think that that is the way it works.
Do I know?
No.
Does anybody know?
Of course not.
But I do not believe that the creatures that we love and who love us back, I don't believe they get left behind.
From Stephen, I want to know why you think that being Catholic is the default religion.
I would think that because most think you can just tell a priest all you have done wrong, say a couple of Hail Marys and you're fixed.
Anyway, what I meant by that, I did mean a very specific thing by that.
I didn't mean it was the religion.
I meant all other versions come out of that and out of Eastern Orthodoxy.
So for instance, if you're a Protestant, what are you protesting?
You're protesting Catholicism.
So you're defining yourself in terms of Catholicism.
Just the word Protestant defines you in terms of Catholicism.
You don't have to agree with it.
You don't have to like it, but you're reacting to it.
And that makes it central to the Catholic religion, to the Christian religion, in a way that being a Lutheran is not.
It doesn't make it better, doesn't make it worse, doesn't make it right, doesn't make it wrong.
I'm just saying its position is creative and original in the way Protestant religions, which came later, are not.
And I think the Nicene Creed is still basically the best statement of what all Christians believe.
And I think that that is part of the Catholic Church as well.
So again, that's not an endorsement of the Catholic Church.
It's just saying its position in the history of the church.
All right.
I got to stop there unless you're a member.
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