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Daily Wire host Andrew Klavan urged his male viewers to “find a woman who doesn’t need to be smacked around in order to behave in a civilized way,” asserting that many women who “wind up in the hospital” because of domestic violence are there because they “threw the first punch.”
A novelist and right-wing pundit who has likened Donald Trump to Godzilla, Klavan argued on Friday’s episode of his podcast that “there are certain things that might not be nice and might not be fair,” but that if you “don’t follow them – you die.” While stating this was “an important point in governance,” Klavan went on to insist this also is the case when it comes to romantic relationships between men and women.
“This is the kind of thing that I should never say out loud, but I’m gonna say it out loud,” he said in a segment first flagged by Media Matters. “A lot of the women who wind up in the hospital because they were beaten by their boyfriends or husbands threw the first punch. I don’t have the exact figures, but it’s a substantial number of women who got in a fight with their husbands and their boyfriends, and they threw a punch, the husband punched them back, and the woman is in the hospital.”
Grumbling about movies showing “girls beat up men and win sword fights,” a subject he’s been fixated on for years, Klavan said that “a woman punches a man, her hand breaks, and if he gets angry and he doesn’t restrain himself, he’s gonna punch her back.”
Calling this “the law of the jungle,” the Daily Wire host then suggested that many women only know how to act civilly under the threat of physical violence, encouraging his audience to steer away from those women when seeking relationships.
“Now, if you’re a person like me who loves women and wants to have a wonderful life with a wonderful woman and respect her and never raise a hard hand against her — never raise my voice to my wife because I’m so enamored of her — you have to find that woman,” he declared. “You have to find a woman who doesn’t need to be smacked around in order to behave in a civilized way, and that’s the way you do it.”
Telling his viewers to “avoid the women who don’t respect you,” Klavan stated that “if a woman hits her husband, he should never hit her back, but he will.” He added that she’ll “learn what it’s like to live with somebody who’s bigger, meaner, tougher, stronger than she is,” reiterating his belief that this “is the law of the jungle.”
Though Klavan recognized that this was “not right” and “not good,” he also gave credit to far-right misogynist social media personality Andrew Tate for having “some kind of panache with young people because he says this out loud, and nobody ever says it out loud.” Besides being a notorious “manosphere” influencer, Tate has been charged in Romania with rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women. He’s also facing civil and criminal cases in the United Kingdom related to sexual assault and harassment.
“That doesn’t create a responsibility in you to beat your wife,” Klavan concluded. “It creates responsibility in you to find a woman who will respect you so you can treat her as she deserves to be treated.”
Klavan has a history of making sexist remarks while dismissing allegations of sexual misconduct against conservatives. He’s claimed that “women cannot take care of themselves” and the “world with run fine” if “every woman in Congress went home.” Klavan’s also said that he doesn’t “care if Donald Trump pinched some model’s backside” and does not give “one rat’s hair about” sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.
