Ep. 99 mocks Obama’s foreign policy apologies—from Argentina to "Quranic slave states"—as hypocritical Judeo-Christian restraint, then pivots to Easter’s resurrection faith as the antidote to political detachment, contrasting it with Obama’s trivialization of terrorism (e.g., Brussels attacks) and economic naivety ("you didn’t build that"). The episode slams 2016’s presidential field—a communist, a felon (Clinton), and a fascist (Trump)—while praising Ted Cruz as the sole principled candidate, urging listeners to study Witness by ex-Soviet spy Whitaker Chambers, whose exposure of Alger Hiss reshaped Cold War ideology. The core argument: America’s decline stems from abandoning its founding ideas, not just bad optics. [Automatically generated summary]
A letter from the people of the United States to the nations of the world.
Dear nations of the world, you may have noticed a man traveling around your area apologizing for the actions of the United States of America.
Even though this man happens to be the President of the United States of America, we thought you should know that he does not speak for the people of the United States of America.
We the people do not apologize to you.
In fact, we the people think you should thank us.
In fact, we think you should kiss our collective butt in gratitude and appreciation for all we've done for you.
For instance, Argentina, the other day, President Obama apologized to you for our CIA.
Our CIA supported right-wing South American groups to try to keep communist groups from taking over your stinky, god-forsaken countries.
Obama apologized, but we, the people of the United States, do not apologize.
We, the people of the United States, say, you're welcome, knucklehead South Americans.
It really was nice of us to try to save you from your own tyrannical stupidity.
Believe me, if there had been any freedom-loving, good government types running around in your idiot jungles, we would have supported them instead of the right-wingers.
But there weren't.
You're bad.
We did what we could.
Nice of us, I know.
Don't mention it.
The same President Obama has even traveled around the Middle East apologizing to Quranic slave states for the behavior of the freest land in existence.
But we, the people of the United States, do not apologize.
We the people think you in the Middle East are heathen savages.
The only reason we haven't blasted you to atoms as you deserve is because we're constrained by our superior Judeo-Christian values.
We also think your headwear looks ridiculous and your beards are filthy.
And if your women had the brains God gave a goose, they'd be baptized en masse and then tell you fat creeps to keep your grubby hands to yourselves.
If that sounds anything like we apologize, we apologize because we don't apologize.
As far as we're concerned, we think you ought to pray to Allah that we conquer you so your crap countries can start to be run well and your people can be free.
Or you could pray to the real God, which might work better.
Meanwhile, the next time Obama bows to one of your foul and abusive sultans, imagine we, the people of the United States, planting our collective boot on his buttocks because he's not us, he doesn't represent us, and nothing he says is coming from us.
And to those countries Obama hasn't gotten around to apologizing to yet, we the people would just like to say, if you're free, enjoy your freedom on us because we preserved it for you by protecting you from your enemies.
That is, unless we gave it to you by shoving it down your backward slavery-loving throats.
If you're not free, then you're not worthy even to be talking to us.
Get free and then get back to us.
We still won't apologize, but at least you'll be fit to be in the same room with Americans.
Well, that's it from us here in the States.
Otherwise, we're having a wonderful time.
You wish you were here.
Love America.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I just thought they'd like to know, you know.
Thank you, people of the United States, for getting in touch.
All right, I hope you had a wonderful Easter.
We have a new ad from Hillsdale College, a new course.
We told you about their Constitution course, and I got a lot of letters telling me it was great.
I haven't had a chance to sample it yet, but I will.
But they also have a course in economics.
Now, a lot of times when people talk about economics, they sound like and that may be because you're talking to Chinese people.
But if you'd like to learn about economics in English, all you do is you need to take Economics 101 from Hillsdale University.
That's right.
Economics 101 from Hillsdale University.
It's a free course they or you can take right now when you go to hillsdale.edu slash Andrew.
Liberals would learn that the left's government-down economic policy is all wrong for America, or humans, and that the free market is the only thing that will save our economy.
Self-proclaimed conservatives will learn why big import tariffs and mass deportations will crumble our economy.
So get educated.
Sign up for Hillsdale College's Economics 101 for free at hillsdale.edu slash Andrew and get a new lesson every week right in your inbox from Hillsdale's professors.
Now, it said Hillsdale University, but it's a college, right?
We should change that in the copy.
But in either case, it sounds like a great course.
And economics is the one thing that nobody knows about that everybody should know about because it really affects them.
We're going to hear today, we're going to hear today that the one person who should be taking economics 101 from Hillsdale College is the president of the United States.
I have got some stuff to play today that is going to blow your head off.
I mean, this is not just Obama is like the least of what you're going to hear today.
And I know you haven't heard it because I went to the mainstream media, so you didn't have to.
And you can hear it here first.
Optics and Leadership00:10:11
So anyway, I had a, did everybody have a good Easter?
Yes?
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I had a great Easter.
It was really uplifting and inspiring.
And I read, you know, I'm reading this book by a Jesuit priest named, I think his name is James Martin.
And interestingly, I opened the Wall Street Journal.
I'm reading a book.
It's called Jesus a Pilgrimage.
And I opened the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, and they have that wonderful review section, best review section in the country, reviews books and arts and theaters on.
He had the lead story.
He had this big two-page story on why Easter hasn't become commercialized like Christmas has.
And I have my own theories about this, but his theory was that basically the belief in Easter, like anyone can be born.
So Christmas, anybody can celebrate Christmas.
But in order to celebrate Easter, you really have to believe this tremendous event, this incredible event of the resurrection.
And it just asks the question that we talk about, the Jacob Marley question, which I think is the most important question, where Jacob Marley's ghost shows up in a Christmas carol and he says, man of the worldly mind, do you believe in me or not?
And I think that this is the moment at Easter when we get asked this question.
And if you do believe, it changes everything.
And one of the things that it changes is it changes the political landscape from a Russian tragedy to a Russian comedy.
You know, Danny Kay, the comic actor, one of the most funniest men who ever lived, Danny Kaye, he used to say, you know, the Russians are very doer people and they write this very doer, you know, crime and punishment, that kind of thing.
And so he would say that a Russian tragedy, everybody dies.
In a Russian comedy, everybody dies, but they die happy.
And so when you believe in the resurrection, when you believe in the spirit, when you believe in God and the promises of the New Testament, it's still a tragedy.
Everybody still dies, but they die happy.
And the same thing is true when you watch this political landscape, because what we are seeing, this is a country some of you may remember.
If you look at your dollar bill, you see the guy with the funny hair on your dollar bill.
That's George Washington.
He was the first president of this country, one of the best people who ever lived.
Literally one of the best, you know, one of the most virtuous, decent people who ever lived.
And he was our first president.
And now we have Obama, which is not like, that's not like a slow downward progression.
That's like an anvil being dropped from an airplane.
Splat.
So now we have Obama as the president.
And we had this incredible, I mean, everybody running for president right now, with the possible exception of Ted Cruz, because I still have not heard a case against Ted Cruz.
I haven't heard anybody make a case against Ted Cruz that's stuck in any way.
But the rest of them running for president, I'm talking on the left and the right, and I have friends on the left and the right, and I'm embarrassed for them.
They're making excuses for Hillary Clinton.
You know, they're making excuses for this woman who sold her offices for gain.
She was the Secretary of State.
She sold interests in a uranian company that the Russians got hold of, something like 20% of our uranium.
When she was in the Senate, she sold business.
She sold business influence.
She got good bills for businesses if they gave money to her foundation.
All these, you know, if you're wondering why her emails were on that private server, it wasn't just for fun.
It was to hide the fact that she sells influence, you know?
And I listen to left-wingers making excuses for, and I just think you're better than this.
Even left-wingers are better than this, you know?
And then I look at Trump and I think the same thing with my friends on the right.
This guy, our president, we had George Washington, we had Abraham Lincoln, Donald Trump.
You've got to be kidding me.
But possibly the nadir of our presidency is Obama's last week.
And we had this terrible terrorist attack in Brussels.
And he's standing next to a communist dictator, Raul Castro, and he's teaching him to do the wave at the baseball game.
And then he goes to Argentina and he dances the tango.
And it's like complete, complete non-understanding of what he looks like.
Or maybe he doesn't care.
Maybe he doesn't care.
It may come down to that.
So I thought, well, what is the mainstream media, by which I mean the left-wing media, how are they covering for this guy?
What are they saying about this guy?
So I went on the PBS News Hour, and the PBS NewsHour is really a joke because they have a panel discussion and they debate the left and the right.
On the left is this guy, Mark Shields, a reliably left-wing columnist.
And on the right is who?
David Brooks, a reliably left-wing columnist who pretends to be, he pretends to be the conservative guy at the New York Times.
I mean, the only real conservative columnist at the New York Times is Ross Duthat.
He's also the only columnist at the New York Times who's not only not going to hell, I think the rest of the guys at the New York Times are actually phoning in their stories from hell.
You know, it's like, this is Maureen Dowd.
It's like, I know, it's Charles Blow.
It says, Charles, you sound just like Maureen.
I know.
It's just, don't pay any attention to that.
It's like, these guys, they are such knuckles.
This is Paul Krugman.
Gee, you sound just like Maureen Down.
Yeah, I don't pay no attention to that.
So Ross Duthat is a good columnist at the time.
But David Brooks, he's the guy who loved Obama, the crease in Obama's pants.
He loved the crease in Obama's pants.
And that's his idea of conservatism.
It's dressing well.
If you dress well, the fact that you're a communist doesn't matter.
So they go on with Judy Woodruff.
And Judy Woodruff is hilarious.
I mean, she is so left-wing that whenever Obama does anything wrong, she asks, she talks about it with concern.
She says, does it really matter that Obama blew up the Iraq?
Does it really matter that he, I mean, isn't it?
So he goes on, first, Mark Shields makes the case that all these problems that we have, all of them, George W. Bush, listen to Shields.
I just want to show you what is the left of them.
And of course, if you're watching, you can see Judy Woodruff nodding with real understanding.
Go ahead.
Let's be very frank.
The organizing principle of this was the United States invasion of Iraq and the United States occupation of Iraq.
I mean, that remains to this moment, whether we left early, should be there.
The fact that we went in, invaded, and occupied this country, and it was a tragedy and a disaster.
And we have reaped that whirlwind, and it remains with us.
It's true.
If we hadn't invaded Iraq, there would have been no attack on the World Trade Center.
Oh, wait.
I mean, it's like if we hadn't invaded Iraq, there wouldn't have been any Islamic terrorism, which was going on for years.
We finally paid attention to it.
But it does, you know, yes, yes.
Okay, we surrendered after we won.
Obama surrendered the victory after we won.
Yes, he drew a red line in Syria, and then when they crossed it, he didn't pay.
Okay, but the real problem is George W. Bush.
Now, here's my favorite part.
Now we get to David Brooks.
And Judy Woodruff, with terrible concern, she says, you know, okay, Obama may have had some, but really, you know, we're listening to these attacks on his optics, the optics, what things look like.
So listen to Judy asks the question, and David Brooks gives the wonderful answer, my favorite answer.
David, even criticism this week of the optics.
President was in Cuba for this historic visit and there were some voices, well, he shouldn't have gone to the baseball game, he shouldn't have gone on to Argentina.
I mean, how much does that matter?
Yeah, I think those criticisms are unfounded.
The president, we have a big government, we can do a lot of things at once.
If the president skipped the baseball game and gone home, what more could he have done?
I mean, he has a telephone, he can make decisions, he can have meetings.
It's my basic principle that that's just political point scoring.
It's my most fundamental basic principle.
There's never a good reason to miss a baseball game.
Oh, that's never a good reason.
We're scraping the blood off the wall, they're killing children in fact.
But there's no that, David Brooks, he's just, he's a guy, I just love that, that is so, you know.
I mean really, there's never a good, you know, let me, let me tell.
Yes, do I have time?
Of course I do.
Let me tell you my only story, my only personal story about George W. Bush.
Okay, I met George W. Bush one time.
I shook hands with him and I was invited to the Laura Bush's authors gathering all day long and you end up in I guess it's the National Library.
You know, in this beautiful, beautiful room and you have a big dinner and I was invited and, you know, gave a reading and all this stuff and there are all these authors.
I talked to Salman Rushdie.
That was like that was great I've.
You know, you're walking around a party and you've got no one to talk to, you know, and you look over and there's Salman Rushdie and he's got no one to talk to.
So I thought well, I'll go talk to Salman Rushdie, you know.
So I said to him, you know, do you feel like you were the first guy?
You know, the first guy to feel?
You know you, you'll remember that he was threatened with death and I went out I was a baby mystery writer at the time I went out and protested because the bookstores took his book off the shelf and all this.
And I was still a left-winger then and left-wingers were saying, what are you doing?
He he insulted Islam.
You know, I was like I don't care what he insulted.
He wrote a book.
You could pay you can't kill a guy for writing a book but who knew it was the beginning?
So I talked to him and then I go in and it's it's dinner time and I look at the table and they have little place cards and my place card is next to the president of the United States.
Okay, so I'm gonna be sitting there making small talk with the president of the United States and I like thought well, that's cool, you know, like he couldn't even be nervous because you thought like you're gonna make an idiot out of yourself.
You're talking to the president of the United States, but I'm gonna be sitting at dinner with the president of the United States.
Now the financial crash had just happened.
I mean within days it was within days of the financial crash.
And so just before dinner starts, they there's, this brass band comes in, plays hail to the chief it's very impressive.
And Bush walks in in a tie and jacket and comes over and shakes the hands of all us, the people who are seated at his table, and he says, I'm sorry, I can't stay because I have to go fix, deal with this financial crash.
And he walked away and one of his people came up and explained to us that he didn't want there to be a photo op of him in a tuxedo, drinking champagne and having dinner while people were suffering.
Okay, he wasn't running for anything.
That was the end of his administration.
Right, he was, he was done, he was just about to leave.
He had nothing to lose.
He had nothing, you know.
He just didn't want the leader of the free world to be seen partying while people's tax, you know, stock portfolios were being wiped out, while people were losing their house.
Fixing Financial Crashes00:12:54
He wanted to let them know, with his optics right, that he, he cared about them, he was their leader and he cared about them.
That's not optics Okay, that's leadership.
You know, they use this word optics.
And that's why when Brooks is sitting there going, oh, there's no good time, no bet, you know, no good reason to miss a baseball game.
You know, how elite, elitist, never mind elite, how elitist do you have to be to not care about those people who are being blown up, about the people in Pakistan, the families in Pakistan who are being blown up?
No good reason to miss a baseball game.
Even when they start killing women and kids in Pakistan, even when they crucify a priest in Yemen, no good reason to miss a baseball game.
That's your elites, folks.
Those are your thought leaders, okay?
At the New York Times, a former newspaper.
Let me pause here.
Just looking for this.
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All right, let's go back to our friend David Brooks because now, okay, let's move to the larger picture, the larger picture of this question of ideas and whether ideas matter.
Because now David Brooks goes on to explain why there's terrorism, why it really doesn't matter, why you shouldn't not go to a baseball game.
He's going to explain to you why there's terrorism.
Play the second Brooks cut.
Yeah, I've spent the last week so repulsed by Donald Trump.
I'd forgotten how ugly Ted Cruz could be, but he reminded us this week.
You know, as I said, and as everyone says, the reason we have terrorism is not because the Prophet Muhammad came down and not because there's a religion called Islam.
That's right.
The reason we have terror is that young men are alienated and feel they can wage war and a just war against societies that are racist and xenophobic and crushing toward them.
And if you want to spread that message, a good way would be to have extra police operations directed at Muslim neighborhoods.
So he's picking on Ted Cruz for suggesting we need more policing in Muslim neighborhoods because we don't have terrorism because of the Prophet Islam.
But ideas don't matter.
It doesn't matter what God you believe in.
I believe in a God of love.
You believe in a God of killing everybody who's not you.
What's the difference?
Come on.
It's all God.
All roads lead up the mountain.
You know, this guy makes his living peddling ideas and he thinks ideas don't matter.
The only reason there's terrorism, now, he goes on earlier and says, well, there's terrorism.
For one reason, there's terrorism in the Middle East because Obama made all these mistakes.
He withdrew from Iraq too soon.
And the red line in Syria, blah, blah, blah.
Despite the crease in his pants, he didn't get everything exactly right.
But that's not why there's terrorism in Europe.
There's terrorism in Europe because the Europeans are such xenophobic bigots, basically, that they haven't let these guys assimilate, and so they've all been radicalized.
You know, they're such xenophobic bigots that they let all these people come into their country, gave them a home there, and assumed innocently that they would think, be so grateful that they would adopt the standards of the country.
And when they didn't, they didn't like that very much, and so they were mean to them.
You know, I mean, it makes no sense.
It makes no sense whatsoever.
So ideas don't matter, okay?
That basically, that was basically the message that Obama was sending as he went down to as he went down to these communist countries, to Cuba and then Argentina, which is not a communist country now, but he went down to Cuba.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter, right?
You know, you, Raul, you know, you're a communist.
I'm a president of the United States.
What's the death?
You know, let's be pals.
So he goes to Argentina and he makes this speech to a bunch of young people.
He explains very carefully the difference between communism and capitalism to these young Argentinians.
You know, so often in the past, there's been a sharp division between left and right, between capitalists and communists or socialists.
And especially in the Americas, that's been a big debate, right?
Ah, you know, you're a capitalist Yankee dog.
And, oh, you know, you're some, you know, crazy communist, you know, that's going to take away everybody's property.
And, I mean, those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works.
You don't have to worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory.
You should just decide what works.
What works?
What works?
Which works better, a pen or a car?
Which works better?
It doesn't matter what you're trying to accomplish, right?
Like, if I asked, you know, what he's talking about is not only, it's not only wrong to begin with, but it makes no sense, okay?
It depends what problem you're trying to solve.
Now, he goes on to say that, but I want you to listen to what he thinks the problems you're trying to solve.
Now, remember, he just got back from a country, Cuba, that is right off our coast.
It's a beautiful, beautiful tropical paradise that could be running a tourist operation, could be getting all these American dollars, and has basically impoverished itself with communism.
He says, he tells this audience, he was very impressed with Cuba because everybody there gets an education and everybody there gets health care.
Okay?
He's telling, you know, he's just come back from this country that's frozen in the 1950s.
But he did notice it was frozen in the 1950s.
So now he goes on to say, but there's something wrong.
Even though communism has done wonderful things, it's gotten them education, it's gotten them healthcare, but there are some problems.
So go ahead.
You drive around Havana and this economy is not working.
It looks like it did in the 1950s.
And so you have to be practical in asking yourself, how can you achieve the goals of equality and inclusion, but also recognize that the market system produces a lot of wealth and goods and services and innovation.
And it also gives individuals freedom because they have initiative.
And so you don't have to be rigid in saying it's either this or that.
You can say, depending on the problem you're trying to solve, depending on the social issues that you're trying to address, what works.
What works?
What works?
Okay.
So you remember when Barack Obama got up and told people who had built their own business that you didn't build that?
You didn't build that, you know, because there were roads.
You could take stuff, you know, other people built those roads.
You didn't build that because there was a postal service and the government, you know, this is this incredibly stupid idea that the postal service and the roads preceded the wealth that was built that was used to pay for them.
It's insane.
You know, how did they build the postal service and the roads?
They took money from people who had created wealth and they used that.
And people were willing to do that because we could all use it together.
But, but that doesn't mean they're willing to put your kid through college.
It doesn't mean they're willing to pay for your birth control.
It doesn't mean they suddenly owe you, you know, I give you a cookie, now you want the whole house.
You know, that's not what it's about.
Okay, so he says to you, you didn't build that.
Well, the thing is, Obama doesn't realize that he didn't build the ideas that have made him president of the United States.
He didn't build the idea that made the United States so powerful that he could stand there and talk nonsense like that without being swept off the face of the earth.
I mean, if we were an ancient tribe and we're that detached from reality, we'd be dead in seconds, all of us.
We're just so powerful because of this tower of ideas.
This tower of ideas that begins in Greece and Jerusalem, in Athens and Jerusalem, comes together in Rome and builds up through the West.
People died for those ideas.
They fought for those ideas, and they were trying to accomplish something.
They were trying to figure out what is best for man.
Who is man and what is best for man, okay, for mankind?
That's what they were trying to figure out.
They weren't trying to solve the problem of, oh, we need more, you know, better cars.
We don't like those cars in Cuba.
Those cars don't look good.
But we want education for everybody, free education.
How do we get those things?
They weren't trying to figure out.
They were trying to figure out what is the best life for man.
And they killed each other over these things.
And they spent their lives.
Some guys went down dead ends and wasted their lives trying to think these things through.
Some people just didn't have the talent to write down their ideas and sell them.
I mean, millions of lives over centuries disappeared and were lost building this foundation that he's standing on top of and he thinks he's floating in midair.
It's like that Bill Marquis.
That's just common sense.
It's not common sense.
If it were common sense, everybody would be doing it.
There's a series of ideas that were built up.
And what they are trying to accomplish is not a better car and it's not healthcare.
It's human liberty.
It's the idea that what you do, what you choose, is for you alone, that you are a child of God, completely sovereign over yourself, as far as that's possible within the reality of a fallen world.
That's basically the idea.
That's what we're trying to achieve.
So when he decides that your money, you know, you make money, when they say time is money, that's literally true, right?
You go out and you make your money by spending your time doing something.
Hopefully you're doing something you like, but if you're not doing something you like, you've got to be doing something because you've got to get that money.
You have to be worthwhile to somebody else.
Money just shows that you're worthwhile to somebody else.
They're willing to pay you to do what you're doing, okay?
You spend that time, you get that money.
That money is just a symbol.
It has no worth.
It's a piece of paper.
It has no worth of itself.
It just symbolizes your time, your effort, your dreams, your sacrifice.
That's all it symbolizes.
And he decides, he decides, Barack Obama, that the problem we're trying to solve is getting some kid educated somewhere.
So he's going to take that money away and spend it as he sees fit.
And he doesn't understand the idea that he's violating when he does that, the same way these students don't understand when they won't let, you know, Ben Shapiro or, you know, come to speak.
They don't understand the ideas that they're violating when they do that because they stand on the shoulders of giants and they think that they're flying.
They stand on the top of this tower of ideas and they think they're floating in their own virtue and common sense.
And Barack Obama, this is why he doesn't care about terrorism.
This is why he can go do the wave while people are dying.
This is why he can dance the tango while people are dying.
Because he has been quoted in the Atlantic as saying, in the Atlantic Monthly, as saying, you know, more people die in bathtubs, falling down in bathtubs in America than die in terrorism.
And Nicholas Kristoff, another one of these guys from the New York Times, he phoned in his column from hell.
I have a column.
Wait a minute, you sound just like Maureen Di.
Don't pay any attention.
So here's Nick Christoph's column, right?
Just, this is the very, very beginning.
Are terrorists more of a threat than slippery bathtubs?
President Obama slipped into hot water when The Atlantic reported that he frequently suggests to his staff that fear of terrorism is overblown, with Americans more likely to die from falls in tubs than from attacks by terrorists.
The timing was awkward, but he's roughly right on the facts.
464 people drowned in America in tubs, sometimes after falls in 2013, while 17 were killed by terrorists.
The basic problem is this, says Nick Krustoff.
The human brain evolved so that we systematically misjudge risks and how to respond to them.
That is not the basic problem.
The basic problem is to compare bathtub accidents with terrorism is to compare a birthmark with cancer.
It's like saying that birthmark is much bigger than that little cancer.
Why are you worried about the cancer?
Human evil, if not opposed, spreads.
Bad ideas, if not opposed, spread.
In 1935, and I hate to make the Hitler comparison, but I'm sorry.
Whitaker Chambers' Witness00:03:59
It is apt in this case.
In 1935, he could have said the same thing.
More people die of falls and bathtubs than are dying in Nazi Germany.
What's the problem?
You know what?
It's ridiculous.
Hitler's not an existential threat.
We're America.
He's a little tiny German country.
He's not an exorcist.
But evil is a cancer.
Bad ideas are a cancer.
And it does matter which God you believe in, and it does matter which system you live under.
And if you don't think it does, just go and look at the places where they don't live under free systems.
This is a very sad thing that we have forgotten the ideas that made us great.
And it is the reason, I think, that some of the worst people in the country are now running for president on both sides.
And I think that I really do think that so far, as far as I can tell, Ted Cruz is the only exception.
We really have some lowlights, a communist, a felon, and a fascist running for president.
And it's because we have forgotten what made us great.
If you don't stand for those ideas, you don't stand for anything.
If you just stand for, oh, some idea of America, you don't stand for anything.
You've got to stand for the ideas that made us great.
Stuff I like, aside from great ideas.
A lot of people have been asking me to recommend books about conservatism.
Like newbie conservatives say, well, what books do I read?
And the thing is, it's not always the right question because a lot of times, you know, you could just read, like, Mark Levin wrote an excellent book called Liberty and Tyranny, and that's kind of a primer on conservatism if you want that.
But if you want to really build up the stuff that you know and that you think, there are things you should read.
You know, you should read the Federalist Papers and things like that, and you should read the Conservative Mind and all these things.
So here this week, a couple of stuff I like that I think are basic texts that are really good.
And the first one is called Witness by Whitaker Chambers.
Witness by Whitaker Chambers, written in 1952.
Whitaker Chambers was a, he was a Soviet spy who came to Christ and realized that he had made a mistake, and he turned into the government a guy named Alger Hiss, who was a major State Department functionary who was also a communist spy.
And Alger Hiss was a sophisticated, elegant member of the elite.
He would have been David Brooks' pal.
David Brooks would have palled around with Alger Hiss.
And Whitaker Chambers was an unpleasant, bisexual, overweight guy who could barely speak English.
And the elites went after Chambers with both boar.
And one of the reasons they hated Richard Nixon is that Richard Nixon hounded Alger Hiss until finally he broke and they got rid of him.
They got him for perjury, I think.
Years later, after they got all those telegrams out of the Soviet Union, it became clear that Chambers was right and Hiss was guilty.
I mean, Hiss was guilty.
He was a major State Department communist Soviet spy, okay?
And the elites, the David Brookses of the world, the New York Times of the world, stood up for him and attacked Whitaker Chambers.
And Whitaker Chambers wrote his biography, Why He Became a Russian Spy, Why He Became a Christian, Why He Stood Up Against Alger Hiss.
And it is a beautiful book.
It's beautifully written.
I would call it life-changing.
I don't think you can see the world the same way.
Chambers was very dour about the future of democracy.
He thought he was on the losing side, but he was standing for it because it was right.
And for all his flaws, for all the things he did wrong in his life, Whitaker Chambers wrote one of the great books.
It was one of Ronald Reagan's favorite books, Witness.
It will change the way you look at the world.
And you should know who Alger Hiss is.
I know Hugh Hewitt, when anybody ever comes on who he doesn't like, he always says, who is Alger Hiss?
Do you know who Alger Hiss was?
Well, you should know.
He really was important because he was just the kind of guy.
just the kind of guy that people supported then because he was one of us.
The crease in his pants was perfect.
And Whitaker Chambers was a sloppy guy.
I think he was a time, an editor of Time.
That's what he was.
But Chambers was right.
And his book about it is just absolutely fantastic.
Stuff I like.
All right.
A new week now begins.
Hey, this is going to be my last week and then I get a week vacation.
It's not a vacation.
I have to go to New York, meet with editors and things like that.
So cherish every moment that we're together because I'll be gone for a week and you're duped.