Michael Knowles and the host dissect War for the Planet of the Apes as left-wing propaganda, mocking its anti-American, anti-Christian subtext—like burning the Alpha Omega symbol—while dismissing it as a fantasy world where figures like Hillary Clinton are idealized despite scandals. They pivot to Game of Thrones, debating its pornographic comparisons (Pornhub data shows 4% traffic drops during episodes) and feminist themes, which they call unrealistic, before defending Gone with the Wind’s "politically incorrect" portrayal of slavery as artistically honest. The episode frames modern media as a battleground between sanitized narratives and unfiltered reality. [Automatically generated summary]
Newsweek magazine has run an article describing how wonderful the world would be if Hillary Clinton had been elected president.
I wish I were making this up, but I'm not.
The article, As God is My Witness, is entitled, Hillary Clinton is President in an Alternative Universe Where America is Great Again.
The author is Chris Riata, whose previous writings include, In a make-believe world where I'm a journalist, my articles have information in them, and in a fantasy land where people read Newsweek, I'm doing something useful with my life.
Now, this is the part of the show opening where I usually start inventing some insurd, absurd thing some leftists said by way of illustrating that leftists are fatuous knuckleheads who live in a delusional cloud of fake virtue where they can pretend their politicians aren't power-hungry crooks pushing cynical constitution-destroying policies.
But not today.
Today, I'm simply going to quote from this article word for word with only a few edits for brevity, which will accomplish the same thing.
The article sets the fantasy scene, beginning, quote, Hillary Clinton sits behind the resolute desk in the Oval Office.
It's 9.30 p.m., and Madam President spent the day successfully rallying House Republicans and Democrats behind a health care bill that will improve upon her predecessor's landmark initiative, the Affordable Care Act.
The bill passed an hour ago, but she isn't anywhere near done for fulfilling her duties to the American people.
I won't be taking any more calls, Clinton tells senior advisor Huma Abaddon.
I want to look through these Russian sanctions one more time.
Tell Bill not to wait up for me, unquote.
That's right.
In the same bizarre alternative universe where Hillary is president, Bill Clinton waits up for her to come to bed.
Maybe they even sleep together.
Who knows?
I mean, the Affordable Care Act works in this universe, so anything is possible.
Oh, and there's Huma Abidin, who in real life received classified emails from Hillary's illegal server and then shared them with her husband, Anthony Weiner, who was busy sending obscene texts to underage girls.
But in this story, she's a good person.
What a wonderful imagination this writer has.
But let's read on.
Quote, and again, real quote, Huma Abidin, leaning on the half-open door to one of the most powerful rooms in the world, gives one last look at the president and says, you did a good job today, Madam President.
Who runs the world? Clinton asks.
Girls.
Girls run the world, Abidden responds, leaving the president to her work, unquote.
That's right.
This alternative Newsweek world is run by girls.
If by girls, you mean soulless, power-obsessed hags with a propensity for breaking the law while making the kind of stupid decisions that have left places like Libya in chaos and given 20% of our plutonium uranium supply into Russian hands.
And finally, in this alternative world, there are no Donald Trump mean tweets against journalists accusing them of reporting fake news.
Like this article.
In this alternative universe, there's just fake news.
Like this article.
So it's a leftist paradise.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Living Dead Paradox00:12:40
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-cunky-cocky.
Shipshaw tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
You cannot make this stuff up.
I can't.
You know, we actually, this is going to turn into the theme today, this fantasy world that the left lives in and then tries to sell to us.
But that is an amazing article.
Girls run the world.
So the Clavenless weekend is over, and it was a bad one.
We lost Martin Landau, a terrific actor from Mission Impossible, and he won the Oscar for Ed Wood, which is a great film.
Have you seen Ed Wood?
I have not.
Terrific film.
Terrific movie.
And George Romero died, who made Night of the Living Dead.
So we lost a couple guys.
But on the positive side, Michael Knowles is here to discuss Game of Thrones.
You saw, I'm sure, our fantastic video.
If you haven't, you should watch it with Ben playing the Game of Thrones theme on violin, while Knowles shows up as what's her name, Tardarius Tardari, with his shirt off.
People did, you know, thank us for pixelating his breasts, but I have to tell you, that's actually the way he looks.
He actually has a pixelated body when he takes off his shirt.
It's kind of horrific.
So just for one more time, let me say, how's the sound working?
We're doing good?
We're good.
All right.
All right.
We had terrible problems.
And, you know, after we have problems, we had problems in the new set with the sound.
After you have problems, you get together and you sort of assess.
You have meetings.
You know, you talk about what went wrong.
And I think what we finally decided was when we went to hire people who could work sound equipment, what we did is we went out to Hollywood and Vine where the guy stands with the bullhorn shouting that the world is about to end.
And we thought a bullhorn is sound equipment, right?
And we hired those guys.
I think in retrospect, we probably should have gone to ziprecruiter.com.
I'm just saying that, you know, you go to ziprecruiter.com, you don't get psychopaths, you don't get criminals, you don't get people who, you know, abuse drugs and things like that, which is basically the entire status of the Daily Wire.
Austin loves it when I make these jokes.
I hope your folks are watching Austin.
They every day.
All right.
But when you go to ziprecruiter.com, you can post your job to 100-plus job sites with just one click, and then their powerful technology efficiently matches the right people to your job better than anyone else.
That's why ZipRecruiter is different.
Other job sites, unlike other job sites, ZipRecruiter doesn't depend on candidates finding you.
It finds them.
It drags them out of their homes, brings them to you by force.
I'm just making that part up.
But in fact, over 80% of jobs posted on ZipRecruiter get a qualified candidate in just 24 hours.
80% get a good candidate in just 24 hours.
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Find out today why ZipRecruiter has been used by businesses of all sizes to find the most qualified job candidates with immediate results.
Right now, my listeners can post jobs on ZipRecruiter for free.
That's right, free, which is really inexpensive.
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 or just go out to Hollywood and Vine and find a guy with a bullhorn and you're all set.
All right.
So, you know, I'm thinking about Romero.
I was thinking back to when I first saw Night of the Living Dead.
It must have been, I must have seen it a couple of years late because I could drive.
When Night of the Living Dead came out, I was too young to drive.
But a couple of years later, I was driving.
I lived out on Long Island.
And, you know, when you're a kid in the suburbs, you drive a lot.
Like, it's kind of like just to try and get away from home and get into your own head a little bit.
And I was driving with one of my brothers, I think it was, and we saw something that some of you have probably never seen in your life, a double feature.
And it was, yeah, I know, it was the old days, they had double features.
And it was two films neither of us had ever heard of, Night of the Living Dead.
And I think the second one was Ben, in which rats take over the world while Michael Jackson, as a little boy, sings the song Ben.
I think that was the second.
And it may have been, Ben may have been the sequel to Willard or Willard may have been the sequel to Ben.
It was one or the other.
So we came in and we thought, well, double features, good deal, you know, and we sat down and we watched Knight of the Living Dead, got up and walked out.
We were so terrified that the idea of even ginning our emotions up to take on another movie was completely out of the question.
We could not do it.
That was, I have to think, I have to say, probably beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Now, I don't like, I don't like zombie movies.
I don't like monster movies.
I don't like gore all that much, real gore like that.
That was one of the scariest films I've ever seen.
It may have been the scariest film I ever saw.
To see that without warning in a movie theater on a big screen and not know what it was or what, you know, with the acting was so amateurish and it had this real sense of that you were watching something real, had a real sense of a newsreel.
It was terrifying and it really did stick with me.
And again, I don't like zombie stories, but they've become a genre.
And the reason they become a genre, I believe, is because they're a comment on materialism.
They're a comment on a world in which people are not supposed to believe in God.
And they really answer the question of what life would be like if there were no God.
You'd just be a piece of meat being eaten by other pieces of meat who are waiting to be eaten themselves.
That's all you would be.
And I think that's why it has so much resonance in the society.
I think that's why it became a genre because of that.
Anyway, it was a great, great film.
They've never matched it.
Nothing's ever been as good.
And what's kind of weird is then they made Resident Evil, which I played, which was the video game ripoff of Night of the Living Dead.
And then they started making movies of the video game ripoff, ripping off, you know, it just goes on and on forever.
I'll tell you what I did see over the weekend.
I saw War of the Planet of the Apes.
And I really do want to talk about this because it goes back to this theme of what we were talking about, of this left-wing fantasy.
And there's not a lot of news going on.
John McCain has been ill, so they can't take a vote on the health care bill.
I told you it's what they call in the news business the silly season, where nothing is happening.
And so what happens is they will find whatever small story they think hurts Republicans and they will blow it out of proportion.
That's going to be going on all through August until Congress is back in session and they start voting on things again.
Maybe there'll be some news that pops up.
But if not, if not, all through July and August, you will be hearing absolute outrage at every time Donald Trump sneezes.
I mean, Donald Trump shook hands with President Macron from France, and they had one of those long handshakes that guys get into sometimes when they're still talking.
This has happened to me half a dozen times.
You're talking to somebody, and you're just, you kind of forget you're shaking his hand, but you just keep going.
And I mean, CNN had an entire panel discussing this handshake and what it meant and what it was so silly and all this stuff.
Anyway, so you're going to see a lot of that.
So we're going to ignore it, basically.
I mean, I'm just not going to sit around and talk about some guy who knew a guy who looked like Boris Badenoff and might have been related to Russia, who bumped into Donald Trump in the hallway of his hotel.
We're just not going to do that if we can help it at all.
But this is important because it does really speak to something that is going on and something that the people have been rising up against.
And I think we're in a struggle.
I don't know how the struggle is going to end between people who feel like the people who made War of the Planet of the Apes.
Now, for those of you who haven't been paying attention, obviously Planet of the Apes was an old movie with Charlton Heston.
And the old idea of the film was Charlton Heston is in a ship where he's in suspended animation.
The ship breaks and he lands on this planet and he doesn't realize that he's gone into the future and he's now on a planet where the apes rule and the people are apes, basically.
And he gets his throat hurt when he's caught so he can't speak.
He doesn't have the human facility to speak and nobody will believe he is anything but a primitive beast.
So here, just a quick scene from that as Charlton Heston is trying to describe to the scientist who studies the primitive human beings, the ape scientist who studies the primitive human beings, trying to communicate with him.
Good morning, Dr. Zero.
Good morning, Julius.
How's our patient today?
No change.
The minute you open the door, he goes into his act.
Well, and what do we want this morning?
Do we want something?
Come on, speak.
Come on, speak.
Do we want some sugar, old-timer?
You could get hurt doing that, Doctor.
Oh, don't be silly.
He's perfectly tame.
They're all tame until they take a chunk out of you.
Well, Bright Eyes.
Is our throat feeling better?
It still hurts, doesn't it?
See?
He keeps pretending he can talk.
That bright eyes is remarkable.
He keeps trying to form words.
You know what they say.
Human see, human do.
That's basically the entire joke of the movie.
Human see, human do.
That is the entire joke.
It's all the cliches we say about apes.
Now they're saying about Charlton Heston, who we know is a scientist and an astronaut and all this stuff.
So that was the old thing.
It was a really powerful movie.
When you go back and look at it, it was made for about 10 cents, and the special effects are hilarious.
The technology that goes into this new movie is so miraculous.
Who's that guy?
Andy Serkis?
Yeah, I mean, he's the guy who played Golem, Gollum, and he played King Kong.
I mean, he's just, he has, he's like, fulfills this profession that simply didn't exist, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago.
Anyway, the technology is so great that I was sitting there thinking that human beings are such miraculous creatures that if ever the apes rise up against them, we should kill them all.
We should kill every single ape we can get our hands on because they'll never be able to make a movie like this one.
But in the movie, the apes are the good guys and the people there are some sympathetic people, but basically the lead ape, Caesar, is the leader of his people and he is fighting against Woody Harrelson, who is the evil colonel who has been sent to exterminate them and has gone a little crazy.
And I will tell you why I'm talking about this, but first let's just watch Harrelson delivering one of his patented evil guy performances.
Have you finally come to save your apes?
I care for you.
For me?
Look at your eyes.
Almost you.
How did you know I was here?
I was told you were coming.
That more soldiers from the north would be joining you here.
Joining me?
To finish us off.
Forgot.
Who told you that?
Okay, this picture comes out and it gets fantastic reviews.
I mean, just spectacular.
I don't know what it's got on Rotten Tomatoes.
It's like 98% on the critics and 88% from the humans.
And unbelievable reviews.
And they tout the box office receipts.
Why we should care how much money a movie makes.
I don't know why.
That's any of our business.
We're not getting any of that profit.
But that's a big story now.
Here's the way CNN, fake news CNN, ran it.
Planet of the apes wins box office war with Spider-Man.
LA Times, war is victorious over Spider-Man.
Same thing, right?
It's a victory.
The fact is, the movie didn't bomb, but it came in very low.
It earned about $56 million, which is the low end of what they're hoping for.
Why Stamps.com Matters00:02:35
Obviously, a film this big, this expensive, this Titanic and promoted, you know, is supposed to make over $100 million in its first weekend, didn't do it.
And people are talking about why, why?
The reviews were so good.
The technology is so amazing.
Maybe it's because it wasn't violent enough.
But I'm going to tell you why I think this movie is not doing as well as it could do, but I cannot tell you before I talk to you about stamps.com, which I have to talk to you about because it is the one and only reason why I'm here and not standing online somewhere.
I said this before, this is one of those things that I will do anything I can to avoid.
If I have to sell your mother down the river to get out of Standing Online, I will do it.
But it's much easier to just sign on to stamps.com because stamps.com brings all the services of the U.S. Postal Service right to your fingertips, right there on your computer.
And this is the thing.
The Postal Service actually does a good job.
Everybody likes to complain about the post office.
They really do a good job.
But it's just a little out of date to have to stop what you're doing, drive to the post office, hope it's open, wait online, stand online, get your stuff weighed, buy the stamp.
Instead, you just turn to your computer, put the envelope in.
You can buy and print official U.S. postage for any letter, any package, any class of mail with your own computer and printer.
Stamps.com makes it easy.
They'll send you a digital scale so you can automatically calculate the exact postage.
And they'll even help you decide the best class of mail based on your needs.
So there's no need to lease an expensive postage meter.
You just use stamps.com.
Right now, you can enjoy the stamps.com service with a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale without any long-term commitments.
What you do is you go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, and type in Clavin.
Let's spell it.
K-L-A-V is in Victor.
A-N.
Stamps.com.
Hit the mic, then enter Clavin, stamps.com.
You will never have to go to the post office again.
So we got Michael Knowles coming on, the king of trolls, but you will not be able to see it on Facebook or YouTube.
We give you free video for a little while, and then if you come to thedailywire.com, you can watch the whole show and video if you subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month, a lousy $10 a month, if you subscribe for a year, which only costs about $100.
I'm supposed to say $99.99, but I know this audience is so sophisticated, so incredibly hip to the jive, you know, hep to the jive, that they would say, wait a minute, that's only a penny.
I'm saving a penny.
So it's like $100.
Star-Spangled Symbolism00:03:49
And you get the leftist tears mug, which will keep your leftist tears nice and cold as it keeps my coffee hot.
Come on over to TheDailyWire.com and subscribe, and you can listen to the show if you don't subscribe, and you can still hear Knowles say whatever the heck he's about to say.
So here's the thing.
This movie, All the Evil, is done in the name of Christ and America.
There is a scene in this movie where the apes who are the persecuted minority and clearly the good guys in the movie and we're clearly rooting for them.
The soldiers, the evil soldiers run by Woody Harrelson, come out and they start blasting the Star-Spangled Banner, which for those of you who didn't know is actually your national anthem, right?
It's the Star-Spangled Banner.
And they come out and just beat the crap out of these apes while this music is playing.
And I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, and I was enjoying the film.
It's so spectacular to look at that you can't help but kind of enjoy the wonderful technology they're using, and the plot is interesting enough.
But I did think, like, really?
Like, really, I have to listen to some corporate millionaire diss my country, while he's making millions and millions off my country.
Really?
I have to do that?
That's a necessary thing.
The symbol of the evil soldiers is Alpha Omega, which those of you who are Christians will know is the sign of Christ.
The symbol is written on top of a flag.
The flag goes up in flames in the moment of victory.
The symbology is all against everything you might possibly hold dear.
And of course, the evil guys are building a wall.
And what is amazing about this part of the plot is they're building a wall and the good guy says, oh, this wall is madness.
And you think, well, wait, they're about to be invaded.
They should be building a wall.
There's nothing wrong with the wall except that it's a wall, except that it references Donald Trump.
These corporate million, I mean, this is a big corporation spending tens of millions of dollars and then poking you specifically in the eye.
And you know, this is where we stand.
You know, there's one way that's kind of funny, kind of ironic, that the West does this a lot.
You know, the first great work of Western art, what is it?
It's the Iliad, written for the Greeks, by the Greeks, in which the Trojans have Hector, the good guy, and the Greeks are represented by Achilles, who's just a pain in the neck.
You know, he's just a kind of a bully and a kind of whiny prima donna.
And, you know, we have done this all the time.
In fact, Edward Said, who wrote the book Orientalism, which is one of the Bibles of the left, complained about this, complained about the fact that we created noble Easterners in our imagination.
I mean, there's just so many things like this.
There's the Persians.
After the Greeks beat the Persians, they wrote the Persians.
They wrote the Trojan women about how sad it was for the women to be conquered by them.
You know, we've always done this.
The Song of Roland has the noble Saladin, the noble Muslim who fights against Roland.
Even if you think to All Quiet on the Western Front, which was a German novel but became very popular in the West, tells the story of the war from the point of view of the people who lost it.
This is the stuff we do.
This is why we're the West, is because we're always thinking about the other guy.
We're always identifying with other people.
This is very typical of Western art.
But at the same time, why do what is best about Western art while dissing the West to that degree, while telling you, and this is, you know, this is the way these ideas are injected into people's minds, especially the minds of the young and the uneducated.
You don't have to think to see the Star-Spangled Banner while the people you're rooting for in the movie get beaten up.
You don't have to think to see Alpha Omega get catch on fire when the good guys win.
You know, you don't have to think.
These just ideas go into your mind.
Television's Exploitative Side00:14:56
And if you want to see the results, there's this wonderful video that I think we put up actually on the Daily Wire.
And I'll play a long cut from it because it's worth it.
It's an organization called Campus Reform that goes out and does these hit videos against kids on campus.
And they're just interviewing kids about socialism.
And this is the result of the kind of propaganda you see in the war for the planet of the apes.
In your opinion, is socialism a good thing or a bad thing?
I mean, I think people kind of throw that word around to try to scare you.
But if helping people is socialism, then I'm for it.
It could really benefit our country in the future.
I think it's a good idea.
Socialism as a concept, as a philosophy, is good.
I think that it's got a bad rep. Trying to spread the wealth is definitely a good thing in America and it's definitely a thing that's needed.
There's a lot of things with social welfare that I think would be good to have.
Do you have a positive reaction to socialism or a negative one?
I'd say a more positive one.
I'm definitely more open to it.
But we should have a standard of living for all people.
By default, that should just be available.
If we did it democratically, then we could really incorporate socialism.
Like, it definitely seems like a more feasible option, and it could help more people.
Like, just as a broad term, it could help more people.
How would you define socialism?
I mean, honestly, that definition gets thrown around a lot.
I'm not exactly sure.
How would you view what socialism is though?
Economically, what is socialism?
Economically.
Hmm.
So.
I'm going to think about that for a second.
Jeez.
I guess just specifically just, you know, getting rid of that wealth gap in the United States.
How would I describe it as little as possible?
How would you define socialism?
I mean, it's definitely more of an open form of government, and it feels like a lot more accessible to a lot more people.
And that's kind of how I see it, like being more accessible and more kind of like equal ground.
Yeah.
Love socialism.
What is it?
Economically, I'm not sure what socialism is.
It reminded me of this picture of one of my favorite comedies of the last few years, This Is the End.
Very raunchy comedy, but it has this scene where Josh Rogan, is that his name?
Josh Rogan and Jay Berichel.
Berichel.
And Jay Berichel plays a guy who's away from Hollywood, and he comes back to talk to Josh Rogan, who's playing himself as a total Hollywood jerk.
And Jay says, let's go to Carl Jr.'s, but he can't because he's on all these fad diets.
Here's a little bit of the exchange.
Look, man, if you stopped eating gluten, you'd feel way better all day.
Whenever you feel shitty, that's because of gluten.
That's not true.
Who the f told you not to eat gluten?
It's just true.
You don't even know what gluten is.
Gluten is.
No, you have no idea what.
I do know what gluten is.
Gluten's a vague term.
It's something that's used to categorize things that are bad.
You know, calories, that's a gluten.
Fat, that's a gluten.
Somebody just told you you probably shouldn't eat gluten.
You're like, oh, I guess I shouldn't eat gluten.
Gluten ain't bad shit, man, and I'm not eating it.
They cut to Carl Jr. Seth Rogan, not Josh Rogan, sorry.
So that, I mean, that is the world the left is setting up.
And I mean, even, you know, I was making fun of David Brooks for talking about ways in which the upper strata, you know, create little code words that keep the lower strata out.
But that only happens on the left.
I don't see right-wingers doing that.
These little fads that they create hate America, hate Jesus, hate gluten, hate, you know, whatever.
You love socialism, but you don't know what it is.
You just know you have to say it if you want to be in with the in-crowd.
And that's why they live in that fantasy world from the opening.
That fantasy world where Hillary Clinton is president, where Huma Abadin is a good person, where the Affordable Care Act works.
They live in that fantasy.
And the fact that we woke them up by voting for Donald Trump, by electing for Donald Trump, is like, it's like an invasion.
It's like Game of Thrones.
The country of fantasy has been invaded.
And I just want to play, before we bring on Knowles to talk about Game of Thrones, I want to play Carl Bernstein, remember from Watergate, is talking about why the people don't believe.
Brian Stelter says, how can they not believe us?
How can they not believe everything we say?
They doubt our sources.
Why is it different than Watergate when you used anonymous sources, which, by the way, because of Woodward, not probably because of Bernstein, because of Woodward and because of the checks and balances at the Washington Post, they checked their anonymous sources.
They had to get three and four anonymous sources.
They didn't just run with whatever somebody told them.
So Bernstein tells you, you got to listen to this really carefully to hear all the code words.
Bernston tells you why things are different now.
The difference between Watergate and now, one of the big differences is that we are in the midst of a cold civil war in this country, a political and cultural civil war, and all of our reporting is taking place in the context of that cold civil war.
And nothing quite like that existed at the time of Watergate.
And that part of the Cold Civil War itself is the configuration of media with Fox News, with CNN being perceived by different sets of viewers as representing different truths, when in fact Fox has changed American politics as perhaps no institution has since its invention in 1996.
Our politics has been changed inalterably by this right-wing counterforce, whatever you want to call Fox News.
But also, cable news itself is a different form than we had during the time of Watergate.
We didn't see reporters on television discussing their stories.
You woke us up from our fantasy.
I mean, listen to that, the right-wing counterforce.
It's not a right-wing force.
The force is liberalism.
The force is leftism.
It's the counterforce is the right-wing.
And Fox News, with its million, 3 million viewers, wipes away everything that the network did.
All Fox News did and all cable news did is move the camera behind these guys where we could see that they weren't wearing any pants, that the seat of their pants was missing and their backsides were exposed.
That's why they're complaining.
That is why they are so hysterical.
We woke them out of their fantasy world.
It's like Game of Thrones, except we're fighting over the minds of the people.
Knowles, you there?
Hey, this is amazing.
Look at this.
I cannot believe this.
We're bringing you in all the way from down the hall.
That's right.
We actually sent satellites into space to be able to do this, our personal Daily Wire satellites.
I'm having deja vu all over again.
So this is it.
Your show begins on Monday, right?
That's right.
Thankfully, not from this dungeon that they put me in right now.
There will be a set.
It's going to start on Monday.
I don't know what we're going to talk about or with whom or for how long or really even from where.
They told me there's a studio.
I haven't seen it.
But it is going to start on Monday.
That's exciting.
I hope you'll still drop by and visit us from time to time, or else we'll have to get somebody who knows something.
You can, that's right.
And you can call my agent, I'm sure.
We're just a little busy these days, but I'm sure we'll figure something out.
Well, I'm glad.
You deserve it.
What am I talking about?
Let's lying to the guy's face.
So we sent you off on the dangerous mission of watching Game of Thrones, which I was afraid you would just sit around watching the nude scenes over and over again.
You hadn't watched it before.
You're not a Game of Thrones watcher.
No, and I was performing the nude scenes.
I wasn't watching them.
Yes, we saw that, and some of us are still trying to bleach our eyes after that.
I think a great way to launch my show and to really set it up for success is to come on today and trash talk the most popular television show in the world.
Still thinking, yeah.
It's got to work.
I'll say it.
I'll admit it.
I don't care about Game of Thrones.
I haven't watched it since Dumbledore died.
I just don't.
I really don't care.
Wait, Dumbledore died?
He gave it away.
I know.
Give away season four.
Well, but I did watch it, and I think actually it kind of gives me, not being a big fan of Game of Thrones, I've seen some episodes.
I don't really care about it.
I do think it gives some perspective when looking at the controversies surrounding Game of Thrones and some of the different media reactions to it and the alleged think pieces.
Because there is one criticism, the big criticism of it from both the right and the left, and the Christians and the atheists, is to quote Covenant Eyes, which is a porn watchdog organization and software.
If you're watching Game of Thrones, you're watching pornography.
Did you know that?
I did not know that.
That makes me feel a little better about the whole thing.
I would have started watching it a lot sooner if I'd known.
Exactly.
No, I actually don't believe that's true, but what's the argument?
So the argument is, the argument is Game of Thrones, one of the biggest shows in the world.
It's won 38 Emmy Awards.
It's won a gazillion awards.
And it's mainstreamed everyone watching pornography regularly, and that's the reason it's successful.
There are some data to back this up.
I took a deep dive into Pornhub Insights, which is apparently a statistic gathering organization.
Which I'm sure is on your most visited sites anyway.
That's right, it's my homepage, actually.
So Pornhub analyzed some of the data from different premieres and season finales and just regular episodes throughout the season.
And apparently, during episodes of Game of Thrones and on nights that it premieres, traffic to the website is down by over 4% throughout the United States.
Save people, so people turn off Pornhub and start watching Game of Thrones.
And then in the lead-up to major events, season finale, season premiere, searches that include the phrase Game of Thrones increase by 370%.
On Pornhub.
That's right, yeah.
And apparently the top one, when they search for characters, is Amelia Clark, which I take a little offense at, having played her role in our recent Daily Wire video.
But there are some data.
People clearly associate this to some degree with pornography.
There are a lot of saucy scenes.
I watched a supercut of all of these scintillating scenes from Game of Thrones.
I made that.
That's right.
It was a great, great piece.
I didn't know you could edit so well.
But the supercut was like over 10 minutes long, and it was pretty raunchy.
In a way, it's a little bit encouraging because one of the terrible things about pornography, and we're joking around, but pornography can be addictive and destructive, and it really can.
And one of the worst things about it is there are no characters in pornography.
You're just looking at shapes.
And I think one of the things about Game of Thrones that makes it so sexy is when the women take their clothes off, you know who they are.
And really, you know, I think most men who are not like crazy actually don't want to see women take off their clothes.
They want to see a woman, this specific woman, take off their clothes.
So it's a little bit more humanizing, even though the sex is overdone.
That's a great point.
Like when Amelia Clark plays it, you're not just looking at a piece of meat.
You're looking at her.
When I play it, you're looking at a piece of meat.
That's the way you are.
It's totally objectified.
That's right.
So, you know, another interesting thing that I think defends my not liking Game of Thrones that much is that, according to a study done last July by eScore, Democrats tend to love Game of Thrones.
They rate it as their favorite show.
They're most passionate about it.
And Republicans don't.
And it's unclear by the numbers.
It might just be that Republicans are less passionate about it.
Obviously, a lot of Republicans are watching it because there are tens of millions of viewers.
But there is a whole element of feminist fantasy world in the thing.
There wasn't at the beginning, but there is now.
I noticed that, no spoilers, but some of the lines from the episodes that I've watched are, you know, you can't, a little girl will say, you can't tell me that I can't fight.
I'll go out there and I'll fight just as well as anybody.
Yeah, she was the size of, I mean, you could have flicked her away with your finger, basically.
That's right.
You know, it's funny.
It wasn't like that in the beginning.
At the beginning, the women were clever and smart and seductive, and they could maneuver politically with their wits, but then they introduced a lot of characters who can fight like men, which I just kind of tune out because I just don't believe it.
That's right, that's right.
And the complaints from both sides, from the left and the right, and the Christians and the atheists and so on, or the treatment of women.
You know, obviously we see there's a little bit of a feminist injection with women being able to fight physically like men.
But here's from the American Thinker from a conservative outlet.
There's absolutely nothing in the show thus far to suggest that the author or maybe the director has what would be considered by any well-adjusted person a healthy sexuality.
I've seen prostitution, adultery, incest, rape, homosexuality, and except for a couple of rapes, I've never seen any sexual act committed by a husband and wife.
A fair enough point.
New York Times, obviously a former newspaper and coming from the other side from the fake news side of the aisle, says rape is often presented in television plot lines, but critics of Game of Thrones fear that rape has become so pervasive that it is almost a background noise, routine and unshocking.
Variety, same headline.
Why does Game of Thrones feature so much sexual violence?
And a left-wing writer at Huffington Post, and I think this starts to get at the heart of the matter, says, my feminist opinions ruined Game of Thrones for me and my boyfriend.
The Guardian hammering in a little bit more on this point.
That ought to be a sign to the boyfriend to take a hide.
It's going to be a long life otherwise.
Yeah, update, my ex-boyfriend.
The Guardian hones in, I think, fully on this point.
A feminist writer there says, Game of Thrones, too much racism and sexism, so I stopped watching.
I don't really know where the racism came in, and she doesn't really describe it, but she says, it is strange to quit a show after putting so much time into it.
I also decided to skip the final season of Mad Men, having long ago lost interest in the weekly display of misogyny and ill will that Don Draper visits upon everyone around him.
I am a quote, I'm exhausted by the triumph of men at the expense of women as a narrative device.
It's like they do not want to watch the world as it is.
That's exactly.
And they certainly don't want to watch the world without technology when everyone is at war because an important point, rape is often in television plot lines, and I don't want to watch men dominate women.
Probably best not to watch movies about ancient warfare in fantastical lands.
You know, I once explained this to an executive at sci-fi, actually, the sci-fi TV channel.
She was complaining about this.
Politically Incorrect Masterpieces00:05:45
I said, well, they didn't have guns.
So when you don't have guns, women can't defend themselves against men.
And she said, well, you just don't write it that way.
And I said, then it would be a good show, but not a great show, because it would be dishonest.
But that didn't register with her.
Because leftists do not want to see the truth.
They think that they are transforming the world by lying about it.
That's what political correctness is.
That's right.
And it's the same response to both sides, to people who say Game of Thrones is exploitive in its sexuality.
Perhaps it is a bit.
Perhaps television is a little exploitative.
But there is a reality that's being presented in this fantastical world.
And reality is what makes art worth watching and experiencing.
No question about it.
But I think we have a better way to produce, to introduce fantasy worlds, I think.
We have a much better way.
George R.R. Martin says rape and sexual violence have been a part of every war ever fought from the Sumerians to the present.
To omit them would be fundamentally false and dishonest.
I agree with that.
There is another partially realistic and partially fantastical piece that includes all of these scary and realistic and wonderful things, but it's much, much better than Game of Thrones.
That's absolutely true.
And it's the next book by Andrew Clayton.
It's Another Kingdom.
That we are producing as a podcast.
You and I together are producing this as a podcast, and we'll be releasing it.
I hope in a couple of weeks we'll start to release it, and people will actually get to see this book develop in real time.
It's pretty cool, yeah, because we just recorded the first chapter.
What's really cool is that we're releasing it in real time, so we'll be, or I won't be writing anything because as you saw from my last book, it's not my forte.
But you'll be writing, and it'll be very live and very fresh, and it's really good.
The first chapter, I really loved it.
And, you know, listen, I'm never going to work in Hollywood again after reasons to vote for Democrats.
So it's nice to have a job again.
I'm going to create your acting career out of absolutely nothing.
All right, Knowles, it's great to see you.
Good luck with the show.
I, of course, won't be listening because I don't care what you have to say, but everybody else should take a listen.
I will actually listen to it.
I'm sure it'll be great.
Good luck.
All right, thank you.
All right.
Stuff I like.
You know, it really is true.
It really is true that like the left will not watch the world as it is.
They think that somehow it's offensive.
This is the whole thing.
Whenever there's a scandal because of something some right-winger said, it's always because he said something obviously true.
Men and women are different, or crimes or black people commit a disproportionate amount of crimes.
And they'll say, well, that's racist.
It's just life, reality can't be racist.
It doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
So this week on stuff I like, I want to talk about politically incorrect masterpieces.
Things that are actually great in their field, but nobody kind of gives them their due anymore because they are politically incorrect.
And the first one is Gone with the Wind.
How many people in this room have seen Gone with the Wind?
All right, Austin has seen Gone with the Wind.
Jess, come on.
This is, I mean, there is no list of the 10 greatest films ever made that can't include Gone with the Wind.
It is one of the greatest films, and it goes on forever.
It's like four hours long, and I have seen it maybe five times.
And every time, like The Godfather, you cannot stop watching it.
It is about the Civil War.
It basically romanticizes the South.
The whole idea is it's a civilization that has gone with the wind.
And it centers around Scarlett O'Hara, this kind of spoiled daughter of a plantation, and Hrett Butler, a kind of noble thief, I guess you would call him.
He's a guy who lives on the edge, who basically is looking for the cause that will make him whole.
And he falls in love with her, and she falls in love with him.
And it's politically incorrect in every way.
First of all, there's no question that it depicts slaves from the point of view of white people.
You know, there's good slaves and bad slaves, dumb slaves, and lazy slaves and good slaves, and powerful, intelligent slaves, but they're all depicted by white people.
It has nothing to do with what it is actually like to be enslaved, which, by the way, was a very complicated thing because, like the Hebrews led out of Egypt, there were blacks who after the war missed the world of slavery.
I mean, slavery, I think, is very natural, not to black people, not to Hebrews, but to people.
I mean, teaching people freedom is one of the hardest things we have done in the West, and you can see how easily it slips away the minute they start offering you free stuff, you know.
So it depicts slaves, but it depicts slaves.
There's no question from the outside, not from the inside.
But the other thing, of course, is this relationship between a powerful man and a very sexy, seductive, and clever girl.
And he uses his power, his physical power on her and her desire for him, and she uses her attraction to control him.
And there's this real power struggle that goes on throughout the course of the Civil War.
Here is a scene where, a very famous scene where Clark Gable, Rhett Butler, is basically flirting with her, and she is flirting with him.
And she's wearing black, I think, because one of her husbands has died.
And so here is a very famous scene where they first start getting together.
But Rhett, I really can't go on accepting these gifts, though you are awfully kind.
I'm not kind.
I'm just tempting you.
I never give anything without expecting something in return.
I always get paid.
Well, if you think I'll marry you, just pay for the bonnet.
I won't.
Don't flatter yourself.
I'm not a marrying man.
Well, I won't kiss you for it either.
Open your eyes and look at me.
No, I don't think I will kiss you.
Although you need kissing badly.
That's what's wrong with you.
You should be kissed an orphan, and by someone who knows how.
A Kiss Refused00:01:17
Oh, and I suppose you think you're the proper person.
I might be, if the right moment ever came.
You're a conceited, black-hearted vomit, Red Button.
I don't know why I let you come and see me.
I'll tell you why, Scarlett.
Because I'm the only man over 16 and under 60 who's around to show you a good time.
The complexity of this relationship, which goes on for four hours, is so intense.
It includes scenes that would never, ever be written today, even in Game of Thrones, sexual interchanges between them, where sometimes one has the upper hand, and sometimes the other has the upper hand, and where things are misunderstood and understood.
It's just a beautiful, powerful film and so incredibly entertaining.
And when you watch it, and you should watch it, if you haven't seen Gone with the Wind, you should definitely watch Gone with the Wind.
You will see that you feel uncomfortable confronting these things because the left has simplified everything to a good and bad, left, good, right, bad, that simply has nothing to do with real life as it is lived.
And they insist on it, and when we interrupt it, they go nuts.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We will be back again tomorrow as the Clavenless Week ends and drifts into just an evil memory and our Clavenful week begins.