Ep. 567 – A Crisis of the Imagination dissects CNN’s retracted Lanny Davis claim about Trump and Russian collusion, exposing media bias while mocking their defensive spin. The episode pivots to Travis Smith’s Superhero Ethics, contrasting Hulk’s liberal individualism with Wolverine’s suppressed honor codes—mirroring modern societal tensions. It then skewers progressive gender ideology as detached from biology before teasing a mailbag segment, framing the discussion as a clash between cultural narratives and unchanging human nature. [Automatically generated summary]
CNN says it stands by a story that is completely false and trusts in its reporting, which was both wrong and dishonest.
So hooray for CNN.
You all remember CNN, of course.
It's that white noise machine they turn on at the airport to make sure you can't hear the announcements about how long your flight has been delayed.
Well, last week, CNN breathlessly reported that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had evidence that Donald Trump was aware of a Trump Tower meeting no one cares about before the meeting where nothing happened took place.
Now it turns out Cohen's lawyer, Lanny Davis, was the anonymous source for this largely meaningless story, and he says he made a mistake and the story was completely untrue.
This means CNN was not only incompetent in its reporting, but also dishonest because they allowed Davis to give a no comment on the record as if he weren't the original source.
In response to their latest catastrophic and humiliating error, CNN released a statement to its audience, which is like three or four guys who were passing through Dulles Airport.
The statement was released by a man in a clown mask who said he wanted to stay and answer questions, but couldn't because he'd missed the gate change of his flight because CNN playing on the public TV drowned out the announcement.
The CNN statement read, quote, we here at CNN stand by our completely false story and remain absurdly confident in our totally incompetent reporting.
Although our facts were not correct, the story contained the words Trump and Russia and so point to a narrative of collusion and treachery that we have been selling for coming up on two years now with stories just like this one, which we also stand by.
Though many now say our network is a waste of cable space peopled by cow-eyed buffoons with the intelligence of eggplants, we would like to say to our critics, if you are so smart, how come you just missed your plane while we were talking over the boarding announcement?
Ha unquote.
The original story was written by, among others, Carl It's Worse Than Watergate Bernstein, who said the Michael Cohen scandal is worse than Watergate.
When told that his story was totally false, Bernstein said, quote, that's worse than Watergate, unquote.
Later in the day, however, CNN did issue a correction saying, your flight is now leaving from gate 38B.
Why It Can Happen Here00:10:32
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Shipshape ipsy-topsy, the one to zippity-zing.
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All right, it's the end of Western civilization, and you know that that means.
Yes, tomorrow is the mailbag.
And you can send in your questions very easily.
Just go, you have to be a subscriber.
So that's the first thing.
So first you got to send us 10 bucks, 10 lousy bucks, you get the whole month, or for 100 bucks, you can subscribe to thedailywire.com for the year.
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But more importantly, or as importantly, you can also be in the mailbag.
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Hit the mailbag button and then ask your questions.
Ask anything you want.
Truly, you can ask about your personal life.
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Other times, ha ha ha.
We also have an interview later on today with Travis Smith.
You will like this interview.
You know, I do nothing.
I do nothing but pick on comic book movies.
Travis Smith is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University.
He has written a book about what superheroes can teach us about ethics and about our country.
And the way he did the book is really clever.
He paired off.
You know how when you were a little kid, ladies, I'm not talking to you because you're far more intelligent and have better things to do.
But guys sit around before they discover they're girls.
Guys sit around and they say, you know, what would happen if Spider-Man fought with Batman?
Do girls even know that guys do this?
I mean, or do they care?
You know, it's like, that's what we were doing while you were studying like physics, ladies.
But he uses those little battles to explain his point.
It's a very entertaining interview.
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All right.
You know, I got to talk just for a minute about the CNN story because it's so absurd.
It is so absurd.
Everybody, everybody picked up the story.
Lanny Davis fed them a story, possibly because he was running a GoFundMe campaign to pay his bills, to pay his fees for Michael Cohen.
And so he slipped in the story as an anonymous source saying that Donald Trump, Michael Cohen had evidence that Donald Trump knew about this stupid Trump Tower meeting, which I'm sorry, but I cannot get excited about this Trump Tower meeting.
This is the meeting Don Jr. had with the Russian lawyer.
She said she has some dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Don Jr. probably didn't know enough to know that that might be illegal.
It might not be the right thing to do.
So he goes to the meeting.
Turns out the woman is just pushing to get some relief on the, what's it called, the Magnitsky Act or something, which bothers Putin and his pals because it keeps their money from flowing freely in the West, which is how they rip off their own country.
By the time the meeting was five minutes in, Don Jr. is on his cell phone texting.
Finally, he left.
Nothing goes on.
This is a big deal because this proves that somehow there was collusion with Russia.
And to me, the whole story is kind of ridiculous.
The whole story has just gotten absurd.
They have run this thing into the ground.
But Lanny Davis slips him this note saying his client had evidence that Trump knew about this meeting before it took place, which Trump says he didn't.
But that problem was his client had already testified under oath that he didn't.
So now Lanny Davis has revealed that he was the source.
CNN not only used him as an anonymous source, but also let him say no comment on the story as an official source, which is truly dishonest, truly unrepresentative of what they should be doing.
Why are they doing this?
So I have talked about this a lot, but it's worth going back to this whole idea of crisis in your imagination.
You know, your imagination is where almost everything that matters in life takes place.
When I use the word imagination, this is what I mean.
I'm using it the way the old romantic poets used to use the word.
I'm not just mean when you sit around fantasizing about something.
Your imagination, obviously the most important thing is your health, that you're well, that you're going to continue to live.
But after that, everything that matters, beauty, truth, love, delight, joy, they all take place in your mind.
Those are not things that exist outside yourself.
They're an intermingling of your mind and reality.
And what the media is trying to do is they're trying to colonize your imagination with a state of crisis.
They want you to think there's a state of crisis all the time.
And they do this.
They do this not so that not because they want each story to stick or they expect each story to stick.
They don't care if they have to retract stories.
They don't care if they just forget about them.
First of all, they know that you hit the crisis story a thousand times where the correction story gets hit twice.
So they know that they're getting some play out of this.
But eventually, eventually, there will be a crisis.
Eventually, something will happen.
This is the world, right?
There are wars.
There are explosions.
There are dips in the economy.
All those things happen in the course of eight years, in the course of a presidency, a normal presidency.
All these things happen.
There may be a scandal in the Trump administration.
Most administrations have scandals, except the Obama administration.
It had scandals, but no one covered them.
So they weren't there.
They were invisible.
But for the rest of us, when they're covering the presidency, there's going to be a scandal.
And then, and then the crisis, the crisis of the imagination pays off for the opponents of Republicans.
This only happens during Republican administrations, really.
Then it pays off because then they say, see, there's a crisis.
We've been telling you all this time there was a crisis and there it is.
And then you have to admit, you know what?
They've got a point.
It's to Nixon.
It was how they hounded him out of office on what was really minor stuff.
I mean, compared to things that like Clinton and Obama did.
It was really minor stuff.
But by the time they caught him dead to rights on stupid things he shouldn't have done, they had created such a sense of corruption and terror and horror going on that people then lost faith in the present.
That's what they're waiting for.
That is what they are selling you every minute of every single day.
No matter what is happening, that's the crisis.
And you know who it affects most?
Who is on, we always talk about the echo chamber, but who's on the echo chamber?
I am.
Ben is, Knowles is, Rush Limbaugh is.
We're the people who pay attention all the time.
And it's us, it's we who have to say, wait a minute, whoa, whoa, is this a state of crisis?
Is America in a state of crisis?
I mean, look, Trump loves chaos.
He creates chaos.
He says things all the time that make him seem ridiculous and that cause chaos.
But the country is doing well.
The country is doing well.
We're not at war.
The economy is doing great.
The economy is doing great.
And yet, and yet, if you visit like the nether world, the imaginary world of say the New York Times, you will see the crisis playing out into screaming headlines every single day.
Every story on the front page of the New York Times is crisis, is meant to create a crisis of the imagination so that when the real crisis comes, then the go-to-war headlines come out.
Like Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, oh my God, it's hell week.
Remember, they all said it's hell week for the president.
Was it hell week?
Did Paul Manafort, anything he got convicted, have anything to do with Trump?
Did Michael Cohen saying he paid off Stormy Daniels really constitute, what are they using now?
They're using this phrase.
Oh, he's an unindicted co-conspirator.
No, he's not.
No, he's not.
I mean, it's like they don't even have on a crime if he was contributing money to this.
So, you know, it's hell week.
It's hell week.
It doesn't matter if they have to retract it.
It doesn't matter if it goes away.
The point is one day there'll be a crisis.
And that's the moment when they will say, oh, man, oh, man, it's the, what did they call it under Bush?
The culture of corruption.
The culture of corruption.
That worked.
That worked for an entire midterm to blow out Bush's support.
They're hoping it'll work again in these midterms.
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Paul Krugman's Warning00:13:23
So let me read you, Paul, let's go to, let us go to the New York Times, a former newspaper, and visit our favorite den of iniquity, the op-ed page, or as we call it, Knucklehead Row.
Paul Krugman, who may be the biggest knucklehead on Knucklehead, right?
It's hard to tell because sometimes one of them is sometimes another.
He has a column, so help me.
It is called Why It Can Happen Here.
And for those of you who haven't been alive for 180 years, it can't happen here is the phrase they used to say about fascism.
Fascism can't happen here because we're protected by the American way.
We're protected by the Constitution.
We're protected by that culture of free speech we used to have before Facebook and Google put it to an end.
So that's the idea.
But when you say why it can happen here, he's talking about fascism.
And he says we're very close, very close, we're so close to becoming another Poland or Hungary.
In both countries, the ruling parties, law and justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary, have established regimes that maintain the forms of popular elections, but oh my my, they have destroyed the independence of the judiciary, suppressed freedom of the press, institutionalized large-scale corruption, and effectively delegitimized dissent.
The result seems likely to be one-party rule for the foreseeable future.
Let's just pause for just a minute and take each one of those in turn.
They maintain the forms of popular elections.
We don't have popular elections.
We have electoral elections.
Donald Trump won.
They have been bitching and moaning about this ever since it happened.
They have refused after telling us how horrible it was that Trump said he might not accept the results of the election.
They have refused.
They have destroyed the independence of the judiciary.
Whose judges are the ones who make stuff up?
Whose judges are the one who say, oh, yeah, Trump can't make immigration.
It says, you know, the law says that Trump can make the immigration rules, but I say he can't.
Who does that?
Only leftist judges.
Suppress freedom of the press.
Who shuts up whom?
Whom?
Where?
Point to me one time, Paul Krugerman.
One lousy time, the right shuts down anybody.
It is the left at Google that has, when you put in searches on Donald Trump, only bad news comes up.
When you put up searches for right-wing things, you get all this fact-checking by left-wing people.
If you go on Facebook, they've taken down Dennis Prager, and oh, it's a mistake.
It's a terrible mistake, mistake that never happens to the left, never ever happens to the left.
YouTube demonetizing our videos, demonetizing all conservative material.
Who shuts down whom?
Okay, and institutionalized large-scale corruption and effectively legitimize dissent.
Oh, that's when Trump used the IRS to silence his political opponents.
Oh, wait, I meant Obama.
Obama did that.
And Obama also used the Justice Department to spy on an opponent's campaign.
So who is doing all this stuff?
Where is the it can't happen here happening from?
All right.
He goes on, he says it could all too easily happen here.
There was a time not long ago when people used to say there are democratic norms, our proud history of freedom would protect us from such a slide into tyranny.
In fact, some people still say that, but believing such a thing today.
I got to give this the real Paul Krugman reading, but believing such a thing today requires willful blindness.
The fact is that the Republican Party, the Republican Party, who hasn't silenced anybody, hasn't stretched the rules of constitutional governance, the Republican Party is ready, even eager, to become an American version of Poland and Hungary exploiting its current political power to lock in permanent rule.
That's what we're looking at.
First, he starts, he says, let's look at what's happening at the state level.
Then he brings up a couple of things.
He says, in North Carolina, after a Democrat won the governorship, Republicans used the incumbent's final days to pass legislation stripping the governor's office of much of its power.
This is a power struggle that they're having in North Carolina, and they're playing very hardballed politics, no question about it.
But go back and remember 2011 when Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin tried to, did in fact break up the unions and basically establish the state as a right-to-work state and to keep from voting on it, the Democratic lawmakers left town.
Do you remember that?
They hid in a hotel across the state line and they refused to come in and vote on it.
So, you know, politics can get hard-boiled.
It's not exactly the fascist, it's not like the Nazi flag going up.
And Wisconsin, by the way, is doing great economically because of what the governor did over there.
All right, in Georgia, Krugman goes on, Republicans tried to use transparently phony concerns about access for disabled voters to close most of the polling places in a mainly black district.
A consultant came in and said these polling places are not suitable and they cost too much.
Let's close them down.
Black people said, you know what, those are our polling places.
So the council said, all right, don't do it.
And it was over.
I mean, this is the great fascism.
Our government is crumbling.
It's crumbling.
You can see the little bricks of freedom are falling.
In West Virginia, Republican legislators exploited complaints about excessive spending to impeach the entire state Supreme Court.
The entire state Supreme Court is in a massive overspending scandal that has already cost people their freedom.
I mean, people have already been charged in this.
This is not a political ploy.
This is a scandal going on.
So all his references are all fake.
They're all ridiculous.
They're all politics.
Some of it is politics.
It's hardball politics.
But basically, I mean, if this is his proof that fascism has come to America, Paul Krugman is living in his own backside.
He is not living in the light of day.
So now he goes on the national level.
Now listen to the crisis on the national level.
We're currently sitting on a knife edge.
We're balanced on a knife edge between fascism and freedom.
You know, here we are.
It's terrible.
If we fall off it in the wrong direction, specifically, if Republicans retain control of both houses in Congress in November, this is the crisis.
We will become another Poland or Hungary faster than you can imagine.
And you can believe this because this is from Paul Krugman, who said the stock market was never going to recover from Donald Trump's election.
So you know when this man talks, he's spouting nonsense.
Many Trump critics celebrated last week's legal developments, taking the Manafort conviction and the Cohen guilty plea as signs that the walls may finally be closing in on the lawbreaker-in-chief.
But I felt a sense of deepened dread as I watched the Republican reaction faced with undeniable evidence of Trump's thuggishness.
His party closed ranks around him more tightly than ever.
This goes even for politicians who once seemed to have some principles like Susan Collins of Maine.
She sees no problem with having a president who's an unindicted co-conspirator, a phrase that has not been used in court, by the way, or not been used by any legal team, unindicted co-conspirator, appoint a Supreme Court justice who believes that presidents are immune from prosecution.
Now, Bill Clinton was under investigation for most of his presidency.
He was impeached for committing perjury, right?
He appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, two of the most unconstitutional left-wing hacks on the Supreme Court.
Nobody said that that was an illegitimate thing to do, right?
But in Paul Krugman's universe, this is the end of America.
I mean, it is just, you know.
It's all, it is all a terrible crisis.
And meanwhile, by the way, you know, I just have to play this one guy, Target, or as we call it, Target, Target, CEO, Brian Cornell, has just dumped billions of dollars into his stores.
Why?
Here he is on CNBC explaining why.
This is the crisis in America.
This is, remember, it's a big crisis, so don't forget to vote.
It's a big crisis.
Here is the guy who runs Target about why he's spending on his stores.
It's a very healthy consumer environment.
I've been doing this for a long time.
I think this is the healthiest environment I've ever seen.
But importantly for us, we're building market share in virtually every category.
Who are you stealing from?
Well, I think we're picking up more footsteps when we see traffic up 6.4% and stores growing at almost 5%.
Becky, it was almost yesterday.
People are saying, you know, stores are dead.
No one's going to invest in stores.
I remember back in February of 2017, when we announced we were going to spend $7 billion of capital over three years and take $1 billion of operating income and invest in our team, our brands, and providing more value.
People looked at us and said, why are you investing in the state?
The street didn't like that at first.
They didn't.
I actually remember it was February 28th of 2017.
We were just talking about that with the analyst, too.
When we pushed the announcement across the wire and I watched you and Joe on set and you looked at it and said, $7 billion of capital in stores?
$1 billion in wages and training and development in the brands?
There must be a typo here because he's talking about consumers now, right?
He's building stores.
Consumers want to buy.
Why?
Because they have money.
Why?
Because the economy is doing great.
You want to know about a crisis?
Look at Venezuela.
In a city, here's from the AP, in a city once called the Saudi Arabia Venezuela for its vast oil wealth, residents of Maracaibo now line up to buy spoiled meat as refrigerators fail amid nine months of rolling power outages that recently got worse.
Socialist president Nicolas Maduro blames the strife on an economic war waged by the United States and other capitalist powers.
That's the problem.
The problem is socialism.
That's a crisis.
That is what a crisis looks like.
This is, you know, where does the crisis exist?
It exists in the imagination of the press.
I have to play this.
Tiger Woods, golfer, right?
Guy hits a ball with a stick.
That's his job.
He finishes a tournament.
They ask him about Donald Trump, who he pals around with.
Here's his response.
He's the president of the United States, and you have to respect the office.
And no matter who's in the office, he may like, dislike the personality or the politics.
But we all must respect office.
Do you have anything more broadly to say about this date, I guess, the discourse of racial issues?
No, I just finished 72 holes and really hungry.
He finished 72 holes.
He's really hungry.
He doesn't want to talk politics.
He hits a ball with a stick for a living.
He has nothing to say about this.
He has no reason he should say anything.
Here is ESPN, which you turn on, I know, for the sports scores.
Here is ESPN reacting to Tiger's statement.
Tiger, be clear.
Are you saying that the office therefore confers respect onto its occupant, its present temporary occupant?
No!
Having respect for the office means, principally, in my view, is the office holder should have respect for the office.
We are all set to a standard.
We're held to a standard of behavior.
We at our jobs, right?
People in their daily lives.
The president, if anything, is held to a higher standard of behavior.
It is not such that we have such great respect for the office, that no matter what the behavior of its occupant, we must therefore respect its occupant because of the office.
No, Tiger Woods is being, you said being slick.
Here he's being slick.
We must respect the office, therefore that confers respect to the occupant.
Tiger, is that what you're saying?
If that's what you're saying, that is a stupid comment.
I don't, but I don't even know if he believes that that's what he's saying.
Well, first of all, we don't know what Tiger Woods believes.
He's Camblination.
He's not black.
R-E-S-P-I-C-T.
Yeah.
Pay some respect to Tiger Woods.
That was a sports program.
There is a crisis going on in the heads of these people.
And what it really is, you know, Lance Morrow, a think tank guy, wrote about this in the Wall Street Journal.
To give him credit, I can't read.
I don't have time to read what he said, but basically, this is a holdover from the baby boomers.
Hillary Clinton's a baby boomer.
Trump is a baby boomer.
All these people are living in the world created by the baby boomers who basically thought we were fighting for our lives because they had to make some kind of heroism.
They had to give their generation some kind of heroism because their parents had fought the Depression and World War II.
And so they turned everything into a major crisis and they overturned two presidents, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
And they keep up this crisis mentality.
Ain't no crisis.
There is not a crisis in this country.
We have a noisy, obstreperous president who is repellent to some, but is also doing a great job.
He is doing a good job as president.
That is his job.
You don't have to like him, but his job is president.
He is doing a good job.
He's a big character with big flaws, but this is not a crisis of democracy.
They are doing this.
So when the crisis comes, when the crisis comes, it will be like Tinder and the crisis like the spark that will set your brain on fire.
Don't let it happen.
And by the way, if you really want to keep the crisis from happening, go out and vote come November and make sure you vote for the local Republican in your district so we don't have to go through a million impeachment proceedings and investigations.
Superheroes and Society's Deepest Commitments00:15:54
All right, let's bring on this interview.
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Travis Smith is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University and the author of the new book, Superhero Ethics, which attempts to answer the question, can superheroes be good role models of ethical behavior and personal responsibility for a free society?
Very fun interview.
Stay tuned.
Travis Smith, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thank you very much for having me on the show, Andrew.
Now, you're coming into a slightly hostile environment.
I have talked a lot about how it's not that I dislike any one superhero movie.
There are just so many of them.
It seems like they're kind of sucking up the culture.
But you have had a long, your relationship with comic books goes back a long way.
So let's start with that.
How did you get interested in comics in the first place?
Oh, boy.
Do you want me to name the particular friends and relatives that I blame for getting me into this expensive hobby?
No, a simple description of the comics themselves.
Sure.
Well, I enjoyed these kinds of stories as a kid on Saturday morning cartoons.
And then when I discovered them as a pre-teen, I got hooked and eventually it becomes a habit.
You know, and yeah.
One of my cranky complaints is that I feel like I was a collector of comic books.
I loved them as a kid, but I do feel that you should leave things behind, leave some of these things behind.
But you don't, you actually feel this is something to say, that comics in general have something to say.
Is that fair?
Yeah, I've tried to make the case in superhero ethics that it's worthwhile to critically examine the kinds of characters that culture puts forward as heroic.
You know, these are characters that are advanced within our culture as if they are to be admirable, as if they are to be perhaps imitated and praiseworthy.
And so, of course, it's an important exercise for us.
We're going to engage in some introspection regarding our culture to take a look at those kinds of models, those kinds of examples.
Ask, are they good role models?
Should they, in fact, be the kinds of people that we look up to or aspire to be ourselves?
That's, I mean, it's a perfectly good point.
They wouldn't be this popular if they weren't feeding some kind of emotional need in people.
One of the things that I just really enjoy about superhero ethics is that you pose a lot of your points as kind of battles between two superheroes.
And I remember as a kid, all these long, long, long, you know, what Stephen King called the conversations you have before you discover there are girls about which superhero would win a fight.
So let me take you through some of these superhero fights and you can explain to me what it is that you think they say.
You start out with the Hulk versus Wolverine as two beastly superheroes.
What do we learn from that?
Right.
Well, Wolverine famously first appears in an issue of the Hulk.
And so they pair up well, just as a matter of historical fact.
Of course, it's the case that you'll probably remember that it's commonplace in the stories that the superheroes clash and fight a bit before they realize that they've got to team up together and fight the bad guy.
And so I took advantage of the fact that heroes often fight heroes and not just the villains in order to frame the book.
And so I start off with characters that are beastly and move toward characters that are divine.
So I started off with Wolverine and Hulk.
Hulk is famous for being angry, right?
And Wolverine says that he's the best there is at what he does and what he does isn't very nice.
And so I put them together to say, what do these kinds of people represent about what our society is like or what is lacking in our society?
And actually contrast them in that way.
I talk about how the Hulk kind of represents a sort of extreme of individualism.
Hulk isn't just always wanted to prove that he's the strongest there is, that he always wants to be left alone.
And so he represents the kind of idea that some people have that if only they were just left alone, right?
If only nobody meddled in my business and I was just totally free to do whatever I wanted, then I'd be happy.
I would succeed at everything I'd want.
And you get angry when people get in your way and you get really angry when people tell you that who you are and what you're trying to do isn't that great.
And you become resolved to demonstrate your greatness against that.
And the Hulk speaks to that impulse that I think to the degree to which modern liberal society has this individualistic quality to it, that aspect of the Hulk is familiar to us.
Wolverine, on the other hand, I say, represents something that's lacking in our society, something that modern society as a whole was intentionally designed to suppress and downplay, which are considerations of honor, at least as they're understood in pre-modern societies in which codes of honor govern the behavior to a greater degree than they do in, say, free society, modern society.
And they present a rival standard of right and good other than universal morality or piety or just the law.
And so Wolverine aspires to be an honorable person.
Being honorable, concerned with intangible goods like honor, is something that animals can't do.
It's something that's distinctively human.
So you have Wolverine, who's a very animalistic character, who's always striving to prove his humanity and is aware that in order to prove his humanity, he has to behave honorably.
That's a distinctively human thing to do.
And he finds himself at odds with a modern society that tends to disregard and poo-poo considerations of honor.
And so he doesn't find himself at home in modern society.
But nevertheless, considerations of honor, as much as a society like modern society can tend to suppress them and disregard them, they never go away.
It's a part of the human condition that we're stuck with.
And we kind of see the way in which perverse codes of honor come to the forefront, even in a society in which we pretend that we're not going to, you know, have a feud to fight each other over some slight.
But that is almost exactly what we do now, except where we do it on social media and on the internet.
And we shame people and try to destroy people's lives on the basis of being able to claim that they've said something dishonorable or they've behaved shamefully.
And so I talked about how Wolverine's represents also the desire to protect his tribe, the mutants.
And he gets extremely angry when anybody from his tribe is threatened.
And we see that all over social media as well, the way in which people get in a fur or an outrage whenever they perceive that somebody who they regard as belonging to their tribe is under some sort of threat.
And the degree of rage and fury that we see in Wolverine, we see unleash across the internet on a daily basis nowadays.
It's interesting.
One of my favorite of the superhero movies, Logan, Wolverine, is kind of compared to Shane from the old Westerns, and his ethos is shown as kind of an old-fashioned honor ethos.
He's a really, he is a very interesting character.
Another matchup movie.
I was going to say, Logan's a fantastic movie, and I see that movie as depicting him as a kind of Moses character.
It's a sort of secularization of Exodus in which Wolverine discovers that the young lost members of his own tribe are enslaved in a foreign land and he has to go and rescue them and try to bring them to another promised land.
Some Eden happens to be Canada.
I know it was kind of a letdown, but yeah.
Which, of course, he dies before he gets there and helps them find their way to some paradise.
So these kinds of movies, as much as we often suspect them of just being mere juvenile amusement, they have staying power because they are drawing upon a lot of the resources on which modern Western society is built, whether classical or biblical.
And I try to bring these out in my book.
Yeah, that's certainly, I have to say, that Logan was certainly an intelligent movie with a lot of underpinnings.
The next battle that I really liked in superhero ethics is the battle of Green Lantern versus Iron Man as a battle between two representations of the imaginative man, the imagination.
Can you explain that?
I sure can, Andrew.
Iron Man represents our hopes that technology will fix everything and save us.
And I like to draw, for a point of cultural comparison, when I was a child, the Star Wars movies came out.
I grew up on Star Wars.
And in 1977, Obi-Wan Kenobi told Luke Skywalker that Darth Vader was more machine than man now, twisted and evil.
In 1977, we didn't need to be told that that meant he was twisted and evil.
We understood.
More machine than man now, that's not good.
Right?
And then even in the 90s, when Star Trek had the Borg get introduced, these half man-machine hybrid aliens that are going to assimilate humanity, we know they're the bad guys on site.
Tony Stark, however, aspires to be a man-machine hybrid.
In fact, he's someone who is increasingly becoming more machine than man.
And nowadays, in the early 21st century, we watch his character and he's become so beloved, we envy him.
We wish that we too had his powers.
We can see how this hope, this expectation that technology should fix everything and save us all is made manifest in this extremely popular character that Robert Downers Jr. has done an amazing job at making so lovable.
And yet it's disturbing the degree to which, I mean, in the Infinity War movie that recently came out, Spider-Man dies.
I put scare quotes around that, dies.
We know he'll be fine, I'm sure.
But he dies praying to Tony Stark to save him.
And Peter Parker, Spider-Man, is one of the most moral characters among all superheroes.
He should not be praying to Tony Stark to save him.
Green Lantern, I liken to the tendency of people to believe that if only we had enough imagination, enough willpower, enough resolve, and the means at our disposal, we could reshape the world, right?
Sort of revolutionary impulse that some people have.
We could fix everything.
And the only thing that's lacking is enough imagination.
People say, you've probably heard this quote, another world is possible, right?
Sure.
And Green Lantern speaks to that feeling that especially maybe the adolescent reader might well have as well, to expect, you know, the world's wrong, right?
And I can imagine how it should be, what it ought to be, and why don't we just fix it, right?
All it takes is get on board with the program and we can make the world the world it ought to be and not this flawed world that our parents and ancestors handed down to us.
How did they not realize that it should have been, you know, made right by now?
And so Green Lantern speaks to that impulse as well.
Do you think that there is something in the idea?
I sometimes see how many of these films there are and how popular they are.
And I wonder if humanity is sort of preparing itself for a Tony Stark universe.
If humanity is sort of saying, you know, we're one generation from a world in which we're going to be putting, entering things into our brains through technical means that are going to make us supermen in some ways.
And this is an imaginative way of getting ready for that.
Do you think that's possible?
Yeah.
In my research as a political scientist, I've read the works of thinkers like Francis Bacon and René Descartes from 400 years ago.
And you read them.
And as far as I can tell, they had already figured all of this out 400 years ago.
They just knew it would take an awful long time for us to get to the point in which the technology, the science would be able to do the things that they envisioned to transform the human condition.
And I don't want to put some sort of causality to some sort of force that's out there moving us and compelling us toward some evolution or something.
But these characters speak to us because they get to the heart of our deepest commitments in some ways.
And so the fact that Iron Man is torn in some ways between his brilliance and his ability to produce the machines that are going to make possible these transformations.
And at the same time, he's troubled by them and he holds back.
doesn't pursue them to their furthermost conclusions in terms of he doesn't just impose on all humanity such technologies that would save us from ever needing to be saved again.
Instead, he just flies around and comes to the rescue of a few people here and there now and then.
Why doesn't he try to bring about the singularity as people talk about today?
Why doesn't he do that?
On the other hand, you see that he's an alcoholic and a womanizer, someone who is very indulgent with respect to pleasures.
And I think that that's sort of indicative of the fact that he's shutting down part of his brain.
He wants to forget that the furthermost conclusions of his own science aren't simply that we could transform ourselves, but that in a certain sense, we're not worthy of it because from the technological perspective that he represents, our lives, including his own, which he's so proud of, are actually insignificant.
And he's troubled by that.
In the last movie, The Infinity War, the villain says specifically to Iron Man that he's not the only one that is cursed with knowledge.
And I think that's one nihilist speaking to another nihilist about those kinds of conclusions.
I have to ask you to keep this short because I'm running out of time, but I do want to give you a chance to get it.
You got me all excited.
No, that's absolutely go on and on and on.
But I want to ask you about your divine conflict between Thor and Superman.
I have to ask you to keep it to about a minute.
What do you see coming out of that?
Right.
There's a sort of a messiah-like quality to all superheroes, and some of them even more so than others.
And I talk about how it's not that Superman would want to rule the world.
The concern is that some people might want someone like a Superman to come about to rule us for our own good.
And I talk about the way in which, as much as we pride ourselves on being free people, there still is in a lot of people this desire to have some super person come to the rescue and save them and absolve them of responsibility for themselves and fix everything for them.
And so Superman, I think in some ways, represents this temptation, but also because he's one of the great American superheroes, he himself resists this and instead treats people with respect, respects people's equality, respects people's freedom, and wants to be an inspiration to people to help them take responsibility for themselves rather than to assume responsibility over them for their own good.
Well, Travis Smith, your book is superhero ethics.
Lacy Bras for Men00:03:23
I have to say you have made many people here at the Daily Wire happy.
They're tired of hearing me attack these films.
You gave them a very good argument for a reason for being.
Thanks very much for coming on.
Thank you very much for having me on the show, Andrew.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks a lot.
An entertaining interview.
I really enjoy that guy.
All right, sexual follies.
So here's a story.
Lacy bras for men are now a thing.
And you can also buy matching knickers.
Do we have a picture of this?
Oh my God.
Now I just went blind.
I can't see anything.
Lingerie brand omestere is making, that's my bad French accent, hom mystère, is making lacy underwear and sleepwear, especially for men.
Ladies, if you've ever looked at your man's underwear and thought it was a bit dull, then you're not alone.
There's so much choice when it comes to women's underwear.
But mostly men have boxers or briefs.
However, that's all about to change as one lingerie company has created a unique line of bras and knickers, especially for men.
Knickers are panties.
You know, there's an old expression that news is what happens to your editor's friends.
You know, like every reporter knows this.
And this kind of story is what happens to your editor's gay friends.
I mean, this is really, this is what, you know, a guy, the editor has a couple of gay friends and they say, oh yes, now we're getting manicures with our nails pink or whatever they're doing this week.
And it's like, that means a story comes out.
Men are having manicures with their nails pink.
Here's the thing.
Whenever I see these stories, I think about one thing.
When, you know how they have these things, Ben calls them roach motels on the side of every website.
There are these little things that you're supposed to click on, clickbait stuff, that you go and look at.
Pictures of World War II or pictures of disasters or the last picture somebody took before he was eaten by a snake or something like this, right?
Have you ever noticed that each and every single one of them has a woman with large breasts on her?
Have you ever noticed this?
It's like the same incredible pictures of World War II.
And it's just like a girl in a Nazi uniform with big breasts, you know?
And the reason I bring this up is that nature never changes.
Nature doesn't care what you think.
It doesn't care if you think there are 47 genders.
It doesn't care if you think that men are going to suddenly change, stop being men.
It doesn't care if you think that women are now, you know, wonder woman.
It doesn't care.
All it wants to do is look at breasts.
That's all nature wants.
It wants men to look at breasts and sleep with women so there are more people.
That is all nature wants and it doesn't go away.
It never goes away.
That's why I like, there was another story Amanda Presto wrote that they were having a liberal cities were flooded with feminists over the weekend seeking nipple equality for the annual go topless day for feminism.
They're going topless.
You know, now I'm a feminist.
So now I'm a feminist.
It's like, what I love about these people is they just, it's a war on reality.
They just don't look.
If they just would look at these little pictures on the side, it doesn't matter what it is.
The last picture she took before she was eaten by a boa constrictor and look at those breasts.
That's all nature wants.
It wants men to look at breasts and sleep with women so there are more people.
Never changes.
Don't listen.
If a headline suggests anything else, it just ain't so.
Nature's Desire00:00:41
Mailbag, tomorrow, I'm Andrew Clavin.
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