On this episode of The Megyn Kelly Show, host Meghan Kelly is joined by Andrew Klavan of The Daily Wire and author of After That, The Dark, and longevity expert Gary Brekka. Meghan and Andrew discuss the Golden Globe nominations, and why they think there may have been a deliberate snub by Hollywood.
00:08:34.300Well, I totally agree with you in terms of values, but not necessarily in terms of effect.
00:08:40.860When you say you weren't snubbed, you only had to leave your name in the running, and you would have been snubbed.
00:08:46.540Certainly, there is no way that you were ever going to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award or any other award that I can think of offhand.
00:08:52.840And back in the 2000s, I wrote a book called Empire of Lies, which took a very honest look at the clash between Islam and the West.
00:09:02.760And when I put the last period on the manuscript, I walked – this is absolutely true – I walked into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and I said,
00:09:11.180can you live with the fact that you're never going to win another award?
00:09:14.480Because I'm the recipient of multiple literary awards, the highest awards in my particular field.
00:09:19.880I've won the Mystery Writers of America Award twice.
00:09:23.280I've been nominated five times, I think, maybe six.
00:09:26.400And I knew when I wrote this book that I was never, ever going to win an award again.
00:09:31.940And I also knew that my reviews would turn.
00:09:35.560I was a recipient of glowing reviews in hundreds of venues.
00:09:39.740And after Empire of Lies came out, I got one review in a major venue, and it called me a right-wing lunatic.
00:09:45.440I can't remember the exact words, but it was something like a right-wing lunatic.
00:09:50.260Anybody who's looking at these things and thinking that they're fair or that they're going to maybe come around and like us,
00:09:56.420you know, I don't know what Ben was thinking.
00:09:59.300Maybe he just wanted the publicity of going after it.
00:10:02.400But, you know, this is a problem on the right is that we talk about the New York Times and how dishonest it is,
00:10:08.940but the New York Times comes along and offers to do an article about us.
00:10:11.780Instead of telling them to pound sand, we agree to it, and then we get, you know, absolutely ripped to pieces by their passive-aggressive hostility.
00:10:19.780Although I did an interview with the New York Times, and I did not get ripped to pieces, and it was very fruitful.
00:10:24.720You know, she and I had some very challenging back and forths that I think exposed the times.
00:10:36.160However, the thing about awards, and the thing about the arts in general, and entertainment in general, is it's kind of like sex.
00:10:43.060You know, you experience sex in the moment as fun, but over the long term, it's a very deep spiritual experience that's going to have an effect on your life
00:10:50.860in a very rich in multiple ways according to how you do it.
00:10:54.800So if you treat sex lightly your whole life, you're going to end up in a bad place, whereas if you treat it as part of commitment and love,
00:11:00.180you're going to end up in a much better place.
00:11:01.560And the same thing is true with the arts.
00:11:02.580We experience the arts as fun, entertainment, but the way the arts affect us over time is going to have an effect on our society as a whole
00:11:10.860and on some people's, especially young people's, souls, you know, as a whole.
00:11:16.500And I think the problem with the right is we just haven't paid enough attention to this.
00:11:21.420But we have no awards that we run until Trump took over the Kennedy Center and started to give Kennedy Center awards from the right.
00:11:29.400An author starting out is never going, if he's a conservative, is never going to get the kind of recognition that a left-wing artist is going to get.
00:11:40.180Artists like Tom Stoppard, one of the greatest writers of my lifetime, just maybe the greatest writer of my lifetime,
00:11:46.460was virtually canceled because of his non-attacks on Margaret Thatcher and ultimately gave an interview saying that he was kind of a socialist, really,
00:11:56.380I think he was a Tory to the day he died.
00:11:58.520And I think the same thing is true of Cormac McCarthy, who I know was a conservative but never said so because he was a guy who could easily have won a Nobel Prize for literature,
00:13:38.860And it ultimately takes from you something that is of value, which is the prestige of your peers and your colleagues.
00:13:46.200And you are a tough person, so you understand that, just like I'm a tough person and I understood it when I gave it up.
00:13:52.700But I realized that I was giving up something of value.
00:13:55.480And I think that knowing that I will never win those prizes, that it's very difficult even for me to get on the lists that the New York Times sends around for its bestseller list, because that's a very rigged bestseller list.
00:14:08.060It's very hard for me to get on those.
00:14:10.060You know, those are things that do affect your career and do affect your prestige and do affect your pleasure at what you do and affect the audiences.
00:14:17.040Because I'm somebody, I am a very good novelist, and my novels are very much appreciated by the people who read them.
00:14:27.880But breaking out of that right-wing audience to spread these novels, which I think would be appreciated by a lot of people of good values, is very difficult.
00:14:39.840So I've been really fortunate, you know, I'm one of these guys who has had this wonderful career in spite of my having a big mouth and saying what I have to say.
00:14:52.880And it would be better if we would participate more and fight back more.
00:14:57.040Like, all I could think when they were talking about, you know, how I needed to go out there and sit with these people and try to razzle-dazzle them was, I would rather blow my brains out.
00:15:14.540Nor do I have it in me to sit at one of their little tables around their movie stars on the big night and act like I care, like I wish for their good approval.
00:15:28.360It's too important to me to excoriate and mock them endlessly and ruthlessly, which they give me fodder to do every day.
00:15:36.080Once you start getting sucked in by these losers, you lose your own ability to stay empowered and speak honestly about what they do, right?
00:15:47.980Like, I cannot be—I can't be corrupted by them.
00:16:44.620Like, there's a little friction between us, as it should be.
00:16:48.880You know, like, it's fine to do, like, the occasional party, this, that, the—I'm not saying that there's anything inappropriate with that.
00:16:55.760We do that no matter what president is in office.
00:16:58.000But, like, making a politician or making Hollywood or people who are that out of touch your BFFs as a journalist is corrupting.
00:17:32.080It's amazing what you do when you marry one of the richest men in the world.
00:17:35.160And it was just announced today that Beyonce, Nicole Kidman, and I think Venus Williams are going to be the three co-chairs of the Met Gala this year.
00:17:47.980Because they're all super relevant in our culture.
00:18:32.020They're chairing an event at which all those people who will be sitting in those Golden Globe chairs will parade themselves in $100,000 gowns to a dinner where the, you know, the plebs have to pay $40,000 a table to show up.
00:19:22.560Take a look at Ariana Grande right now of the music industry and now also an actress starring in Wicked.
00:19:30.760Let's check in on how Ariana, who was raised on television on Nickelodeon, then parlayed that into singing, now is a Hollywood actress, is doing.
00:19:46.520She looks like you could snap her in two with, like, your fingers.
00:19:52.560And she's having some sort of weird, I don't know what it is.
00:19:56.860It, sexual, I don't know, relationship with a they-them, her co-star, Cynthia Erivo, who also looks dangerously thin.
00:20:04.440Then we take a walk down the street, and there's Andy Dick, comedian, actor, this is sad, but it's in the news today, literally on the street, reportedly having OD'd.
00:20:17.400Like, this is him, just this week in the news, I think it was yesterday, spotted after having overdosed like a homeless person on the streets.
00:20:27.820Take a look at Kelly Osbourne, also reality TV star, daughter of Ozzy and Sharon.
00:21:01.040You shouldn't be spending your money to get a table with these people.
00:21:05.120You should not aspire to have a child go into this industry, and you should never feel bad that this industry doesn't recognize you for your life accomplishments.
00:21:15.960And I say that to you as Andrew Klavan and to the audience writ large.
00:21:19.700Well, yeah, you know, of course this is true.
00:21:22.360This has to do with a mistake about the arts that came about during the Romantic era.
00:21:27.680I mean, it's quite a long time ago where the arts went from being a piece of work that was either good or bad on its own to being the production of this artist.
00:21:36.780You know, I don't look at myself as the creator of things.
00:21:39.760I look at myself as a guy who receives information and puts it out on the page.
00:21:45.360I think most really good artists think of themselves as a conduit to their art, not as the creator of their art.
00:21:50.720But at some point, we began to think that the artist himself was important and that he was the guy to be elevated.
00:21:57.560I mean, I think all the time about people like Whitney Houston, one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen, with one of the most incredible voices I've ever heard, dead in a bathtub after being abused by her partner.
00:22:09.760And then, you know, on drugs and all this, Philip Seymour Hoffman, probably the best actor of his generation, dying after injecting heroin to himself.
00:22:19.320You know, so these are these are obviously broken people who have been given a great gift.
00:22:24.540And that gift is that something comes through them that we all benefit from and admire.
00:22:28.940And yet when you put that on them and you admire them, you're just making a fundamental category error.
00:22:35.060You're just basically saying you're looking at the wrong thing.
00:23:14.340There's an old George Cohen musical called I'd Rather Be Right Than Be President.
00:23:18.280And I, too, like you, would rather say what I have to say and speak the words I I would say what I had to say if I sold one book.
00:23:26.360You know, I mean, I would not I would never, ever change the things that I want to put down on paper.
00:23:30.400And you can talk to the people who work with me.
00:23:32.400I hope I'm a pleasant enough person in general life.
00:23:36.520But when you try to make me say something that I don't agree with, I become incredibly prickly and unmovable.
00:23:42.240And I, you know, I've gone through multiple editors and agents just making sure that I got to have the career that I wanted to have.
00:23:50.180But again, I've been incredibly fortunate and durable.
00:23:53.900And I just think about a lot of people, a lot of actors who have all the talent in the world or writers who have all the talent in the world, singers who have who have no chance because they they support Trump or because they believe in the Constitution or they believe that, you know, being white isn't a crime or whatever it is we're not supposed to believe in these days.
00:24:13.580I was watching Sidney Sweeney, who had made the beautiful move of basically showing herself to be at least her family to be Republican and refusing to turn away from a jeans ad that she did, which was absurdly attacked as white supremacist.
00:24:38.220Because because her movie, we just had a debate on the show privately about whether that was her backtracking or bending the knee, which I maintained it was.
00:24:46.560And my executive producer didn't feel as harshly about it.
00:24:50.000But I was like, no, this is what she's changed the messaging.
00:24:53.120They got to her Hollywood, her agents, her PR people, the casting directors, the money men, you know, like producers who actually could like control her presence in a film.
00:25:04.860They got to her because her messaging sounds very different from, I think, when I have something to say about that, people will hear.
00:25:14.500Now, I'll just play it, Andrew, and I'll let you take it.
00:26:14.260She's got managers and agents and friends and family and, you know, colleagues saying, you know, just you don't have to say anything you don't want to say.
00:26:22.140But just go out and say you're against hate.
00:26:28.420Yeah, she said this is to People magazine, which, by the way, I don't know if people know this, but People magazine is woke and fucking annoying.
00:26:56.860In the past, my stance has been to never respond to negative or positive press.
00:27:01.600But recently I have come to realize that my silence regarding this issue has only widened the divide, not closed it.
00:27:12.980So I hope this new year brings more focus on what connects us instead of what divides us.
00:27:17.160It's that part of but recently I have come to realize that my silence regarding this issue has only widened the divide, not closed it.
00:27:25.880So to be clear, I'm against hate and divisiveness.
00:27:29.820And I really think that's what she that's as close as she will get, I guess, to telegraphing.
00:27:35.520I don't agree with the Republican crazies who backed me and I'm not a white supremacist.
00:27:41.780And I don't like the the people taking my jeans ad as a comment on G-E-N-E-S any more so than I explicitly wanted them to in that ad.
00:27:52.800She was better off with the first answer.
00:27:56.560Yeah. But, you know, think about this, Megan.
00:27:58.060I just I just want to put it in human perspective.
00:28:00.000I mean, think about Chick-fil-A who came out against gay marriage and not in a vicious way.
00:28:05.280Not I hate gay people, but I think marriage is between a man and a woman and stood and held to their guns and became because of that one of the biggest franchises, fast food franchises in the country, much bigger than they were before, despite the consistent attacks of the left.
00:28:21.460But every time they went to open a restaurant, no matter where it was, when they went to open a branch of their franchise, no matter where it was, the left showed up and frequently caused enough trouble to have the municipality refuse them the space that they needed to open a restaurant.
00:28:36.980And ultimately, they started to change their mind.
00:28:39.540Ultimately, Sidney Sweeney lives off the love of the people.
00:28:43.380The people learn about her movies through the reviews and through word of mouth.
00:28:47.680The left has incredible energy and incredible dedication to making sure that word of mouth does not spread in her favor.
00:28:56.500And she cracked, you know, let's guess.
00:29:20.640But like, but still, you know, the thing is, the thing is, this is part of the profession that she's in, just like part of my profession is signing books or going out and chatting with people about my books.
00:29:31.020You know, these are parts of the things that you do.
00:29:33.460And the left is dedicated to destroying you.
00:29:36.980I have a friend, wonderful guy, if you haven't had him on the show, you had, you should, Cyrus Nawassa, who is a rebel director who made a film called The Road to 9-11 that has never been released on DVD, despite the fact it was one of the most popular TV movies ever put out.
00:29:53.400But it's never been released because it showed that Bill Clinton was partly responsible for not killing Osama bin Laden and therefore opened the path to 9-11.
00:30:02.220And he didn't do it because he didn't have any political capital because he'd been banging.
00:30:06.280Yes, so because it was put out by Disney, by ABC, they've basically banned it.
00:30:21.700And the New York Times attacked it because it's about a little girl who inherits, a little black girl who inherits some land on which there's oil and her struggles to get the oils based on a true story.
00:30:31.200Yeah, so and it's a lovely film and the New York Times attacked it because it glamorized fossil fuels and because the little girl had a white friend who was protecting her and that was their attack on it.
00:30:43.620So, in other words, they can't stand the white savior.
00:30:46.260The white savior is a trope that must be avoided at all terms.
00:30:49.840But think of the small soul, small minded approach that says no work of art can have ideas in it that offend me.
00:30:57.960That's essentially what they're saying.
00:30:59.020I watch works of art that I think are quite good that actually have a left wing point of view, even though I disagree with their point of view.
00:31:04.420I admire the artistry that's involved.
00:31:06.320Sometimes I'll, you know, Sean Penn, the great actor.
00:31:09.280I've never stopped saying what a great actor he is.
00:39:09.400And we'll see what happens in the next year or so.
00:39:13.280I mean, what I always love is when the Democrats start talking about affordability, you always know they're going to charge you twice as much.
00:39:59.520Why can't Schwarzenegger is obviously also a Republican.
00:40:02.940He's not a Trump publican, but he's a Republican.
00:40:05.440Why can't Sly Stallone and Schwarzenegger and Mel Gibson and some of these other guys get together and form their own production company?
00:40:15.580Like, I know The Daily Wire makes some films that are more conservative, but I'm talking about like mega Hollywood connection people who have the juice, the connections and the dough to fund films.
00:40:26.800They don't even have to be conservative films.
00:40:48.800But I'm not somebody who could who could build a business.
00:40:51.300I'm not somebody who could put that together.
00:40:52.720And maybe that's true of some of these guys, too.
00:40:54.560You know, and Sylvester Stallone is a really interesting example because he won a Kennedy Award and some people were making fun of him because he was in a lot of, you know, Rambo 8 and, you know, Rocky 12 and all that stuff, which I heard him along the way.
00:41:10.380I heard him on TV kind of complaining about that because the funny thing about Sylvester Stallone, he has that voice like he's a palooka.
00:41:16.820You know, he sounds like he's not that bright, but he's, in fact, a very, very talented man.
00:41:21.740And, you know, he made one of the classic American movies.
00:41:24.620There are not that many people who can say that.
00:42:10.640But they're used to just being talent, and they don't know how to run a business, so it's an obstacle.
00:42:15.680Now, I do think all of this is relevant to what we should be rooting for on this purchase war for Warner Brothers.
00:42:24.520Warner Brothers, one of the original and big five Hollywood movie studios, like, still cranking out films that we see in the theater, not direct to streaming, not direct to the little box in your living room, but, like, the theater experience.
00:42:39.240And it makes me think of, like, Tom Cruise when Top Gun Maverick came out.
00:42:42.360And he was like, I make movies for the big screen.
00:42:53.960Like, there's almost like a, not in a negative way, but like a snobbishness toward, like, going direct to streaming for these big Hollywood stars who are used to audiences having the experience that you have in theater with the surround sound and the huge screen and your fellow Americans around you.
00:43:10.300You know, some talking too loud, some laughing with you, some crying with you.
00:44:33.620It's based on a true story of a trans woman, meaning a fake woman, who dreams of working the coal mines, but in a town steeped in superstition and patriarchy, Carlita, the real name is Carlos, must fight to earn her place underground.
00:44:50.120And it stars Lux Pascal, a trans identifying man, which again means a man who's pretending to be a woman, who's the brother of an existing Hollywood star, Pedro Pascal.
00:45:01.280And this is what they want to show us, and this is what they want to show us, how coal miners are a bunch of scumbags who didn't immediately accept a man pretending to be a woman underground in the coal mines.
00:45:13.520That's what Netflix is devoting its time, money, and attention to.
00:45:21.680Concerned Women for America, per the Daily Wire, just released a report on Monday finding 41% of children's content on Netflix contains LGBTQ themes.
00:45:32.94041, nearly half, okay, so that's, and this is not a children's film, but I'm just talking about the children's films, almost half of them have LGBTQ, so that's Netflix.
00:45:44.040So I'm not rooting for Netflix to amass more studios, more control over filmmaking or artistry whatsoever.
00:45:52.340And on the other side, you have Paramount Skydance, which is trying to get Warner Brothers with a hostile takeover, with a much better bid that far exceeds $100 billion.
00:46:04.120The shareholders will make more money, it could close in less time, it's more likely to get approval from the government,
00:46:09.300because the Netflix deal would require the number one streamer, Netflix, combining with HBO Max, which is the number three streamer, I guess I'm told,
00:46:18.820which could not, that could wind up in an antitrust problem that would lead to the disapproval of the merger.
00:46:23.160But Paramount Skydance has no such issues.
00:46:25.880But what I'm being told by the left-wing media is we're supposed to hate Paramount Skydance and its bid, Andrew,
00:46:32.720because Jared Kushner is putting money into that deal, Qatar is putting money into that deal,
00:46:40.440I think either Saudi Arabia or the UAE, one of those is putting some money into that deal.
00:46:44.040And so because we've all been critical of some of those Middle Eastern countries over the years,
00:46:50.380and because Kushner, of course, everyone has to hate him, even though he just reached peace in the Middle East for us,
00:46:55.460we're supposed to object to that one, because we don't want Qatar controlling CNN,
00:47:02.020which would be acquired as a Warner Brothers property, as part of the Paramount Skydance acquisition.
00:57:19.800But he was just saying what a low IQ individual she was, which is really probably not great, something you don't want to reinforce.
00:57:25.480Now she's out today with a rapper who appeared at a rally she was at trying to, like, rap about how great she is as she just sits there trying to look cool.
01:00:06.920And she just tweeted out, today, the 10th?
01:00:09.900Today, she tweeted out, today, I formally introduced articles of impeachment against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has turned his back on science and the safety of the American people.
01:00:20.960Michiganders cannot take another day of this chaos.
01:00:23.920And here is Haley Stevens during COVID, just in case you're wondering who the hell this woman is.
01:03:37.100Um, Ambassador Rhoda J. Elmi, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for Somaliland, a region along the Gulf of Aden that broke away from Somalia in 1991,
01:03:49.280shared a clip of comments Omar made in Minneapolis over this weekend in 2024 with a translation that Omar has since disputed.
01:03:58.760But according to this Elmi, whose translation is consistent with quotations in, um, a resolution that's now taking aim at Ilhan Omar, Omar said the U.S. government, quote,
01:04:10.100will only do what Somalians in the U.S. tell them to do.
01:04:14.940We have now put an English voiceover on the soundbite, um, right?
01:05:28.460I mean, we're having a robust debate in this country these days about whether it's acceptable to have loyalty to another country before the United States as an American citizen.
01:05:37.960We don't do it in the context of Somalia that much, but I think someone needs to check in on Ilhan Omar and her loyalties.
01:06:45.960And I mean, and I feel this way, you know, I will say it.
01:06:49.480I feel this way about the American blacks who think that they should be given some kind of, you know, repayment for slavery, a state that they were never, ever in.
01:06:59.980Or Jasmine Crockett thinks that they should get, they should not pay taxes.
01:07:03.480I know they should not pay taxes because they were, not because they were held slaves,
01:07:07.700because someone with their same skin color was held slaves.