After 30 years, Dave Rubin abandoned Gillette over its "We Believe in the Best in Men" ad—directed by feminist filmmaker Kim Gehrig—which conflated harmless masculinity with crimes like Weinstein’s predation and depicted white men as villains while non-white men as saviors. Four razor brands suddenly adopted similar messaging, mirroring corporate virtue-signaling (e.g., Nike’s Kaepernick campaign) to profit from leftist cultural trends. Rubin ties this to broader liberal failures, like Chrystia Freeland’s Rahaf al-Khanoun PR stunt while ignoring Canada’s executed drug dealer, Michael Schellenberg, and mocks Trudeau’s weak diplomacy. The episode argues conservatives must fight ideological dominance in media—not just economic policies—to reclaim cultural ground. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Gillette the Razor Company makes an anti-mail ad.
It's so weird, but it's so predictable.
I'll show it to you and why I think I'm going to stop being a 30-year customer.
It's January 16th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
You know, there are some consumer items that once you choose a brand, you really never switch.
At least I think that's how it is for men.
Because I don't think most men think about certain items once they've decided what they like.
It's not a big deal.
Toothpaste, probably.
Deodorant, shampoo.
Maybe you find a brand and you just never change it.
I mean, why would you?
I guess if you can't find your brand in a store, you might try something new, but how often does that happen?
And when it comes to razors, manufacturers do a trick.
They sell you the razor handle cheaply, but they get you with very expensive blades that only attach to their handle anyways.
Once you have a Gillette handle or a shick handle, you're sort of stuck buying the blades that go with Gillette or Schick.
Not that you're really thinking of switching because you're a guy.
I honestly haven't thought about what kind of razor I've used in decades.
Not since the last century have I thought about it.
I just don't care.
Then I saw this ad by Gillette pop up on Twitter.
It's less than two minutes long, but that's still very long for an ad, don't you think, in an era of 30-second or even five-second ads?
They call it a short film because they're a bit pretentious that way.
And the short film was directed by a young feminist woman named Kim Gehrig, which is unusual.
I mean, this is an ad for men about, you know, a sharp piece of metal.
It's odd that a feminist woman would be given the role of directing this ad.
I mean, the analogy would be having a middle-aged male direct an ad for tampons.
I mean, why would you do that?
Unless you were doing that for a very special reason on purpose, and the purpose was not to sell razors.
I'm going to show you that Gillette ad in full in a moment, but first I want to show you some other work that I found on Kim Gehrig's own video channel.
Let me just show you one of those called, You Think You're a Man.
That's the title of this video.
I'm not going to play too much of it because, frankly, it's upsetting.
Take a look.
Turn around.
So it's not hard what to guess this director thinks of masculinity and maleness.
She doesn't much like traditional ideas of feminine beauty, though, either.
Here's an ad that I think is intended to encourage overweight women to exercise.
Now, that's a great idea.
And I should be inspired by it, even though I'm not a woman.
I should do it.
I'm not against exercise.
I think it's a good thing.
But there's two subtle things going on in this ad.
One is the normalization of being fat.
Look at how it's redefined as healthy and sexy.
But it's anti-male a little bit too, just a little bit.
It's a much lighter touch here than in the last one.
This is another short video by Kim Gehrig.
for the anti-male moment at the end of this clip.
Now I'm all for encouraging fat people like me to exercise.
Maybe I should take that video to heart, but there's an undertone there.
It's not as blatant as that you think you're a man video, and I wouldn't mention that really were it not for the new monstrosity that Kim Gehrig has directed for Gillette, her greatest masterpiece yet.
I mean, there's an ideological, cultural, aesthetic pattern here.
Take a look at this 60-second ad that she made for Uber.
Feminist Ad Narratives00:15:14
Look at the confident, in-control leader of a young woman of color, of course, and the emasculated, goofy, nerdy, beta male white guy, of course, who tags along with her.
The fact that the heroine is a minority and the nerdy loser is a white guy is just sort of obvious these days.
But I'm focused on the gender rules, not the racism.
look at it Oh, baby.
You should do swing.
Who've got me beat up and down inside, out and across.
Oh yeah.
Yeah, do you think the director of that ad knows anything about what being a man is about or what being a man should be?
Do you think she knows how to talk to men?
Okay, so let's get to her Gillette ad, the short film.
As I say this, it's being watched more than 11 million times on YouTube in just two days, 200,000 comments.
More than a quarter of a million people clicked like on it.
Nearly 700,000 have clicked dislike on it.
So if the goal is to start a conversation, mission accomplished.
But if the goal is to sell razors to, you know, men, I don't think that works.
Here, take a look.
Bullying.
The Me Too movement against sexual harassment.
Toxic masculinity.
Is this the best a man can get?
Is it toxic masculinity?
And me too.
That's the term for sexual predators in the workplace like Giangameshi or Justin Trudeau.
So that's how you start an ad about men, a male product to sell to men.
And you disparage your old Gillette brand.
The best a man can get.
I know it.
I've heard it a million times.
So now Gillette is saying that that's, don't pay any attention to that.
That's out of fashion now.
Being the best, being manly, that's no longer in.
And they're so sorry for all of that.
And the whole woman kissing your cheek, that's so, what's that supposed to be?
It's a woman kissing a man's cheek.
Is that supposed to be rapey or something?
Is that toxic masculinity that a woman is attracted to a man and he's clean-shaven?
She kisses most likely her husband, kissing him on a smooth cheek.
Is that not what they actually are selling?
They're destroying their own brand value.
It would be like if Apple suddenly said, don't think different anymore.
Come to think of it, they sort of are increasingly saying that with their censorship, aren't they?
Or Subway Sandwiches, which says, eat fresh, suddenly did an ad saying, well, you know, eating fresh isn't really important.
And were we really that fresh after all?
It's bizarre if your goal is to sell a product and make your company look great, but maybe that's not what they're pushing here.
Anyways, let's keep watching.
We can't hide from it.
Oh, so bullying by preteens there, that's a toxic masculinity thing.
Razors are for men, by the way.
Preteen boys, those were what, eight, nine, ten-year-old boys, they don't buy razors.
That's who I assume was doing the online bullying there too that they showed in text.
And if you don't think that girls are the masters of mean comments online, well then you've never met a teenage girl before.
Apparently, that's all at the feet of grown men who shave.
But it gets worse a lot quicker in the ad.
And that's the thing.
This is so rapid-paced, and it conflates so many different things into one giant stew called men are bad.
Keep watching.
I'll let more of it play now.
Sexual harassment is taking over.
It's been going on far too long.
You can't laugh it off.
Who's the daddy?
What I actually think she's trying to say.
Making the same old excuses.
Boys will be boys.
But something finally changed.
Allegations regarding sexual assault and sexual harassment.
So hang on, boys wrestling with each other at a family barbecue, that's in the same league as groping a woman's rear end and putting a hand on a woman's shoulder in a boardroom.
I agree I wouldn't do that myself, but is that really in the same league as the Me Too sexual predators they were talking about?
Well, of course it is when you're a feminist director.
It's all evil maleness unless you're like that nerdy guy in the Uber ad.
But those boys wrestling, young boys, they're not shaving yet.
Imagine some scolding social justice warrior feminist with pink hair coming in.
You boys, you stop wrestling, boys.
Again, if you've ever met boys, you know they do that.
It's called playing.
Boys don't play with dolls.
They maybe play with dump trucks, but pretty soon they're chasing each other, playing tag, doing feats of strength wrestling.
It's called rough housing.
It's called being a young boy.
This is a razor ad, just a reminder.
And that quote from Anna Kasparian at the end there, that pundit they quoted, she said, sexual harassment.
Now, she's a pundit on a far-left YouTube channel called The Young Turks.
Her role on that channel is pretty obvious to anyone who's ever watched it.
It's to smile at the main host named Sank Uyghur, a big fat guy like me.
And Anna's job is to wear tight shirts while she does it.
Sorry, watch the show and tell me if she has another role besides being eye candy.
So it's weird that they would quote her.
And just one more thing on that.
The founder of that show, the young Turk Sank Uyghur, the fat guy, he's a bit famous for Me Too sexism himself.
He's basically a washed up pickup artist who objectifies women.
And he's a male feminist too to cover it up.
Like most male feminists, his woke politics is just to, you know, like Jean Gameshi, was just to cover up or preempt criticism of the fact that he's abusive towards women.
Anyway, so that was a little weird gem quoting the woman whose main job is to provide feminist cover for Sank Uyghur's own misconduct and to show some TNA on his own channel.
So weird.
Sorry for the digression, but I had to point that out.
Anyway, back to the video.
Watch some more.
And there will be no going back.
Because we We believe in the best in men.
Men need to hold other men accountable.
Smile, sweetie.
Come on.
To say the right thing.
To act the right way.
So this is Gillette.
And it's hanging the sins of male feminists, the sexual predators of leftists like Harvey Weinstein and Charlie Rose and Bill Clinton.
They're hanging those male feminist sins around the necks of men and saying it's a problem with masculine men.
And it's scolding other men for not holding men accountable.
And this is supposed to make me feel good about getting a scolding.
I feel so great about being scolded.
And maybe I'm going to go buy a razor right now and say, thanks, Gillette.
I have nothing to do with any of that sexual predation.
That's actually a leftist thing in the main.
I mean, anyone could do it, but in the main, the Me Too moment has been leftist feminist men.
It's leftist men gaming feminism, gaming it, figuring out how to use it as a trick.
It's not masculinity or manliness, by the way.
It's the opposite.
Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer, would invite women over to his hotel room, telling them he had a great feminist role for them in a movie, and then he would pressure them to sleep with him.
He was using feminism, not manliness.
He was using feminism as a trick.
And that man who was in Congress there, the black man who was testifying, he was assaulted by some Hollywood agent, a male feminist in LA.
You're hanging that around my neck as a Gillette user?
That's not the culture of manning lists.
That's not the culture of men.
That's the culture of celebrity Hollywood men, male feminists, which is just the other side of the cone, the coin of the female feminist who directed this ad.
And right at the end there, a young man telling a young woman to smile at a pool party.
Is that wrong?
Maybe.
I mean, I'd have to know the context, maybe know who the people are, and I'd have to wonder if that's really a problem at what was really a pool party for young singles.
I don't know, was that a clumsy pickup line?
Hey, can you smile some more?
So is any pickup line now called toxic masculinity?
And is that on par with rape or something?
Because they're mentioning all these things together in the ad.
And I noticed that both of the offending men there were white and both of the correcting men were black.
Now that's not my focus here, but it's so obvious who the stereotypers here are, who the bigots here are.
It's the Hollywood folks who made this ad who also were fine with Harvey Weinstein for years.
It's Gillette who's the bigot here.
There's a racist narrative here, just like there's a misandrist anti-male narrative here.
Let's watch some more.
Some already are.
In ways big.
Young men were strong.
But some is not enough.
Some treat each other, okay?
So some 10-year-old boys wrestling at a barbecue is the same as a pack of teenagers beating up someone on the street.
Do you see the elisions here, the blending of things?
Asking a girl at a pool party to smile is as evil as touching a female colleague on the shoulder.
It's as evil as grabbing a female's butt on a TV show.
It's as evil as, I don't know, whatever Terry Cruz was talking about.
What was he talking about, by the way?
Well, he was groped by another man named Adam Vennett, a Hollywood agent.
Who knows?
Maybe that Hollywood agent even worked on this ad.
How has that anything to do with anything?
Anything to do with treating women right?
Anything to do with buying a razor?
Other than just saying men are evil, or at least white men are, I guess.
I didn't make this about race.
They did, sorry.
Watch the rest.
because the boys watching today would answer the little scold there in writing just in case they didn't hit you over the head hard enough They put the words on the screen.
You have homework to do, by the way.
You have to improve yourself, people.
You're not really good enough to buy razors from Gillette.
No, men are.
Men need to be rebuilt.
So says Kim Gehrig, the director of the ad, and her Hollywood team.
I wonder how many Me Too moments there were in the making of this ad.
If you click on the link that they show you there, it takes you here.
Let me read just one line from their re-education page.
They say, but turn on the news today, and it's easy to believe that men are not at their best.
Many find themselves at a crossroads, caught between the past and a new era of masculinity.
While it is clear that changes are needed, where and how we can start to affect that change is less obvious for many, and when the changes needed seems so monumental, it can feel daunting to begin.
So let's do it together.
Yeah, so a media company made an ad smearing men, and then it complains about when you turn on the news, you see men not at their best, really.
And we have to get rid of that old masculinity, you know, that old stuff, the masculinity that stormed the beaches on D-Day, that toxic masculinity, or when on 9-11, firemen actually ran into a burning Twin Towers rather than running out of it because they went in to save people.
That's old-fashioned, you see.
Gillette wants to retrain your mind together with you.
And no thanks, there are enough pink-haired feminists screaming at me already.
I don't need my razor company to do that.
And I'm not really into signing up for re-education camp yet.
It's not mandatory yet.
That's a weird ad.
Would you agree with me?
It would have been even weirder had they stood up against real, real, real toxic masculinity.
Here's what Imam Tahidi of Australia said, a great tweet here.
He said, hi, Gillette, I can't find your video on men who force women to undergo female genital mutilation, force their wives and daughters to wear a burqa, kill their women for leaving the religion, rape their wives because their imam allows it, form rape gangs across Europe.
Thank you.
Now, of course, that would be pretty weird for a Razor ad too, because it's political scolding and political activism, and this is a Razor company.
But the Razor Company was just as weird and scolding and political.
Both would be weird ads, but at least the one the Imam from Australia mentions would be accurate and helpful.
Hey, could you imagine an ad for a women's personal product?
Not Razors, but I don't know, maybe some feminine hygiene products of some sort that said, hey, girls, we need to do better.
No more false accusations of rape, which are a thing, unfortunately, especially on campuses these days.
Women, we need to do better.
No more, oh, I don't know, banning your ex-husband from getting visitation rights with his kids after you're divorced.
I don't know.
No more fake paternity schemes.
I don't know, whatever.
I don't know what the analogies are to the slanders against men put out by Gillette to the men of the world.
As if all men are guilty of all of it.
I don't know what the female equivalents would be.
There are things in the battle of the sexes that some women do.
It would just be weird for a feminine products company that blamed all women as what?
I don't know.
Being promiscuous, stop being promiscuous, women, stop being unfaithful.
I mean, whatever.
Who on earth would try to sell a product this way?
But of course, products are not really for sale here.
Hollywood feminism is for sale.
Harvey Weinstein would have loved that ad.
He would have produced it.
I want to show you something for real from the Toronto Star yesterday.
I know you think this is unbelievable, but believe it, it is from their advice column.
Let me read it to you.
I'm married to a woman whom I love and adore.
The thing is, she sees other men for sex and is open about it.
She doesn't have sex with me and says I'm too small.
Now she wants to have a baby, but it won't be mine.
What do I do?
Ask Ellie.
Yeah, that's the new Gillette.
Unmanly Ads00:07:28
That's that Uber guy.
The new Gillette is about unmanliness, about being, in that case, cuckolded.
I wonder which man involved in that Toronto Star story uses Gillette.
I'm guessing it's the husband who uses Gillette and not her boyfriends.
Because he's renounced traditional ideas of masculinity just like Gillette has asked him to.
Because after countless generations, centuries, millennia, Gillette has found a better way to be a man.
And lucky for us, this better way came from, of all people, a woman named Kim Gehrig.
She should win the Nobel Prize for something.
You know, Kim Gehrig made a long ad for a woman in women's personal products for the brand Libres.
Now, I don't know anything about Libresse because I'm a guy.
But I want to show you 35 seconds of this ad.
It gets heavy duty after 35 seconds.
So I'm going to stop it there.
I'm not going to say this is an R-rated ad.
It's more artistic than pornographic.
But turn away now if you don't want to see some lady bits.
But all the man-hating, emasculating, disavowing in the Gillette ad about razors, imagine for a moment what the absolute 180-degree opposite of such hatred for men would be if it was deployed on a female hygiene product.
Here's the first ad of her Tampon ad.
Same director.
Viewer discretion advised.
Again, this is not porn.
It's artistic sexuality.
Take a look.
We've come a long, long way together through the hard times and the good.
I have to celebrate you, baby.
I have to praise you like a shoe.
You're so rare.
So fine.
I'm so glad you're mine.
You're so rare.
So rare.
So fine.
It goes on.
That's a real ad.
Yeah, like I say, that's the woman who made the Gillette ad.
Do you think they picked the right gal?
You know what?
I don't really care about what razor I use.
I swear.
I know I couldn't tell the difference between brands.
They all overcharge.
But after watching that Gillette ad three times and learning more about the woman who directed it and reading that awful propaganda website by Gillette and their pledge to take a million dollars from you, of course, from your razor purchases to re-engineer what it means to be a man, I just don't want to be a part of that.
I didn't sign up for that.
I didn't realize I was in that.
But as a Gillette customer, I am.
I have not thought about my razors in 30 years.
But now I'm forced to think about it and I hate my razor now because it's all about that super weirdness.
Now I'm not going to throw out my razors.
They're too expensive.
I will use up the blades that I have.
And then I just will not buy the same brand.
I'm not going to buy Gillette anymore because it's just too bloody weird.
By the way, I checked out Shick, which was the only other consumer brand I knew.
And they are just as bad.
They're just less artistic about it.
Here's an announcement two months ago that Schick was doing a web series, let me quote there, that hopes to challenge toxic masculinity.
They really had, they deleted it, I should tell you, in the last 24 hours, they had this really gross Twitter video that actually attacked masculine phrases like man up or be a man.
I was going to show you that video here now, just to prove they're just as bad as Gillette.
I didn't think they would delete it, but they quickly deleted that ad in the last 24 hours, pretending they never did it, because they see how bad it's getting for Gillette.
And by the way, the Dollar Shave Club and Harry's Razors, they're positioning themselves as no-name, cheaper alternatives.
Of course, they're owned by corporate giants.
They're just the pretend cheap brand.
They've come up against masculinity too.
But I note that every single one of these companies, Harry's, Dollar Shave, and Schick, have all deleted their anti-male videos in the last 24 hours.
They've deleted their tweets, they've deleted their press releases all in the last 48 hours.
So they're all in it.
How did that even happen?
So what am I going to do?
Not shave?
No, I'm going to shave.
I just, I despise all of them.
Gillette, Schick, the no-name brands, because they've all been colonized by the feminists of Hollywood, the female feminists like Kim Gehrig, and the male feminists like Harvey Weinstein of Hollywood, the ad agencies.
I bet they had Me Too moments on the set.
Of course they did.
They all share the same anti-male bigotry.
It's a weird ideology.
All four razor companies agree.
But I suppose the fact that the last three companies I mentioned, Schick, Dollar Shave, and Harry's, have tried to cover their tracks, tried to deceive their customers, tried to delete their smears, but Gillette is still plowing ahead with theirs.
Well, maybe I should still move away from Gillette to one of the others because at least they're renouncing their cowardice.
No more Gillette for me.
I cannot give those people my money.
I'm not saying boycott Gillette.
I'm just saying there's no bloody way I'm going to give my money.
And I really don't care what I shave with as long as it works.
I just don't want to give a dime of my money to people who hate me simply because of my sex.
I mean, would you, they're calling me names.
I haven't done any of those things.
Stay with us.
We'll talk to a guy who's got some thoughts on this, Michael Knowles.
up next on The Red Bull.
Well, Gillette is a global brand, and they were the subject of global mockery.
And one of my favorite online memes was this one by Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire.
He tells me that it was the idea before it came from his wife.
There's a picture of him on the left.
A man's man drinking, I don't know what that is.
Looks like hard liquor to me, shaving while smoking a cigar, as men are wont to do.
But when he uses Gillette, well, ladies, at the right is your social justice warrior.
He's not drinking whiskey or smoking.
He's got a cup of tea and he's wearing, I think that's a pajama outfit done right up to the neck and spectacles.
He is the modern man.
And joining us now is that modern man, Michael Knowles, who is the host of the Michael Knowles Show on the Daily Wire every Monday to Thursday on the Daily Wire.
Michael, great to have you back on the show.
That's a great job.
Thanks for having me back.
Which one of those is closer to the real Michael Knowles?
You know the most I had all of those costume pieces in my bedroom when we were shooting it in the morning.
I think I generally lean toward the Stogies and the Scotch and sort of keeping myself unkempt on the weekend.
But I got to tell you, every once in a while, a nice little sip of tea in a lemon cup just really hits the spot.
Well, you know what?
I think a masculine man can drink whatever he likes.
And I mean, I don't think drinking tea necessarily makes you emasculated.
But boy, I mean, you go through frame by frame of the video.
Corporate America's Image Battle00:14:02
And it's not a lot of joking.
Like, they are deadly serious.
What gets me the most about them, Michael?
I'd love your thoughts on this, is that they conflate, you know, boys wrestling at a backyard barbecue, which can be rough housing, but it's not any sort of, you know, crime or I don't even think I would call it violence.
They conflate that with Harvey Weinstein-style Me Too rapes.
They conflate that with workplace sexual harassment with a pack of teenagers chasing someone down the street.
They just swallow all that up with that's what being a man is about.
That's what bugs me the most about this.
Of course, I can't wait to see all of the commercials about toxic femininity from secret deodorant or something.
I don't want to see all that.
You don't hear about toxic femininity very much.
And for the people who are defending this ridiculous ad, it shows the goodwill of conservatives because they say, well, you know, the ad is saying we shouldn't be bullies and we shouldn't be mean and abusive.
And oh, yeah, right.
What it's actually saying is that masculinity is toxic.
This is on the heels of the American Psychological Association saying that traditional masculinity, you know, as opposed to that newfangled masculinity in the onesie pajamas with the teacup, is harmful to people.
And you don't see it on the other side.
If I made a commercial about how women need to do better, women have been so bad for so long and they need to do better.
I would be run out of town on a rail.
And the other side of this is, obviously, as you make, a great point.
There is a big distinction here between Harvey Weinstein forcing himself on women and leching for decades and ruining people's careers because they won't sleep with him and boys wrestling with each other.
Little boys like to roughhouse.
Every little boy for all of human history has liked to roughhouse.
And what this agenda is doing, this left-wing commercial, is it's trying to purport to be compassionate.
There's nothing compassionate about this.
We now have a generation of people, the millennial generation, my own generation, which was raised in the age of the self-esteem movement and of anti-bullying all the time, no bullying, and helicopter parents and being sheltered from everything, both experientially and academically.
And what has happened?
We have the most miserable generation in modern history.
Millennials are much more anxious, much more stressed, much more clinically depressed, much more likely to be hooked on depression drugs, much more likely to attempt suicide than other generations.
There was a study that came out of ASU.
It showed that a quarter of American college students are suffering PTSD because a Republican won the 2016 election.
If we raise a generation as coddled little buttercups, they're going to encounter reality and they're going to crack.
They're going to be too fragile to withstand it.
There's nothing compassionate about it.
The only thing that we can get out of this Gillette ad that I think is a good thing is we can laugh at the absurd leftism of corporate America.
Yeah.
You know, it's important not to let the left get away with saying Harvey Weinstein was toxic masculinity because Harvey Weinstein calls himself a feminist to this day.
In fact, his first gambit when he was caught was to say, oh, I'm going to rededicate myself to my mother's memory and I'm going to put a lot of money into anti-violence and I'm a feminist.
Like, he said he was a feminist.
Bill Clinton said he was a feminist.
Teddy Kennedy said he was a feminist.
They were all using male feminism as a preemptive excuse or a confuser for their private conduct, which was.
This is.
And I would put it to you.
And even Terry Cruz, who was the black actor there who said men have to tell men to do, he was groped by a Hollywood agent, a male.
So this is a Hollywood feminism problem, not a real working collar blue collar guy problem.
That's a feminist problem.
What Gillette and what the APA are now saying is that masculinity is toxic, that manliness is a vice and we need to root it out.
But of course, manliness is a virtue.
Manliness is such a virtue that the word virtue actually comes from the word for manliness.
It comes from the Latin word vir, which means man.
These are good virtues.
Now, all the virtues can be perverted into vices, but let me tell you something.
When the enemies are storming the beaches, you'd better hope that you've got manly men in your country to protect you.
When people are being victimized, women especially are being victimized, you'd better hope there are manly, courageous men to protect you.
I always joke about those male feminists that they're the creepiest people on the face of the earth and how they always use these ideologies of feminism and leftism to pursue rampant self-interest.
They say, oh, honey, I'm a feminist.
We don't need all that patriarchy of going out on dates or getting married.
Let's just go back and net flicks and chill, baby.
I'm really progressive.
It's outrageous.
And this is another aspect, by the way, of this commercial for those defending it among the conservatives.
It is just pure leftism, even in the racism of the commercial, in the commercial.
The first part of it, with one exception, all of the bad guys who are bullying and doing all those things, all of them, maybe 50, 60 guys, are white guys.
And in the second part, when it's all the good men being good guys, it's virtually all non-white men going up and stopping white men from doing bad things.
That is a racist trope that shows you that this isn't just about stopping bullying.
This is about pushing a leftist agenda with all of the ideologies that come along with that.
Yeah.
I watched a bunch of ads produced by this same female director, and they're all on this same tear.
You know what?
I was so frustrated.
And I have not given a thought to what razor I buy in decades.
But I just do not want to give even $1 to these guys.
So it's not like I want to call for a boycott.
It's not like I'm boycott Gillette.
I personally don't want to give any money to a bunch of weirdo creeps like that.
Trouble is.
You better not call for a boycott because that would be toxic masculinity.
Yeah, a girl caught a boycott of Gillette.
Here's the thing.
Schick, who I think is the big competitor, they had a whole bunch of smaller ads that just didn't go viral.
Now they have deleted them all in the last 48 hours.
I literally saw an ad that was just as bad as this.
It was going through all the masculine phrases we have like man up, be a man, put in a man-sized effort.
Like it just any common parlance where the word man was a positive.
They had this short video and I noted that.
I said, oh, I'm going to mention that today.
In the last 24 hours, Schick has deleted all traces of that, and so has Harry's and Dollar Shave.
But I have gone online and I see that all three of those competitors, Schick, Harry's, and Dollar Shaved, have the identical messaging to Gillette.
They just didn't have theirs go viral and they're deleting a lot of theirs.
Now they're since say, oh, come to us instead of Gillette.
They're sort of pretending they never bought into it.
But can you explain for me, Michael, how is it that four companies who are in the sell sharp metal to men business, how did all four of them get into the pink-haired social justice warrior feminist business all at the same time?
How the hell did that even happen?
Well, this is where you're right that Gillette doesn't deserve all of the blame.
What they are seeing, especially Schick and Gillette, they've seen their market share decline in recent years because of the mail order companies like Harry's and like Dollar Shave Club.
And so what they're seeing is that they need some new marketing campaign.
And they look around at corporate America.
And the old expression was, get woke, go broke.
That when you embraced politics, it would hurt you.
Michael Jordan, they said, why don't you talk about politics?
He said, because Republicans buy sneakers too.
And this has changed in recent years.
It's changed because we on the right tend to see that politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of religion.
What the left has done is make an idol out of politics.
So it's turned their politics into their religion and into their penance and their sacraments and all of their virtue they put into politics.
Corporate America, I think there's a ridiculous idea that corporate America is right-wing.
It's all those big fat cats.
No way.
Corporate America is very left-wing and it follows the popular culture because they just want to make a buck in an amoral way, whether they do it by embracing politics or by disavowing politics.
And because the left has been so successful at pushing their agenda through the culture, corporate America has followed suit and they are embracing these things.
I would have said that get woke, go broke remains true until Nike embraced Colin Kaepernick, embraced a protest of the American flag itself as its spokesman, and it's done very well.
It has made money on that gambit.
So now other companies are saying, I guess we've got to embrace leftism.
There seems to have been a backlash here against Gillette.
We'll see, however, what this actually does to their bottom line.
Once the smoke clears, perhaps this is the way of the future.
And it's why I think conservatives have to be much more careful.
We always give money to politicians.
We always focus on free markets, deregulations.
That's all great.
But if you lose the culture, none of that matters because the culture is going to decide how your politics and your markets and your companies look.
And right now, the left is winning that game.
Yeah, you're so right.
Just a quick point.
When I was working for Ethical Oil as a little NGO, I was shocked to find how many vice presidents of major oil companies in Calgary had absolutely bought into the theory of man-made global warming.
And I thought, you're kidding me, right?
This is just some double talk for PR.
No, I mean, in the vice president and the C-suite offices of all the oil companies, they were absolute true believers, or so they said.
Let me throw at you one last theory, and then I'll let you go.
You're very generous with your time, Michael.
I appreciate you joining us.
I have two possible explanations, and I'd like your thoughts on this.
One is that, like a lot of journalists, they're not actually writing for when journalists write their favorite stories, it's for their peers and their competitors and for the club.
They're writing for other journalists.
Look what I did, look what I did.
They're not writing for what their readers want.
So maybe this filmmaker, they call it a short film, maybe this director and this ad agency was just trying to show off for other ad agencies how cool they were and how hip they were.
That's theory number one.
Theory number two is, I mean, I have to say that, you know, my wife goes to the drugstore a lot more than I do.
I think women generally go and buy their beauty things a lot more than guys do.
And I think a lot of guys should say, oh, can you pick me up some razor blades while you're there?
I think.
So maybe this ad wasn't aimed at men, but at the women who pick up razor blades for the men because they're going to get their makeup or beauty things every day.
So maybe it was trying to woo women.
I don't know if it'll work.
But what do you think about those two theories?
Number one, that maybe this was just ad agencies indulging their own artistic adventure.
Or number two, that maybe they're trying to get women buyers of stuff for their guys.
I think both of those ideas hold a lot of water, especially the first one.
There is a prestige factor here.
There is a virtue signaling here, both by the director, by the ad agency, and by the company.
And corporate America is very keen to do this sort of thing because people are so reactive in their politics now because we're in the age of reality television politics with a reality TV star as president.
You are seeing people constantly engaging in politics.
They'll choose which rideshare app to use based on how they reacted to some Trump policy a year ago.
And so I do think there is a little virtue signaling.
I think corporations are often inefficient and they have a lot more going on than just what is necessarily best for their business.
They want to make money, they want to increase profit to shareholders, absolutely.
But their theories on how they do that tend to be locked in a bubble with other people in the C-suite, as you say, who read the elite coastal newspapers, who go to the same cocktail parties.
There's a lot of that.
And television has always been for women.
Women are the people who watch sitcoms.
Women are the people who watch network television.
Women are the people who are watching these advertisements and doing all of the shopping.
All of that is true.
All of that underscores just how much conservatives have to come back because as a gender divide continues to grow in politics, especially among single women compared to men and married women, as the culture becomes more polarized and more politicized, you're going to see that problem worsen.
And for those conservatives who want to bury their head in the sand and say, let's just talk about taxes, let's just talk about deregulation, everything that isn't cultural is ultimately counting beans because of the strength of that.
And it's not just the culture of the commercial, but it's the culture in that C-suite.
And it's the culture of the journals and the magazines and the newspapers that those corporate masters are reading.
And it's the culture of the customers as well who demand boycotts and girl cots and who are reacting to these politics.
That's the culture that you've got to engage in.
Wow.
Holy cow.
You said a lot there, Michael Knowles.
What a pleasure to have a moment of your time.
I want to encourage all our viewers to check out Michael's show.
Chrystia Freeland Controversy00:04:09
It's called the Michael Knowles Show.
It's on the Daily Wire.
We have other friends there, Andrew Clavin and Ben Shapiro, so you'll be in good company.
Make sure to check out Michael.
Thanks for your time, my friend.
Keep up the fight.
Thanks for having me.
Good to be here.
All right, there you have it.
Stay with us, folks.
More ahead after the break.
Welcome back on my monologue Monday about Chrystia Freeland rushing to bring Rahaf al-Khanoun to Canada while being silent about a Canadian on death row in China.
Billy writes, Freeland is milking it, but considering how Trudeau is all about the photo ops, it's not the least bit surprising.
Yeah, you know, I was surprised to see some backlash against Christy Freeland's gropey handsiness with Rahaf al-Khanoun.
The most surprising was from the CBC.
They had someone named Shanifa Nasser condemn it.
And I thought, well, I wonder if she's running Takia for the Saudis or something.
It was really, really weird.
I criticized it because it's liberal grossness.
But why is a Muslim journalist who covers Muslim beat for the CBC criticizing that?
You'd think this is great, a liberated Muslim woman getting out from the yoke of Sharia law, but the CBC's Muslim reporter didn't like it one bit.
I thought that was quirky, don't you?
Linda writes, ironically, the liberals save this woman from Islamic extremists, yet have no qualms about importing immigrants with the same ideology as her persecutors.
Yeah, yeah, you're so right.
And Trudeau has no problem going to all the most radical mosques in the country.
I remember at the Sundays Network when we asked him a question about going to one mosque, the Asuna Wahhabi Mosque in Montreal that the Pentagon said was a recruiting zone for terrorists, like not just having medieval ideas, but actually violent terrorists.
And Trudeau said, no, absolutely.
He doesn't regret campaigning there and he will continue to do so.
Of course he will.
You've got 1.3 million people in Canada who identify as Muslim.
I don't know how many your citizens are able to vote, but that's a massive block compared to one quarter that number of the Jews.
Trudeau can count votes.
Paul writes, the Liberals are using Rahaf al-Khanun as a trophy.
They could care less about her.
She's an election prop.
Canadians being held in China are symbolic of liberal failure and weakness, so they will be ignored.
Yeah, you know what?
I did some digging into the Schellenberg guy who is sentenced to death, a Canadian from Abbotsford who's sentenced to death in China.
And I'm pretty sure he is a drug dealer because he was convicted of drug dealing and all sorts of offenses here in Canada.
And then he thought, oh, let me go to China and do that.
What a foolish guy.
He should have stayed in Canada where he would be dealt with impunity.
I mean, Trudeau and the liberal courts have struck down Harper's mandatory minimums, any three-strike-out type laws or whatever strictness Harper tried to bring in.
He should have stayed here and done that.
I'm not saying he was innocent.
I don't think he was.
But China went back and said, oh, we just gave him a custodial sentence.
We're now going to retry him and sentence him to death.
That's clearly, clearly, clearly, clearly not a judicial move.
That really is a murder of a drug dealer, I grant you that, but a murder in return for what Canada is doing.
That's just on the China front.
Is there a country in the world with whom Canada has better relations now than when Trudeau took over?
China, disaster.
India, disaster.
Cuba, you'd think would be better, but they're using sonic waves to harm our diplomats.
Russia, Christy Freeland's banned from going there.
Donald Trump, how do you think they get along there?
Country after country.
Trudeau's wrecked it.
And he was supposed to be this savvy millennial grown-up or whatever.
I don't know.
He's been a disaster.
Anyways, thanks for holding the fort yesterday.
I had to go to a funeral, but I'm back in Toronto, obviously, at our world headquarters, and I'll be here again tomorrow.
Until then, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.