Michael Knowles, the former Rush Limbaugh guest host and longtime Daily Wire right-wing staple, openly professes a long laundry list of conservative beliefs, from opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion to total support of Donald Trump and a gushing love for Greta Gerwig and the “Barbie” movie.
Wait – what?
That’s right: Knowles not only sincerely called Greta Gerwig a “genius director,” but flat-out said his boss Ben Shapiro is “completely” wrong about the Warner Bros. smash hit – which he called a “conservative” movie.
“I left the movie a lot more optimistic about the culture,” Knowles said Wednesday on “The Michael Knolwes Show,” and with not even the least bit of irony.
“‘Barbie’ is great,” he said. “Ben is completely wrong. A lot of conservatives, mostly who haven’t seen the movie, are wrong to think it’s terrible and woke. The movie is splitting the right. I’ve noticed that a lot of the conservative, traditional, kind of hardcore right-wingers really like ‘Barbie.’”
In fact, Knowles said The Daily Wire asked him to go see it specifically because of Shapiro’s harsh – and harshly criticized – critique.
“They said OK, see it and see if you agree or disagree with Ben because it’s probably going to come up on the show,” Knowles said. “I did not watch or read any reviews before the movie. I saw that Ben hated it and saw the little clip of him throwing the Barbies and setting them on fire in the trash.”
But he also said he saw some of his favorite fellow conservatives praising the film, and “wanted to go in with a totally fresh slate, not colored by anyone else’s views,” and as a big fan of Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” felt he might even be primed to like it.
Boy did he ever. Knowles even went as far as to say that “It’s not even particularly ambiguous that Barbie is a conservative movie,” suggesting it had “strongly anti-feminist moments – clearly intentional and clearly very precise.”
The truth is, no film becomes an $800 million-and-counting global box office smash – and the biggest hit of summer with weeks left to go – by aggressively catering to only one half of the population’s political sensibilities. Gerwig is too smart and nuanced to make that mistake, and Knowles’ seemingly genuine love for the film – even if he genuinely thinks it’s got a “conservative” message – makes that case all by itself.
“She says the word ‘patriarchy’ like a dozen times in there – that’s a joke – that’s a punchline,” he said. “In order to cope with the craziness of this world we just make things up – like Barbie – we make things up like patriarchy. Does this mean we make things up like the actual structure of the patriarchy that controls everything, or we make things up like the concept of the patriarchy just like the concept of Barbie? I think it’s the latter, and Greta Gerwig an interviews has said everything in this movie is intended to operate on two levels.”
You can listen and watch Knowles make his entire case in the video above.
