Andrew Clavin dissects Trump’s political persona, mocking Jeb Bush’s campaign tactics and Rand Paul’s withdrawal while dismissing media polls as unreliable. He contrasts capitalism’s innovation with socialism’s stagnation, then critiques Trump’s profanity-laced rhetoric and Russia collaboration talk as hollow masculinity. Clavin defines true manhood through integrity—praised in Sanders, lacking in Trump—before pivoting to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, where Kenneth Branagh’s Catholic-infused adaptation reveals love and deception’s interplay. The episode ends by framing art as a counterpoint to modern political noise. [Automatically generated summary]
With the Iowa caucuses behind us, it's time to take a look at the two great contests looming ahead, the New Hampshire primaries and the Super Bowl.
Let's take a look at the similarities.
In the Super Bowl, one of the game's greatest quarterbacks, past his prime, will try to see whether courage, heart, and class can lift him to the level of a brash young newcomer with all the talent in the world.
In the New Hampshire primary, a corrupt, power-hungry old crone will try to see whether she can lie and cheat her way past an ancient socialist trying to sell an outdated economic philosophy to people too ignorant to know that it's failed everywhere it's been tried.
So that's not really all that similar.
On the other hand, in the Super Bowl, the strongest defense in the game will test whether it can outflank the highest scoring offense that has a flexible attack both on the ground and in the air.
In the New Hampshire primaries, a staunch conservative of Cuban descent will go head-to-head with a staunch conservative of Cuban descent to determine which is the staunch conservative of Cuban descent who's best for people who like staunch conservatives of Cuban descent.
So again, I'm not entirely sure where the comparison is.
Finally, in the NFL, we have an entity that has repeatedly been plagued by cruelty, thuggishness, stupidity, mistreatment of women, and corruption.
In the New Hampshire primary, there's Donald Trump.
Bingo.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
All right.
It's some kind of comparison.
Something's the same.
All right, a lot of craziness out there.
I mean, first the news.
The news is Senator Rand Paul has dropped out of the race.
He said he wanted to continue, but he was just too insane.
He said, I like my constitutional libertarianism, but the fact that my isolationism would get us all killed sort of cancels that out.
Because what good is the Constitution if everybody dies?
That doesn't really make any sense.
And then Jeb Bush, Jeb Exclamation Point Bush has called his mother, Barbara Bush, to come and help him campaign in New Hampshire.
I think we have video of that, actually.
I have to call my mommy.
Your mommy?
Yeah, I'll just use the phone for a short time, okay?
A short time.
A short time.
Okay, well, seeing as it's your mother, go ahead.
Oh, but make sure you make it a short call.
Oh, I promise.
Okay.
Short time.
Okay.
Because I'm expecting a very important phone call myself.
Just make it short.
Hello, mommy.
I think that's where the exclamation point comes in, after the mommy.
All kinds of, everything today just seems a little bit nutty.
And on Twitter, there were not one.
There were like a few guys accusing me.
They were saying that Ben Shapiro is only supporting Ted Cruz because he's been hanging out with Andrew Clavin.
And I thought, wait, wait, now it's my fault, Ben is a conservative.
I went and I like carved the Bernie Sanders bumper sticker off his car.
I said, Ben, you've just got to stop singing the old red flag.
It's like the workers of the world thing is not going to work.
It's like, I made Shapiro a conservative, as if.
It's like ignorance.
I think when you're in this cloud of ignorance, people just start saying stuff, which is kind of where we are.
We're now going into New Hampshire.
I was watching TV.
I don't get to watch the TV news all that often, but yesterday I watched a little bit of O'Reilly and a little bit of Megan Kelly.
And O'Reilly, man, O'Reilly plugs himself a lot.
You know, he has letters.
He has a letter segment of his show.
And the letters are all like, dear Bill, I love your book.
Where can I get a copy of it?
And you go, really?
Really?
You know, like, has nobody said, you know, what's happening in New Hampshire?
Or I don't like your take on this or that.
It's no, like, where, you know, I love your books.
Where can I, I'm glad you asked me that question, you know, Sam.
Just a little too much.
But anyway, not to, you know, riff on Bill O'Reilly.
He's doing, obviously, he's doing God's work, but I'm listening to them.
And he's saying, yeah, Trump is going to win in New Hampshire.
Trump is going to win, because Trump is over 20 points ahead in the polls.
And Megan Kelly sort of said the same thing.
She was a little bit more circumspect.
And I was thinking, you know, I told you before with Iowa. that the polls didn't mean anything at the point that we were talking about them because something like 46% of Iowans made up their mind at the last minute.
And this is now in New Hampshire.
It's like 60%.
60% of people haven't made up their minds.
Just as a question of mathematics, that makes the polls useless because we don't know what that 60% is thinking.
We just don't know.
And it's not that the polls are being done badly.
It's that the facts aren't there.
They're reporting a story that hasn't happened yet.
So you can't report the future.
I mean, you can't report on something that hasn't been, the people in their own minds haven't made up the decision.
And I keep having the same conversation with people.
They keep saying, yes, but every poll puts Trump ahead.
And you think like, yes, but five times zero is zero.
If you have five polls, each one of which is meaningless, they're all meaningless together.
And then the other thing they say to you is, yes, but he's so far ahead in these meaningless polls.
I'm not sure you're getting the whole meaningless point, the point of what meaningless means.
It means meaningless.
It's interesting to watch.
I mean, one of the great pillars of Western civilization, obviously, is Plato and Socrates.
Socrates, a character essentially invented by Plato.
And the great story of Socrates, the reason he's one of the pillars of Western societies, is the story where one of his friends goes to the Delphi oracle, the oracle of Delphi, who speaks for the God Apollo and says, who's the wisest man alive?
And she says, speaking for the God Apollo, she says, there's no man wiser than Socrates.
And Socrates goes, what?
You know, I'm not, I don't, not wise.
I don't know anything.
And so Socrates goes to all the people in Athens and asks them what they know.
And the first guy he goes to is somebody who's renowned for wisdom, and he finds out he's not very wise.
And then he goes to artisans, people who make things.
And what he finds out about them is that they're really smart about what they do.
They know how to make what they do.
But because of that, they think they're smart about things that they don't know anything about.
And so they're really dumb.
And I run into this with, in this business, you meet a lot of very wealthy people who sort of fund things.
And they think that because they made a living, they made a billion dollars selling one thing.
They think they now know everything.
Michael Bloomberg is like that.
He thinks he knows everything.
He figures if I don't know everything, why am I so rich?
So Socrates finds out, no, no, no, that's not true.
And then he goes to the politicians.
They don't know anything, goes to the poets.
And finally, what he realizes is there's no man wiser than Socrates because only Socrates realizes that he's not wise.
He's the only one who knows that he knows nothing.
And that, when you look for that on the news, you're not finding that at all because here we are in this moment when we know nothing.
We know nothing about what's going to happen in New Hampshire, literally.
I have this feeling, you know, this kind of gut feeling that Rubio is going to surprise everybody.
It would surprise Rubio, I think, if he won.
I don't think he's actually playing to win.
I think he's playing to just do well.
But I kind of think that this Trump thing is about to collapse.
I just have a feeling about this, and it's not a prediction, just kind of a gut feeling.
But I don't know anything.
And so when you listen to these people, when you're in a state of ignorance, remember the Christmas carol when the ghost says, this girl is ignorant.
No, this boy is ignorance.
This girl is want.
Competition's Common Good00:04:07
Beware them both.
But most of all, beware this boy.
Most of all, beware ignorance, because when you're ignorant, you start to, and by ignorant, I mean not knowing anything.
I don't mean stupid.
I mean, you just don't know stuff.
You start to listen for things that sound right.
You start to follow phantoms and you start to follow noises.
And I think that is really what is happening as we come to New Hampshire.
I mean, I was looking at some of the Iowa stats, you know, the Iowa poll numbers and all this stuff.
And Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire got 70 points more of the young, the youth vote than Hillary Clinton.
So the youth like flocked to Bernie Sanders.
And that makes sense because Bernie Sanders is selling socialism.
And young people do not know that socialism has failed everywhere.
And they look around and they see things.
They say, well, Sweden, Sweden is great.
You know, what about Sweden?
Sweden's wonderful.
Socialism works in a small, contained country that is all people of the same race.
So they all have the same standards and culture.
They all believe in the same things.
They're all responsible to the same ideas.
Everybody wants to work hard.
Everybody is down with the socialism.
You're sharing with people who look just like you, who think just like you, and talk just like you.
And you don't need an army.
Why?
Because the big capitalist monster country, America, has an army that protects you.
So you don't have to spend money.
And you can have socialized health care.
Why?
Because Americans are paying so much for health care that the drug companies use our money to do research and development.
So they develop new drugs on our cash.
And everybody in Sweden is thinking, hey, great, new medicine.
This is wonderful.
This socialized healthcare is great.
European socialism is funded by American capitalism.
European socialism is an illusion.
And even so, even so, socialism takes 70 years to destroy a country, destroy a culture.
It takes 70 years, one lifetime.
You get to spend everybody, all your ancestors' money in one lifetime.
From the time you're born to the time you die, you've spent all your ancestors' money, then your country collapses.
If European countries are still somewhat viable financially, and it's very dicey that they are, if they are, they are still losing the competitive edge and the virility and the power that capitalism provides because capitalism, you know, people don't like capitalism because of all the competition, this raw competition.
But competition is a magic machine for turning self-interest into the common good.
I want stuff, and in order to do stuff, in order to get the stuff I want, I have to make something that you want.
And I have to make it better than the guy next to me.
It turns my self-interest, the competition machine, I put my self-interest into the competition machine, and it comes out as good for you.
And the reason for that is because you have free choice.
It's not like socialism where Barack Obama says, I'm going to take your money and I'm going to give it to this solar company because I like them and they gave money to my, you know, and then it crashes and your money is gone and you never had a choice.
You get to choose and that means my self-interest becomes your good.
So capitalism looks ugly.
It looks mean because there's a lot of greed and self-interest and people with smoking big cigars and looking nasty and all that stuff.
But it actually serves you.
That's why you have an iPhone.
You have an iPhone because somebody said, you know, this phone is going to sell more than that phone.
Steve Jobs said, you know, if I do this, this, and this, we will make more money.
And so it turned his self-interest into your good.
And that's why, you know, and that's why socialism fails.
Socialism bleeds that virility.
I mean, there's no other word for it.
It bleeds that power, that competition, that self-interest translated into the common good.
It bleeds it out of a society.
And you have these dead societies like you have in Europe.
I mean, what is coming out of Sweden that you are in a big hurry to buy?
What Swiss product are you standing online for out of Best Buy?
Zero, none.
Socialism sounds like fairness.
It sounds like fairness.
It's the noise of fairness, but it's not really fairness.
And in this cloud of ignorance that these kids are in, they follow that sound.
Sound of Strength00:15:37
The same thing is happening on the right with Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has the sound of conservatism.
He sounds like a conservatism.
You know, one of the things that the polls showed is that conservatives voted for Ted Cruz.
Moderate conservatives voted for Marco Rubio.
And Marco Rubio is pretty conservative, no matter what anybody says.
You know, remember, he was a Tea Party candidate.
He's a conservative guy.
Moderate conservatives went for Rubio.
Moderates, moderates, people in the middle, went for Donald Trump.
And that makes a certain amount of sense because Trump is a guy who is promising what every Democrat promises.
He's promising he's not going to cut any entitlements.
Rubio is making noises.
Rubio says, I'm not going to do anything to hurt my mother.
That's Rubio's line.
I'm not going to do anything to hurt my mother.
But that means he's going to do what Paul Ryan has said we have to do, is he's going to cut entitlements down the road.
Trump is promising, you know, I'm going to, it's going to be great.
You'll have huge entitlements, huge entitlements.
Listen, he made a speech after his defeat in Iowa where he's trying to come back because he feels a little humiliated.
The press, he's angry because the press is saying, oh, that was a loss for you, but Marco Rubio's third place finish was a win for him, which is literally true because Marco Rubio was gathering people to him and people were bailing on Trump.
And so it was a win for Rubio and a loss for Trump.
So Trump tries to come back and he makes this speech in New Hampshire.
Listen to this.
If we are attacked, somebody attacks us, wouldn't you rather have Trump as president if we're attacked?
Oh, we'll beat the shit out of them.
Anybody attacks us.
You know, interestingly, speaking of potential, because he hates Obama so much, Putin, he said, Donald Trump is a genius, and he's the real leader over in that country.
And these people that I'm negotiating with all the time, these people on the stage with me, they said, you should disavow what Putin of Russia said.
I said, I'm not disavowing that he called me a genius.
Are you crazy?
Don't worry.
I can't be seduced.
But wouldn't it be nice, if you think about it, wouldn't it be nice if we actually got along with Russia and others and we can use them to knock out ISIS with us so that maybe we don't always have to pay for it, knock the hell out of them, but let them drop some of their bombs that cost a million dollars apiece.
Let them use some of their weapons that cost billions and billions of dollars.
Let them beat the shit out of ISIS also.
Right?
Right?
So crazy.
So first of all, what a bore.
I mean, just to reiterate this, this is one of the worst things about Trump.
I'm not a prig.
I understand sometimes we use language.
Sometimes we use four-letter words and all this stuff.
Little rule of thumb, if you're standing in a podium wearing a tie, that's probably not the time.
It's not like, you know, if you go to a comedy club, you expect to hear these guys say what they say.
You know what you're signing on for.
That's why you're there.
He doesn't know who's in that audience.
I mean, there may actually be ladies in that audience who still have standards.
I know they can be hard to find, but they may be there.
They're probably not at a Trump rally.
Okay, but still, they might be.
It's like, so what a bore.
But that's not the thing.
What he just said is really stupid.
I mean, yesterday, the Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, made a list of the biggest threats to us.
Who's at the top of the list?
Russia.
Who told us that was going to happen?
Mitt Romney.
Remember when they were making fun when Obama was saying the 1980s want their foreign policy pact?
Ha ha ha.
And then Hillary Clinton went to press the reset button with Russia.
Now Ashton Carter is telling us Russia is our biggest threat, our biggest threat, even more than ISIS.
Why?
Because Russia is violating borders.
It's annexed the Crimea.
It's gone into the Ukraine.
It's built missile defenses that now make it hard for us to fly in the airspace over Poland and Europe.
I mean, imagine if we can't defend Europe, their socialism is going to stop working in a big, big hurry if they have to build an air force that's going to defend them from Putin.
So what he's saying is, why can't we be friends?
Why can't we be friends with Putin and let him?
The only reason Putin is strong is because Obama is weak.
Putin is broke.
He's got no money.
So if anybody stood up to him, his armies would collapse.
He wouldn't be able to pay for the armies he needs to do the bad, evil stuff he's doing.
He's only strong because Obama is weak.
If the United States says, oh yeah, you know, join us, become our ally, help us bomb ISIS, he just gets stronger.
He just gets stronger.
So what you are hearing in Trump, and he does it on purpose, and the reason he's using that language, you're hearing the sound of manhood.
You're hearing the sound of strength.
You know, you're hearing a noise that sounds like the guy who's going to do something.
Wouldn't you rather have Trump as president?
No, because he doesn't know what he's talking about.
And even, you know, a four-letter word isn't going to kill ISIS any more than a good strategy, any more than a smart strategy.
So we're talking about this idea of virility, which is really a tough idea to deal with.
And one of the reasons it's a hard idea to deal with, I wrote about this in a novel called Man and Wife, is that one of the first tenets of manhood is that you don't talk about manhood.
It's like fight club.
You know, a guy who sits around and talks about what a man is has probably got a problem.
Okay?
So when I'm talking about this, I'm using a little bit of my old guy prerogative because old guys have nothing to prove.
They've been there, they've done it, they've seen it.
I got nothing to prove.
So I'm going to use my old guy prerogative to talk about this subject just a little bit, okay?
Because when you listen to Trump, that's what he's playing on, and that's what he's hearing.
You know, show that picture of him with what's his name, Al Sharpton, right?
I'm getting all these attacks from white supremacists because I'm after Trump.
Trump gives you the sound of white supremacy, but he's no more a white supremacist than I am, I have to say.
He may be a racist, but he's not, you know, so he's just, this is an illusion.
So this is the sound of virility.
Now, why is this important?
Here's a columnist, Iben Threnholm.
She's a popular female Danish columnist, who wrote a story that after these attacks that Muslim men are making, these immigrant Muslims are making on European women, especially in Germany, right?
Actually, it's all over the place.
It's in Britain too.
She wrote this column that said, what we need is less Angela Merkel, the head of Germany, and more manhood.
We need more tough men, strong men.
She writes, pundits and politicians assure the public that refugee males now storming the gates of Europe from the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Central Asia will be required to learn that Western women are independent and sexually liberated.
Such arguments, however, are obviously too weak to have any impact on the male cultures representative of certain refugee groups.
To these individuals, these Muslims, strong European women are easy and easy victims.
They have respect only for strong men, and strong men aren't exactly thick on the ground in Europe.
The deficiency of masculinity in European culture renders it impotent in the face of the political and cultural chaos that has escalated along with growing immigration.
Instead of a single-minded focus on imposing liberal feminist values on Muslim males, it might well be much more beneficial for Europeans to consider if the feminist war on masculinity might be the underlying cause of the weakness of European culture, feeble and defenseless as it is, against the culture of immigrants and refugees.
The irony is that the vacuum feminism has created means that women become victims of an aggressive male culture.
Get rid of strong men and women are victims to the next, because strong men don't go away, right?
They just come from someplace else and take the place that weak men have vacated.
That's socialism.
Socialism gets you to that place.
It takes the edge off men.
You know, it takes the edge off competition.
It takes the edge off that fever.
If you look at businesses, look at every business.
Almost every business.
I won't overgeneralize, but most businesses are started by men, built by men, and then women come along and say, it's not fair that we don't have a place in this business.
And this is, you want to call me sexist?
Please knock yourself out.
Step in line.
When you see women taking over a business, it means that business has reached its peak.
When you see women becoming new TV news column, TV news anchors, it's because TV news has become irrelevant.
TV news is not where people get their news anymore.
So if you want to put a woman in there, fine.
But these businesses, when you want to see where the future is going, it's going where the men are going.
And if the men are going down the drain, that's where the future is going.
It's actually just kind of a mathematical thing.
It's just this men, young men have so much energy.
Young men have so much stuff going on.
They're going to do stuff that if they're savages, tomorrow will be savagery.
If they're civilized, tomorrow will be civilized.
If they're weak, tomorrow, strong men are going to come in and replace them.
It's just simple mathematics, all right?
So the other day on HBO, there is this feminist comedian being featured, Whitney Cummings, and she has a show called I'm Your Girlfriend.
And I watch it.
I didn't watch the whole thing, but I watched a lot of it.
And she's amusing.
I would say, you know, give her a six out of a ten.
She's kind of funny.
And I like watching these things because I'm watching somebody I disagree with make her case in a pleasant way.
And I like watching people I disagree with because it makes me think about things.
You know, I don't just sit there and nod.
So take a look at this cut of what she says about herself.
And just take a look.
This is feminist culture kind of writ large and written in a very attractive way.
She's a good-looking person and she's obviously funny.
So let's take a look at the first one.
I'm the worst.
I'm loud.
I'm obnoxious.
I'm bossy.
You know, but I think I got confused about what guys like.
Because do you remember there was a rumor going around for a while that men like strong women?
People would say that.
They'd be like, men like strong women.
Men like independent, strong women.
Yeah, no, they don't.
Okay, I've seen porn.
Men like Asian schoolgirls with duct tape over their mouths.
That's what men like.
Literally, in porn, they have categories you can pick from.
There's a menu on the side.
It's like girl on girl, college girls.
There's no CEO.
All right, very funny.
But, but, and I'm not taking away from, I know she's making jokes and all that stuff, but there's an underlying argument there.
First of all, there's this argument that men are somehow obligated to like her, that she's this annoying.
She says she's bossy, she's annoying.
Why would anybody like her?
I don't like men like that, frankly.
You know, I mean, so what, you know, men have no obligation to like what they don't like.
This idea that, you know, men like strong women was an idea that was imposed on us.
And the idea of strength is a stupid idea.
So here's the thing that she's saying that's ridiculous, okay?
She's saying men like, you know, she goes on to say after this, that what men like is little girlish girls who are too weak and can't do anything.
That's nonsense.
That is nonsense.
A lot of nonsense about what men are, this whole thing that all men are thinking about is sex.
I mean, my wife says this.
My wife says men are easy.
All you have to do, your husbands are easy.
She says, all you have to do is feed them and give them sex and they'll be happy.
Now, that's because she's been living with me all this time.
She's got a very limited view of what men are.
I'm a simple soul, you know.
But in general, and more seriously, what men are looking for is not weakness.
They're not looking for weakness in women.
They're looking for tenderness.
They're looking for generosity.
If men wanted to live with nasty, selfish, brute people, they'd live with other men.
They're looking for something a little bit soft.
Now, that means that a woman to be that kind of person, to be tender, to be soft, to be generous, you have to be vulnerable.
You have to be a little soft.
And so, the trade-off is that men say, Yes, we are willing to protect that.
We're willing to support that.
We're willing to stand up for that, to have that in our lives, because it makes life not only our lives better, it makes the world better.
It makes the world better when women are like that and when women behave like that.
So, everything she says is based on a false premise of what, whether it's about strength.
Look, I know women who are plenty strong, plenty strong, but they're not brash, they're not nasty, they're just strong.
You know, they just stand for what they stand for.
So, now she goes on to say, play the second cut: It's the 21st century.
I don't need an alpha male to protect me.
I don't need a big, strong man to fight off a tiger.
I need a geek who can get my naked photos off the cloud again.
Funny line: I need a geek who can get my negative photos off the cloud.
But that idea is not working out so well, it's not working out so well for the women in Europe.
You know, you get rid of strong men, and other strong men come in to replace them who are not nice.
The thing about manhood, now using my old guy prerogative, the thing about manhood is it's not a moral quality.
There are men who are men who are bad men.
Manhood is composed of exactly two items and two items only: it's composed of courage and integrity.
And those are two traits that actually are not moral traits.
Courage is a virtue that has no moral foundation.
Hitler had courage.
Hitler was a courageous soldier in World War I. He's a bad guy.
If he had less courage, the world would have been a better place.
But he had courage.
But without courage, no other moral value is possible.
You cannot have them because people will try, the world is not a moral place.
People will try and get you to behave in a bad way.
Only courage stops you from going down the bad road.
If you are a moral person, you've got to have courage to keep that morality alive.
And the second part is integrity.
And integrity, you know, it comes from the same root as integrated or the number, integer.
Integer is a whole number.
Integrity means being whole.
It means that all your parts are one.
You are what you say you are.
You are what you seem to be.
And a man who has courage and integrity is a man.
He may not be a good man.
He may not be a good man.
Bernie Sanders, I think, has integrity in that his philosophy is truly his philosophy.
He is what he says he is.
He doesn't pretend he's not a socialist like Barack Obama.
He says, I'm a socialist.
He has integrity.
And he has the courage to stand up and say it.
He's a manly guy, in my opinion.
He's just wrong.
He's just wrong.
I don't disrespect him, except for his ideas.
His ideas are kooky, and he hasn't been paying attention to history, to real history.
He's only been paying attention to an idea.
So I don't respect that about him.
But as a person, I have no problem with him.
As a man, I have no problem with him.
So what we're looking for is a good man.
We're looking for a good man, a man who has courage and integrity and is at least trying to do the right thing.
He doesn't have to be a saint.
He doesn't have to be an angel.
He doesn't have to be nice.
He doesn't have to be nice.
Trump is none of those things.
Trump just has that sound, that sound.
Because a man who has courage and integrity will state things baldly and directly.
He doesn't have to state them profanely, but he will state them baldly and directly.
And so he has that sound of manhood.
And in our ignorance, in this moment of this cloud of ignorance that we're passing through, he sounds like something that he's not.
And so does Bernie Sanders.
He sounds like he's being fair and he's not.
And of course, Hillary Clinton sounds like exactly what she is.
A lying, brazen, power-hungry, crazy person.
Somebody said, by the way, I pointed out that when she made that victory speech, putative victory speech in Iowa, she had these big eyes.
She looked afraid that some, like the walking dead, were coming up behind her.
Somebody said to me, that's because there was a sexual predator standing behind her, her husband.
Shakespeare's Truth Revealed00:05:20
Anyway, Valentine's stuff I like, okay?
Now, I said, yeah, I said earlier that Shakespeare dissed love a lot, and that is true, but he did write some great love stories.
I kind of put aside Romeo and Juliet because it's kind of a parody of the love story almost.
However, the thing I want to talk about about Shakespeare for just a minute is Shakespeare is almost universally regarded among scholars as being a secular playwright.
And this, I believe, is entirely wrong.
I think Shakespeare is a religious Catholic Christian playwright down to the ground.
And when you really read his stories, stories like Hamlet, Hamlet is about the Reformation.
Hamlet is about what happens to truth, to our idea of truth, when the Catholic Church loses its monopoly on virtue.
That's what I think that play is about.
I think a lot of his plays are like this.
And I think the idea that he's a secular playwright is really important because it's part of this idea that modern professors had that in order to discuss the truth, you need to be secular because God puts a cap on where the truth is.
And that idea was so wrong that in the 60s, when people came along and challenged it and said, well, how do you know there's any truth at all?
Modernism collapsed.
And that's how we got to where we are.
Because if they had said, in order for there to be truth, there has to be an ultimate truth.
And so there is a God.
We have to discuss his nature.
We have to discuss what he's like.
We can discuss all this different stuff.
But if they had said that, they would have had a defense against the guys who came along and told us that there is no truth and one culture is just as good as another and Islam means peace and all the nonsense that we've been fed all this time.
So the play I want to recommend and I want to recommend a movie version of it is Much Ado About Nothing.
In 1993, Kenneth Branig made Much Ado About Nothing after he'd made Henry V. Those are my two favorite Shakespeare movies.
I think Brannig made the two greatest Shakespeare movies ever made.
And I'll show you why in a minute.
Much Ado About Nothing is about Beatrice and Benedict.
And the reason I bring that up is because they kind of hate each other and they spend the whole play jesting at each other and then of course they fall in love.
And Beatrice is a name that means one who blesses and Benedict is a name that means one who is blessed.
And so Shakespeare is talking about a relationship between God and man at the same time he's showing us a loving relationship.
And Brannig understood that.
And if you've watched the movie, it's filled with Christian symbolism that comes and goes according to how these two people are treating one another.
And it's really a brilliant movie.
It's also a very touching movie.
And it is also in keeping with our theme about how information works because it's all about false information versus true information and what you hear and what you see and what it really is and what you should have heard.
So here's a quick scene.
And I'll show you why it's so brilliant in a minute.
But here's a quick scene in which Benedict, they play a trick on Benedict.
They try to convince him that Beatrice is in love with him.
And she can't stand him.
And when he hears that, she's in love with him, he falls in love with her because now she's in love with him, so she must know something, right?
So this is the scene where he's just overheard them pretending that she's in love with him.
This can be no trick.
The conference was sadly born.
They have the truth of this from Hero.
Love me!
Why?
It must be requited.
I hear how I am censured.
They say I will bear myself proudly if I perceive the love come from her.
They say, too, that she will rather die than give any sign of affection.
I did never think to marry.
I must not seem proud.
Happy are they that hear their detractions and can put them to mending.
They say the lady is fair, tis a truth, I can bear the witness, and virtuous, tis so, I cannot reprove it, and wise.
But for loving me, by my truth, it is no addition to her wit, nor no great argument of her folly, for I will be horridly in love with her.
The thing I love about Kenneth Branagh is you can actually understand what he's saying.
You know, it's Shakespeare, but he makes it fair.
And here's just one thing I want to point out.
He comes out and he says, love me.
She loves me.
Why?
Which is very, you know, it's a funny line, right?
The actual punctuation in the Shakespeare play is, love me.
Why it must be requited.
Why, comma, it must be requited.
He puts a question mark in there.
It's a brilliant piece.
It's a brilliant piece of punctuation that changes everything and makes this great joke and gives you his character and all this stuff.
It's a lot more honest change of punctuation, use of punctuation than the exclamation point after Jeff.
Anyway, talking about stuff that only sounds like stuff and stuff that's the real thing.
Shakespeare is the real thing.
That is a great love story, a great movie.
Much ado about nothing.
You can understand what he's saying, even though they're talking Shakespeare talk and really worth watching.
That's it.
Tomorrow, it's already the last show of the week.
I know, it's just that rushes by because we're just so entertaining.