Andrew Clavin and Michael Knowles dismantle the culture of manufactured crisis, from Trump’s Comey firing to media hysteria over "climate fascism," arguing routine politics are framed as existential threats. Knowles’ firsthand account of Cuba—$25/month wages, black-market dominance, and police extortion—exposes leftist romanticization of socialism, while Clavin mocks the NYT’s Mother’s Day op-ed for "proving" the gender pay gap is a choice, not systemic bias. The episode pivots to Lion, praising its universalism over identity politics, before teasing Christian Toto on media double standards—all to reveal how panic sells, but reality often outlasts the hype. [Automatically generated summary]
Today, we confront a question so terrifying that no one else in the entire country has dared to ask it.
What if everything is fine?
That's right.
Everyone and his mother and even your mother has seen the internet meme in which a dog sits drinking coffee in a burning building and then says, this is fine.
But as shocking as it may be to contemplate, is it at least possible that an internet meme is not a reflection of actual reality?
In fact, is it possible that the truth is exactly the opposite of the meme?
Maybe in real life, the dog is sitting drinking coffee in a perfectly pleasant environment and then suddenly starts shouting fire when there is no fire.
There's just coffee and a dog.
Ever since Donald Trump fired James Comey, reporters and commentators on both the left and the right have been using words like crisis, disaster, and debacle.
But what if when the President of the United States decides to fire someone who serves at his pleasure, it's not a crisis, it's just Tuesday.
Journalists keep telling us that it's a big story, but ask yourself, is it a big story in your life?
Does it raise your taxes or weaken your system of government?
Does it even undermine an ongoing FBI investigation?
Is it possible this is just a big story in the gossip mill of Washington, D.C., but for the rest of us, everything is fine?
In fact, maybe the entire election of Donald Trump is like this.
Trump's an offbeat character with a tendency to tweet himself in the foot from time to time, but he doesn't seem to be violating any of the basic principles of American governance.
Checks and balances are still working.
Democrats are still dishonest.
Republicans are still incompetent.
With the exception of all the hysteria in the media, everything's pretty much the same as it's always been.
Is it possible that even after the election of Donald Trump, everything is basically fine?
But you might say, what if I'm a leftist and I'm terrified about the make-believe climate crisis or Trump's make-believe fascism or all the make-believe oppression confronting Americans with no real problems?
Take a look around you, lefties.
Are the people who are telling you to panic panicked themselves?
Al Gore is still making long-term investments.
Keith Olberman and Charles Blow aren't in hiding.
And all those Hollywood celebrities who promised they were going to flee to Canada, they're all still here.
Sure, there are lots of predictions of coming disaster, but a prediction of disaster is not a disaster.
It's not even an event.
It's just a guy saying stuff about the future who doesn't know any more about the future than you do.
Predictions of disaster make the predictors seem important, and they're a good way to make you panic, so you'll give the predictors prestige, power, and money.
Predictions Of Disaster00:14:58
But look around you.
Look at yourself.
How's life going?
Are you a dog drinking coffee, shouting fire?
Stop shouting fire and ask yourself, what if everything is actually fine?
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, Michael Knowles is back from Cuba.
Was there ever a better ambassador for capitalism than a man who makes a fortune with a blank book?
You see, my friends, in America, even a blank book, we make money, you know?
They're probably weeping.
In America, they make a blank book.
Get me a rubber tire.
I paddled ashore.
All right.
And we have visitors.
We have two new animators, Alvin and Pat.
Did I get it right?
And if you could see these guys, I know you would look at them and say, why didn't they go to ziprecruiter.com?
I'm joking.
I'm not joking.
Go to ziprecruiter.com.
You can post your job to 100-plus job sites with just one click.
Probably better.
See, we kind of use the system that Castro used in Cuba where he sent over all the criminals.
That's kind of what we do here.
But with ZipRecruiter, their powerful technology efficiently matches the right people to your job better than anyone else.
That's why ZipRecruiter is different.
Unlike other job sites, ZipRecruiter doesn't depend on candidates finding you.
It goes out and finds them.
In fact, over 80% of jobs posted on ZipRecruiter get a qualified candidate in just 24 hours.
We don't even know what that looks like here.
No juggling emails or calls to your office.
Simply screen, rate, and manage candidates all in one place with ZipRecruiter's easy-to-use dashboard.
And you can find out why ZipRecruiter has been used by businesses of all sizes to find the most qualified job candidates with immediate results because right this minute, my listeners can post jobs on ZipRecruiter for free.
That's right, free.
Just go to ziprecruiter.com/slash daily wire, ziprecruiter.com slash daily wire.
One more time to try it for free, go to ziprecruiter.com/slash daily wire.
Don't let this happen to you.
So, a long time ago, in a story I'm not going to tell, I spent the night with a congenital liar, somebody who just lied and lied and lied.
And I found this very strange thing that by the end of the evening, it was easier for her to fool me than it was at the beginning of the evening because I just found it almost impossible to believe that someone could be lying about every single thing.
But everything she said was a lie.
And by the end of the evening, he just got worn out.
And that's the way I feel about the media now with Donald Trump.
I mean, everything they say, they said, you remember Comey was five, they said Rod Rosenstein, the deputy AG, was going to resign.
He threatened to resign because Trump had put the firing on him.
Rosenstein says, not true.
The Russian investigation, there's going to be compromise.
That's why Andrew McCabe, the guy who's the acting head of the FBI, says not happening.
The FBI's low morale.
They're starting a war with Donald Trump.
They predicted this.
They said months ago the FBI had low morale because of Comey.
So now they're reporting that the country's in a crisis.
Everything is a crisis.
Donald Trump is going to fire this one and Fire's going to clean house.
He's going to do this.
He's threatening James Comey.
That was the one that really got to me because that, I'll get back to that in a minute because that just is totally untrue.
But you know, it's like why you start to believe them.
You start to think, well, they've been wrong about everything, but they wouldn't be lying about this.
It's like they wouldn't be lying about the whole thing.
The whole thing can't be a lie.
You know, Michael Crichton gave a great speech once.
Molly Hemming, we talked about it in her broadside that we were talking about last week when Molly was here.
Michael Crichton gave this wonderful speech about how much meaningless speculation and lack of fact there is in the media.
It was a long time ago.
I guess, yeah, but it's a brilliant speech.
But at one point, he talks about the fact that every now and again you come upon a newspaper piece about something you know about.
So for instance, I've been in publishing all my life and I'll start to read a thing about publishing.
You realize they don't know anything about anything you know about, they don't know about.
When they write about Hollywood, I've worked in Hollywood.
I think, no, that's not really the way it works.
You know, the other day, the LA Weekly had a story about this theoretically secret band of Republicans.
The story was totally untrue.
Their sources were wrong.
The guy was just throwing shade at them.
It had no truth in it whatsoever.
Then what Crichton noticed is you turn the page and you start to read a story about Indonesia, and you think, oh, well, this must be true.
Because you don't know anything about Indonesia.
So it's like every time you hit something you know about, you realize they're lying.
So all weekend long, the media and the Democrats, but I repeat myself, are working to spread this sense of crisis, of the administration is falling apart and all this stuff.
And of course, we've already had the whole, we've been, you know, we're in Dutch with, we're in league with Russia, Trump's a Russian spy and all this.
And remember, remember, James Comey serves at Donald Trump's pleasure.
He can fire him for picking his toes in Poughkeepsie.
He can fire him for chewing gum.
He can fire him for looking at him cross-eyed.
He can fire him for any reason he want.
There's nothing's going on.
Like, it's just a firing.
Clinton fired one.
Did Obama, I can't remember if Obama fired an FBI guy, but it just is what it is.
You know, it's a story in the sense like you go like, wow, that's an interesting story, but it doesn't change anything except it gets this kind of grandstanding guy out of the FBI.
So former Defense Secretary Robert Gates was on with John Dickerson, and he was talking about the Russians meddling with elections.
And this is what he said was Putin's objective.
Here's Gates.
Look, I think this is a guy who saw the U.S. basically come out against him in his reelection campaign in 2012.
He saw the U.S. being behind all of the color revolutions in Eastern Europe and in Georgia and Ukraine and so on.
So his view is the West has been interfering in his politics for years.
And I think that he has decided in a very strategic way to turn the tables and do everything in his power to, as we describe Russian elections as illegitimate, to try and communicate to the rest of the world that Western elections are illegitimate.
And it's not just us.
We know that now.
It's Germany.
It's France.
It's a number of other countries.
And it's a very broad and not very well-disguised effort to create questions about the legitimacy of these Western elections.
And I think, I mean, this is very KGB.
So he's trying to create, Putin is trying to create questions about the legitimacy.
So are the Democrats.
You know, he's trying to create chaos and dissent.
So are the Democrats.
So is the media.
I mean, just here's Chuck Schumer talking about Jeff Sessions' role, the attorney general's role in the firing of James Comey.
Guard your dad.
Hey, why?
Hey, my wine, Bomas Boy.
I bet you're going to cross.
Bombers, boy.
I see you cry.
Come on.
Okay, maybe that wasn't you.
But it was close enough.
Here he is for real.
I have asked the Inspector General, and the request I've made is not only to look into any interference to thwart the investigation, but whether Attorney General Sessions should have participated in the firing of Comey and should participate in FBI director.
You know, Attorney General Sessions has a much higher obligation.
He didn't tell the truth about meeting with the Russians, so he recused himself.
Now he seems to be violating that recusal.
That would seem on its face to be part of this.
And look, I called for him to step down when he didn't tell the truth about the Russians because it's the highest law enforcement officer in the land.
If the actions of the last week make all the more reason that he should not be Attorney General.
This is clownish stupidity and spreading of panic and spread.
You know, everything with Schumer is like amped up to this hot, to shrill.
The dial is always on shrill.
What the hell does he mean Jeff Sessions shouldn't have a say in the firing of James Comey?
You know, he says, oh, well, he recused himself in the Russian investigation.
Comey wasn't doing the Russian investigation.
He's running the entire Bureau.
Sessions has got to have a say in fire, and the Bureau is part of the Justice Department that Sessions runs.
It's nonsense.
The entire thing is nonsense.
That Lawrence Tribe, the Harvard lefty law guy, is saying, well, this might be obstruction of justice.
There has to be a crime for there to be obstruction of justice.
The FBI investigation into the Russian collusion is not an investigation into a crime.
It's an intelligence investigation.
There's no crime.
It's not a federal crime for Putin to mess around with us.
You know, he can do, that's what he does.
You know, it's like there is no crime alleged.
So there's no special prosecutor.
You don't need a special prosecutor.
So, of course, who's the hero?
Who, all eyes, in such a crisis, because we all see what a horrible crisis the press, Putin, the press, and the Democrats are trying to sell us.
Who's really in collusion here?
Who is in collusion?
So Putin, the press, and the Democrats are all trying to tell us it's a crisis.
But who's the hero?
Who's going to save the day?
Well, Fareed Zakaria.
Who else has the answer for us?
Donald Trump, in much of his rhetoric and many of his actions, poses a danger to American democracy.
There is just one real check on the president, impeachment.
And it is political, not legal.
Since Trump's own party controls both chambers of Congress, there has been little resistance to him there.
So far, it appears that the Republican Party is losing any resemblance to a traditional Western political party, instead simply turning into something more commonly found in the developing world, a platform to support the ego, appetites, and interests of one man and his family.
There are only two forces left that can place some constraints on Donald Trump, the courts and the media, and he has relentlessly attacked both.
Every time a court has ruled against one of his executive orders, the president has ridiculed the decision or demeaned the judges involved.
That leaves the media.
Trump has gone at them, at us, like no president before, smearing news organizations, attacking individual journalists, and threatening to strip legal protections guaranteed to a free press.
What a shock.
The media is the hero.
The media, it's Fareed Zakaria, is the hero of Fareed Zakaria.
It's like David Copperfield, am I to be the hero of my own life, Fareed Zakaria as the hero of his own life.
You know what they need at CNN?
They need ejector seats that the audience can operate.
It would just be, you know, Donald Trump poses a danger to democracy.
He went far that time.
And here's the New York Times.
I mean, this is everywhere.
Everybody, the entire, I would play Keith Olbermann, except the entire media has turned into Keith Olberman.
I don't have to.
New York Times, which used to be a newspaper, GOP senators pulling away from Trump have a lot less fear of him.
I could see how fearful the Republican senators, Republican senators are lucky.
They're just not walking in.
There's somebody to take them out of a corner.
They need an aide whenever they walk in the corner to tell them how to get out of it.
Senate Republicans, increasingly unnerved by President Trump's volatility and unpopularity, are starting to show signs of breaking away from him as they try to forge a more traditional Republican agenda.
So it says several Republicans have openly questioned Mr. Trump's decision to fire the FBI director, James Comey, and even lawmakers who supported the move have complained privately that it was poorly timed and disruptive to their work.
Many were dismayed when Mr. Trump seemed to threaten Mr. Comey.
This thing about threatened, because this was on the Daily Wire too, and I really object to this.
What Trump said was, James Comey, this is a tweet.
James Comey better hope that there are no tapes of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press.
That's not a threat.
I don't see where that's a threat.
What he was saying was, first of all, I thought it was a joke.
I thought what he was saying was, you know, I know the truth and he's better not lie about it.
But I mean, come on.
You know, we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, which means you're going to miss Michael Knowles and how he trolled Cuba unless you come over to thedailywire.com.
If you subscribe, you can just watch the whole thing.
You don't have to get bounced around like this.
And you can be part of the mailbag, which is coming on Wednesday.
So here's the New York Times proving their thesis that because of what they say, they say the administration is lurching from crisis to crisis, right?
It's lurching from crisis to crisis.
You know, I guess, I mean, it must be true, right?
It's in the New York Times, and it's a former newspaper.
So the Republicans are deserting.
So it says, as they pursue their own agenda, Republican senators are drafting a health care bill with little White House input.
You think Donald Trump wants input on that health care bill?
He didn't have input before.
He told him, just get it done.
That's all he tells them.
They're seeking to avoid the public relations pitfalls that befell the House.
So it goes on and on and on, and it basically says, and then it has this line.
So far, Republicans have refrained from bucking the president en masse in part to avoid undermining their intense push to put health care and tax bills on his desk this year, which is the Trump agenda.
So they're quietly pursuing the Trump agenda and occasionally complaining to some clown at the New York Times.
I mean, the entire story is nonsense.
They've got no real quotes.
I mean, you can always get John McCain to come on and say, oh, oh, my God, this is terrible.
Only I can save the country.
But other than that, Susan Collins, you can get the complaint.
But, you know, nobody's complaining.
It's just like everybody sort of wishes that Trump weren't such a loudmouth.
But you know, this disruption is what it takes to get these people off the dime.
I'm going to just end with this wonderful column from Kurt Schlichter before we go to Michael Knowles and talk about Cuba.
Cubans On The Street00:15:35
He says, oh, here it is.
All this insanity, he says, is going to help us normals retain power from your gyno hat marches to the fake hate crimes to your insistence that the Russians are responsible for everything from Hillary losing the election to the rarely discussed but well-known liberal epidemic of ED.
Kurt Schlichter, Nick Searce used to be the meanest man on Twitter, but now I think Kurt Schlichter is vying for the title.
He just says, he says we should make them even crazier.
He says, who, here's the test, he says, who voted for Trump and now says something remotely like this?
Yeah, I really regret not letting Hillary pick a SCOTUS judge who thinks the Constitution bans guns but mandates taxpayer subsidized transsexual abortions.
Or, wow, that 70% drop in illegal alien entries into America and all those deportations of MS-13 guys are depriving the country of valuable, productive future Democrat voters.
Or, gosh, I hate so much how Trump has paid attention to that sliver of our country lying between I-5 and I-95.
Or, it was Ashley Judd's VCAP slam poetry combined with Bill Nye's sex confusion clip that convinced me that what America needs is liberals back in power.
He says, no one, no one who voted for Trump has ever said any of those things.
They might have voted for him reluctantly, but no statistically significant slice of them wish they hadn't.
But the Democrats work under the assumption that such folk exist and are receptive to their tantrums.
Good.
These liberals are crazy and they're stupid and we totally need to encourage them to keep doing crazy, stupid things.
I think that's great.
That's Kurt Schlichter.
All right, we're going to talk to Michael Knowles about Cuba, but first, one more word from another sponsor.
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Well, what they've created in Venezuela is a socialist paradise to this.
What you had in Venezuela wasn't technically socialism.
It was Chavez-ism.
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Try it today.
No.
That was Remy from Reason.
That was brilliant, brilliant stuff.
All right, and now from another socialist paradise, Michael Knowles from Cuba.
I want to see you in CVA.
I see you.
Peace to you, Hurt P.
It's where the dark-eyed stellas light their fellas' panatellas.
That's a beautiful cigar.
I'm expecting to reap the harvest of cigars here.
I might have brought you back one or 1,000 or so, yes.
So Michael Moore's right.
It's a socialist paradise.
It's a total paradise.
I didn't, who knew?
I didn't know that I was a communist until now.
I actually am really confused about one thing in Cuba.
When I walk around liberal places in the United States, left-wing places, I see a lot of Shea Guevara t-shirts.
But when I walk around Cuba, I don't see any Shea Guevara t-shirts.
I see a lot of American flags.
Mysterious.
It doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, that is a mystery.
I wonder why that's true, huh?
It's almost like the people who know anything about communism and have been brutally and brutally oppressed by it for 60 years, they don't like it very much.
And then a bunch of dummies on college campuses really, really like it and embrace it.
Do they really wear American flags?
I saw, I was in Cuba for three and a half, four days.
Okay.
I saw over a dozen people wearing American flags.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
So they're not getting arrested for it, at least, or at least that you saw.
It's interesting.
I didn't see people getting arrested for it.
And also, unlike other communist dictatorships, I didn't see a big clampdown on religiosity.
There were a lot of cathedrals, a lot of famous religious places in Cuba.
I see, I saw a lot of people getting shaken down for other reasons, though.
You mean by the cops?
By the cops.
Really?
Walking around on the street, and I'm going to be very careful not to mention professions or anything like that because they live in a brutal communist dictatorship.
But I talked to a lot of people on the street, a lot of Cubans, even in very poor Spanish.
And I saw multiple people getting shaken down by the cops in only my three to four days trip to Cuba.
You forget what it's like here when, you know, I mean, if an LAPD cop pulls me over and I try to give him money, he'll arrest me for it.
That's right, that's exactly right.
It's exactly the opposite in Cuba.
And the first thing you notice, first of all, it's a beautiful country, it's a wonderful country.
And people will talk to you on the street, but they won't hassle you.
They aren't trying to shake you down for money.
Where in Italy, you have a dozen poor people grabbing onto your legs and you drag them down the street to try to get your money.
Not in Cuba.
They just talk to you.
And I spoke to a number of them and I asked, how are things today?
Is it true that there are a lot of reforms going on with all of the American money?
Are things really getting better?
And what a lot of them told me is it's the same.
It's the same.
It's the same as it ever was.
Now, that isn't entirely true.
If you look at a macroeconomic picture, Cuba is liberalizing, or rather was liberalizing certain sectors of the economy.
So private guest houses like Airbnb can be used.
They still pay a hefty shakedown to the government.
I mean, it is a racket.
Just as all communist and mafia regimes work, this is a racket.
Communism and the mafia are the same thing.
It's exactly the same.
It's a gang thing.
And you see it vividly in Cuba.
But even certain private restaurants and private guest houses are a little bit liberalizing.
However, last year when Raul Castro announced that he would step down next year in 2018, the economic reforms seemed to kind of fall by the wayside.
There was a big pushback from Communist Party officials who didn't like that certain people were making some money now, certain wealth inequalities were growing.
Wealth inequality meaning that not everybody else was getting some money.
Yeah, that's right.
Somebody making any money.
Because I don't think people really understand the poverty in Cuba.
The government reports that the average salary is $25 a month.
$25 a month?
$25 a month.
But that'll buy you a mansion today.
Not really.
You might think so because it's so deeply depressed.
But the economy, the Castro regime liberalized tourism in the early 90s once communism fell and they stopped getting their free money from Soviet Russia.
So they've had this influx of tourists and prices are expensive.
You will never see Cubans walking around the big international hotels, swimming in the swimming pools.
It simply does not happen.
So what is a guy when you talk to people?
What's their life like?
Are they saying, you know, yeah, we love it here, everything's great, or are they actually complaining about it?
It's awful.
It's awful.
I asked a number of Cubans on the street what they think of America, what they think of all these Americans coming in and spending a lot of money.
And they say the Cuban people love Americans and they love America, and the Cuban government despises America and Americans.
But the only people who admire Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and all the other thugs that have destroyed that country and brutalized those people are left-wingers in Western societies and here in America.
I did not see any Cubans who had anything but disdain for, yeah.
A lot of people see some clown walking around LA in a Che Guevara t-shirt where these are real people, really oppressed.
These are real people, and a lot of them wouldn't speak about the government to me.
There's a huge fear of political dissent.
But for people that I encountered on the street and in squares and where there wasn't a big fear of getting caught right away, To a man, they despise these people because they've ruined that country and they've ruined these people.
And forget even the death squads and the crackdown on dissent.
The economy is so terrible there that when you factor in, there is a black market, obviously.
People are having shakedowns and paying people off all the time.
But even in that case, the upper 1.5% of Cubans, the 1% of Cuba, makes $12,000 a year.
That includes all the party guys.
That includes the brutalizers.
Obviously, the Castros make significantly more.
But the majority of the Cuban people make less than $100 a month.
You know, it's insane when you think back on people like Barbara Walters doing that kind of lavishly fawning interview with Fidel Castro, the way they have treated him like a rock star.
I mean, these guys are really like treating John Gotti like that.
I mean, it's all it is.
All communism or socialism is a protection racket.
You know, give us your money.
I mean, you know, I mean, how do they make any money at all?
Is it all on the black market?
Is that what they do?
A lot of it is on the black market.
And there is a schizophrenic experience of going to Cuba because it is a lot of fun.
It is a great experience in Havana.
And it really does benefit the Cuban people at least a tiny bit when we give them our money, when we tip them well, and when we bring some more resources into that country.
And one should not be naive.
The government is stealing most of that money.
The vast, vast majority of that money is going to that government.
However, I was sitting, I was watching a beautiful show in Havana, an amazing Ricky Ricardo old school Cuban show, and I thought, this is one of the best shows I've seen in years.
I'm really enjoying this.
And I am filled with nothing but a deep and profound hatred for Fidel Castro.
For what he did to these guys.
And there is that balance that you're, this totally split experience that you're having in Cuba.
The people that I met to a man were wonderful, warm, just kind and generous people.
The question is, should we go?
What do we do about the embargo?
What do we do about these travel restrictions?
Because some people don't know this either.
Barack Obama did not end the embargo.
He eased restrictions from the executive branch on travel to Cuba.
So that question is something we'll have to deal with now.
If we look at China, Nixon goes to China in 1972.
Liberalization opened up in 78, very similar to the liberalization under Roll Castro, which has now been stalled.
It seems to me that the Chinese are better off a quarter of a century later because we have opened up trade with them.
Yeah, and because, you know, Mao's gone.
I mean, that was helpful too.
I have to say, by the way, that cigar smells fantastic.
Well, I only have about 100 bazillion of them left.
Maybe I'll be able to give you one.
You know, there is one really fun thing I did.
I'm really filled with this rage a lot at Shea and Fidel Castro.
And Barack Obama famously stood in front, very dignified in front of Shea Guevara as he was lying through his teeth to the Cuban people and promised that he wouldn't rescind Wetfoot Dryfoot, the policy that allows Cubans who make it to this country to stay here, which he did.
But I got to stand in front of Shea Guevara and I got to wear a Make America Great Again hat.
Oh, okay.
And you smoke a cigar.
I think we have, here's the photo right there.
You tell me which version you prefer.
Give me a moment.
Boy, Nasi, now, if you're not subscribed to the Daily Wire, you are missing one of the great photographs.
This is a Pulitzer Prize-level photograph.
Michael Knowles smoking a cigar, wearing a Make America Great Again hat in front of the big poster of Che Guevara.
La Plaza de la Revolución.
Well, Revolución is happening.
And my recommendation, I saw a lot of Americans coming.
A lot of my friends have gone.
I will certainly go back.
Tip people very well.
You're an ambassador to your country.
These people need it much, much more than you do.
And by every dollar you give to a Cuban guy on the street is sticking an eye right in the, sticking a finger right in the eye of that regime.
And we'll see what will happen next year.
So what happens?
What happens when, you know, I mean, I had this experience of going to Oberlin and listening to these people be, you know, they're oppressed.
You know, they're in the middle of Ohio.
They're oppressed.
They're going to college, a lot of them on government loans.
They're oppressed.
You know, I'm oppressed because I'm a black man in America, which is at this point a joke.
I mean, the only thing oppressing you at this point is Democrat values and Democrat programs that keep you in slavery.
So what happens when liberals go to this country?
This was an incredible experience.
I overheard it on the plane back from Havana and just from Americans I was talking to around there.
They have to tell themselves an absurd fiction to live with themselves for their political philosophies and for their behavior in Cuba.
They're left-wingers and they say, I say, the crushing poverty is really depressing and it's caused by these brutal leftist dictators.
And they say, no, This is true.
This is a real conversation I had.
You don't understand, Michael.
There's a black market economy.
It's just the government gives them some money.
And then they, look, you can't trust these Cubans.
Direct quote.
Really?
You can't trust these Cubans.
They make a lot of money.
They're shaking.
You don't even know what's happening.
Well, all of the statistics on this tell a completely different story.
But the final quote, which I think a lot of left-wingers in America would agree with, is, but at least they all have jobs.
Seriously, in America, we have unemployment.
And there, who needs air conditioning?
Isn't it so nice?
We need air conditioning.
They don't even need it.
They don't even need nice food or sufficient food to.
And the health care, and they have all that free health care, too.
I talked to some Cubans about this.
I wanted to bring up the Michael Moore question.
And I said, well, how are the government services?
This is touted by the left in America all the time.
And in broken Spanish, a person that I spoke to responded, yes, we have a hospital here.
Free Healthcare Myths00:02:05
Thanks to the communist revolution, we have a hospital.
Anyone can go to the hospital.
Any person, poor, doesn't matter your race or your status, you can go in that and not receive any medicine.
You can go to that hospital and receive no service.
And that's Cuba for you.
Well, welcome back to the good old US of A.
It's good to have you back.
As I told you when you left, if you do get in trouble, don't call me.
I was worried, you know, I was kind of even hoping a little bit that I would get thrown into a Cuban jail for some political shenanigans.
And I didn't.
That was a disappointment.
After this segment, I certainly will have to.
Look forward to it.
Michael Knowles, the president of all trolls in America, sent to Cuba, and probably, I would say there'll probably be a capitalist revolution within the hour after they met Knowles.
You know, I have to end just with a little cultural note that from, since we were talking about the New York Times, a former newspaper, there was a piece for Mother's Day.
You know how the left can't touch anything without poisoning it?
You know, it says Mother's Day.
What do you say about Mother's Day?
Happy Mother's Day, mom.
That's what it was you say.
No, here's the article that the New York Times ran.
The gender pay gap is largely because of motherhood.
Now, I want you to notice something about this headline, though.
It disproves the idea of the gender pay gap, right?
They keep saying that women get paid 77 cents on the dollar, and we keep saying, no, it's because they make different choices than men.
It's their choices that make them get paid less.
So they're admitting it, right?
Because women choose to be moms, right?
And they see that as a problem.
The article goes on.
When men and women finish school and start working, they're paid pretty much equally.
But, but, a gender gap appears as they become moms.
So my question is this.
These enemies of, these enemies of capitalism, why is money the only thing they consider of value?
I mean, mothers are like the most valuable thing in the country, right?
I mean, is there anything more valuable than a mother to anybody, to anybody?
Is there anything more valuable than a mother?
But not to the New York Times because they don't have as much money.
They're not getting the money.
Give us the money.
That's like we're anti-capitalism.
Give us the money.
Lion: A Family Film00:04:15
Everything is like this too.
Even their tolerance, is really give us the cheap labor, because globalization is where we get to, we don't have, you know, we support your union, but we're not hiring your union.
We're going to Bangladesh and getting our parts made there.
And if we bring in, you know, Muslim workers to do cheap labor beneath the minimum wage, you have to be tolerant of Islam because otherwise you're Islamophobia.
It's all about the money with these people.
Anyway, I just had to bring that up.
I just love this fact, like that women are, you know, they're just having babies.
But whoever heard of women having babies?
So speaking of this, stuff I like.
Over the weekend, I saw a couple of movies that I really like.
But the first one I want to talk about today is this film Lion.
Has anybody else seen Lion, L-I-O-N?
This film is a beautiful little film.
It's rated PG-13, but I don't know why.
I mean, maybe there's some language in it that I missed.
But it's, I have rarely seen a film that gets every value right.
This is a movie that is about the things that matter in life.
And it's wonderful because the story is about this little kid in India, and he looks like he's like five or six years old.
He's just the most adorable little muggins you've ever seen.
He's the cutest little kid.
And he's scraping by.
His mom is a laborer, and he and his brother are scraping by.
And the brother takes him on a night trip, and he falls asleep, and he's taken away, and he falls asleep.
And the little boy wanders onto a train, and the train takes him like a thousand miles from home.
And that's the story.
And I'm not going to show a clip from it because I don't want to give anything away because it didn't go in the way I thought it was going to go.
And it's just the story of this, what happens to this little guy.
And it's got this wonderful cast.
It's written by Luke Davies and directed by Garth Davis.
It's got Dev Patel, who was that terrific actor from Slum Dog Millionaire.
Rooney Mara and Nicole Kidman are in it.
But it also has this Indian cast of people I, of course, had never seen before, like Priyanka Bose, who plays the little boy's mother.
She looks like the Virgin Mary.
She's one of the most beautiful women.
And the kid is named Sonny Pawar, and he is like just as adorable as it's possible to be.
But I've never seen it, you know, it's a rebuke to two kinds of people in a way.
It's a rebuke to the left because it completely, just without saying a word about it, without saying anything about it, just completely destroys the idea of identity politics.
It just shrugs it off.
It just tosses it away because it doesn't matter.
And it destroys the idea of why people do things and the people you think are going to turn out to be bourgeois or liberal types or actually turn out to be empowered by visions from God.
And it's just so everything about it is right.
And everything that's important in the movie is important in real life.
And it also speaks to all these Christians who want to make good Christian films.
There's not one mention of God in this that I can remember.
There's certainly no Christianity because the guy's in India, right?
And yet, and yet it is one of the most godly and Christian films I've seen.
It's a very, very beautiful film.
Garth Davis directs.
Luke Davies wrote the script.
It's based on a true story.
Oh, that's the other thing.
I forgot to say.
That's why I think the values are so good, because it's based on the memoir that the guy wrote about his experience.
The actual little kid who gets lost writes about his experience.
I cannot recommend it highly enough.
You can watch it as far as I'm concerned with the entire family.
It's called Lion, and you may have missed it because it just came out.
It got some, I guess Deb Patel was nominated for an Oscar, wasn't he?
But it didn't get, you know, it didn't get a lot of press.
I didn't see it.
And it's also not as highly rated on the rating sites as I think it should be.
So take a look.
All right.
Tomorrow we have, Emily, who do we have?
We have Christian Toto, don't we?
Excellent.
Christian Toto, one of the very few people who is both a conservative and knows anything about movies.
He has a great website.
We're going to talk to him about the way left-wing celebrities get treated versus the way right-wing celebrities get treated.