Andrew Clavin mocks Detroit’s 1967 riot portrayal as divisive, arguing Catherine Bigelow’s film exaggerates systemic racism while ignoring progress—like a Black president—and downplays white victimization, despite its historical accuracy. He dismisses police brutality claims, citing lower unarmed shooting rates for Black suspects, then pivots to NASA’s $160K–$180K "planetary protection officer" role as bureaucratic absurdity, contrasting it with Apollo-era ambition. A Google memo on gender differences sparks defense of "common sense" biology, framing left-wing backlash as censorship, before linking all debates to a broader pattern of suppressing conservative narratives—culminating in a celebration of Robert Mitchum’s 100th birthday as a counterpoint to modern cultural shifts. [Automatically generated summary]
With the President and Congress off on vacation, this is a good time to take stock and make some predictions about what's going to happen next.
Of course, no one knows the future, and so predictions are always meaningless and usually incorrect.
But why should this political commentary show be any different than the rest of them?
The big question facing us immediately is whether the new chief of staff, former General John Kelly, will be able to bring order to the White House.
I believe Kelly will solve the problem of Oval Office chaos by taking some very simple steps, like instituting a strict appointment schedule, keeping the office door closed during meetings, and shooting the President of the United States with a tranquilizer dart.
After the President loses consciousness, Kelly will chain his enormous body inside a crate and ship him to Manhattan, where he'll be put on display as Trump, the eighth wonder of the world.
Trump, however, will recover from the tranquilizers, burst from his chains, and climb to the top of the Empire State Building, clutching a beautiful young woman by the crotch.
As biplanes circle the gigantic president, firing machine guns at him, Trump will swap the planes away like flies and manage to send out a tweet unleashing a nuclear strike on Wolf Blitzer.
Meanwhile, back in D.C., special counsel Robert Mueller and his crack staff of Democrat donors will come up with the bright idea of trying to unseat a duly elected president by indicting his compatriots for the sort of trivial malfeasance that Hillary Clinton usually pulls off between felonies.
Paranoid talk show host Alex Jones will declare this is a coup by the deep state.
The deep state will respond by declaring that Jones doesn't have a government license to express his opinion and will therefore have to pay a fine of $5,000 a day until he obtains a license by leaving a paper bag full of cash in the men's room of the Starbucks nearest FBI headquarters.
Furious at the deep state coup, Trump voters will rise up to protect the president, whereupon Democrats will suddenly realize that Trump voters own most of the guns in the country.
Maybe trying to unseat their president for no reason wasn't such a brainy idea.
Panicked by the rebellion, the Democrats will call the military and will receive a recorded message saying that the military isn't in right now because it's out protecting the president from the deep state.
At this point, Nancy Pelosi will announce that when she recently said she would never resign, she actually meant she had resigned six months ago and was now living with a 27-year-old psychiatric nurse named Lance in the sprightly European principality of Liechtenstein.
Skillshare Showdown00:02:36
Finally, summer vacation will end.
Trump and Congress will return to Washington.
Trump will go back to appointing conservative judges and cutting regulations.
And congressmen will go back to bravely facing down political pressure by fulfilling their seven-year promise to repeal Obamacare.
Okay, forget that last prediction.
Satire is one thing, but there's no point in being absurd.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Shipshaw, tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, raw hooray!
Oh, hooray!
All right, the Clavinless weekend has come to an end.
Those of you who have survived, welcome back.
We have a lot to talk about.
We're going to talk about the new film Detroit, the Catherine Bigelow film that is bombing at the box office, film about a racial atrocity that took place in 1967.
We'll try and get to that Google memo that went out.
And of course, we will have the lovable rogue Michael Knowles, which is now, I think, his only job.
And he also hosts the Michael Knowles show.
He's going to come on and talk about the new guy at NASA who is there to protect the planet.
I think NASA hired Al Gore, and now they have a planetary protection officer.
You know, if you want to be a planetary protection officer or protect the world from alien invasions, do any of the new jobs that are coming up in the new century, you might want to go on Skillshare.
Skillshare is this really interesting place that I've been using to refresh old skills, learn new skills, learn all kinds of stuff for hobbies and things like this, because I always like to be learning things.
You know, it's for professionals who want to get a leg up at work or you're just someone who loves learning things.
What it is, it's these videos, these incredible video classes, basically, where someone who knows what they're talking about will teach you.
They'll give a series of classes on the video.
They'll have things like design.
They'll teach you how to use Adobe Illustrator, logo design, typography, animation, photography, marketing, entrepreneurship.
I mean, these are things you can really use if you're moving into a new field or if you just want to learn new skills or if you just want to learn how to do something you've never done before like calligraphy, some crazy thing like that.
And you can learn just about anything and you get unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price.
So you never have to pay per class again.
It's not like those things where they say in-apt purchases and halfway through the class they say, oh yeah, we'll continue this class, but we've got to hitch up for more money.
Chris on Leaks and Grand Jury Investigation00:06:26
It doesn't happen.
You just pay one price and you're on.
Skillshare is giving my listeners a month of unlimited access.
It's absolutely free.
So you can test out the whole thing.
I did.
It really is interesting.
Go to www.skillshare.com slash Andrew and redeem your free month, www.skillshare.com slash Andrew, and you get a free month of all the classes.
So many of them there.
It's really worth taking a look.
Before we talk about the movie Detroit, which I really want to talk about, I just have to talk about this hilarious interview that Chris Wallace had on with acting AG Rod Rosenstein.
This guy comes on.
Have you ever seen this guy talk?
He is like, you just, all you could do was think about what it would be like to be interrogated by this guy because he was just a stone-faced machine.
I mean, just this absolutely no way through him.
So what they were talking about, of course, is that Robert Mueller has reportedly, we don't know this, but sources say, as we now say now, as we say nowadays, sources say that Robert Mueller has opened a grand jury, has gone to the grand jury to further investigate this Trump-Russia connection or whatever he is investigating at this point.
And there was word, rumors, that he was also going to look into Trump and Associates' financial ties to Russia.
Now, this is one of the things that when Trump was talking to the New York Times, they asked him, would that be a red line?
They asked him at the same time, two people were speaking, and they said, would that be a red line or would that be a breach of his brief, of Mueller's brief?
And Trump answered, yes, that's going too far, basically.
So there are all these leaks.
And the first thing Chris Wallace asks Rosenstein is, why are there all these leaks?
Is it because there is a coup going on, basically, by the deep state?
And just listen to Rosenstein's response and put yourself in Wallace's shoes, okay?
So this is cut number three.
Do you see a concerted effort by people inside this government to hurt or take down or try to take down President Trump?
Chris, you know, we evaluate every referral we receive based on the facts and circumstances of the particular leak.
And so as the Attorney General described, we've had a surge in referrals to the department, and we're responding appropriately.
We're going to devote more resources, reevaluate our procedures, and make sure we investigate every one of those leaks in an appropriate way.
But you must have some thoughts about why there has been a surge in these referrals, as many in the six months of the Trump presidency as in the last three years of the Obama presidency.
That's right, Chris.
We have seen a surge in referrals.
We've seen an increase in the number of leaks.
And we're going to respond appropriately and try to establish an effective deterrent.
Criminal prosecution isn't the only way to prevent leaks, but it's an important part of the solution.
He's not giving them anything.
He keeps saying, why is this happening?
Why are there more leaks?
Yes, there are more leaks, and we're going to investigate that.
Yes, but why are there more leaks?
Well, there are more leaks.
You're right, Chris, and we're going to investigate.
Is this a coup by the deep state?
Well, there are certainly more leaks, Chris.
This guy is a stone.
So then he goes on, and he asks him, he won't even talk about the, you know, a grand jury is supposed to be secret.
And the fact that the leaks came out on this, it really is.
There's something like three times at least as many leaks in the first six months of the Trump of the Trump administration as there were in the last, I don't know what it was, years of the Obama administration.
And the reason is, of course, is because Trump has been slow off the dime appointing his own guys in there.
So there are all these Obama operatives inside the government trying to destroy the president.
That's the reason.
That's why it's happening.
And of course, Trump is such an outsized figure and such a wildcard that people who are maybe not even opposed to him are just nervous and they're giving out this information and they get petted by the press and all this, which they all like.
So now he asks him about the grand jury, nothing.
This is number four.
You're right that I'm not going to comment on the case.
I'm not going to comment about whether Director Mueller hasn't opened a grand jury.
You know, you read a lot about criminal investigations in the media, and some of those stories are false.
We just don't comment on investigations.
That's important for a number of reasons.
First of all, we don't want to disparage anybody who may be a subject in an investigation.
Number two, we don't want to interfere with the investigation by complaining.
But I'm asking you a different question.
What does it say when a prosecutor takes a case, in general, to a grand jury about the likelihood of indictments?
In general, Chris, it doesn't say anything about the likelihood of indictments because we conduct investigations and we make a determination at some point in the course of the investigation about whether charges are appropriate.
And what's the advantage in terms of the investigation to taking a case to a grand jury?
Many of our investigations, Chris, involve the use of the grand jury.
It's an appropriate way to gather documents.
Sometimes you bring witnesses in to make sure that you get their full testimony.
It's just a tool that we use like any other tool in the course of our investigations.
Oh, he's not going anywhere.
But finally, just one more cut.
It's worth playing, that he asks him whether this is a phishing expedition, and Rosenstein says, no, of course not.
It's not a fishing expedition.
But he asked him about the process by which Mueller can expand his investigation.
Because you remember that under Clinton, Ken Starr went in to investigate.
I think it was Whitewater.
He went in to investigate, wound up investigating Monica Lewinsky and whether he lied about having an affair.
And it just expanded and expanded and expanded.
And he asks him, basically, if that can happen here.
Now, this, Bailey, we're going to skip a cut.
This is number six.
Well, Chris, if he finds evidence of a crime that's within the scope of what Director Mueller and I have agreed is the appropriate scope of his investigation, then he can.
If it's something outside that scope, he needs to come to the acting attorney general, at this time me, for permission to expand his investigation.
But we don't talk about that publicly.
And so the speculation you've seen in the news media, that's not anything that I've said.
It's not anything Director Mueller said.
We don't know who's saying it or how credible those sources are.
So anyway, you know, Chris Wallace got hit, even by us.
I think at the Daily Wire, they said, why didn't he ask him what he would stop him, where he would stop him?
And I can tell you, from being a journalist, I can tell you that he just was looking at this thing and thinking, this is going nowhere.
I'm sure they had an arrangement before he went on the air that he wasn't going to ask specific questions about specific cases.
He did the best he could with a sweat-inducing interview.
I mean, you could see Wallace just his eyes going.
I mean, he was so relieved when it was over.
He actually reached out and shook his hand.
You know, he was grateful for it being over.
But let's move on to Detroit.
I want to talk about this film Detroit.
This is Catherine Bigelow's new film.
Racial Tension in Detroit00:15:59
And it's a big new movie.
Came out with, of course, just absolute rave reviews.
I mean, just, oh, it's brilliant.
And she gets those reviews.
I will say at the outset, I like Catherine Bigelow.
I don't love her films.
I mean, I love Point Break.
And there's something else I love about Catherine Bigelow, which is that she obviously, who was she married to?
James Cameron, right?
Was married to the director of Titanic, I think, at one point.
And she likes men.
She goes out, she likes big, burly, active guys.
There's a scene in every one of her movies where she basically pays tribute to action men.
And there's a completely meaningless scene in this movie with Jennifer Ely, that girl who was her biggest thing was that she was in Pride and Prejudice on the BBC, but now she appears, she's a good actress.
And there's a scene where she appears as a doctor talking about raising boys, and it has nothing to do with the movie.
It's just like Jennifer, just something that Catherine Bigelow is talking about.
This movie comes out, gets all the great reviews in the world, and basically bombs.
They gave it a small opening and it grossed about $350,000 at 20 theaters and then they expanded and it just collapsed, basically.
It's not making the money they thought it was going to make.
They thought it was going to make $13 million.
It made $7 million plus.
It's just not going anywhere.
And I want to talk about why this is because first, is it a good movie?
Yes, it is.
It's a harrowing film.
And it's about a racial atrocity that took place, a racist atrocity, I should say, that took place in 1967, Detroit.
Let's play the trailer clip.
I assume this is about what went on at the motel.
What happened at the motel?
You don't know, I tell you.
I was working security by Wisconsin.
And on Tuesday night, we heard gunfire coming from the area near the Algiers.
Police was there.
There was a lot of shooting.
When I went in there, three kids have been killed.
No.
So they were killed right before you got there.
Sir.
You carry a 38.
Right?
You carry a revolver.
I do have a 38.
You ever shoot anyone?
I didn't do it.
Police.
Oh, here we go.
All right, so that actually gives a kind of false impression of the film.
It makes you think it's going to be about a guy falsely charged, but this is not what the story is about.
I'm going to tell you what the story is about.
Slight spoilers, but it's a historical event, and I won't give away what happens in the picture.
But in 1967, Detroit blew up.
There was a minor police incident where they busted an unlicensed nightclub that frequented mostly, almost entirely by black people.
They arrested the guys, they brought them out front, and people saw it.
A crowd gathered, and a riot exploded.
Okay.
And this was one of the biggest riots in American history.
I mean, the only riots that are bigger than this riot are the riots, the anti-draft riots during the Civil War, and then those ones we had here in LA back in the 1990s, 1993, I think it was.
So this was huge.
43 people died, thousands of people injured.
The place was an absolute war zone.
There were snipers on the roof.
They had the Army National Guard called out the police, obviously, state police, everything.
The Algiers Hotel, the hotel that he's talking about, was a dive.
It was a place where prostitutes hung out and thugs hung out.
And at one point, as the picture tells it, some of this is, you know, stuff they've researched.
And some, obviously, with any historical thing, there has to be guesswork involved.
But apparently, some thug started firing a starter pistol to purposely making it look like it was sniper fire.
And they went nuts, of course, they riddled the place with bullets.
The police charged in, found a group of people in an annex of the motel.
And what followed after this was a harrowing hours-long event where the police essentially tormented these people in the hotel and killed some of them.
And it was led by a cop who was obviously, I don't know if I want to call him a psychopath, but clearly a racist.
They seem to have been set off by the fact that there were white women with black guys there.
That seemed to be part of the deal.
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Okay, so this terrible racial atrocity took place in 1967.
And of course, the picture starts with some beautiful African-American, what would I call it?
It's kind of very simple art, country art.
There's a word for it, but I can't remember it.
But anyway, it starts with that, and it has a little bit of a preview where it says, you know, there was a great migration, of course.
The blacks came up from the South looking for work in the North.
But when they came, they found there was bigotry here too.
And there was a lot of, and they were, as it says in this introduction, they were restricted.
Blacks were restricted to certain neighborhoods.
The police force was almost entirely white.
There was a lot of racial tension.
A lot of the hopes of having a better life did not pan out.
And there was a lot of segregation.
And there was just a lot of tension.
there's a lot of stuff going on now where first let's talk about what the right there are people on the right who are saying stuff about this film that that that are in that's incorrect okay that That they're saying, well, look, you can't say that blacks were restricted to certain neighborhoods.
There was no policy.
There's no government policy restricting blacks to certain neighborhoods.
Well, the fact is that if you were black and you went into certain neighborhoods and tried to get housing, you wouldn't get it.
And there was stuff called redlining.
And there was, you know, redlining.
What's interesting about redlining, of course, this was where the banks wouldn't give money to certain areas.
And you know what really exacerbated redlining?
It was FDR's New Deal because they brought out, they started the federal housing, you know, whatever it was, the federal housing agency, and like everything the government does, it was a complete screw-up.
And it did the opposite of what they wanted to do.
And it redlined that idea of things being in red comes from the law starting this agency.
And anyway, it was very tough for black people to get in.
You know, there's stuff in the movie that's manipulated, okay?
The scenes in the Algiers Hotel are just harrowing.
To watch these Americans who are African American or black American, whatever you want to call them, Americans, being tormented by policemen is a terrible thing to behold.
Anybody who's ever dealt with the police knows it's very frightening.
The police have a lot of power.
You want them being the kind of professionals that most of us run into, most police officers are back in those days.
A lot more of this went on, and it went on especially, it went on with whites too, but it went on especially in black neighborhoods.
There were a lot of bigotry.
Look, the film shows the victims in the most sympathetic light.
There are two white girls in there.
They kind of make them look like they're girls just wanting to have fun.
All the information I can get about them is they were, in fact, prostitutes at the Algiers Hotel.
I'm sure a lot of the people who were rounded up were criminals.
It was that kind of place.
They show you them in the most sympathetic light.
Okay, you know, and that's, and the security guard who you saw, that's that guy from Star Wars, Boyega, John Boyga, is that it?
Yeah.
Excellent actor.
I mean, all the actors.
Anthony Mackey isn't.
He is great.
He should really be in more stuff.
I mean, I know he does a superhero turn, but he really should be in more stuff.
He is a great actor.
All the acting is terrific.
And the British actor who plays the main racist cop, let me see if I got his name here.
It is Will Poulter.
And he's great because he has this innocent, sweet, he's British, but he has this innocent, sweet, all-American face.
And they just use it very well to make him a psychopath is really frightening.
Okay, so they manipulate you a little bit.
Obviously, when riots start, there's a lot of people having fun.
When you see some of the, they intersperse actual clips of the riots.
And one of the frightening things about riots is people go nuts.
I mean, people start to really have fun burning things down and they cheer and they cheer each other on and all this stuff.
Let's talk about the racism thing just a minute.
You know, when there is a dominant culture and a successful culture, it is absolutely natural for those in that culture, for those who come from other cultures, to want to be part of it, to want to imitate it.
Why not, right?
It's the successful culture.
If you're a tribe living in the dark and the tribe next to you invents fire, you're going to start to want their fire because you don't want to live in the dark.
It would be absurd to have somebody at the New York Times writing, well, we don't want to use, that's cultural appropriation.
You know, we don't want to use their fire.
Of course, that is how good ideas spread.
So when you have a country like England that is doing well and is bringing in immigrants from India, the Indians want to become like the Englishmen.
They want to talk English and they want to wear English suits and they want to.
And when you have a white culture that is doing well, and the blacks have been kept out of it, they want to become part of it.
They want to become businessmen.
They want to learn to speak well.
They want to become part, you know, partake of the successful society.
When you deal, when they are excluded, when they are excluded because of tribalism, it's not just racism is a sub-order of tribalism.
You know, we all have our tribes.
All you have to do is take a baseball player in a Boston Red Sox hat and the New Yorkers hate him.
Let them turn that hat into a New York Yankees hat.
Suddenly they love him.
I mean, that's how tribal we are.
When you exclude people, they become alienated from that main culture, and they think, screw it, I'm not going to become part of this culture.
I'm going to tear it down.
I'm going to live on the outskirts.
I'm going to be alienated.
I'm going to become a criminal class.
Happened to the Jews in Russia, happened to the Irish in England.
It has happened to black people here.
And so there is a reason to this, but now that's the macro view of it.
Now look at the micro view of it.
You're walking down the street and a black guy mugs you.
What do you care about the macro view of it?
You don't care about that.
All you know is your black guy mugged you, a black guy mugged a friend of yours, black guys are burning your city down.
That's all you know, you know, and that's a completely rational point of view.
The macro view, the micro view of it is just as rational as the macro view of it.
And this is the thing when you have a press that concentrates only on the big view and doesn't take into account the fact that there are innocent white people, innocent black people in a neighborhood being tormented by these riots, tormented by a black criminal class, you're not seeing the whole picture.
The picture goes both ways.
And when you only look at one side of it, you exacerbate the tension between the two groups of people.
The problem with this movie, and it's a really good movie, and I recommend it and it's worth watching, the problem with this movie is nothing that's in the movie.
The little stuff they do to manipulate you in favor of the victims of the crime is perfectly valid movie stuff.
It's a movie.
It's a Hollywood movie.
If you're getting your history from the movies, you're in the wrong place.
It's perfectly valid.
It's not that bad.
They show you that the thug, and he is a thug, fires a weapon out the window, terrifying the police.
They show you that the police, they're good police officers, concentrates on a bad cop, but they show you they're very good police officers trying to do their job.
They show you like all the tension everybody is under, but it is about an atrocity, and it really took place, and it really was an atrocity.
These guys confessed to the crime.
The confessions were, well, I won't go on because I don't want to spoil everything about it, but like, you know, it really was an atrocity.
The problem is with the reviews and the interviews that Catherine Bigelow has been giving.
Here is Catherine Bigelow, the director, on the CBS Morning Show.
And just listen to what they're saying about this movie.
Entertainment Weekly says it's, quote, an American horror story rooted so deep, deeply and shamefully in home soil that it is still painful to watch half a century later.
And it is painful.
Painful to watch.
And so relatable today.
It's so relatable.
It's scary.
What made you want to tell this story?
Well, predominantly that, that it is so relatable to today.
When I was first introduced to it, it was right around the time of Ferguson, Missouri.
And I'm thinking, this is 50 years ago today, and yet it's happening today.
It's happening tomorrow.
It's happening, you know, it's recurring far too often.
And so I hope that it could perhaps invite a dialogue to encourage a bridge between an incredible racial divide in this country.
What the hell is she talking about?
What the hell is she talking about?
This was 1967.
These cops, you were dealing with an influx of people that exacerbated racism.
There was racism.
They were all white.
And you know, just like having all liberals on TV, and all they do is reinforce their opinions.
When you have all whites on a police, a major metropolitan police force with a black population, they're going to do the same thing.
They're going to reinforce their, you know, bigoted positions.
Listen to this from, I think this is from USA Today.
It is from USA Today.
She says, I lost the, oh, there it is.
Wait a minute.
I will find it exactly.
Here it is.
Very early on in the picture, Will Poulter, the racist cop, very early on shoots a looter in the back with his shotgun.
And a cop calls him in and says, hey, you know, I'm going to recommend murder charges for you doing that.
And Poulter just sort of shrugs it off.
He doesn't feel anything's going to happen to him.
USA Today review, it's impossible to take in the scene without seeing Trayvon Martin's face or Michael Brown's.
Well, guess what?
I didn't see that.
Why not?
Because Michael Brown was a thug who attacked a cop.
They're living in a mythology where it's still 1967.
You know, here's Heather McDonald, one of our favorites, wrote the book, The War on Cops, just talking in a Prager U video about the actual statistics of police violence against black people today.
This is number nine.
When it comes to the subject of American police, blacks, and the deadly use of force, here is what we know.
A recent deadly force study by Washington State University researcher Lois James found that police officers were less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white or Hispanic ones in simulated threat scenarios.
Harvard Economics professor Roland Fryer analyzed more than 1,000 officer-involved shootings across the country.
He concluded that there is zero evidence of racial bias in police shootings.
In Houston, he found that blacks were 24% less likely than whites to be shot by officers, even though the suspects were armed or violent.
Building to the Moon00:09:18
This movie bombed because they told us it was about today.
They told us we have not come anywhere.
They did that sinister thing.
You know, Barack Obama's policies failed.
They failed in the Middle East.
They failed at home.
They failed just about everywhere.
His policies were wrong on everything.
And as he went on, he started to play the race card more and more.
And the way he did it was on targeting police.
And he was targeting the police so that federal investigators could come in and look over the police's shoulder and institute the kind of 1970s restrictions on police that caused the upsurge in crime in the first place that had to be, you know, that they had to respond to with better policing.
They did this with the Handmaid's Tale, too, where they said, oh, yeah, this is a story about today.
The freest women who have ever walked the face of the planet, American women, looking at a dystopian story like the handmaid tale and say, yeah, it's just like now, excuse me, could I have another Mai Tai, you know, while I'm, you know, sitting here in my brownstone in New York that I own, you know, and talk about how I'm living through the handmaid's tale.
I mean, this is the same thing.
You know, we just got through an administration with a black president, a black attorney general, a black, you know, virtually, you know, I won't say it was a black administration, that's not true, but it was a fully integrated administration.
But if nothing else, proved that people were willing to elect a black president twice, okay?
We are not living in that world.
For the left, though, it's always this fantasy of crisis that gives, because why?
Because when there's a crisis, people get afraid and they're willing to turn over power to the government.
That is why.
And it's always a crisis.
It's always 1967.
There are always heroes standing up for the people.
And it's offensive.
It's offensive.
You know, it's offensive to say to these police officers, since the 60s, policing has become so much more of a professional occupation.
The cops, when you watch cops on the streets of New York, first of all, they look like everybody.
I mean, they've got every color of skin.
They're women, they're men.
When you watch them, you are watching a highly trained, professional, paramilitary force policing one of the biggest cities on Earth excellently well.
I mean, really well.
That is what you're watching.
I'm not saying there's not an individual racist somewhere along the line, guys who do bad things.
I'm just saying that the idea that this film represents the, it's a good historical document.
It's good to remember.
This stuff really happened.
And when the right plays it down and says, oh, it wasn't so bad, I was alive.
It was bad.
It was bad.
Black people, the treatment of black people is inexcusable in this country.
There's no writing it out of history.
It's a real thing.
It's a real deal.
But to say that it keeps going on just makes the situation worse because it's offensive to people in a country where whites are suffering too, where everybody's suffering.
Only, only when you stop judging people by the color of their skin does the injustice stop.
As long as you do it, you can't make it right.
You cannot make it right.
Let's bring on.
Have we got the lovable Michael Knowles?
There he is.
The semi-lovable Michael Knowles.
Cinema is generous.
Y'all take it then.
How you doing?
Hey, I listened to the show.
It's the Michael Knowles show.
It really is good.
You're doing a, I'm shocked.
I mean, I'm as shocked as anybody.
I was.
I was really tempted to just make it 45 minutes of silence and give the people what they want, but we have words in it anyway.
Frankly, some of the best words, folks.
You know all the best words.
I've always admired that about you.
So I brought you on because I had to talk about this story about NASA now has, and we all remember NASA.
They used to do something.
They used to do Muslim outreach.
I believe it was, yeah, for, I know in the last eight years, the primary mission of NASA, this is not hyperbole or a joke, was outreach to the Muslim world, according to a director of NASA.
But I don't remember what they did before then.
You know, what I love about the Obama administration is it was so insane that we act, and the press was kind of covering it like it was normal, that we kind of accept it.
I mean, really, I was joking in the opening about Trump climbing to the top of the Empire State Building with a beautiful girl in his arms.
If that happened, it would still be less insane than the Obama administration.
So now NASA has hired a planet.
What did a planetary?
It's the planetary protection officer.
This is a good topic to talk about today, because as you can tell, I took a turn on the sun over the weekend on the face of the sun.
So yes, NASA has gone in.
And you know what's funny, by the way?
Just thinking that NASA's primary mission was outreach to the Muslim world under Barack Obama, that is like the 65th most bizarre thing in his administration.
That's why we don't think about it.
You're exactly right.
Now they're hiring the planetary protection officer.
They're offering a $160,000 to $180,000 salary for someone who has a secret security clearance and, quote, advanced knowledge of planetary protection.
I don't know where you're going to be.
Protecting us?
Well, I hate to ask the big question, but protecting us from what exactly?
Well, obviously it has to go to Gore.
I think you're absolutely right.
This is the only guy with the credentials to do it.
But what the Planetary Protection Officer is supposed to do is protect us from aliens.
It really is, to protect us from any alien microbes, and also as we explore other planets to protect them from us, which is probably a better use of resources.
Are we going to build a wall?
Well, we're allowed to protect against extraterrestrial aliens, but not against terrestrial aliens.
The government can't do that.
That's a very big issue.
I don't want those little green men coming and taking my job.
That's right.
They're doing the jobs that Earthlings won't do, don't you know?
Exactly.
Exactly.
This is a crisis for Brian.
Until you came on here, I had no idea.
So does NASA do anything anymore, seriously?
No, the answer is no.
But there is good news on the horizon.
There actually seems to have been some move in the right direction.
You know, in 1966, height of the space race, we're gearing up to go to the moon, NASA constituted over 4% of the federal budget.
I think it was 4.5 or 4.4% of the annual federal budget.
Today, it comprises 0.47% of the annual federal budget.
Wow.
Very little money.
It's been declining ever since then.
Part of the reason, you know, the last time we sent a human being into beyond low Earth orbit was 1972.
Wow, really?
Is that right?
Apollo 17, it was 45 years ago, was the last time a human being left near-Earth orbit.
And the reason for that is it's extremely expensive.
And there's a lot of space out there.
There's nothing out there, yeah.
There's nothing out there.
But just to launch one of those shuttles, to go to the moon, cost $711 million in 2016 dollars, which just to put that in, and that doesn't, I'm sorry, that's just to build it.
That actually doesn't include the cost to launch it.
And to put that in perspective, in 2016, to build the Empire State Building would cost about $650 million.
So I mean, you're just, just to build a thing, you have to build 15% more than the Empire State Building.
And unless you get to Mars, there's nothing out there, basically.
Yeah, there's a lot of space and not a lot to see, I suppose.
But the real story here is that finally, for the first time in over 50 years, we are beginning to have private partnerships and have private industry begin to explore space.
And this is, I think, one of the unintended consequences of the Apollo program and the space race.
You know, we were able to land on the moon within eight years of JFK calling for it, which is a pretty amazing thing.
But it seems to have crowded out all of the talent and all of the funding that could have gone toward private space industry and private space exploration.
It's classic government.
Classic government.
Everything the government touches turns to crap.
That's right, that's right.
And, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
There were some pretty good returns.
We beat Russia to the moon and so on.
We beat Russia to that soundstage in Culver City on you.
Yeah, I saw that movie.
But as a result, there is no coincidence, I think, that only as NASA, as a percentage of the federal budget, has decreased basically to nothing, are you seeing people like Elon Musk and Boeing and so on developing private technologies.
And even now, there's a lot of red tape at NASA.
Only within the last three years have you seen NASA starting to partner with individuals to try to send astronauts to the moon commercially rather than buying seats on Russian shuttles.
So, you know, the government did a great thing in the 60s, and then the result is 50 to 60 years of slowed progress.
So now, just to wrap this up, I have to ask this guy is literally going to protect us from alien microbes, you said.
There is a great story.
So I'll leave it to the government.
Government has never found a job too absurd to pay people too much money for.
But there was a nine-year-old boy who applied for this position, and he wrote, he said, I'm young enough that I can begin to think like an alien.
I think I'd be great.
I've seen all of the space movies, and NASA did write him back, you know.
Certainly, he was more qualified than anything the NASA officers were doing during the Obama administration.
But as we're looking to come up with a federal budget, looking for all this money to have tax reform in Obamacare, perhaps the Planetary Protection Officer should not totally necessary.
Give that kid a job.
All right, Michael Knowles is the host of the Michael Knowles Show now, which is absolutely terrific.
Viral Attack on Diversity00:05:22
Turn it on, and I hope it will be just completely silent like your book.
I'm sure we'll go right to number one.
It's good talking to you.
All right, we got to talk about this Google thing, you know, because this is classic.
You know, a Google document has been going around and it went viral.
Some guy, they don't know who it is, some tech guy in Google, went off on the culture of diversity, the enforced diversity, and the attempt to bring more women in and all this stuff.
And the thing about this document he sent out, an internal memo, is it bleeds goodwill.
You know, it's just like, I'm for diversity.
I understand all this stuff, but we have to deal with the facts.
And he talks about the fact that conservatives, conservative voices, are completely silenced.
And there's so much.
And I know this for a fact because I wrote the script for an app and we were dealing with, I guess it was Apple and just the left-wing, I mean, buried in there, there are conservatives, but the left-wing culture is so powerful.
So this guy sends out a thing saying, at Google, we're regularly told that implicit, unconscious, and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership.
Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently, and we should be cognizant of this.
But it's far from the whole story.
On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways.
Okay, so so far, right, there's nothing unacceptable.
These differences aren't just socially constructed because they're universal across human cultures.
And this is true.
There is no culture in which men and women perform the same tasks.
None.
There never has been.
There's never been a culture in which men and women perform the same tasks.
There's always a dividing line because men and women are different because some of them are men and some of them are women.
So here are some things that he says are different about women.
Women have more openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas.
Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things relative to men, also interpreted as empathizing versus systemizing.
This is true.
I mean, observation shows this.
And of course, there are exceptions to every rule.
It's always on a bell curve, but he's speaking generally.
He says these two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas.
More men may like coding because it requires systematizing.
And even within these tech jobs, comparatively more women work on the front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.
We always ask why we don't see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs.
These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.
Why do men destroy it?
Because status is a big deal to women.
It's a men.
And care a lot about status.
It's a primary metric, he says that manager.
It goes on and on.
And all I'm saying about this is it's common sense, right?
This is like just absolutely what everybody knows.
Of course, they went nuts.
This thing went viral.
And one of the guys said, Oh, you know, a lot more people agree with this than I would like.
This is really bad.
But classic, I want to read just this one reaction because it's kind of typical of the reactions.
This is from a former Google engineer, Erica Baker, who actually got some press by writing about diversity.
And she says, I am disappointed but unsurprised by the news that an anti-diversity sexist manifesto is making the rounds at Google.
This is not entirely new behavior.
Google has seen hints of this in the past with employees sharing blog posts about their racist beliefs and the occasional internal mailing list question innocently asking if black people aren't more likely to be violent.
What is new is that this, which by the way, has nothing to do with this.
I mean, what is new is that this employee felt safe enough to write and share an eight-page sexist screen internally, aside from how they're going to repair the damage of this event, of which there will be much,
is so damaging that what this guy said, the most important question we should be asking leaders at Google and that they should be asking themselves is: why is the environment at Google such that racists and sexists feel supported and safe in sharing these views in the company?
I mean, this is, it's an attack not just on what he's saying.
It's not arguing it.
It's an attack on his right to say it and his right to express what I think are normal common sense opinions.
And this was the reaction throughout.
This is a false free speech thing.
Oh, you know, I'm hiding behind the First Amendment, someone else said.
You know, it went viral because it's so obviously true.
And the way the left works is not just by propagating their nonsense, but also silencing the truth, because the truth is so powerful that it bowls over their nonsense whenever it gets out.
So they have to tamp it down and silence it.
And this is the stuff that makes people insane.
This is the stuff that makes for the blowback that they get, you know, when people start to say, you know, when people, when somebody says to you, hey, I'm for diversity, let women do whatever they want.
But they may not want to do all the things that you want them to do.
You know, it may not actually be right to write on your daughter's Disney princess book and tell her that she can't be who she wants to be.
It may not be right to tell a woman that she should be interested in this when she's just not.
That may be, in fact, oppressive in and of itself.
That voice has to be silenced.
Insane Perspectives00:02:43
And that's the sort of stuff that creates the fantasy world in which an intelligent woman like Catherine Bigelow can make a movie about 1967 Detroit and think she's making a movie about today.
It's only because they will not listen to any other voice that disturbs their fantasy.
All right, stuff I like.
We have to celebrate Robert Mitchum.
Yesterday, I think would have been his 100th birthday, one of the great tough guy film noir actors and a conservative.
People don't know this.
I think his son actually went into conservative Republican politics.
I'll do a film a day.
Here is one of his greatest films, The Night of the Hunter, 1955.
It was directed by the great, great British actor Charles Lawton.
It had Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish.
And it was a screenplay by the very famous journalist James Agee based on a novel by Davis Grubb.
And Mitchum plays this preacher who, for various reasons, he's a psychopathic serial killer, and he's hunting down these children.
And the children take refuge in the all-American home.
And he comes after them and does his routine.
This is the routine that he always does when he's preaching.
He's got love and hate written on his right and left hand.
And he uses that as this sermon.
Ah, little lad, you're staring at my fingers.
Would you like me to tell you the little story of right hand, left hand?
The story of good and evil?
H-A-T-E.
It was with this left hand that old brother Kane struck the blow that laid his brother low.
L-O-V-E.
You see these fingers, dear hearts?
These fingers has veins that run straight to the soul of man.
The right hand, friends, the hand of love.
Now watch, and I'll show you the story of life.
These fingers, dear hearts, is always a warring and a tugging, one again to other.
Now watch them.
Old brother left hand.
Left hand hates a fighting.
And it looks like love's a goner.
But wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Dog loves a winning.
Yes, sir.
It's love that won.
And old left hand hate is down for the count.
Robert Mitchum.
He lived an adventurous life.
He was on a chain gang for a while.
He was a wandering, like hobo, basically.
And it gave him a very interesting perspective.
Great performance in Night of the Hunter, which affected all of the great directors today.
All the directors you love saw Night of the Hunter because it was filmed almost like a silent film, and it's really interesting to watch.
Tomorrow, we have the great Bjorn Lumborg on, one of the only rational voices in the environmental discussion.
We will be here, and you will be here, too.
If you know what's good for you, I'm Andrew Clavin.