The following is an edited transcript excerpt from The Michael Knowles Show. * * * Val Kilmer is dead. Hollywood now wants to put him in another movie anyway. Not through footage he had already completed. Not through a role he finished before his death. Through artificial intelligence. We are told this is a tribute. It is not a tribute. It is necromancy. Yes, necromancy. And no, that is not just a melodramatic way of saying I dislike the technology. Taking a dead actor, reconstructing his face and voice with AI, and then putting words in his mouth is not ordinary filmmaking. It is an attempt to conjure a human presence from beyond the grave. Not the man himself, of course, but his image, his shade, his likeness. That is exactly what makes it so grotesque. I know the objection. No, it’s not. Necromancy would mean literally bringing someone back from the dead. This is just technology. This is just creating an image that looks and sounds like him. No. That is not really what necromancy has ever meant in practice. When people go to a psychic and try to conjure the dead, they are not expecting a flesh-and-blood man to walk back into the room. They expect a voice, a shadow, a movement, a shape, an apparition. They expect an image that gives the illusion of presence. That is what they are after. And that is exactly what this technology offers: not resurrection, but simulation. Not life, but a convincing imitation of it. That is why the distinction does not save it. It condemns it. A human being is not merely a face, or a voice, or a recognizable pattern of speech. A man is not reducible to a catalog of gestures and expressions that can be fed into a machine and reproduced on command. A man is body and soul. A body without a soul is a corpse. A soul without a body is a spirit. A digital imitation is neither. It is not the man. It is not Val Kilmer. Val Kilmer lived, and then he died. That is the truth. And when you start creating AI performances that ask audiences to forget that truth, you are doing more than making a movie. You are teaching people to deny death. That is one of the deepest temptations of modern life. So much of liberal modernity is about denying mortality, denying limits, denying the fixed realities of the human condition. It is about gathering to ourselves powers that do not belong to us. It is about pretending we can master time, history, memory, identity, even death itself. It is about maximizing human autonomy until man no longer receives the world as a creature under God, but tries to re-engineer it as his own private project. Paramount Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images That is what makes this more than a Hollywood gimmick. This is not just another strange special effect or another morally neutral technological advance. It is part of a much larger effort to flatten reality and replace it with manipulation. It invites us to believe that the dead are not really gone, that personhood is just data, that memory can be commercialized into presence, and that all boundaries exist to be crossed so long as the software is good enough. And it will get good enough. That is part of the problem. If the technology improves, people will look at that screen and think, on some level, that they are really seeing Val Kilmer. Maybe not literally. Maybe they will know, abstractly, that it is AI. But emotionally, imaginatively, culturally, the effect will be the same. The dead man will appear to live again. And when that happens over and over, decade after decade, it will change the way we think about death itself. It will teach us that death is not a real rupture, merely a technical inconvenience. It will teach us that the dead remain available for reuse. It will teach us that a person can be broken down into commercially exploitable fragments and then reassembled whenever a studio wants one more performance. That is dehumanizing enough when done to the living. Done to the dead, it becomes something darker. We should not do this. There are living actors — plenty of living actors. If you want a performance, go find a living man to give one. If you want to honor the dead, then honor them as dead. Remember them. Pray for them. Be grateful for the work they already gave the world. But do not digitally ventriloquize them and call it art. And this applies beyond Hollywood. The same impulse that says we should build AI versions of dead actors is the impulse that refuses to accept mortality at all. It is the same impulse that wants to summon, recreate, simulate, and control what ought to be received with humility. It is the refusal to let the dead remain dead, and the refusal to let the living remain creatures rather than aspiring gods. So no, I do not think this is harmless. I do not think it is merely clever. And I do not think Christians, or anyone with a sane understanding of human dignity, should shrug and accept it as inevitable. Don’t talk to your dead father as though he were still here. Pray for him. Don’t ask a machine to conjure the likeness of the dead so that you can pretend mortality has no claim on us. Speak to the living. Love the living. Live among the living. Leave the dead in peace.

According to the most recent studies on the subject, the average American now subscribes to four different streaming services. Many subscribe to five or six, or even more. Netflix alone has 325 million subscribers, which almost equals the entire population of the United States, not counting illegal aliens. And yet the surveys, and our own experience, tell us that most people aren’t satisfied with these services, and are only becoming less satisfied every day. We all have the impression that it’s just too much, there are too many of these platforms, and they’re only getting more expensive, as the service declines, and the one major promise of streaming — that we wouldn’t have to deal with ads — has been almost entirely abandoned at this point. What’s more, it seems that these services are bad for movies themselves. The art of filmmaking has declined. While streaming services are ubiquitous, the movies and shows themselves feel somehow more marginal, less relevant than ever before. The Oscars happened this past weekend, and nobody noticed or cared because nobody noticed or cared about any of the movies that were nominated. So what’s really happening here, and why? We have done a series of deep dive explorations into various facets of American cultural life, trying to figure out why the quality of everything is on the decline. In a word, everything kind of sucks now. Why is that? What’s going wrong? That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out. Well, speaking of things that suck, these streaming services certainly fit the bill, and so do most of the movies and shows they charge us exorbitant fees to access. Why? Let’s explore that question. Start with the fact that everything is bundled now. Roughly 85% of subscribers to Amazon Prime Video are also subscribers to Amazon Prime, which supposedly gets you faster shipping on some items. Relatively few people subscribe to Prime Video all by itself. Meanwhile, millions of people have access to Netflix and Hulu through a deal with their cellphone carrier, usually T-Mobile or Verizon. The reason that the streaming services offer these bundles is that they’re worried about “churn,” which means losing customers. Churn is reduced — by a significant margin — when customers have Netflix or Hulu as part of a bundle with their carrier. Bundles are complicated to cancel, for one thing. They might be presented as a “free add-on,” when in reality, you’re definitely paying for it. And maybe most importantly, when you have a Netflix/T-Mobile bundle, you’re likely to be less demanding about the content on Netflix. Over time, you naturally come to see Netflix as a component of a larger, necessary contract with your phone carrier. And that’s exactly how Netflix (and the other streaming services) want you to perceive things. Amazon doesn’t have to justify its cost increases if everyone thinks of “Prime Video Ultra” as a necessary component of “Amazon Prime.” The other part of the problem — one of the reasons why it’s hard to evaluate the value of the various services — is that they lose the rights to shows and movies all the time. Netflix acquired the rights to “Seinfeld” in 2019, but you have no idea if they’ll have the show in 2027, because the licensing deal expires at the end of this year. On top of that, even when a show is available, you have no idea if it’s going to be the original version. There’s no streaming service that offers “Scrubs” as it originally aired, for example. The licensing rights to the music — which is a big part of the show — were simply too big a hassle to renew. To give another example — the version of “Seinfeld” that’s on Netflix is widescreen, even though the show was never intended to be widescreen. For the Netflix version, they simply cropped the original image so that it fits widescreen TVs. That means they deleted some of the content on the top and bottom of the image, in every frame. And the result is that the show looks very different from how it originally aired. That may seem like a small issue, and maybe it is in the grand scheme, but it’s more significant than you might think. If we look at films and shows as pieces of art — which they are, or should be — then it’s a problem that these services are making alterations to the art, as they see fit. The only way to avoid these kinds of changes is to buy physical media that streaming services can’t mess with. You can buy “Seinfeld” on 4K Blu-ray, for example, complete with the original formatting and a bunch of special features and so on (And indeed, a lot of people are doing that now. There’s a whole market for physical media that’s undergoing something of a renaissance at the moment). But as it stands, there’s simply no legal way to stream this show in its original broadcast format. Unless you’re an extremely devoted “Seinfeld” fan, you probably weren’t aware of this. And you probably aren’t aware of the many, many other ways that streaming services mess with the content you think you’re getting. On Hulu, you can’t access five episodes of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” because they were retroactively “canceled” during the BLM hysteria. Basically, any episode where a character appears in blackface — even if the point of the gag is to mock Danny DeVito for wearing blackface — has been erased from memory. If you subscribe to Hulu, this is never explained to you. They act like you’re getting the whole show. But you aren’t. Many other shows have similar banned episodes, for similar reasons. NBC removed four episodes of “30 Rock” for depictions of blackface (which, again, weren’t even endorsing the idea of blackface, but whatever). The “Community” episode entitled “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” was nuked from streaming services as well, because the Asian comedian dressed up as a “Dark Elf.” And Comedy Central/Viacom took five episodes of “South Park” offline because they depicted Mohammed in an unflattering manner, which is a capital offense in the Muslim world (which we’ve now imported to the United States). So they decided to stick to mocking Jesus, Christians, and Trump voters instead. This is one of the reasons comedy is dead, by the way. All of the comedians are cowards. What’s important to emphasize here is that, while it’s obviously very bad that these streaming services are censoring shows (without even admitting it), this censorship is a symptom of a much larger problem. The problem is not simply that wokeness has run amok, or that Left-wing DEI bureaucrats have taken over the entertainment industry — although that’s all true. The real problem is, in part, that all of this content exists in the ether, and you access it through subscriptions. Even if you “buy” a streaming movie on Amazon, you still only have access to your purchase as long as you have your Amazon subscription. The death of physical media means that nobody owns any particular piece of media anymore. When I was a kid, we had a physical library of physical copies of our favorite films. We would watch those films over and over again. What this meant was not only that the movies couldn’t be retroactively changed or censored, but also that we got to know these movies; they became a part of our lives in a way that no movie today ever will be, because it always exists in the digital cloud, one bit of content in an endless scroll of other bits. This is how it works now across the board. In every area of life, we’re confronted with an infinite number of options. This plagues society at every level. You go to the store for ketchup, and there are like 97 different types and brands. The same is true of cars, watches, dating apps, clothing, and so on. It’s too many choices. It’s overwhelming, overstimulating. You commit to one and then worry that maybe that one or that one or the other one would have been better. And along the same lines, as mentioned, there is no communal experience of film anymore. Everyone’s watching different things. We aren’t experiencing the stuff together. The movies at the Oscars today aren’t necessarily worse than Oscar movies 30 years ago. Sometimes they are. But it’s more that they exist in a fractured cultural landscape, so none of them make any real impact. That’s why it was so weird to see them win awards the other day. Say what you want about a movie like, say, “Titanic” (an example I’ve used in the past), but that was an absolute cultural sensation in a way that no film today is or probably ever could be. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about: Here are just some of the movies that received Oscar nominations in 2004, more than two decades ago. See how many of them you’re familiar with: “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” “Seabiscuit,” “Master and Commander,” “The Last Samurai,” “Mystic River,” “Lost in Translation,” “Finding Nemo,” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Even though these are now relatively old films, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen several of those movies, and you’ve probably heard of all of them. Many of them are classics. Now let’s look at the major Oscar nominees from 2026. Here’s what we have: “Sinners,” “Marty Supreme,” “One Battle After Another,” “Blue Moon,” “The Secret Agent,” “Sentimental Value,” “Bugonia,” “If I had Legs I’d Kick You,” “Zootopia 2,” “Arco,” “Weapons,” and “F1.” Again, these aren’t all necessarily bad movies. Some of them are. Some of them, like “Weapons,” are actually pretty good. And all of them are technically sophisticated filmmaking. They’re all “well made” from a technical perspective. But most people haven’t heard of about 90% of them. It’s not just that most people haven’t seen them. Most people don’t know they exist. And we certainly won’t be talking about any of these films in 20 years. They’ll be forgotten because we’re all watching different things, and there are so many choices, such an infinite array of options all the time, that no particular piece of content can remain in our consciousness for very long. That’s why ratings are down, by the way.  This is from The Hollywood Reporter: Sunday’s 98th Academy Awards drew 17.86 million viewers on ABC and Hulu, based on Nielsen’s big data plus panel ratings. That’s down about 9 percent from last year’s Oscars, which drew 19.69 million viewers for a post-pandemic high, and the smallest audience for the awards since 2022, when 16.68 million people watched. The show delivered a 3.92 rating among adults 18-49 (equivalent to about 5.34 million people in that age group), a 14 percent decline from last year. So they dropped 14% in the key demographic, and that’s including streaming numbers. They tried to boost the numbers as much as they could, and it’s still a big drop. Unless some kind of stunt is involved — say, someone gets slapped on stage, they announce the wrong “Best Picture” winner — then there’s basically no one who even pretends to care about the Academy Awards anymore. For comparison, the Oscars had around 45 million views in 1996, the year “Braveheart” won. And they had more than 34 million viewers in 2016, just a decade ago. Now they’re down to 18 million, including a streaming audience, which mostly isn’t paying attention. Is “Braveheart” a better movie than the ones that were nominated this year? I think it certainly was, yes. But this isn’t just about it being a better movie. The point is that “Braveheart” was a cultural phenomenon in a way that no Oscar movie today is, or ever could be. The proliferation of streaming and the internet generally has destroyed the communal experience of movie watching so much that it’s almost impossible for any film to be enjoyed, known, and loved by a majority of Americans. None of them can imprint themselves onto the zeitgeist the way that films of the 90s did.  And yes, it’s easy to point out that the Oscars implemented DEI, and they won’t give awards to productions that aren’t “diverse” in some way. That’s obviously a problem. But even without that handicap, these numbers probably wouldn’t be much better. I’m not going to wax poetic about the Blockbuster days, but the fact is, a lot of people are starting to think about how things were different back then. I saw a post on X saying that this is a trailer for one of the most popular indie video games right now. It’s a game where you play as a clerk at a video store like Blockbuster. Two indie devs made a game where you run your own video store in the early 90s. It’s currently the #5 top-selling game on Steam. – Rent out VHS tapes & manage customers – Charge Late & Broken Fees – Upgrade & customise your store It’s called Retro Rewind – Video Store Simulator pic.twitter.com/LIrpX4QI9M — Indie Game Joe (@IndieGameJoe) March 17, 2026 Source: @IndieGameJoe/X.com You just stand behind the desk, hand out the movies, make sure people hit the “rewind” button, and so on. That’s what passes for entertainment today, apparently. So the video game industry is in even worse shape than I thought. But actually, there’s a reason that game is so popular. People are nostalgic for the pre-smartphone, pre-streaming era. It used to be that, if you wanted to watch a movie, you had to make a commitment. You had to plan your night around it. You had to physically drive to a store, scan the shelves, do some research yourself, talk to the clerk, and bring it home. It was an experience. There was a sense of community in it. And then you would take the movie home — just the one, or maybe a couple — and you’d watch the movie you rented. Actually sit and watch it, with no other screens distracting you. If you liked it, maybe you’d watch it again the next night. And then you’d return it. Or you wouldn’t return it, and you’d rack up late fees until you had to go get a membership at the Blockbuster across town under a fake name. But either way, the experience was very different. It was a different experience because watching a film was an experience in a way that it isn’t today. By contrast, as Matt Damon recently pointed out, modern streaming services have a very different audience. Their audience puts zero effort into finding a show to watch. They just throw it on the screen while they scroll through TikTok on their phones. And the streaming companies realize that. So they have to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator. Watch: Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on Rogan taking about how Netflix has changed filmmaking. “you re-iterate the plot 3-4x in the dialogue because people are on their phones.” pic.twitter.com/YxybQJQubE — cinesthetic. (@TheCinesthetic) January 17, 2026 Source: @TheCinesthetic/X.com It’s not just that the writing has become more repetitive, formulaic, and dumbed down. The other issue is that, in more and more cases, these shows are basically being generated by a computer. You have AI writing the scripts, and you have computers generating all of the scenery. That’s one reason why, in Los Angeles, the number of film shoots has plummeted to COVID levels. This is from the Hollywood Reporter, once again: FilmLA Quarterly Reports You can see the graph there. It certainly looks like the entertainment industry is in free-fall. And if you watch enough streaming shows, you’ll quickly realize what’s going on. No one’s actually going outside and filming anymore, because computers can do it all by themselves. Consider this viral scene from the film “Carry-On,” which streams on Netflix. It’s a movie about a TSA agent who’s blackmailed into letting a nerve agent onboard a plane. I actually watched this thing, for some reason, and I can report that it is the dumbest movie ever made. But in any event, here’s the big obligatory action sequence.  Watch: Source: Computer/YouTube.com Some people with shockingly low standards praised this scene, because it’s one of those “single take” sequences that isn’t actually a single take. Really, it’s completely unconvincing in every way. You can tell that these people aren’t really in a car. There’s no sense of physics, momentum, or plausibility. They look like they’re in front of green screens, because that’s exactly what’s happening. They had more convincing, and more authentic, car chases in the 1960s. Films like “Bullitt” were much more interesting and watchable than whatever this is. In 2005, before the streaming era, the budget didn’t go entirely to CGI. It went to scenes like this one. Season 1 of Rome (2005) cost $100 million, making it the most expensive show of its time. The crew built a five-acre replica of the Roman Forum at Cinecittà Studios using real marble to ensure the city felt authentic rather than like a movie set. pic.twitter.com/rDh7HwhdiW — Best Movie Moments

Taylor Frankie Paul’s season of “The Bachelorette” has been canceled by ABC following the release of videos of her allegedly engaging in domestic abuse with her partner, per TMZ. A Disney Entertainment spokesperson told the outlet, “In light of the newly released video just surfaced today, we have made the decision to not move forward with the new season of ‘The Bachelorette’ at this time, and our focus is on supporting the family.” The decision was made shortly after TMZ published a video of Paul getting into a physical altercation with Dakota Mortensen, the father of her child, Ever.

We’re living in the middle of a gigantic online op. It is an op designed to suck young men dry and leave them broken and stupid. It makes their lives actively worse. That op is called the manosphere, and it’s time to wake up to their matrix of evil. Men without proper guideposts and durable moral institutions are being ushered into a world of stupidity and immorality by grifters and liars who traffic in lies, spiritual emptiness, and outright grift, who tell them they can be rich, famous, and have hot women hanging on their every word, lavishing their attention on you, demanding nothing from you in return. All you have to do to get all of this is give the manosphere your money, your brain, and your soul. All these folks are running the same scheme. Here’s how it works. First, they tell young men that they are failing at life. Second, they tell the young men the reason they are failing at life is not because of anything they’re doing, per se, but because of the matrix, a system of power that’s out to get them. That system is what is depriving them of women, of money, of social mobility. Third, these men act transgressively and provocatively. They violate all social stigmas and then magically seem to achieve all of the things the matrix has placed off limits to young men. Fourth, they inform these young men that they, too, can have all of these wonderful things: the hot women and the nice cars and the big houses — if only they join a fake university or some B.S. stock trading app, or donate money to the Kick stream. Finally, they tell young men that anyone who says differently is part of the matrix. If any of this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s basically cult recruitment tactics, just made viral online. Cults typically target people who are suffering from a life crisis. They target the vulnerable, and then they love bomb those people, saying, “You’re with us. We understand you.” They offer the most obvious critiques of the world: the unfairness of life, the impossibility of overcoming challenges. And then they say, “You know, the way out of that is the cult.” Cults encourage recruits to cut out all contrary information, and cults tell these people that people who oppose the cults are actually members of some nefarious outside force. They contend that if you join the cult, you are saved or enlightened or awake, and everyone else is a suppressive evildoer. This stuff is seductive — and dangerous, because it also tells young men things that are not true, such as “women are disgusting and perverse,” but also simultaneously that women are “shamelessly available and completely pliant” if you just crack the code. It says you can achieve wealth and fame, not over time by building a business, but instantaneously, this moment, simply by seeing through the matrix and eschewing the 9-to-5 hard job in favor of a get-rich-quick scam. And, if you fail, it’s because of the matrix. You just need to give them more money. That matrix, by the way, is just code for the Jews. Tapping into the antisemitism allows them to seem both transgressive and also illuminating. Which is why we have tons of clips of these “manosphere” influencers singing Ye’s “Heil Hitler” just a couple of months ago. None of this is new. You want to know what women want? I speak as a man who’s been married for nearly 20 years and has four children with a fifth on the way. Women want men who actually love and protect and cherish and defend them. It’s not all that difficult, by the way. That is the definition of manhood. The definition of true manhood is to love, protect, cherish, defend, and provide for your wife and for your family. That definition of what a man should be is also a great definition of how to be a happy human being. You know what women don’t want? Scumbags who tell them to clean up their rooms while maintaining a harem. That’s intellectual pornography for morons.

While the Iranian regime continues to attack the United States — either directly or through proxy terrorist organizations — some of the regime’s leaders have sent their own children to the United States, and a number have made themselves at home at American universities. The New York Post shared a list of several prominent Iranian leaders who have children teaching at universities in the United States — and although the report noted that none of those employed in the United States have been linked to any nefarious activity, allowing people with such close ties to regime leadership to teach American students could eventually present a risk. Janatan Sayeh, an Iran analyst at Washington, D.C.-based think tank the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, explained: “I would think that there would be a security risk as Iranian academics have been critical in forming public opinion on the left in the US, essentially deceiving liberals into thinking that the regime is more progressive, when it’s still advancing the same hardline agenda.” Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, for example, initially came to the United States for cancer treatment. A medical doctor who worked at Emory University in Atlanta until January, she is also the daughter of Ali Larijani — an Iranian leader who was killed in an airstrike on Tuesday. Lawdan Bazargan, with the Alliance Against Islamic Regime of Iran Apologists, noted the irony of Ardeshir-Larijani’s presence in the United States — especially given who her father was. “The daughter of Ali Larijani came to the United States for cancer treatment, the very country her family’s system condemns, while millions of Iranians are denied access to basic health care and opportunity.” Larijani’s employment at Emory University was terminated in January, amid protests calling for her to be fired, deported, or both. Her dismissal came just weeks after her father was sanctioned by the United States Treasury Department “for coordinating the response to the protests on behalf of the Supreme Leader of Iran” and because he “has publicly called for Iranian security forces to use force to repress peaceful protesters.” Leila Khatami, the daughter of former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, teaches math at Schenectady’s Union College. Her ties to the regime run even deeper, as her aunt was the granddaughter of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who claimed the title of Supreme Leader from 1979 until he died in 1989. Khatami’s photo and bio were removed from Union’s faculty website after the United States and Israel began their joint campaign against the Iranian regime. The page listing her as a professor of mathematics shows only her name and title. According to the Post’s report, thousands of children of Iranian elites are currently living in the United States.