Michael Knowles and Andrew Klavan dissect Avengers: Endgame as a "terrible" film—four acts of decline, from slow pacing to saccharine endings—while praising Game of Thrones for realism. Klavan blames Disney’s forced political correctness, stripping stakes like death or sex, and contrasts Marvel’s shallow morality with classical myths’ depth. They mock Hollywood’s violence-for-shock-value trend (The Conjuring) while noting Disneyland’s visitors still crave traditional stories, exposing a cultural values gap. Meanwhile, Knowles rants about media bias, framing Trump’s condemnation of white nationalism as ignored while leftists weaponize Charlottesville and synagogue shootings for political attacks, all while plugging conservative alternatives like DailyWire. The episode ends with Klavan’s critique of secularism’s "Enlightenment narrative" undermining faith, tying pop culture to broader ideological wars. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, as you can hear, I've been suffering from a horrible case of laryngitis, but I've made my way back with the help of a massive dose of steroids.
That's the good news.
The bad news is now whenever I get angry, I turn into a gigantic green monster that can't make an articulate argument and responds to everything with violence.
That's right, me become Democrat.
One moment I'm walking around like some mild-mannered, fact-based ordinary Republican, then suddenly someone disagrees with me and WAMO.
I'm this slobbering hulk without a brain in my head, but all the muscle of the news and entertainment media behind me.
I can't reason or debate or even explain what I'm talking about, but with one punch, I can knock you off Twitter, blacklist you from Hollywood, or simply crush your ideas by banning them from network news.
Before I know it, I'm on a rampage of blind fury.
I turn beautiful cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles into ruined, crap-strewn rubble packed with homeless people and junkies.
I attack public servants in restaurants.
I attack old men for wearing hats I don't like.
I scream obscenities at any female or minority who dares to express a divergent opinion.
I'm sorry, but believe me, it's just the Royds talking.
Royds talk Democrat.
And when the fit passes, all I can do is pretend that it wasn't me who destroyed the economy or reduced our freedoms or undermined the traditions that made us great.
I pretend I'm the victim here, and anyone who criticizes me is inciting violence.
And if anyone points out that that's absurd, I turn into that huge green hulk again.
So please, stay off the steroids, kids.
You think they'll make you stronger, but in the end, they fill you with rage while turning your testicles the size of raisins.
They make you a Democrat.
Don't let that happen to you.
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.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world a zippity's in.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
So this weekend, people flocked in record numbers to the new Avengers movie and gathered online to discuss the latest episode of Game of Thrones.
People love stories.
People need stories.
Stories help us understand the human experience, and they help shape our ideas about that experience in our time.
But no one can deny that almost the entire storytelling apparatus in America is in the hands of one political party and one political point of view.
There are several reasons for this, but the results are the same no matter what.
There's a skewed narrative about what's happening in America, a steady stream of lies.
Barack Obama knew in 2014 that Russia was tampering with our elections.
He did nothing.
Hillary Clinton used disinformation that probably came from Russian intelligence in an attempt to stop Trump.
No problem.
The FBI used that disinformation to get warrants to spy on Trump's campaign.
Those are the facts.
But the story is different.
The story is Trump colluded with the Russians, which he didn't.
The story is that he obstructed justice when he got angry about being falsely accused, which is nonsense.
And now there's been another hate crime against Jews.
And we're hearing that the president with his Jewish daughter and grandchildren, the president, a hero in Israel, the president is to blame.
That's the story.
Let's take a look at the facts.
But first, let's talk, you know, you can tell I'm still suffering a little bit from this laryngitis.
It was absolutely terrible.
I've been gone for a week, and I came back, and I just forgotten what chaos and incompetence fills this place.
We barely get on the air.
Everything, you're looking at me live streaming.
There's a guy with one of those old-fashioned cameras.
He has to crank it.
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Don't let the Daily Wire happen to you.
All right, so, you know, the White House had their correspondence dinner, you know, that thing where they all get up and they tell jokes and ha ha ha is the White House correspondence and it's all a big, you know, we're all one big happy family.
We make fun of each other, except really we only make fun of Republicans.
And when Obama shows up, he's a god and nobody makes fun of him and all this stuff.
So Trump doesn't go.
Why should he go?
These people hate him.
They haven't said a nice word about him.
He's jump-started the economy.
He's wiped out ISIS.
He's doing a great job with justices and judges.
90% of their coverage is negative and it's about this Russia story, which now turns out to have been a complete hoax, a complete fraud, and a complete cover-up of a story about collusion with Russia done by Hillary Clinton.
And by extension, the FBI.
No curiosity about that at all.
They're just not curious about it a little bit.
But without Trump there, all the glamour went out of the room.
And so instead of making jokes where last year they just made fools of themselves, I think her name was Michelle Wolfe.
She just got up and had that mean routine where she insulted people's looks.
It was just ugly stuff.
So this time, it was what journalists do best, congratulating themselves for their massive, massive heroism.
Here's the chairman of the White House Correspondents Association, Oliver Knox, just talking about what incredible heroes, these wonderful, wonderful journalists who lied to us for two years and then didn't cover Obama for the eight years before that and how heroic that is.
I don't want to dwell on the president.
This is not his dinner.
It is ours.
And it should stay ours.
But I do want to say this.
In nearly 23 years as a reporter, I've been physically assaulted by Republicans and Democrats, spat on, shoved, had crap thrown at me.
I've been told by senior administration officials of both major parties that I will never work in Washington again.
And there was a brief moment in Afghanistan when I thought a soldier not quite old enough to shave would shoot me dead for the crime of taking a picture inside the presidential palace.
And yet, I still separate my career into the period before February of 2017 and what came afterwards.
And that's because February 2017 is when the president of the United States called us the enemies of the people.
A few days later, I was driving my then 11-year-old son somewhere, probably soccer practice, when he burst into tears and asked me, is Donald Trump going to put you in prison?
At the end of a family trip to Mexico, he mused that if the president tried to keep me out of the country, quote, at least Uncle Josh is a good lawyer and he'll get you home.
You know, I love these stories that liberals are always telling about their weepy little kids and how scared they are.
Oh, is George W. Bush going to kill us?
You know, it's on Twitter all the time.
My four-year-old looked at me and said, you know, shouldn't everybody get health care or we'll all die, mommy?
You know, and it never occurs to them that it's the fact these kids get this from them.
It's not like they get it from the world.
It's not like they get it from looking around at things as they are.
They get it from them.
So Oliver Knox is even giving a false story to his kid.
And by the way, Oliver Knox's complaint is that, yes, before Donald Trump people threw stuff at me, before Donald Trump, a guy tried to shoot me, before Donald Trump, they cursed me out.
But Donald Trump criticized me.
And now, now I'm really afraid.
And my little boy is breaking into tears because I tell him these stories.
Okay, so this sad panda press.
Let's all take a moment and feel sad for the press.
But then let's look at what these guys are up to, okay?
because we just got through this Russian collusion thing and now all we're hearing about is obstruction of justice.
Not a sliver, not a smidgen, as Barack Obama would say, of curiosity about how this investigation got started.
How was it that we covered for two years this collusion story?
How was it that Obama, a liberal called me up the other day and said, why isn't Donald Trump doing anything about Russian interference?
I was like, Obama had this, in 2014, he knew this was going on.
Nothing.
Remember, Obama came forward and he said, There's never been anybody, the idea that anybody could tamper with the elections is ridiculous because it's too spread out.
They can't do it.
It's never happened before.
It's not happening now.
That was during the 2016 election because he thought Hillary was going to win.
He was trying to cut off Trump's complaints that Russia or anybody else had anything to do with it.
Then when Trump won, suddenly, whole new ballgame, it's a big problem.
You know, suddenly this is the worst.
But not even any curiosity.
So now, on top of this, this clown goes into a synagogue near us, outside San Diego, and he opens fire.
And it's an incredible story of heroism and tragedy, and of course, anti-Semitism.
A guy goes in to shoot the rabbi, and a 60-year-old woman who was there mourning her mother, I believe it was, her name was Lori Kay, and she jumped in front of the rabbi and she was shot dead and she was killed.
Just a, you know, what can you say about that kind of heroism and love?
And the guy had his usual manifesto with, you know, he hates the Jews.
I mean, it does get me with this stuff because it's coming back, the anti-Semitism.
After the Holocaust, people were ashamed, and so they stopped a little bit, you know, and it was kind of like there was a little bit of quiet after the Holocaust, but now it kind of always comes back because it's an eternal hatred.
And if you ever just want to know what anti-Semitism is, listen to the way they talk and then watch a scene from The Exorcist of the possessed woman spewing curses at people because it's the same kind of thing.
There's no logic.
It's, you know, the left blames the right, the right blames the left.
The right has this much truth behind it, is that anti-Semitism is now being mainstreamed in the left.
Ilhan Omer is an anti-Semite.
She is a congresswoman.
Talib, a congresswoman, an anti-Semite.
They can't even condemn it.
They can't even come out and pass a bill condemning anti-Semitism because they've got to condemn everything, which is essentially condemning nothing.
But there's no doubt also that on the right, not obviously on our right, not on the conservative right, not on the constitutional right, the small government right, on the fringes of the right, there's just no question that these violent, ugly little people and their sewers, their mind sewers are boiling this stuff up.
And a lot of these guys are the violent guys and they come up with the old stuff about, I always love it when they say Jews cause all the wars.
It's like saying women cause all the rapes.
It's like saying, if we, you know, freedom causes all the wars.
People wouldn't attack us if we weren't free.
So all we have to do is get rid of our freedom.
The same thing with the Jews.
People attack the Jews.
And all we need to do is get rid of the Jews and everything will be all right.
And of course, there's also the religious thing that Jews killed Christ, which I also never understood.
I never understood why the people who killed Christ are the Jews.
But the people who are Christ, who are his disciples, who are his followers, why aren't they the Jews?
I mean, it just doesn't make any sense.
But, of course, this kind of hatred is hatred.
It's a kind of madness, a kind of possession almost, and it spews up.
It's always anti-Semitism exclusively, exclusively is the devil's flagpole.
I mean, there's just something about Jew hatred that where the devil is at work, that is what you will see.
Mom's Day Dilemma00:11:44
All right.
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After this tragedy, I think the little boy was hurt and another person was hurt as well.
This woman was killed.
The rabbi had his finger blown off.
And so the rabbi, so Trump called the rabbi, and this is the rabbi responding to that phone call from Donald Trump.
As I was in my house, I received a personal phone call from our president, Donald Trump.
I was amazed to answer the phone and say the Secretary of the White House is calling.
And he spent close to 10, 15 minutes with me on the phone.
And it's the first time I've ever spoken to a president of the United States of America.
He shared with me condolences on behalf of the United States of America.
And we spoke about the moment of silence.
And he spoke about his love of peace and Judaism and Israel.
And he was just so comforting that I'm really grateful to our president for taking the time and making that effort to share with us his comfort and consolation.
So the rabbi who looked this gun down the barrel of this gun, who saw one of his parishioners killed, the rabbi is comforted by the president calling.
Of course he is.
It's a good thing.
It's a good thing in our country that when there's violence against Jews or anyone else, actually, for that matter, that the president is on it, that he cares, that he shows he cares, that he makes a personal gesture and talks to the guy for 10, 15 minutes.
Obviously, comfort.
Who wasn't comforted?
Don Lemon.
Don Lemon just doesn't believe him because, you know, Don Lemon, he was there in spirit.
He was persecuted in spirit.
The guy who was really persecuted found comfort from From the president's words, but not Don Lemon.
And who are you going to believe?
Listen to this.
So this is tough because you have a death here and you have people who are injured.
You could have had more deaths.
We want to give, on one hand, you want to give the president his due.
But when you consider the language that we have been discussing over the last couple of days, especially with Joe Biden getting into the race, what the president has said, making excuses, revisionist history, about what happened in Charlottesville and on and on, one has to wonder as a thinking, rational person, if he means those words and if they ring hollow to Americans who have been looking for him to say those things and stay the course,
as Ansel has said, instead of trafficking in bigotry, in racism, in anti-Semitism, in hate, and making excuses for us.
I want to believe it.
So this is Don Lemon looking for a thinking, rational person.
I guess he forgot he was a CNN.
But this is Don Lemon spreading the word with very definitive language here that Donald Trump is a hater, Donald Trump is a bigot, Donald Trump is a racist.
Doesn't matter that this rabbi who was there.
I mean, this is the story that's being told.
This is the facts being transformed into a story as you watch, as you watch in real time, right?
The facts are terrible incident.
Another one of these anti-Semitic clowns coming up out of his sewer, his mind sewer to do violence to innocent people.
A rabbi, obviously traumatized, shocked, terrible, injured, gets a call from the president of the United States.
He's uplifted.
He says in his own words, he's comforted, but not Don Lemon, and not the rest of the press either, because I only played Lemon.
I'm only singling him out because he actually said the words that he doesn't believe in what the president was saying, even though the rabbi does.
I single him out for that, but it's the whole press.
Listen to this.
We have a president who will not, who not only will not acknowledge that we have an epidemic of white nationalist terror after New Zealand, just a few people, he's providing the mood music for it.
That is the reality we face.
Yeah, I think the president needs to at some point look in the mirror and understand that the rhetoric, the words he uses in all of this inflame this big part of what's going on in America, give permission to the most craziest people in America.
And it happens in part because there's a climate set at the top of unbelievable, constant lies and hostility and division in this country, not only as policy, but with his affect.
The conspiracy theories cited by these neo-Nazis in Pittsburgh and New Zealand and now outside San Diego, a conspiracy theory that Trump never condemned and actually seemed to support.
And we don't know if it has any connection to the politics that's going on.
But I mean, it would be a stretch to say that it doesn't.
Somebody that's anti-immigrant in California, the anti-immigrant hate and refugee that's going on in the country, what happened at the Tree of Life, and then you couple that with the president's language, it's a big problem.
It's a big problem.
It's the president's language.
It's not this language.
You got to get that right.
It's not them creating this president.
It's not them creating this sexist president who has more top-level female advisors than any president in history, okay?
It's not them creating the story, the image, the character of this Donald Trump who is a terrible racist, and yet black people thrive under his administration.
And yet Israel, they're renaming streets after Trump because they love him so much, because he moved the embassy to Jerusalem, because he has been such a great supporter of Israel and the Israeli people.
You know, it's not that.
It's that Trump, it's that character they're creating.
But it can't possibly be that because that character is real in their minds because they're surrounded by people who agree with them.
There's no one to tell them that it's not real.
And listen to the things they talked about where they said, oh, that evil Donald Trump, he said that white nationalism isn't a growing problem.
White nationalism isn't a growing problem.
It's a problem.
It's an ugly philosophy.
It's a stupid philosophy.
I've talked about that a million times.
But that's not the point.
It's not growing.
The numbers show that it's not growing.
When Obama talked about Islamic terror and he said, oh, you have a greater chance of being killed in the bathtub than you do of being killed by an Islamic terrorist, I thought that that was a tone-deaf remark because Islamic terror, Islamic violence is going on around the world, not just here.
It's going on everywhere.
And it is true these white nationalists are violent and they're ugly, you know, terrible people with these stupid theories.
These stupid theories that they think are just so very smart.
You know, it's like, I love the way they talk.
It's always like, you know, you don't see it, but I see it.
The problem is the Jews.
Like no one ever thought of that before.
Like no one ever had that stupid idea before, but they've now come up with it.
So this whole thing is a story they're telling.
And people are wrapped up in it.
People do believe it.
They get caught in it.
And of course, it all goes back to that Charlottesville thing.
They keep bringing that up.
The very fine people.
They hammer it, hammer it, hammer it.
So what's his name?
Oh, Kellyanne Conway is talking to Jake Tapper about this.
And she says, she says to him, you know, it's you.
It's you guys.
You did this.
He came out and he denounced these people.
And you turned that and twisted that and made it about this very fine people remark.
And I want you to listen to what Jake Tapper says, because Tapper has been a little better than the rest of the journalists, but not by much.
And I want you to listen to what his response.
He condemned hatred, bigotry, evil, called out the neo-Nazis and the KKK supremacists there.
He said there were very fine people on both sides.
He was talking about the, and if you continue the sentence, he said people were there, people were there who had not signed up with the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who were there about a park being renamed and a statue being taken down.
But when the president of the United States, Donald Trump, condemns white supremacy and neo-Nazis and KKK in the first couple months of his term, and it is twisted around for almost two years for people's political perversions.
talking about the people i don't know who he was talking about the case is might use might be a very clear But no, no, I understand.
He wasn't talking about the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists.
I understand that.
He said that.
But he condemned them.
But he absolutely did.
But he also said there were very fine people.
Well, I've been saying this the whole time.
He also said there were very fine people on both sides.
My question about this incident, since you brought it up, is who were these very fine people?
Okay.
Now, the incident started.
What happened in Charlottesville was there was a local battle over this Robert E. Lee statue in this park and renaming this park.
And the bad guys, the Nazis, took up on this and they kind of descended on Charlottesville from out of town.
And the bad guys, the Antifa, this violent anti-fascists who are actually fascists themselves, they descended, knowing they would start trouble.
And the trouble started.
So there were evil guys on both sides causing trouble out of a local argument.
Trump was referring to the local argument.
Now, here's my only point.
This was in 2017, August, I think, of 2017.
All right, so it's almost coming up on two years ago.
Let's call it a year and a half.
Jake Tapper just asked Kellyanne Conway, who was he referring to?
The proof that this is a lie, the proof that this version of Trump is a lie, is that no one has asked him before.
No one ever said to Donald Trump, who were you referring to?
I mean, right at that moment.
If you go back and watch, it's just people screaming at the president the whole time.
Right at that moment, if I'm a reporter and I've been a reporter, if I'm a reporter in that room, I go, whoa, whoa, whoa.
You just said there are very fine people on both sides.
Did you mean on the sides of the Nazis and Antifa?
Is that who you're talking about?
Give the man a chance to clarify, right?
But they don't.
They ran with it and they've been running with it ever since.
They are creating a Donald Trump character, an evil Donald Trump character who's never existed.
The guy's never been a racist.
He's won awards from the NAACP.
I mean, he may have, you know, the ticks of his age.
You know, he's in his, he's 70, I think he is now.
You know, he may have the ticks of his age that sometimes people look back on and feel racist in our modern woke era.
But the guy is not a racist in the sense that he's trying to hurt anybody.
But why didn't Jake Tapper or anybody at CNN ask the man before?
Same thing about Russian collusion.
Why hasn't anybody said to James Comey, wait just a minute, how did this work exactly?
How did you get these FISA warrants?
Battle for the Nation's Soul00:05:42
Can we see these now, please?
The only person doing this are people on the right filing FOIA requests to get the documents.
Nobody's doing it on the left.
CNN's not doing it, ABC, CBS, nobody.
Nobody's doing it.
It's the questions they don't ask because they don't want to get in the way of the story they're telling.
More on this in just a second, but first let's talk about Bowl and Branch.
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So Joe Biden, this absolutely terrible person as far as I'm concerned, he's like just a total human weather vein.
He says anything that he has to say.
He'll put himself in any position.
He lies to black people about what Republicans want to put them in chain.
And he opens his campaign with that lie, with that both sides, him and his actually pretty good facelift.
I have to say, it's a good facelift.
But then his whole story is, when I saw Charlottesville, I knew I had to run for president.
That's when we heard the words of the president of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation.
He said there were, quote, some very fine people on both sides.
Very fine people on both sides.
With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it.
And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.
I wrote at the time that we're in the battle for the soul of this nation.
Oh, that's even more true today.
We are in the battle for the soul of this nation.
So he's right about that.
We are in a battle for the soul of this nation.
And that's what all these lies about Trump's racism, the rights racism, the George W. Bush doesn't like black people racism, all the racism that has been this long, long story that the left is telling about us, basically.
They're telling it about Trump, but they're also telling it about the rest of us deplorable, racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever we hate.
We hate everybody.
I mean, I can't even list all the people I hate.
But all it is about is the battle for the soul of this nation is really about this.
Let's take a quick visit to the place where our soul is under attack, Knucklehead Row, the op-ed page of the New York Times, a former newspaper.
So David Bentley Hart is a scholar of religion and a cultural critic, and he writes a piece for the New York Times, Can We Please Relax About Socialism?
He says, he says, I know in this country we employ terms like socialism with wanton indifference to historical detail and conceptual distinctions.
I grasp, too, that many among us truly believe that a higher marginal tax rate or a public subsidy for poor children's dentistry is only a step away from the gulags.
And I'm painfully aware that the male Fox commentariat nurtures his sickliest obsession with Alexandria Ecasio-Cortez, partly because they resent her cleverness, charisma, and moral vitality, but mostly because they suspect that in high school she was one of those girls they had no hope of getting a date with.
No, I always thought I had a hope of getting a date with pretty girls who were stupid.
I mean, if they were smart, I knew I had no chance, but if they were as dumb as Alexandria Ecasio-Cortez, I was in.
Only in America, he says, only here is the word socialism freighted with so much perceived menace.
And he goes on with the usual idea that, oh, if only things were as great here as they are in Europe.
You know, Europe, this culture that is dying as we watch it, this culture is being overrun, it's being conquered, a culture that hasn't produced anything since 1945 that's really worthwhile, opposing to our culture, which has produced everything, all the medicine, all the machines, all the inventions.
And that somehow is supposed to be a better culture.
We're supposed to look at how happy they are in Norway, where they did invent the paperclip, it's true.
But we're supposed to think how miserable we are here, where we're curing cancer, where we're building things that can talk, you know, the spaceships, where businessmen are building spaceships that'll take us to Mars.
That's supposed to be the problem.
We are in a fight for the soul of the nation.
It is absolutely true.
And because their ideas stink, because their ideas lead to cultural death, because their ideas are unfair, because your money does not belong to the state.
Struggling Values in Superhero Stories00:11:46
It belongs to you.
You made it.
You earned it.
It's yours.
Because of all those things, they have nothing.
They got to call us racist.
And that's the story that they're going to tell.
Hey, you know, speaking of stories, we have Michael Knowles, our cultural critic, our one-time cultural critic and now a star in his own right.
We will have him on to speak about Avengers because I wasn't going to watch it, so I made him watch it because that's the kind of guy I am.
First, we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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All right.
Knowles.
Good to see you.
I'm glad you're back, man.
You know, I mean, if I had broken legs, I would crawl here, but without a voice.
I thought I was going to need to get superpowers, go back in a time machine, save you from whatever laryngitis you had, bring you back to do the show.
I was going to try to bring you back to go watch Avengers in my place, but that didn't work.
There's a line in Avengers where they say, no amount of money can buy any time.
Huh?
Well, right.
It's also very true.
No amount of money can buy me the three hours back that I spent watching that movie.
So, so bad.
It's a bad movie.
It's terrible.
Did you see the last one, Infinity War?
Absolutely.
I was going to watch it, but actually, Infinity War was the length of it in reference to the length of the film.
The one good thing I can say about this movie is it was not Captain Marvel.
Which was the last one I saw, which was truly unwatchable.
This one is really bad.
It's a movie in four acts.
Most movies are in three acts.
This one goes on so long, it becomes a movie in four acts.
The first act is unbearable.
I was checking my watch every five minutes.
It was just a- You know, Jacob Aries waiting outside the hall without you.
He's going to pounce on me, I know.
The first act was tedious, slow, unbearable, unwatchable.
The second act was actually almost tolerable.
There were a handful of interesting moments.
There was one actually sort of interesting scene that they completely bungled because the movie has nothing to do with reality, which is, I think, one of the overall critiques.
The third act was inevitable.
It's that act that is in all of these superhero movies that you're all expecting.
And then the final act was total self-indulgence, just saccharin sentimentality.
It was so gross.
I had to go to the dentist afterward.
My teeth were rotting after that last act.
I mean, the other big story is Game of Thrones, which is so cynical and real and alive and vital and all this stuff.
Both the most popular things in the world.
Avengers Endgame made $1.2 billion.
And the only redeeming quality is Scarlett Johansson.
She's such a good actress, and she's hotter than a $2 pistol.
So it's really, I mean, her performance is good, but I can't think of many redeeming qualities.
The shoehorned politically correct messages were so unbearable.
Disney is ruining everything.
Marvel used to be kind of cool and sardonic, and now everything has to be, like, everybody has to be like a fat, gay superhero.
I don't know how they're going to make Brie Larson into some fat gay guy, but they'll figure out how to do it.
This is one of the issues with those characters, is with PC, if you're from an oppressed group, then you can't have anything bad about you.
You can't have any character flaws.
And Captain Marvel is the most obvious version of this.
But this bleeds over more broadly into this movie and all the others, is that there's no stakes.
People in this franchise, I'm not saying in this movie, but in this franchise, have died and come back to life.
Yeah.
Right?
That's comic books forever.
Comic books forever.
So there is no stakes.
Anytime there's a big battle and it's really consequential.
There's no death and there's no sex either because all the women are exactly the same as the men, except for having long hairs and nice bodies.
There's no difference between them.
So there's no sex, there's no death.
That's what life is.
I mean, that's why tell a story without sex and death.
In this movie, this also is not a spoiler.
The problem that this movie is taking on is how to deal with grief and regret and failure and looking at evil in the past and trying to grapple with what to do with that.
And the answer it gives avoids the question entirely.
It just doesn't, it's so shallow, it's so trite.
The only sort of interesting thing about the movie, it just plays around with in a way that doesn't offer any meaning.
And this is the, people accuse me of not liking these movies.
I can't imagine why.
But I do like the Greek myths.
I like the Nordic myths.
I like fantastic movies.
They compare them a lot.
I mean, they're.
Yes.
They always compare them.
The Greek myths use all of these fantastical elements to tell us core truths about our nature and about reality.
They're vicious.
They're filled with death and sex and racism.
Yeah, reality.
What core truth about our human nature do we learn from Avengers Endgame or any of the other Marvel movies?
You know, the problem is, or the answer that I always get, because I have the same problem.
I mean, it's not like I won't see a superhero movie.
I just don't want to see 10 superhero movies.
And people always say to me, well, it's about good and evil.
But, you know, good and evil isn't like that at all.
Good and evil is much more like Game of Thrones, where people are, the good people are dishonest and evil, and the evil people have good qualities and all that stuff.
And I mean, that's much more what good and evil is like and makes life much more complicated.
Whereas these guys, I mean, let's face it, we know who the good guys are.
Even the moral questions they ask, like, should I have accidentally killed somebody while saving the universe?
Yeah.
Yes, you should have.
The real bad guys were the executives at Disney and Marvel who forced this kind of piffle on us.
There is something kind of nice.
Here's the thing that I like, okay?
After Game of Thrones, I watched it last night.
It was so, I don't know if you watched, oh, you don't watch that.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I watch all the scenes with Khaleesi.
I basically just do a supercut of Khaleesi.
They do have a supercut of all the nude scenes.
I've never watched it, of course.
You just heard about it.
I've never watched it five times.
Anyway, they have this battle scene.
I'm not going to give anything away, but an amazing battle scene.
So amazing that I was in bed before I thought parts of it didn't actually make sense.
But still, just so exciting and so much fun, so beautifully directed.
Best battle scene since the last battle scene they had.
And it's kind of fun.
You go on Twitter and people are talking about it.
It's nice that there's a story that everybody's involved in.
It's nice that there's a story like The Avengers that everybody wants to go see.
And it's just some stories are better than others.
That's all.
Yes.
And some stories are better than others.
And you would think that in a movie that cost a zillion dollars to make, it's the 20th movie in this franchise or whatever, they would get decent writing.
You would think that they would hire a decent writer.
They would take it seriously.
There's one scene in the movie that I can't describe because it would be a spoiler that is nearly poignant.
It approaches poignancy.
And ironically, it just explains why the entire enterprise is frivolous and futile and incoherent.
It's that incoherence.
It doesn't hold together as a narrative.
So you actually have a handful of good acting performances.
Scarlett Johansen's great.
Robert Denny Jr. is always great.
A few of the others.
But no amount of good acting is going to make up for a three-hour incoherent movie.
For obvious reasons, I always have a prejudice in favor of the writers because they don't get to do what's, you know, they don't get to do what they want, essentially.
But it is a real problem.
There's another franchise, the Conjuring franchise, which is Ghost Stories.
And the first two movies were really quite good because a ghost story shouldn't have a lot of violence in it.
It just should be spooky and they kind of were.
And then they just got like unbelievably violent.
I mean, people being cut in half and crucified.
You thought like, sorry.
But that is the way Hollywood works, because they know if 10 people will show up to watch something really creepy and subtle and scary, a million people will show up to watch a guy cut in half and hung on a wall, you know, and I mean, I think that that's, and if people can appreciate the scary idea, how much more will they appreciate somebody being ripped to pieces, you know?
And I think that's true in these stories.
I mean, there's no subtlety.
There is no subtlety.
Even Jacob Airy would be a picture of that.
I think he would admit there's no subtlety.
I'm not going to let him in because we don't want to hear from him.
Because then I'll be cut in half and torn to pieces.
Yes, that is such a problem as you go into it.
And if that is the central cultural story, how stupid must we all be?
How stupid.
I mean, I'm not saying there's no room for some big, flashy escapism and gratuitous violence and gratuitous nudity.
I'm into it in little doses.
But if that is basically the only story we've got, what does that say about us?
You know, this is an interesting thing.
My grandson was out over this last week.
So even though I couldn't talk, I had somebody to play with.
And we all went to Disneyland.
Have you been to Disneyland?
No, I've been to Disney World, but not Disneyland.
You go there, and I can remember Disneyland from back when Walt Disney was alive.
But you go there and it's filled with people who look like Americans now look.
They're tattooed.
They have weird hair.
There are a million different colors, a million different religions.
There are people with Mickey Mouse hats that have rainbow gay symbols on them and all this stuff.
So it's like this can be.
I always knew Mickey was gay.
I never bought for a minute that he wanted Minnie.
You just have to listen to his voice.
But there they are to enjoy Mickey Mouse.
I mean, they're still there to enjoy this 50s entertainment, this very clean-cut, very wholesome entertainment.
The same thing with The Avengers.
Like, those comics are from my childhood.
Even before my childhood, I should say, they're back from the 30s, some of them, the 40s, they were invented.
And so now you have this kind of weird world we live in of everybody's doing his own thing.
Everybody looks weird.
Everybody's with the tattoos and the nose rings on.
But they're still showing up for these stories.
And the one thing you think is, like, maybe we should be responsible to those stories.
If this is what we love, if what we love is Mickey Mouse, if what we love is the heroism of the Avengers, maybe we should live a little bit more into those values instead of showing up looking like, you know, 300 pounds tattooed and ring through my nose and then watching this story about Captain America.
Maybe we should be a little bit more like Captain America.
That's absolutely true.
And there is a moment, this has been happening in this franchise for a while, where the political correctness, the overt leftism, really doesn't make any sense.
And you can tell they're trying to take this story that's been around for 70 years and turn it in a way that just doesn't hold up.
But I wonder if some of that, of all these crazy tattooed people who are going to Disneyland, they don't even have kids.
They're just in their 30s going to Disneyland.
A lot of people do that.
If some of that is just self-indulgence, nostalgia, thinking, you know, 70 years ago, those times were great.
When I was a little kid, everything made much more sense.
Our stories made more sense.
I want to go back to that.
Watching this movie, the entire final act of this movie is nostalgia.
And they say nostalgia is history after a couple drinks.
That's what you're seeing here.
It's this sentimentality, which I think is the enemy of real narrative, of real stories, of reality.
Oh, there's no question about it.
Sentimentality is the enemy of real emotion.
The Enlightenment Narrative Questioned00:03:58
They could be reading Another Kingdom.
They could have the novel.
They could be listening to your audiobook of Another Kingdom, which is getting great reviews, by the way.
But I hope people will go on and order Another Kingdom.
Thank you for doing this.
I only do it to torture you.
I know that.
I know.
I was thinking the whole time.
And I only torture you because I hate your guts.
I only do it out of spite.
And meanness.
Anyway, a final reflection.
Hey, you know what?
I forgot to do this at the top of the show.
I wish I had.
There are a couple of things I want to plug that I didn't get to plug while I was gone with laryngitis.
I have written two major nonfiction pieces.
And in the way of these things, they both came out at the same time.
One is in City Journal called Can We Believe, and it has gotten an amazing, amazing reaction.
But please go to City Journal and all you do is Google it.
And it's on the left-hand side.
You have to scroll down now.
It used to be up at the top, and now you have to scroll down.
It's called Can We Believe.
It is a major statement, my major statement on faith in the West.
And the other is my speech, the speech that I made at Hillsdale is now up online.
And that also, it's almost got 100,000 hits on it, which is pretty good for the kind of speech it is.
All you do is go on YouTube and search Andrew Clavin, Hillsdale College, and it will come up.
Plus, if you get a chance, if you get a chance to read Can We Believe or see the Hillsdale speech, I would love to hear your reaction to it.
I would love to send me emails.
I will get them eventually and let me know what you think.
In Can We Believe, It is about our faith and our lack of faith and the difficulty that intellectuals have believing even when they know, even when they know that we need faith for our culture to survive.
And that's the theme of it, is that people can't believe if they don't believe it's true.
And I call out what I call the Enlightenment narrative, this idea that after the fall of Rome, we went into this dark period that was only relieved by the Enlightenment and coming into science and leaving religion behind.
And just to read a small section of this, it says the Enlightenment narrative had its beginnings as a sort of humanist propaganda campaign.
Terms like Dark Ages and Middle Ages were created at the dawn of the Renaissance, which is a loaded term in itself.
They were meant to solidify the new generation's self-congratulatory idea that they had relit the fire of knowledge after a dark middle period.
This campaign worked.
The Enlightenment narrative has dominated the Western mind.
It's the context in which Don Quixote went mad trying to imitate old chivalric values out of keeping with the new reality.
It's why Shakespeare imagined a Hamlet stranded without certainty in the sudden absence of clear moral truth.
It's why Hegel declared that trust in the eternal laws has vanished and Nietzsche proclaimed that God is dead.
And while many mighty minds such as Coleridge, Dostoevsky, C.S. Lewis, and Pope Benedict XVI have protested that no, even in the Enlightened world, God still lives, the prevailing sense among thinking elites was expressed by Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, the sea of faith, once at full tide, is inexorably receding with a melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.
We've been talking all day, all the show, about stories and the fact that stories can be manipulated and the facts can be turned to stories that actually deny the facts.
I think the Enlightenment narrative is one of those stories.
I think it's been sold to us down the ages many times by people who didn't really understand that it was undermining faith and not fully true.
There's much that is true in the Enlightenment narrative, but there is much that can be criticized.
I criticize it in this article, Can We Believe in City Journal?
I hope you'll take a look at that.
I hope you'll take a look at my speech at Hillsdale College and let me know what you think.
And of course, you should buy another kingdom because the arts will not survive on the right if you do not support the arts.
All right, I'll be back again tomorrow.
If I have my voice, I will be here.
Critiquing The Enlightenment Narrative00:00:55
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sayovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, Copyright Daily Wire, 2019.
I'm Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles Show.
A neo-Nazi attacks a synagogue on Passover.
Politicians politicize the tragedy.
And Avengers is awful.
We will examine how the tragedy happened and why our culture no longer knows how to talk about it.