Andrew Clavin and Michael Knowles dissect the March for Science’s leftist weaponization of climate alarmism, comparing it to Holocaust denial, while mocking suppressed satire like Reasons to Vote for Democrats. They contrast Macron’s centrist France with global class divides—elites thriving on globalization while working-class populations drown in opioid crises and gang violence tied to open borders. Marvel’s forced diversity (Miles Morales Spider-Man) and pro-Islamist art in X-Men Gold expose Hollywood’s leftist takeover, blamed for millennial unemployment and avoidance of real-world threats like Islamism. Clavin rejects dystopian automation fears but warns virtue—not just freedom—sustains societies, citing Burke and The Choice of Hercules, before pivoting to transgender absurdity via My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and praising The Vanishing’s moral realism over Hollywood’s decline. [Automatically generated summary]
Thousands upon thousands of irritating buffoons with nothing better to do took to the streets over the weekend to march for science.
Many of these pro-science marchers are people who believe that if a man puts on a dress and gets breast implants, he magically becomes a woman, and that it's perfectly fine to kill an unborn baby until a blue fairy sprinkles it with sparkly light and turns it into a real boy.
Maybe that's Pinocchio.
It's all very confusing.
So if the people marching for science are so incredibly irrational and idiotic and unattractive and loud and irrational and unattractive, then what is this science they're marching for and why are they all so stupid?
I think I can explain.
You see, these people aren't marching for science.
They're marching for science.
Science is a technique for understanding the material world through observation and experiment, like when you mix baking soda and vinegar in a test tube and then put a cork in the test tube and the mixture bubbles up and forces the cork to shoot across the room and hit your little sister in the forehead.
That's real science and not only can it be useful for making electric skateboards and curing cancer, but it's also absolutely hilarious when your little sister goes staggering backwards and falls into the laundry hamper, especially if you can get out of the house before your mom smacks you cross-eyed, as you obviously deserve.
But the science the March for Science marchers are marching for is not that science, but science.
Science is a leftist word meaning a combination of unreliable computer models and meaningless consensus used to create panic in order to shut down debate and promote socialist programs that will give more power and money to the people who use the word science to mean something other than science.
For example, our best unreliable and continually mistaken computer models show that if we don't cut back at all on greenhouse gas emissions, higher temperatures could cause sea levels to rise about two feet over the course of the next century.
This means that Al Gore would have to spend the next nine decades moving his beach towel back from the shore at a rate of approximately 2.6 inches a year.
Also, he should put on a shirt because let's face it, the guy has blown up like a balloon.
According to many science marchers, we must avert this computer model inconvenience to Al Gore by immediately raising unemployment, destroying the economy, and putting an end to fracking, which creates cleaner energy with little harm to the earth.
Now, you may say, wait, that's the stupidest thing I ever heard, but that makes you a science denier.
Losing Ground00:03:16
A phrase meant to remind people of those who deny the Holocaust, which is exactly like the climate catastrophe, except for existing in reality.
So that's why we here at the Andrew Clavin Show support the March for Science.
It's a harmless activity for mentally deficient leftists that will keep them out of their homes, where they might do something dangerous, like having sex and reproducing.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey, life is tickety blue.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Well, I just barely survived the Cynthia Ann Gould Memorial Challenge.
The Cynthia Ann Gulow Memorial Challenge is where the lady who does our illustrations for the opening, she just tries to crack me up.
And it's a memorial challenge because if she does it, I'm going to kill her.
All right, so this week, the Clavenless weekend at last is over, long last is over, but this week is a little bit different because I'm traveling to Oberlin College tomorrow to give a speech on fake news.
And so there won't be a show tomorrow, but there will be a show Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
So we'll have a full week.
But this means that you have to get in your mailbag questions.
I won't be here to remind you to get in your mailbag questions tomorrow.
So you got to get them in for Wednesday when I will answer your questions with 100% accuracy, guaranteed to change your life possibly for the better.
And we have Knowles the Trolls here.
Michael Knowles will be here as our cultural correspondent.
This is now his part-time job that he just does.
It's a hobby, really.
He doesn't need the job anymore.
The guy is so wealthy from publishing his book, his blank book, but he does occasionally like to drop in because I buy the scotch.
All right.
So I was thinking, he's a cheap.
He's cheap.
I said, what can I tell you?
Thinking over the weekend, I was watching this French election over the weekend.
And, you know, I'm always hesitant to talk about other people's countries because I've lived in other people's countries.
And one of the things I realized is that you don't know the country until you've lived in it for several years.
And then you begin to detect all the subtle cultural connections and all this stuff.
So you can't, it's very hard to, you know, declaim on other people's country.
But I do think this thing where what happened was the two main parties, which are basically a leftist party and a conservative party, who have been governing since the war, basically, they both lost.
And Maureen Le Pen is now set up, this very conservative nationalist candidate, is now set up to lose to Macron, who is a kind of, they say, a centrist, which is hard to know what that means from far away.
And the reason I say she's going to lose, everybody keeps saying, well, they said Trump was going to lose and he won, and that's true, but she's something like 60% down in the polls, and the elections are like in a week.
They're May 7th, I guess.
So it's unlikely.
But it did show you that just like here, where a guy won as a Republican who's not really a Republican, Donald Trump, there's something going on.
The old order is passing away.
The order that has been in place since the war, since World War II, is passing away.
New Divisions Being Drawn00:15:50
And new divisions are being drawn.
New lines are being drawn.
They keep calling it globalism versus nationalism, but I don't really think that's what it is.
I think it's a class divide.
I think it is a divide between elites who are looking at a world that is a nice place to live for people who work with their minds, people who work with words.
Here we have the First Amendment, so your words aren't going to get regulated, hopefully, if we can keep people like the people who run universities out of power.
So things are good for us.
Yeah, sure, you can have whatever kind of sex you want, but smart, educated people know eventually the best thing to do is get married, have your kids in wedlock.
That's what they do.
They've gone back to church.
They're having a great time.
It's just the people they convinced to grab hold of the new kind of 1960s morale.
All those people are wallowing and dying and unemployed.
And these people are being left behind.
So it really is this class division.
And there was a piece in City Journal where I am a contributing editor.
City Journal is the Manhattan Institute's magazine.
And there was a piece a while back where a guy went out, a guy named Gregory Ferenstein, went out and he took a poll of elites in Silicon Valley.
And you figure these guys are visionaries.
They are the guys who see the future.
And they said, what are things going to be like?
And here's what he wrote.
He said, over the very long run, an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people.
Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial gig work and government aid.
Sounds great, doesn't it?
It's like there's going to be six guys in Silicon Valley making a fortune, and you're going to get government aid.
So the way the valley elites see it, everyone can try to be an entrepreneur.
Some small percentage will achieve wild success and create enough wealth that others can live comfortably.
Many tech leaders appear optimistic that this type of economy will provide the vast majority of people with unprecedented prosperity and leisure, though no one quite knows when.
And I talked to this guy, Gregory, and he was saying, you know, it's going to be great.
It'll all be Burning Man.
You know, you'll sit around, you'll take drugs, you'll be so creative.
You don't need a job.
You'll get a guaranteed government income because Bill Gates will be so rich, he'll be able to be taxed to give you a guaranteed income no matter what you do.
And like, I said to him, so where's the meaning of life?
You know, where's your dignity as a person who creates something and who makes something, who supports a family?
Where's your honor?
Where's your sense of usefulness in the world?
Oh, you know, you got to, stop!
You don't need that.
So you wonder why people are dying of OxyContin addiction.
This is why, because elites have left these people behind.
And it's weird.
It is weird for me personally, if I may add a personal note.
I'm in a class war.
on the other side, you know, because I'm an elite.
I'm a guy who works, I work with my mind, you know, I've done well with what I do.
You know, I've been a big mystery novelist and a screenwriter and spent a good life and all this stuff.
You know, I'm on that side.
I go to the opera, I drink white wine, I eat breeches, I do all that terrible stuff.
I know, get out, get out.
But it's like, I can't, you cannot have a system that just leaves everybody else behind.
So, you know, I was watching, let's play Maureen Le Pen.
Here is Maureen Le Pen.
And remember, her father was one of the great, you know, these guys, the right wing in Europe has a kind of fascist tinge to it that the right wing in America does not have because we support the Constitution and that keeps us from becoming bad guys.
But her father was really a very, he was anti-Semitic and he was, you know, hyper-nationalist.
But she has kind of toned that down a little bit.
But listen to her speech at getting into the runoff.
So she won this level and now she has to go on into a two-person runoff.
And listen to what she says.
French people have to take on board that historical challenge because the challenge of that election is wild globalization which attacks our very civilization.
It's a very simple choice for France.
Either we carry on towards total deregulation without any border, any protection with the consequence it entails with international unfair competition, mass immigration, the free trade and the free circulation of terrorists, or you choose the France with borders that are going to protect our employment and our national identity.
So you have two choices, and that's the real alternative.
The real one, not the one when government merely changed without nothing serious ever changing.
But I'm suggesting that we should aim for the real alternance, a fundamental alternance, which is going to put in place a new type of politics, new faces, and a real renewal.
You know, when she's talking about the borders, you know, people on the intellectuals, elites on the right and left are saying, look at free trade, look how wealthy everybody gets from free trade.
And yes, that's true if you don't mind the fact that free trade means your job goes to Mexico or it goes to some other place where they can do it cheaper and you're now out of work and there's got to be some kind of solution to that.
It's not going to be a guaranteed income and OxyContin.
That's just not going to work for too many people.
And the whole thing about ideas is ideas have to work.
It's not enough for them to be good and noble and true.
They also have to work.
Nobody's going to sit around and celebrate liberty when his kid is starving.
Nobody's going to sit around and celebrate free speech if he can't feed his family.
That's why the left is always saying don't let a good crisis go to waste because when the crisis hits, then that's when they can move in and get government power and destroy the Constitution and all the things the Democrats love to do.
Listen to Trump.
He sounds exactly like Le Pen.
This is Trump's message for his weekend message.
A new optimism is sweeping our country as we return power from Washington and give it back to the American people where it belongs.
For too long, American workers were forgotten by their government, and I mean totally forgotten.
Their interests were pushed aside for global projects, and their wealth was taken from their communities and shipped across the world, all across the seas.
My administration has offered a new vision.
The well-being of the American citizen and worker will be placed second to none.
And boy, do I mean second to none.
And, you know, and people, when the elites hear this, say, oh, it's dark, it's dark.
Yeah, because things are going great for them.
You know, they're not sitting around wondering what they're going to do, where the meaning of their life is coming from.
And the borders, you know.
This is a really tough one because I am a committed anti-racist.
I believe racism is a sin against the image of God.
I truly do.
But I also believe that France is made of French people.
America is not made of English people.
America is made of anybody who will embrace the Constitution.
It has been that way from the beginning.
It has always been that way.
That you can come here.
And did they envision that the world would get as vast and as many people would come to America as have come?
I don't know whether they envisioned that or not.
But the fact is that has always been true of America, that you can come here and become an American.
Ain't true in France.
It's never been true.
In England and Germany, there were always places that had a kind of blood and soil nature.
It was just natural to them to do that.
That's how the countries were formed.
So when people say, well, let's open our borders and let anybody come in, there's a reason people get upset.
If you bring in Islamic people who think like, yeah, you know, Sharia law would be a better idea.
You know, maybe that's not such a good thing.
I mean, for me, it's all about the ideas, but I can understand why in France there's a racial element, or at least a cultural element to it.
I can understand why in England, I don't think there should ever be that element in America, but I can understand why European countries might embrace a little bit of blood and soil and get out of hand still.
But this is the problem.
See, this is the thing.
This is the thing.
When a realignment like this comes, when a realignment like this comes, it's dangerous.
Doesn't mean it's wrong.
It doesn't mean it won't result in good things.
It's dangerous.
And what is at risk is liberty.
That's what's at risk, because both the people, let's call them, and the elites are perfectly capable of destroying liberty.
Liberty is a tough thing.
It's always a minority, it's always supported by a minority.
There's always a minority who believes people should be free.
Because people should be free means the guy who disagrees with you should also be free.
It's very easy to think you should be free.
The government just has to tell people to do what you're doing, and then you're free.
That's what most people believe.
There's a guy in the New York Times writing today about how hate speech isn't free speech.
This is the new thing on the left.
Hate speech isn't free speech.
Yes, it is.
Hate speech is free speech because who decides?
Who decides what's hate speech?
If I decide that saying hate speech isn't free speech is hate speech, can I silence you?
It's like, who decides?
Nobody.
You just have to let the ideas out there and let the best idea win.
So we're watching this, and all I can say is that the elites are clueless to what's happening.
So we need the elites.
The elites defend liberty when they get the chance, when they have the ideas.
We need to defend certain ideas.
You need elites to defend ideas.
But they are clueless.
I mean, they've been talking about the 100 days.
The 100 days are coming up.
I'm going to pause here and say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but stick with us at thedailywire.com because you will get Michael Knowles.
And getting Michael Knowles is one of the great experiences of human life.
I'm lying, but come on over to TheDailyWire.com.
A country needs both its elites and its people.
That's what it needs.
A country, a nation, a culture needs both elites and its people.
It needs elites to generate ideas.
It needs people to live and support and build the things that need living, supporting, and building.
You know, the people who do most of the living and dying and making and doing.
We need those people and we need the elites to come up with the ideas that we need.
The elites have been clueless because decadence works for them and things are going great for them.
I just have to play.
They're talking about Trump's first 100 days.
And has he succeeded?
And obviously he made all these promises and the promises haven't come true yet.
George Sukalapagas on ABC has on Bill Cunningham, radio host Bill Cunningham, to ask him what's happening in the real world.
And he says, you know, well, Trump hasn't done all the things that he's done.
He promised this, he promised that.
Where is he?
And here's Cunningham's response from real life.
For real people, it's about jobs, the economy, and immigration.
Think about this.
Since he took office, about $2.5 trillion have been put into the American economy through the stock market.
The regulation cutback in one study had saving American businesses about $86 billion just in one year with immigration.
Ohioans, Monroe, Ohio has an MS-13 problem.
Pie County, east of Cincinnati, has an MS-13 marijuana grow operation.
If you cut down on illegal immigration, you cut down on criminal lands and you cut down on heroin.
3,000 Ohioans are going to die this year from heroin overdoses.
All of that's not coming from Tennessee.
It's coming from Guadalajara.
So everywhere I look, whether it's regulations, the stock market, energy, coal is going to come back, infrastructure, I see successes everywhere.
And so when I listen to the coastal elites talk about how Trump's doing this and Trump's doing that, I think about normal Americans like me, and I'm darn proud to have him as our president.
You know, that's something that George Sukalapagas has never heard before.
And he then turns to his panel and says, let's talk to some intelligent people from New York.
That's what he says, from the coast.
Yeah, he does, I swear.
I'm sure he didn't mean it quite the way it came out.
You know, all I can tell you is this 100 days thing, fine, you know, everybody needs a lead to write his article with.
But if Trump passes a health care reform bill, and I'm not even talking about a repeal, I'm talking about something that reforms the health care system that Obama destroyed.
And if he cuts the tax rate, he's going to be president for like ever.
And if the economy comes roaring back and he gets some American jobs going, he's going to be president for a long time.
So all these guys are not paying attention to what's happening.
They're not paying attention to this realignment.
We're going to talk in the cultural segment, the final cultural segment of the show, and talk a little bit about the problem of liberty and how liberty survives in a moment when people are so reactionary on both sides and are fighting so hard and are so angry.
Can liberty survive that?
We're going to talk a little bit about that.
But first, we have to turn to our cultural correspondent, Michael Knowles, featured in one of the nastiest, meanest, most small-minded pieces in the New York Times I have ever seen.
They cannot give you a break.
Just to bring people up to date, okay, Michael published a blank book called Reasons to Vote for Democrats, right?
That's a very intelligent.
What would you put in a book called Reasons for a Vietnam?
Except nothing.
And it's been a bestseller.
You've gotten a six-figure deal for a publishing deal.
He won't, barely will talk to us.
He's remembered on this show.
He barely talks to us anymore.
He comes in like this five-minute segment.
But the New York Times has not, first, they won't put you on the bestseller list where you obviously belong.
And second, they did an article.
Tell people what the article was.
It is outrageous.
We sold in the first week of self-publishing this book, we sold 20 times what other books on the New York Times bestseller list have sold.
20 times.
They wouldn't give it to us.
And then this thing has been in international news.
We've done interviews in Italy and France and Germany, Russia.
And the president tweeted about it.
Yeah, the president of the United States endorsed the book on Twitter.
And the New York Times has been silent, except for one opinion column, which was written by some Democrat sycophants that named the book and said, this book is popular.
They refused to name the author or discuss the circumstances around the book.
And then they wrote up a bunch of lame, other blank books that basically made fun of Republicans.
You think you're funny?
Well, we can be funny.
I'm funny now.
I'm being funny right now.
Nothing's funnier than joke on joke.
Nothing's funnier than that, right?
These guys are so, they're so furious that the book did well, you know, and the Democrats are a laughing stock that they can't handle it.
The Democrats are swirling down the drain.
If I could pity them, I would pity them.
All right, let's talk about Marvel Comics, because this is an incredible story.
I want to start.
I don't want to throw you off, but I want to start with the fact that Marvel has been suffering lately in sales.
Is that fair?
That is really fair.
In spite of the fact that every other movie is a Marvel comic movie.
Yeah, I mean, you can't see anything else at the box office.
But Marvel has been suffering for all of 2017.
Their numbers in February, almost half of their titles sold fewer than 20,000 copies.
And to put that in context, titles could be canceled for selling.
I mean, that puts you in danger of being canceled.
So we're talking about like Iron Man is not selling?
And we're talking about huge titles.
And the reason is that Marvel has decided that this year is the year of the Social Justice Warrior, and they have been progressively replacing characters with their black, gay, Muslims.
Wait, replacing characters.
Yeah, well, they'll have a new person be the Spider-Man character.
So for instance, Thor is now a woman.
Spider-Man is both black and Hispanic.
They had to get both in there.
Captain America is black, and Iron Man is a black woman.
And they have sort of different names, you know.
Wait, wait.
So Peter Parker, Spider-Man's not Peter Parker anymore.
That's right.
Spider-Man now is Miles Morales, and Iron Heart, or Iron Man, is Riri Williams.
And they've just decided, you know, leave it to these guys to go a little on the nose.
Spider-Man's New Identity00:04:44
They couldn't slip in one at a time.
It's this barrage of progressivism.
And as a result, their sales have plummeted.
Yeah, I think we've got to get the guy who came up with this idea and give him a raise, right?
Well, it is amazing because Marvel has had to answer for this.
And the VP of sales, David Gabriel, first said, quote, he obviously is blaming the consumers.
He says, what we heard was that people didn't want any more diversity.
Oh, that was nasty.
They didn't want it.
That's what we heard.
Whether we believe that or not, I don't know that that's really true.
That's what we saw.
Any character that was diverse, people were turning their noses up at.
He then implicitly blamed DC's lower prices for the sales drop.
He then later, though, had to correct himself.
He said, let me be clear, our new heroes are not going anywhere.
Stores are proud and excited to keep these unique characters.
And we're hearing both sides of this.
Is this the same guy?
Yeah, the same guy.
I love it.
It's really quite a shift.
All right.
So, I mean, it's clownish because people would accept new characters or sidekicks or whatever coming in, you know, but why do they have to take away all our beloved characters?
And meanwhile, the films are scoring big with the old characters, right?
That's right.
I mean, they're the only movies that anyone goes to see anymore.
Unbelievable.
And yeah, I mean, there's clearly this lack of creativity and lack of originality that's coming out of all of this, out of Hollywood and out of Marvel.
And so they are not, you know, creating the new black and Hispanic character as much as they're replacing these old guys with.
Didn't they also have like one guy who was putting in like little Muslim messages in the.
This is amazing.
And I actually, I have to thank the writer Jacob Airy for this.
Yes, Jacob, that's where I read it.
Jacob put it on this site.
It's this amazing piece on Conservative News.
It's the most thorough piece about this topic.
But we have here, and I have to be very careful with this.
This is Jacob Scott.
This is actually Jacob Scopi.
Yeah, this is worth more than my book advance, probably.
This is X-Men Gold issue 001.
And it was done by an artist named Ardian Syaf.
And if you turn to page 12, that's where the trouble begins.
Right here we have a character.
The character's name is Kitty Pride.
Kitty is Jewish.
Now, what's really incredible, I don't know if you can see this.
There's a jewelry store right behind Kitty.
Now, the only letters that are not obstructed by pieces of hair or other levels.
J-E-W, the global financial elite, or, you know, I've read all those terms the RI was using, but yes, Jew is the word right behind this Jewish character.
Seems coincidental.
Then, if you look further down in the frame, or I'm sorry, on the right over here, you'll see the words, we support our troops, but one of the bystanders' heads is blocking the word support.
So, that is obviously more subtle than writing Jew right behind the character's head.
What is the 212?
I see this thing 212.
So, the number 212, very prominent number, and no one really knew what it meant going into it.
The artist is an Indonesian Muslim.
The number 212 refers to December 2nd, 2016, when the Jakarta governor, Buzuki Chahaja Pernama, who's one of the only Christian politicians in the country, was protested for perceived blasphemy against Islam.
And by the way, the perceived blasphemy was simply to say that Indonesian Muslims should elect a Christian politician, not only a Muslim politician.
That's what that number refers to.
And that one seems a little esoteric, but I think the other examples will highlight it.
You'll see on the character's shirt right here, ALM.
That seems a little out of place.
It stands for Alpha Lambda Mu, also better known as Alif Leem Mime.
And that was the first Muslim fraternity founded in the United States a few years ago.
And then the part where we really can't ignore this anymore is on this character Colossus on the shirt.
The letters QS and then 551.
Uh-oh.
QS 551.
Now, I've read a certain holy book.
I remember reading it a few years ago.
QS stands for Quran Surah 551.
And that verse is, O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and Christians as allies.
And furthermore, there's an Indonesian translation of the Quran which says Muslims should not appoint the Jews and Christians as their leader.
Wow.
Wow.
So the message all put together is, you know, Jews and Christians.
This is mourning the elevation of a non-Muslim leader to Indonesia.
That's right.
And it's clearly supporting the protests against this leader.
So ultimately, obviously this got caught because Jacob caught it.
The real question is, how did this get published?
Among Robots, Infantilizing Culture00:06:49
I'm no expert on comic books.
Obviously, I had to read Jacob's article to really understand this.
This world.
Doesn't take a genius to notice these glaring symbols, QS, Jew, you know, not the least among them.
So this guy gets fired.
He did get fired.
He did finally get fired.
He posted on Facebook, and he admitted to all of it.
He copped to all of them.
He said, yeah, yeah.
Quote, my career is over now.
It's a consequence of what I did, and I take it.
Please, no more mockery, debate, no more hate, no more hate.
Wait a second.
Wait, who's telling us?
That's always the Islamist way.
There's no more hate, except our hate.
No more hate.
I'm reading this whole book of it.
And so anyway, so he's out of here now.
But the real question is, how did this get through?
I mean, how did someone not catch this before?
And what is the environment at Marvel that is allowing this kind of drivel?
You know, Marvel had always had a history, not among the creatives, but among the owners, always had a history of being kind of, you know, conservative, pro-American, good guys.
I mean, what the hell?
I mean, they have, you know, one of their titles is Captain America.
Captain America.
That is red, white, and blue as you get.
You know, these guys, the left ruins everything.
And the way they do it is they can't create their own stuff.
So they enter into stuff that has become popular through its patriotism and through its conservatism.
They enter into it.
They eat it out from within.
They wear it like a mask.
And it just becomes this dead zombie of leftism that looks like Captain America.
You're talking about the Obama era in the United States, right?
The whole country.
That's right, yeah.
But I mean, whether it's Yale, you know, where some of us went, one of us went, you know, whether it's Yale, they take it over and they say it's still Yale, but it's not.
It's just leftism.
And this was like happening to Marvel Comics.
That's right.
It's this grotesque zombie that's still kind of plodding along.
So now, everybody in this office is ticked off at me because I let you do this segment instead of letting them do the segment because everybody here is a big comic book fan.
And I have kind of, I used to be a comic book fan.
They've kind of just run out for me at some level.
Is it just on another topic before I let you go?
Do you feel that there's something wrong with a society that just keeps pushing out this comic universe?
Yeah, you know, they're upset with me, all of the fans who are the comic book fans in the office, because I'm doing it, but they're going to be more upset with me now for the answer to this question.
There is something really troubling that the biggest movies, the only movies that anybody goes to see in the country are these superhero fantasy comic book movies.
And the issue is that it's infantilizing.
It's infantilizing to the culture and it's infantilizing to the people who consume it and to the viewers of these movies.
I think there is no coincidence that over the last decade we've been seeing a lot of troubling statistics coming out from my dear millennial generation.
You know, a third of Americans 25 to 34 live at home.
More than half of all Americans, not just millennials, all Americans think marrying and having children are not important to becoming an adult.
Half of the country.
This is according to Pew, Pew Research Center.
People are obviously marrying much later, and almost 13% of millennials are unemployed.
Almost 13% of people in the prime of their life are not working.
This is your fault, guys.
This is your for going to these movies.
It's your fault.
That's right.
And I always tell people, when I speak to young people, I always say, what you have to do is just sit down and not do any work and then get a best-selling book out of it.
You know, I mean, that's an example to us all.
That's right.
But I do think there is something a little worrying about that.
One of the guy who wrote Captain America, The Winter Soldier, Stephen McFeely, writes that the reason they're popular now is it's the new version of Cowboy Westerns.
And that's the argument Logan makes.
And Logan is a terrific movie.
That's right.
And there are, look, Logan, The Dark Knight.
I mean, there are standout examples of real serious movies that are not infantilizing.
But there's also a difference between a Western and a fantasy.
You know, there is a difference between John Ford taking on a certain view of American reality and superheroes flying around.
The very fact that they don't have to deal with the problems that we have.
Like, in other words, you can have a monster come at a guy, you know, the green goblin or something, and you never have to address Islamism.
You never have to address the real problems that confront us.
You know, I'm all for mythology, and I think comic books have become a kind of American mythology.
And I'm not opposed to that.
It just seems that when that's all you do, when that's the only kind of drama you enjoy, that you never get to deal with the real problems of life, like getting married, like fighting Islamism, like how are you going to be tolerant of different people and yet accept that some philosophies are just unacceptable.
How are you going to let people speak while opposing them?
All that stuff.
During the Cold War, the main movie franchise that took on Good versus Evil is James Bond.
James Bond.
James Bond fought the Ruskies.
He fought the communists.
Absolutely.
And we just don't see that in our movies anymore because as a culture, we're cowards in the face of reality, at least in our cultural offerings.
I think it's true.
Thank you, Michael Knowles, chief troll and cultural correspondent of the Daily Wire.
You know, just to end on this cultural note, to end by talking about this, because we're talking about this realignment where the elites have now been shown to have failed the people.
The elites and the people are at odds.
And I find myself as a person who moves and walks among people who you would call elites, among coastal people.
My friends are artists.
They're weirdos.
They're eccentrics, they're intellectuals, all that stuff.
I find myself feeling like they have failed the people.
They've failed to come up with the ideas that we need, moving into this hyper-technological age that are going to give people employment and meaning.
And I think that stuff is going to come around.
I do not believe in this vision of a robot, a world where robots build robots, build robots, because I don't think, you know, I don't think that's going to stand.
I don't think people will stand for it.
I think we'll come up with, just like as we did in the last machine age, we will come up with new employments.
You know, all those Luddites who went around destroying the machines because they were destroying work during the Industrial Revolution, they didn't envision that with all the leisure that was created by the new machines, people would do new stuff.
They would do new stuff, and there would be new jobs to have, and there would be assembly line jobs, and there would be construction jobs that didn't exist before because technology tends to create new businesses.
And as we go through this realignment, which is a dangerous moment, I mean, there's a moment when people are carried away by passions.
It's a moment when one person says black, so the other person says white without even thinking about it.
It's a moment when freedom is in danger.
And the problem with freedom, the problem with freedom is that it can't just be, it can't just be licensed, as they used to say.
It has to be ordered by virtue.
This is a tough thing to talk about.
You know, during this March for Science, this guy, what's his name?
Bill Nye, the science guy.
Bill Nye's Dumb Moments00:04:16
He's got a new show.
This guy, every time he opens his mouth, like the world just becomes a little bit dumber, you know.
So he's on, Bill Nye has got a new show on Netflix, and he's introducing this show.
And there's this lady who writes music for a show called My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
Now, I've watched five to ten minutes of the show, and it was really, it was like having nails driven into my eyes.
You know, I was like thinking, I was actually trying to decide: do I want to keep watching this or drive nails through my eyes?
It's kind of hard to choose.
But that's because it's a hyper-girly show.
I mean, I can imagine a woman thinking it is about this clingy woman who can't get over her boyfriend.
She ruins her life to go find support.
And it's a musical.
She writes this musical every day.
So here's Bill Nye.
What's the name of the show?
Bill Nye Saves the World?
As if.
Okay, so here's Bill Nye.
And listen, this is a little bit racy, but Bill Nye introduces her and she comes on and sings a song.
And the song is about how we've got to get rid of this idea that there are just men and women.
And we have to realize there are a million genders and we all have to be free.
Take a listen to just a little bit of this.
So, you guys, seriously, this next thing I feel is very special.
This is a cool little segment.
You know this woman from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
Please give it up for Rachel Bloom.
This world of ours is full of choice.
But must I choose between only John or Joyce?
All my options only, heart or moist.
My vagina has its own voice.
Not vocal cords, a metaphorical voice.
Sometimes I do a voice for my vagina.
Please don't tell me you're not a woman who does it.
I don't know, man.
I mean, so this is the vision that they're showing.
You know, I want to show you something.
When I was in England, I was at Oxford and I went to the Ashmolean Museum, which is a fantastic, it's like this little museum, just packed with great stuff.
And I saw this painting, which has been done before by other artists, but this is called The Choice of Hercules by Paolo Di Matteus from the 18th century, 17th to 18th century.
And if you're watching, you can see it, but I will describe it to you.
It's Hercules caught between two women, and one of them is virtue.
And virtue is pointing up a long, steep, rocky climb and explaining it that virtue is its own reward, but it's tough.
And the other is pleasure, and she's just beautiful and seductive.
I think the little card in the museum said, beauty's argument is evidence.
Pleasure's argument is evident.
Because she's this hot dame with her shirt falling off and all this stuff.
And Hercules is looking at virtue going, like, wait, explain this to me about the hard rock.
Are you kidding me?
You know?
And I think that the thing is, you cannot be free without virtue.
People yell at me continually because I refuse to set hard and fast rules about what I think your sexual life, your sexual life should be.
It doesn't mean I don't have hard and fast rules about what I think my sexual life should be, but I refuse to set hard and fast rules about what other people's sexual lives should be.
But what I can tell you is true is that you have two choices.
You can live as if your flesh were your life, or you can live as if your flesh is the language in which God is speaking the idea of your soul.
Your flesh is simply, it's not a little container with Casper the Ghost inside, you know, that Casper the Ghost flies off to heaven.
It is an expression of something else that is elsewhere, it is held within the mind of God.
If you live as if your flesh were, you know, as if your voice were coming out of your vagina or your penis or anything like that, if you live as if that is your reality, you're not going to have a happy life.
You are going to have a crap life, a second-rate life, a second-rate life.
I don't care how much money you have.
I don't care how many women you get.
I don't care how many men, you know, how powerful you become.
It's going to be a second-rate life.
If you live as if you were a soul, if you live as if your body were simply expressing your soul, even when tough things happen to you, you're going to have a joyful life.
If you live like that, you can be free.
If you live like that, if enough people live with at least that idea in mind, they can be free.
But if people live like that lady saying lives, they can't be free, you know?
And it's just, it's physical reality.
You're going to get diseases.
Living Free?00:03:22
You're going to have children out of wedlock that the government has to take care of.
You're constantly going to be going, why don't you take care of me?
You're going to be like the kid who wants to drive the family car, but then wants dad to pay for it after you wreck it, you know.
And when you start to take other people's money, they are less free, and you become less free, and everyone is less free.
Freedom requires virtue.
So in this realignment, in this realignment, we're going to have to be, you know, there's going to have to be these annoying people like me that can be pretty annoying, you know, discussing what the meaning of virtue is, where you find it, how you find it, and what the ideas that are built on.
You know, Edmund Burke talks about this a lot.
Every good thing you have comes from a tradition and a series of ideas.
And the people who are trying to destroy that tradition and that series of ideas think that you will still have the good things when they're gone.
That ain't true.
You're standing on the top of a tower and you pull out the bottom Jenga block and it all comes tumbling down.
And so, you know, as this thing gets realigned, I understand why there has to be a realignment.
I understand things come to an end, things have to change.
You know, freedom, liberty is the thing we're going to have to be talking about.
And it's not just liberty, it's liberty with virtue.
Stuff I like.
Celebrating France as they go into the whatever happens next.
This is actually a Dutch film, but it was made by the Dutch and the French.
Has anybody seen The Vanishing?
No.
Amazing, amazing.
The Vanishing is a picture from 1988, old picture.
And I wanted to show the picture of this woman, Joanna Der Stieg.
I don't know how to pronounce it, but she's a Dutch actress.
For some reason, the Europeans have this way of making movies with women who are uncannily beautiful, but look like real people.
We don't have that.
You know, our actresses are uncannily beautiful, but you don't see them anywhere outside of LA.
And the minute you see one walking down the street, you know she's an actress.
Like, here is a woman who could be anything.
You know, she might be a homemaker.
She might be working in another business, but she's so fantastically beautiful.
Anyway, the story is based on a Tim Crabet novel.
He is very popular.
I met him a long time ago in Amsterdam, and it was really interesting because he just writes in Dutch.
So nobody really knows him.
But in Amsterdam, he's a star.
In Amsterdam, he's a big deal.
And of course, the Dutch feel that they're the center of the universe, so that's fine with him.
But a really good novel that he wrote, and it's turned into The Vanishing, or it was called in French The Man Who Wanted to Know.
And it's about a guy and his girlfriend, and one day, she just disappears at a gas station.
He's traveling, and she just disappears.
And he becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to her.
The novel's great.
The movie's great.
Do not watch the American film.
When they were making the American film, they called me in and asked me if I wanted to write it.
And I said, Well, I'd be delighted to make an American version of this, but I have this terrible fear you're going to do X, Y, and Z, which would ruin the movie.
No, no, we would never, never do X, Y, and Z. Seriously, I'm sitting there with the guy who's going to make the movie.
Never do it.
It's exactly what they did.
They ruined it.
The American version is awful.
The Dutch version, The Vanishing, is just a terrific thriller and really worth watching.
And this woman is unbelievably beautiful.
All right, remember the mailbag.
I'm going to be gone tomorrow, back Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.