Ep. 464’s host and Michael Knowles mock 2018’s "crisis" narratives—dismissing Mueller’s Russian indictments as overblown, school shootings as statistically minor compared to urban crime, and Black Panther’s colonialism critique as historically flawed, citing British abolition of 2.5M enslaved in Nigeria. They slam Marvel films for infantilizing audiences while praising Logan’s depth, then pivot to celebrity activism, like De Niro’s Dubai summit jab at America’s "backwardness," framing it as media exploitation over expertise. The episode ties cultural trends—from superhero tropes to political grandstanding—to a broader critique of performative outrage and historical revisionism. [Automatically generated summary]
Speaking as a black superhero, I would like to say that Black Panther's record-breaking weekend at the box office proves that this is a racist country, because there were still 18 or 19 people who didn't go to see the film.
So clearly, as a nation, we still have a long way to go.
And again, speaking as a black superhero, I would like to point out that not everyone in America gave this movie five stars.
So that's racist too.
Because if you didn't love this movie, you hate black people.
Because as you know, with all the racism and slavery and whatnot going on in this country, we black superheroes should be immune to criticism.
No matter what I do as a black superhero, I should be recognized as super and heroic.
And whenever I'm not super or heroic, it should be ignored.
And if I cause some sort of disaster or something, it should be blamed on someone else who is not a black superhero.
For instance, if a black superhero, like myself, should, oh, just for instance, corruptly use the Internal Revenue Service to silence the political speech of his opponents, it would be racist to say that that was a scandal of historic proportions that made the minor crimes of Watergate look like minor crimes.
After all, I am a black superhero.
And if I say there's not a smidgen of corruption in the IRS, that's not lying.
It's just a black superhero knowingly saying things that don't happen to be true.
And as a black superhero, I can say authoritatively that it would be racist to accuse me of corrupting the State Department to cover up my fatal mistakes in Benghazi or to accuse me of corrupting the FBI and the Justice Department to illegally spy on an opponent's political campaign.
When I, a black superhero, do these things, it is racist to say that I did them because I am a black superhero, as you can plainly see.
Finally, speaking as a black superhero, let me say that the most racist thing you could do would be to erase my legacy of anti-American incompetence in order to restore the economy and the military and reestablish American leadership in the world, because it would be racist for a black superhero to become little more than an irrelevant error in the great scheme of American history.
So, if you don't want to be racist, just remain silent about the fact that I'm corrupt or dishonest or incompetent or anti-American, and just sit back and enjoy the movie, because you're racist, and I am a black superhero.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky-hunky.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, the world is it easing.
It's a wonderful day, hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hoora!
Well, that was our guest star who came in to do a brief opening, because as you know, I never wear costumes because I am a grown-ass man.
But happy Washington's birthday, or President's Day, as some ignorant call it.
Michael Knowles, a former president of the United States, will be here to review Black Panther.
I sent him to see it so that I, I, I am, you are wondering who didn't see Black Panther this weekend?
I am the person who did not go to see Black Panther.
However, I ate well, and you can always eat well with Blue Apron.
Blue Apron is a, it's the leading meal kit delivery service in the U.S.
I did not know that, but yes, it is.
And it's really good.
I mean, we bring it to the house.
We have it delivered to the house, and it basically sends you the ingredients all measured out, all done, gives you a big card with very simple, easy-to-read instructions.
And after your wife finishes making it, because in my house, even simple, easy-to-read instructions are like a death wish.
But once your wife finished making it, it is like having a home-cooked meal that tastes like a restaurant meal.
It is really, you know, instead of getting like a home-cooked meal that's just like a burger or goulash or something like that, you get stuff like strip steak and potatoes with spicy maple-collared greens, spicy chicken and stir-fried vegetables with jasmine rice, soy-glazed Korean rice cakes with broccoli and soft-boiled eggs.
These are the kinds of things people fooling around in the back of me.
I'll say these are the kind of things that you will be making in your home.
It's a two-person meal plan, meals that serve two people.
You can choose from eight new recipes per week with the choice to receive either two or three recipes any week, or you can go to a family meal plan with meals that serve four people, and you can choose from four new recipes per week with the choice to receive either two or three or four recipes any week.
And there's a wine plan.
I haven't done the wine plan, but I would like to.
I mean, that sounds like a really good idea.
It's convenient, there's lots of variety, very flexible, and there's very high-quality stuff.
Blue Apron sends only non-GMO ingredients and meat with no added hormones.
And Blue Apron is treating my listeners to $30 off your first order.
This is how low we have to sink with my listeners.
It's like free food.
Yes, I will go to Blue Apron.
Go to Blue Apron for free food.
You just visit blueapron.com/slash Andrew.
Check out this week's menu and get your $30 off at blueapron.com/slash Andrew.
Blue Apron, a better way to cook.
So, if you were watching TV or the new, paying attention to the news at all this weekend, and why you would be, I don't know, it was like there is this terrible, terrible crisis gripping our country.
And we know it's a crisis because Jimmy Kimmel is crying.
Here is Jimmy Kimmel crying, so you know it's a crisis.
No parent should ever have to decide if they can afford to save their child's life.
It just shouldn't happen.
You can, uh, sorry.
Okay, which happens to be my hometown, Clio's hometown, Clio Senior's hometown.
I'm sorry for getting emotional.
Russian Influence on U.S. Election00:14:40
I'm not great with this kind of thing, but I just think it's important.
You know, it's a terrifying thing.
I'm, you know, my wife is packed in the recovery room.
She has no idea what's going on.
And I'm standing in the middle of a lot of very worried-looking people, kind of like right now.
Thank you for listening.
I promise I'm not going to cry for the rest of the show.
This guy, dude, this guy used to do the man show.
Now he's doing the woman show.
Yeah, whatever's happening.
He's crying.
So, I mean, this is seriously, if you're watching the news, you're paying attention to the news.
The Russians hacked our elections.
We've been taken over by the Russians.
Children are being shot, gunned down right and left.
We're just a crisis, a crisis of school shootings.
And the president is out of his mind and needs to be removed from office.
All of which would be completely true if it weren't totally false.
I mean, none of that, none of those things is happening.
I mean, look, this country is divided right now.
It's very hard to bring together Americans and Democrats.
I mean, it's very, you know, we've really got fallen into two sides.
We've fallen into the side of Americans and crazy Democrats and the press.
And, you know, there's always crises in the country.
There's always something where I can turn to.
I've been talking about homelessness and the international slave, sex slave trade, and all this.
These are things that are really dire and important.
Abortion is dire and important.
But the stuff that they, I mean, this is a press that has been caught in the center of a massive cover-up.
They are the instruments of cover-up, the press, covering up the Obama administration's misuse of the IRS and the State Department, all those things we're talking about in the opening, the Justice Department.
Apparently, it looks like Obama's spying on another presidential campaign, an opposing presidential campaign.
Unbelievable stuff.
And they covered it up.
And now these indictments come down, right?
13 indictments of Russian nationals from the Mueller investigation.
Now, you have to understand what this is, right?
These guys were kind of, they were kind of accused of trolling our election.
They would go out, they would go out and stage rallies.
They would contact people.
They started doing this in 2014.
So all these intelligence guys like James Clapper saying, oh, this is all Trump's fault.
It was their fault.
They weren't watching these guys and they came in.
Are we doing this in other countries?
Yes.
Have they been doing this in every election?
Yes.
That's the first thing.
So this was a kind of small, you know, trolling operation.
These guys will never be tried.
They're all in Russia, so we'll never know whether these charges are true or not.
We have to presume they're innocent until guilty.
But everything they were doing, I mean, some of this stuff was incredibly stupid.
In Florida, they staged a rally for Trump.
So they say after a certain point, they were militating for Trump and Bernie Sanders.
They're playing down the Bernie Sanders stuff.
But basically, they just wanted to shake up the election so discord, play on the things that divide us.
So Discord, get to the guys that they thought were the most extreme.
They thought, obviously, that the best thing for the country would be Hillary Clinton getting elected.
That's why they were trying to prevent her from getting elected.
So basically, they agreed with the New York Times.
So the New York Times and the Russians thought that the best thing would be for Hillary Clinton to be elected.
And both of them acted so stupidly that they couldn't pull it off.
But, you know, they staged, one of the things they did was stage a rally for Trump in Florida.
15 people showed up.
15 people showed up.
Trump staged a rally for Trump, and 15,000 people showed up.
So these guys were complete incompetence.
And were these, remember, these are just charges.
Let's let Rod Rosenstein, the assistant attorney general, talk about the indictments.
It's cut number one.
He'll just tell what the indictments were.
Information warfare against the United States with the stated goal of spreading distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.
They used stolen or fictitious American identities, fraudulent bank accounts, and false identification documents.
The defendants posed as politically and socially active Americans, advocating for and against particular candidates.
They established social media pages and groups to communicate with unwitting Americans.
They also purchased political advertisements on social media networks.
The Russians also recruited and paid real Americans to engage in political activities, promote political campaigns, and stage political rallies.
The defendants and their co-conspirators pretended to be grassroots activists.
According to the indictment, the Americans did not know that they were communicating with Russians.
And don't get me wrong, I think these guys should be indicted, but it's just like I said, they're never going to be tried.
So it's just a kind of flare that he's sending out.
I don't know why he felt this was important to do it.
Maybe to make it clear that something was going on.
But I think we can all assume that something like this is always going on with our enemies and that we do it to them too.
And this is kind of disinformation.
One of the funniest parts of it was that they would call up and try and get information of how they could be most effective in sowing discord.
And somebody said to them, you know, you want to concentrate on the purple states, right?
You want to concentrate on the, like, like that's a really piece of secret information we didn't want the Russians to have.
So somebody asked, John Podesta was, of course, the head of the Clinton campaign.
So somebody asked him this question.
This is cut number eight.
How is it that these Russian operatives knew to focus on purple states like Michigan and Wisconsin and your campaign didn't?
Well, of course, we spent a lot of time and energy and effort in all those states.
Hillary Clinton herself did not spend much time in that.
You know, we had Tim Kaine was there.
Barack Obama was in, and she spent enormous time in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Sure.
And we spent a lot of effort.
We had more staff in Wisconsin than even President Obama had in 2012.
So now let's listen to Rod Rosenstein talk about the effect of the did this affect the election?
Number nine.
There's no allegation in the indictment of any effect on the outcome of the election.
And now let's listen to John Podesta talk about this, because what I want to talk about now is how this was reported.
Cut number seven.
I think that this active measures effort by the Russians could have tilted the election in Donald Trump's favor.
But I think what the real issue is is how he's reacted to it.
And in that context, if this is information warfare, then I think he's the first draft Dodger in the war.
So let's talk about this.
Who reacted to what?
Jonathan Alter, this leftist reporter who used to be with Newsweek when there was a Newsweek.
He sent out a tweet.
Read the full indictment, which I did, by the way.
I read every word of this indictment.
It's like 39 pages.
Read the full indictment to see how much evidence Mueller has for an attack that, but for the loss of life, is as bad as Pearl Harbor.
This was as bad as Pearl Harbor.
And yes, the Russians may well have tipped the election to Trump.
Now, the people who put out the indictment, the Justice Department says there's no evidence that this tilted the election, but Jonathan Alter, he knows.
And for the best one, let's take a trip to Knucklehead Row at the New York Times.
So here's Thomas Friedman, one of the chief knuckleheads on Knucklehead Row.
We just heard that it had no effect on the election.
We saw that it was kind of a Marx brothers Keystone cops kind of affair, the whole thing.
It's a bunch of trolls.
They send him over to do this stuff.
It didn't have any effect.
It was probably not that competent, but glad they're indicted, glad it's exposed, whatever.
Here's Thomas Friedman.
Our democracy is in serious danger.
President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool or both.
But either way, he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy.
This is what people are getting at the New York Times.
And by the way, when I speak to my kind of liberal-leaning friends in New York, this is what is going into their heads.
They think like the country is in crisis.
That is either Trump's real estate, this is Thomas Friedman, you can tell by the voice, that is either Trump's real estate empire has taken large amounts of money from shady oligarchs linked to the Kremlin so much that they literally own him, or rumors are true that he engaged in sexual misbehavior while he was in Moscow running the Miss Universe contest, which Russian intelligence has on tape and he doesn't want released, or Trump actually believes Russian President Vladimir Putin when he says he is innocent of intervening in our elections.
Now, this is the old trick, which we have talked about a million times, that they take the stuff that Trump says and they give it.
Trump is not the most articulate person.
He does not speak very exactly, and they take the worst version of what he says.
So Trump said this is a hoax.
He obviously meant the idea that he was colluding with the Russians was a hoax.
The other thing that he said was he went to talk to Putin and he said, Putin denies it.
You know, I brought it up.
He denies it.
And everybody says, well, he believes Putin.
He didn't say that.
What he said was, I'm sitting there with the guy.
What do you want me to do?
Reach across the table and strangle him.
He denies it.
So now Trump is getting ticked.
He's sitting in Mar-a-Lago and he's watching TV and he is absolutely furious that they're blaming him for something he knows he didn't do.
And he starts sending out tweets.
And you always can tell when the press says, oh my God, an unhinged tweet storm, that he's basically just telling the truth.
So Trump says it was the goal of Russia, this is one of his tweets, to create discord, disruption, and chaos within the U.S. If it was, I'm sorry, if it was the goal of Russia to create discord, disruption, and chaos within the U.S., then with all of the committee hearings, investigations, and party hatred, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
They are laughing their asses off in Moscow, get smart America.
And what's the reaction of the Russians had actually wanted to spread disinformation in order to sow discord in America, they just should have gotten jobs at CNN.
That would have solved the entire problem.
So he puts that out.
What is Brian Stelter, the potato head over at CNN, said this is number three, his reaction to this tweet.
I don't know.
Maybe down at Mar-a-Lago, maybe in person, President Trump is cool, calm, and collected.
But on Twitter, he sounds deeply troubled.
He sounds unhinged.
This is why questions about his fitness for office are so urgent.
This is the biggest story that I see happening right now.
What Mr. Potato Head sees is that the president is insane.
Why?
Why shouldn't he be ticked off?
You spent a year of his presidency while he cut taxes, while he rolled back regulations, while he put constitutional judges in place.
You see, the whole year of his presidency has been this clown and his ilk talking about this Russian collusion with a bunch of trolls that never happened.
I mean, it is unbelievable.
And now we're supposed to believe that democracy is on shaky ground.
This horrible crisis is on shaky ground because the president is basically shrugging off what he knew was happening, what we all know is happening all the time.
You know, I have to tell you, when I consider, when I look back, I know I keep talking about this because I've actually never seen the press engage in a cover-up of the extent they are of ObamaGate, ObamaGate's misuse of the IRS, ObamaGate's misuse of this, Obama's misuse of the State Department, Obama's misuse of the Justice Department.
You know, when I look at this, when I see how corrupt the Obama administration was, I feel with the Trump election, I feel like I was saved from a burning building and the arsonist is telling me that the fireman cheats on his wife.
I mean, that's basically what it is.
You know, we were, this country was in genuine trouble under Obama.
Trump got us out of it, and now they're saying, but he slept with a porn star.
And I'm like, you know, that's wrong, but I don't care.
I'm so glad.
I'm so glad you corrupt, dirty socialist guys did not win this election.
I just am.
And it's not, I'm not, you know, people keep saying, well, you're letting, it's whataboutism.
You're letting Trump off the hook for such and such.
I'm not letting him off the hook for anything.
I'm waiting for someone to name the way he has transgressed the Constitution.
Name the way he has broken the law.
Name the way he has made me less free.
And I will condemn that.
I do condemn some of the way he talks and some of the things he does.
I'm certainly not in favor of cheating on your wife, especially if he looks like Melania.
That's a joke.
I'm not in favor of cheating on your wife.
You know, nothing to do with that.
It's just that if he's the president, if he's not breaking the law, if he's not transgressing the Constitution, as Obama so evidently did, while the press looked on applauding, you know, it's not that big a problem for me.
So, meanwhile, meanwhile, we have this horrible shooting in Florida.
And, you know, you don't want to run it down, but you don't want to play it down.
But CNN is using these traumatized kids.
In fact, all of the people we're doing, they're doing it on NBC, I think as well, and ABC.
They're using these traumatized kids to push, try and get your guns away, to try and repeal the Second Amendment.
Let's just look at a quick clip of this.
I find this shameful.
You said that the governor and Senator Rubio murdered 17 people.
Why?
It's Rick Scott and Marco Rubio who allow this to happen.
They are enablers, and the blood of 17 people and all those injured and all the families that have been hurt, this is all on them.
They have us thinking that this is inevitable and that we can't do anything to stop it.
It's too difficult.
We're done with that.
The GOP has abandoned us and left us to people like Nicholas Cruz.
This is for any of you to respond to.
This is what Speaker Ryan said.
We need to think less about taking sides and fighting each other politically and just pulling together.
I disagree with that statement because it's very clear that there are two sides to this and there are certain people that accept money from the NRA and I believe Speaker Ryan is one of those people.
Now those who will disagree with the framing of what you just said and what we're hearing from others is that the NRA didn't purchase the gun, the NRA didn't pull the trigger, the NRA didn't conspire to kill.
They might not have pulled the trigger, but they're who allowed him to buy the gun.
Someone who isn't even allowed to buy alcohol legally is allowed to buy a war weapon.
Crime Statistics Controversy00:03:59
Like, where does that make sense?
First of all, I'm so sorry this happened to these children.
I'm so sorry that they were in this school.
But who cares what they think?
They're kids.
They're children.
Who cares what their opinions are?
A.
And B, they could find no child in that school, not one child to stand up for gun rights.
You know, they were condemning Marco Rubio for murder, and he came out with a statement.
None of the major shootings that have occurred in this country over the last few months or years that have outraged us, in none of those cases would gun laws have prevented them.
So the Washington Post went out to fact-check them, which usually means just debunk Republicans.
But in fact, they said, he's right.
In each case, gun laws would not have done a thing.
So why am I listening to that?
Why is that not?
You know, let me, Henry Rassette at Ricochet, one of the Ricochets.
Ricochet is this wonderful site where they were the ones who posted Another Kingdom when we were putting that out.
And they're a wonderful center-right site where they let people post responsible posts, even if they're not part of the Ricochet staff.
He put out these statistics.
At the current rate, an American high school student faces a risk of being murdered in a school shooting in a year of about 0.0014%.
That is one in 71,000.
You have one in a 71,000 chance.
Based on last year's crime statistics, the overall probability of a person in the U.S. being murdered in a year is about 0.005%.
That's about one in 20,000.
Also based on last year's crime statistics, a citizen of St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, or Detroit, four cities where combined, there has not been a Republican in office since I believe the Jurassic Age, okay, including children in those cities, has a risk of being murdered in a year of about 0.049%.
That's one in 2,000.
That's pretty big if you're talking about murder.
So St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit, every place that's governed by Democrats, and by the way, many of those have very strict gun laws.
One in 2,000.
If the current rate continues, there'll be about two dozen school shooters this year based on a reasonable definition of what that means.
Their total victims will constitute about one half of 1% of all American homicides.
16,000 murders will probably be committed this year.
About two-thirds of them will be committed by males between the ages of 17 and 35.
And the 30 most violent cities in America represent about 6% of the U.S. population, but they account for a quarter of all murders.
If these guys, you know, what we should really be doing is we should be confiscating America's Democrats.
If we could just repeal the whatever it is in the Constitution that allows there to be Democrats, I think the murder rate would drop substantially.
Here's from Pew.
Violent crime in the U.S. has fallen sharply over the past quarter century.
The two most commonly cited sources of crime statistics in the U.S. both show a substantial decline in the violent crime rate since it peaked in the early 1990s.
One is an annual report by the FBI of serious crime.
It goes on and on, just saying that crime is dropping.
So in other words, all weekend long, you were hearing about this terrible crisis.
If there is a crisis in this country right now, it's not Russia.
It's not the crime rate.
It's not Russia, which had no effect on our elections.
And by the way, in that indictment, when Rod Rosenstein was talking about that, he said that there was no evidence in the indictment of collusion either.
So it's not Russia if there's a crisis.
It's not the crime rates if there's a crisis because crime is going down.
And it's not the president's mental state.
He's a great big character with a lot of weird and eccentric habits, but he's obviously not mentally ill or insane in any way.
The really problem is the fact that we depend on to tell us what's going on, the media that we depend on are in a state of complete and utter hysteria that has arisen from the fact that they are desperately trying to cover up the way they covered up the Obama administration's malfeasance.
They are covering up their cover-up and it is driving them insane.
The media is in crisis, but the country is not.
Racist Elements in Superhero Movies00:15:17
All right, we're going to bring on the lovable and talented Michael Knowles.
Have we got Knowles?
I mean, he's around the corner.
How hard can it be to get Knowles?
So, all right.
One second.
We're flying Knowles into the studio next door by an Apache helicopter, which the Daily Wire does use for these occasions.
Mostly we chase him around with the Apache helicopter.
Do you know that somebody wrote to me last week and told me I was not being nice enough to Michael Knowles?
Is there any, I mean, I'd like to take a vote on that.
Is there anybody who thinks I should be nicer to Michael Knowles?
I sent Knowles to the Black Panther show because basically I'm not a big fan of superhero movies, and I personally didn't actually care if I went and saw it, especially in the first weekend.
And I went and saw three billboards outside of Ebbing, Missouri, which, if you're interested, by the way, has a lot of language, has a lot of violence, has a lot of tough talk and everything, but it's a deeply Catholic Christian movie about God's grace in a troubled world.
And one of the reasons I liked it so much was that you know how I feel about these Christian movies where everything is happy and nobody curses and anybody who has sex gets pregnant and anybody who gets pregnant gets married.
And if anybody who accepts the Lord, even if he dies, it's still a happy scene.
Instead of all that, this is a movie, Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri, is a movie of absolute terror.
It's about the grief and terror of life.
And yet at the same time, it is just an amazing statement about God's grace and about God's forgiveness in the midst of all our evils.
So that's what I went to see, but Knowles went to see Black Panther.
First, before I bring him in, we got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come on over to thedailywire.com and you can listen to the rest of the show.
You can listen to the rest, I think, on YouTube too.
But, but if you would only only subscribe, take a lousy 10 bucks a month out of your wallet, you could subscribe.
You could watch the whole show on thedailywire.com.
And if you got 100 bucks, you can get the whole year.
So that's a savings of a lousy 20 bucks, right?
Plus, you get the leftist tears tumbler, which is priceless.
I mean, the leftist, you know, with the leftist, it's magical.
It fills up automatically with leftist tears whenever I speak.
All right, we'll say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, and then we'll bring on Knowles.
All right, Knowles.
Oh, I can see you.
Hey, I made it back.
You made it.
How are you doing?
I know.
It's amazing technology we have here.
Yeah, thanks, guys.
I appreciate it.
You know, I felt a little guilty sending you this movie.
You kind of feel, you're kind of in the same place as me with superhero movies in general.
Is that fair to say?
I like when you call me and you say, you know, Knowles, I really hate superhero movies and I think they're distressing for the culture.
So you should go see it.
I said, I don't disagree with that really at all.
I don't know if you could hear me that somebody wrote to me and said, I was not treating you kindly.
I don't know how you would even recognize me if I treated you kindly.
That's true.
It would be too shocking.
I might just die or turn into a pillar of salt or something.
I say this all the time.
I get no respect.
No respect, I tell you.
Take it to sweet little Elisa.
Everybody.
That's okay.
I'm a living martyr like Alan Eskin.
All right, now I heard a lot of different reactions, but how'd you like the movie?
The movie was so awful.
Oh, really?
So I went to see this movie, and I was there.
I dragged sweet little Elisa to it, and about an hour and a half in, I'm somehow still awake, and the power goes out.
And I have never been more grateful for a blown fuse in my entire life.
So I walk out and I say, oh, I think I got the gist of this thing.
I don't think I need to see it again.
But they give me a couple free tickets and I say, okay, well, if I'm going to review it, I guess I have to see the last 17 hours of this thing that never ended.
You had to go to the movie twice?
I had to go to it twice, which is evidence of God's whimsy.
Clearly.
You know, suffering.
This is Lent.
This is a penitential time.
Exactly.
And I had quite a spiritual discipline this weekend.
So it's a blackout at Black Panther.
Exactly.
And you just don't like black things.
Am I getting that right?
You know, it's so tough because this movie is explicitly about race.
And so any commentary on it is a commentary on history and race and colonialism and things like that.
And so you get called a racist regardless of what you say.
Right.
The movie is explicitly about race, though.
Some people have wondered about the connection between Black Panther and the Black Panther Party.
Now, they both came out in the same year.
The name Black Panther was used to describe proto-Black Panther Party organizations for at least a year before that.
The comic creators acknowledged this and they said, oh, yeah, what a strange coincidence.
And then in 1971, they actually, when the Black Panther Party was getting a lot of negative press for carrying machine guns and stuff like that, they changed the name briefly to something else, Black Leopard, I think.
And then they went back to Black Panther.
So they didn't actually name it after the Black Panther group.
So they say.
I mean, the name, referring to the proto-Black Panther parties as the Black Panthers predates the comic book by at least a year.
There was also the Black Panther tank division in World War II.
And there are such things as Black Panthers.
And there are Black Panthers.
It seems a little coincidental, as the comic creators admit.
But the whole premise of this movie is that if whites and Western Europeans had not colonized parts of Africa, if it remained untouched from Africa, and if African countries were rich in natural resources like precious metals, then they would have developed into an equitable, fair, just, prosperous, technologically advanced country in total isolation, right?
Now, the great irony of this is I wrote this review and I said it was awful and Ben said it was very good.
Yes.
But we actually agree on most of the movie.
We just disagree on this one point.
Ben wrote that colonialism was an unjustifiable evil.
Really?
And I don't think that's true at all.
I think if you go into this believing that historically Western interactions with the rest of the world have been a good for everybody, then this movie doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
If you go in thinking that colonialism is an unjustifiable evil, then the only things that will make you dislike this movie are the cheesy special effects and the terrible plot and absolutely having no stakes whatsoever because we know exactly what's going to happen because these all follow the exact same formula.
Well, colonialism, like every human enterprise, contained evil.
People did evil things in the name of colonialism, but it also spread civilization, whether it was Romans doing it or the British doing it.
Places where those civilizations touched are actually better off than they might have been without them.
I mean, definitely terrible, terrible things happened during colonialism, but we're human beings.
Terrible things happen wherever we go.
The imagination of man's heart is evil from the beginning.
That's certainly true.
But the initial dispute of the movie, the initial debate, is one between isolationism and intervention with oppressed black people around the world.
But then the latter debate of the movie becomes, we will intervene.
Do we intervene through militancy or do we intervene, I kid you not, through extra community centers in Oakland?
That's the final suggestion.
That's a tough one, yeah.
That's a tough one.
But the premise of European culpability for global inequality is accepted by the protagonist and the antagonist.
But the history shows a different story.
So the idea that Europeans brought slavery to Africa is ridiculous.
Slavery in Africa predates European colonialism by millennia.
And ironically, the only thing that's led to any abolition of slavery in Africa was European colonialism.
So when the, for instance, when the English intervened in the Sokoto Caliphate in 1903, it's a Muslim caliphate in northern Nigeria.
Two and a half million people were enslaved there.
Within just a few decades of British rule, slavery was abolished everywhere.
Whole pre-European African empires were built on the trans-Saharan slave trade.
The Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire, the Songhal Empire, totally built on that.
We know that the Egyptians held slaves, right?
There are a couple good books written about that.
So the premise of the movie doesn't make any sense.
And therefore, if you think that the trouble with superhero movies is that the plots are too coherent and they're insufficiently political, then you're going to love Black Panther.
But that's just the criticism of the premise of the movie, which doesn't make any sense.
There's also the issue of the genre itself, which is so saturated.
Before we get to that, because I do want to talk about that, but before we get to that, the God-King of the Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring, You Must Be Obeyed, was in here briefly, and he said that in the movie that this country, Wakanda or whatever it's called, develops Western civilization without the help of Western civilization, but they do get extra planetary help, like aliens drop something.
Is that right?
There's a bit of a racist element there.
The only way Africa could develop Western civilization is through aliens giving it to them.
You know, there's a real irony too, because the way that the alien civilization reaches Wakanda is through this blue precious metal called vibranium, which allows them to power all of their devices, and it's this really important ore.
But Africa already has abundant stores of a blue precious metal that powers electronic devices.
It's called cobalt, and Congo sells most of it to China.
The trouble with Africa is not that there aren't natural resources there.
Africa is replete with natural resources.
Gold, salt, cobalt, all of these natural resources.
That isn't the issue.
And the thing that has allowed parts of it to develop into just, equitable, fair places is the Western civilization that it so decries.
The other thing I heard was from John Nolte over at Breitbart, the late John Nolte, as we call him here, because he used to be with us.
But Nolte said it's a very conservative movie, and the Black Panther is Trump, and what was the other one?
Oh, the villain is Black Lives Matter.
Is there any truth to that?
Yeah, whatever.
You know, sure.
I think there's a, you can read a little bit of Trump into the protagonist and the antagonist.
It's true that the antagonist, played wonderfully by Michael B. Jordan, the antagonist does want militancy and insurrection of black people against white people, and the protagonist wants more community centers in Oakland.
That's fine.
But to say that it's a conservative film or that it's promoting some conservative agenda, I think, is a stretch too far.
But, you know, John Nolte has a little trollishness in him.
One aspect of the trolls, because you're right.
The whole thing is if aliens intervened and the world were other than it is.
You know, Michael B. Jordan's character says basically that in society, whites are on top and blacks are oppressed, and we're going to restart the world and we're going to make it exactly the opposite.
And they play on these themes, not just on racial themes, but on intersectional themes in the movie, too, such that all of the great scientists and all of the great soldiers and all of the great race car drivers are women.
Actually, just one woman, believe it or not, they have one woman who's like this surgeon, scientist, race car driver.
They're all of the most fearsome soldiers are women.
And you just think, all right, I get it.
You're saying, look, what if it were other than it is?
But what point is that making other than a tedious and shallow political point?
It is sad how much the left is forced to live in its imagination, which is the only place where leftist policies work.
What the world looks like.
Okay, let's talk about this superhero thing, because I get hit with this all the time, especially by Jacob in the next room.
Every time I walk out of here and I've said something nasty about superhero movies, I find this a—listen, not against there being superhero movies.
I find the number of them, the vast number of them, what's infantilizing.
That is exactly the way to put it.
I am being excoriated for saying this.
They say, Michael, it's a superhero movie.
Come on, stop.
You know, I made this point about the movie.
One central aspect of it is that the religion of Wakanda doesn't worship a God in whom there is neither Jew nor Greek, nor male nor female, but it just worships the ancestors, which is to say the race.
That's all that means.
Regressive progressivism, yeah.
Exactly, regressive progressivism.
And I pointed this out.
They say, you're looking too deeply.
It's just a superhero movie.
Stop it.
What's wrong with this?
And I'll say, right, that's the problem.
These are shallow movies that are meant for children.
And they say, oh, you're just, you're being an old fuddy duddy.
People can like these things.
I say, certainly that's true.
We can all eat a little candy every once in a while.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But the market is totally saturated with these movies.
And there's an unhealthy obsession with them among adults.
People ask what I like about the superhero movies, and all I can think about are the ones that I watched when I was a kid, because I really liked Batman when I was a kid.
But I don't watch Batman things now because I'm not a kid.
Now I drink whiskey.
When I was a kid, I drank less whiskey.
Tastes change as you get older.
You know, the thing is, if the arts are anything at all, they are the way a nation kind of talks about the things that can't be talked about.
And the fact that we are having these debates like about whether Wonder Woman empowers women, of course it doesn't.
It's a story about a Greek goddess, you know, and it really does bother me that the genre that now obsesses everybody is a genre without tragedy because there is no heroism without tragedy.
I mean, that's why a movie like Logan stands out, because it is a movie about tragedy, and it's a movie actually that comments on the genre.
But when you have heroics without tragedy, you have basically no way to talk about the state of the world.
Like there can't be a Muslim villain.
There can't be, you know, a villain.
People that we really have to deal with are socialist villains or are they not?
You know, I mean, is somebody who wants to make the world a utopia?
Is he a villain or is he not a villain?
You can't have those questions in these movies because everybody is just kind of a guy with eight legs who climbs up a building and ultimately destroys New York.
And it's why, even technically, even as a matter of plot, these movies are so awful, is that there are no stakes whatsoever, except for Logan, where there were stakes.
But we all know, you know, I don't, I guess this is a spoiler, so if you care, close your ears for five seconds, but trust me, you don't care.
There's this moment where you know the main guy is ostensibly going to die.
And the way that he's ostensibly going to die is so ludicrous.
It leaves such an obvious out for him to come back to life.
And we know that all of these Marvel movies follow the same rigid plot structure that there's no stakes whatsoever.
You don't even worry when it's happening.
You think, okay, well, I guess I've got 15 minutes until he comes back on, and everyone pretends to be surprised.
It's so boring as a matter of plot, and it's infantilizing.
I wonder if even the children are surprised by these aspects of plot anymore.
Children's Boredom With Plot00:06:13
And what that says about us.
We all like a little bubblegum every now and again.
But if these are the myths, if these are the stories on which we're seriously discussing cultural matters, it's very sad to see adults who are obsessed with Harry Potter.
I don't mind children who are obsessed with Harry Potter.
I don't mind adults who have nostalgia and fondness for Harry Potter.
But there are more profound ways to think about the questions that these stories are supposed to be answering.
Yeah, and also, by the way, although I have nothing wrong with dreaming about some world where the women are the great warriors and scientists, the fact is these movies are asexual.
They are asexual because women don't act like women in them because they have superpowers and men don't particularly act like men because they have superpowers and don't have to be afraid of anything.
Anyway, what are you talking about on your show?
So today I'll be talking to the great Professor Carol Swain.
Okay.
We're going to have her in.
Some people know her.
She was in Dinesh's movie, I think, is where some people saw her.
She is excellent.
She was run out of the academy because she had that awful, unforgivable sin of being a conservative and a Christian.
And we will ask the question: Is the Ivy League destroying America?
Yes.
Nobody has to watch your show.
Sounds good.
All right, Noel.
Thanks a lot.
I'm sorry you had to go to see this twice.
Me too.
But I'm also sorry.
It was Cosmic Justice.
Can you have me report on like Boca next week or something or Hawaii or something?
Exactly.
So Puerto Rico.
All right.
I'll see you soon.
See ya.
Our crappy culture.
If that wasn't crappy enough.
So the wonderful Laura Ingraham, who has a really good new show on Fox, she went after some NBA stars who were criticizing the president.
Just play a little clip of what she said.
I feel like our team as a country is not ran by a great coach.
It's not even a surprise when he says something.
It's not even surprising.
It's like laughable.
It's like laughable and it's scary.
But it's also scary, right?
Because I shouldn't be numb to your racist.
Right.
Right.
I shouldn't be numb to your behavior.
I called those remarks barely intelligible, not to mention ungrammatical.
And last night, which is difficult to dispute, and the left erupted.
Slate's piece was titled, In Insulting LeBron James, Laura Ingram proves James' point about racism.
Okay.
It accused me of, quote, something vile and racist.
Almost all the stories accuse me of dog whistle commentary, and many claim my line that LeBron should shut up and dribble was racist.
What?
I wrote a book 15 years ago, fairly well known, New York Times bestseller, called Shut Up and Sing.
And I've been using variants of that title to call out political celebrities for 15 years without regard for skin color, where you came from, what you do.
You know, it's funny because nobody wants to shut, actually shut anybody up, including Laura Ingram, I'm sure.
She's just telling them, you know, she doesn't care what they say, which is what shut up and sing means.
But nobody wants LeBron James not to express his opinion.
But it is, the question is, why are we listening?
The question is why are we listening?
Jennifer Lawrence, the actress, right, she says, she's set to take a break from acting.
Hunger Games star Lawrence revealed her plans while promoting her latest movie.
Her ambitions are to fix democracy.
I'm going to take the next year off, she said.
I'm going to be working with an organization as part of an anti-corruption drive to represent the U.S. to try to get young people engaged politically.
Now, she says it doesn't have anything to do with partisan politics, but back in January, she was out marching in the women's march and said, I stand in solidarity for women's right, equal pay, DACA, CHIP, a woman's place is in the revolution, blah, In Dubai, this is from WND, in Dubai, there was a three-day globalist summit, which had all the great experts, including Robert De Niro, Goldie Hahn, Forrest Whitaker.
These were people talking about.
And here's what Robert De Niro said.
He said, I flew here.
He's in Dubai, right?
He's in the United Arab Republic.
He says, I flew here last night from a backward country, a place where science once reigned and lately has been replaced by ignorance.
That's the way Robert De Niro, gazillionaire movie star who, you know, is talking about America overseas.
The thing about all of this, and I think people get this, it's just the press, that breathless press, because people will turn in to see Jennifer Lawrence.
They'll tune in to see Robert De Niro.
So they have to pretend these people have some kind of some more authority than they do.
This is displaced authority.
This is like when you have a poster on your teenager has a poster on his wall with Albert Einstein saying something about world peace.
Albert Einstein didn't know anything about world peace.
He didn't know anything about what makes for world peace.
He knew that E equals MC squared.
God love him.
You know, LeBron James, love watching the guy on the court.
Robert De Niro, great actor at his best.
He was a terrific actor.
But that doesn't mean they know a single damn thing.
So why, just like those high school kids, they got shot at?
That's terrible.
But why have them on and discuss with them matters of policy and matters of fact without basically consulting?
Nobody said to those kids, what about the fact that no, even the Washington Post agreed with Marco Rubio that no new gun law would have prevented any of the mass shootings of the last couple of years.
They didn't confront them with that.
If you're not going to confront them, if you're not going to ask them questions, why have them on at all?
So the thing is, I don't want anyone to shut up, but it might be a really good idea if we stopped listening.
Okay, who have we got on tomorrow, Rob?
We got a guest tomorrow?
We have DC McAllister.
DC McAllister, the wonderful D.C. McAllister from The Federalist, writes about women's issues, social issues, really interesting.
We will be there.
I hope you will be there too.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Produced By Jonathan Hay00:00:19
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And their animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.