Ep. 119 pits 2016’s GOP "civil war" against Captain America: Civil War, where Paul Ryan’s reluctant Trump endorsement mirrors Stark vs. Cap’s UN compliance debate—both clashing over sovereignty. Trump’s erratic shifts (tax flips, minimum wage U-turns) force conservatives like Jindal into pragmatic choices, while Shapiro’s withdrawal option reflects fears of Reaganism’s collapse. The host dismisses Trump as a "Cretanist bully" but frames the election as a globalist vs. American exceptionalism showdown, warning surrender risks cultural capitulation like Germany’s Islamic extremism concessions. [Automatically generated summary]
Presumptive catastrophic sort of Republican nominee Donald Trump has a big job on his hands.
He has to unify the party while moving to the center for the general election while convincing leaders he won't continue to act like a jackass while continuing to act like a jackass.
Trump got the effort underway by abandoning what only a fool could have thought of as his principles.
After claiming that any candidate who received donations was a bought and paid-for agent of financiers, Trump announced he would be soliciting donations in the hope of becoming a bought and paid-for agent of financiers.
Trump supporters said this was not a flip-flop, but only a canny example of the canny businessman's canny ability to cannily change his most dearly held ideals for totally opposite ideals.
Cannally.
Trump then went on to modify his opposition to a minimum wage hike by turning it into support for a minimum wage hike.
Trump supporters said this subtle shift shows that true conservatism is really leftism, and any conservative who isn't a leftist is a cockservative and possibly even a Jew.
Trump did take a firm stand on his own tax plan by firmly coming out against his own tax plan.
Trump's supporters said anyone who thinks this is a contradiction should be dragged from his home and curb stomped to death, his house burned, and his memory erased from the minds of the living.
Trump says he has also shifted his religion from Christianity to Satanism and is changing his slogan from Make America Great Again to Make America the Flaming Sword of the Evil One in order to destroy whatever is beautiful and good.
Trump said, quote, people say Jesus is Lord, but he was crucified.
I prefer a Lord who wasn't crucified.
Satan has been a strong leader for hell.
He's been a lot stronger than our leaders.
Trump's supporters welcomed his announcement by dancing naked around a golden statue of the billionaire in his manifestation as the sabbatic goat Baphomet, ruler of this world.
Despite Trump's efforts, some Republican leaders have been reluctant to endorse their party's probable nominee.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, for instance, said he was not ready to give Trump his endorsement.
Trump responded by seizing Ryan's wife and carrying her to the top of the Empire State Building, where presumptive Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton tried to dislodge him by flying past on a broomstick and writing, surrender Mrs. Ryan, in green smoke across the sky.
Welcome to Election 2016.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Claven show.
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All right, the weekend we had Captain America's Civil War.
I really liked it, and I also thought I also have something to say about it, which is different than anything I've read.
I actually had an observation about this film that was different than the stuff that I've been reading about.
And I will talk about that.
But first, we have to talk about the real Civil War in the Republican Party, which is coming about because Trump is now trying to gather people around him while being the most divisive and annoying nominee in the party's history.
So he starts out, Paul Ryan came out last week and said he wasn't ready to endorse Donald Trump.
And those two words, not ready, I'm not ready, have been repeated over and over again.
So I wanted to play an extended clip to give you the full sense of what he was saying.
He was talking to Jake Tapper at CNN, and Tapper said, are you going to endorse him?
And here is Ryan's full response.
To be perfectly candid with you, Jake, I'm just not ready to do that at this point.
I'm not there right now.
And I hope to, though, and I want to.
But I think what is required is that we unify this party.
And I think the bulk of the burden on unifying the party will have to come from our presumptive nominee.
I don't want to underplay what he accomplished.
He needs to be congratulated for an enormous accomplishment for winning not now a plurality of delegates, and he's on his way to winning a majority of delegates.
But he also inherited something very special that's very special to a lot of us.
This is the party of Lincoln, of Reagan, of Jack Kemp.
And we don't always nominate a Lincoln and a Reagan every four years.
But we hope that our nominee aspires to be Lincoln and Reagan-esque, that that person advances the principles of our party and appeals to a wide, vast majority of Americans.
And so I think what is necessary to make this work, for this to unify, is to actually take our principles and advance them.
And that's what we want to see.
Saying we're unified doesn't in and of itself unify us, but actually taking the principles that we all believe in, showing that there's a dedication to those, and running a principle campaign that Republicans can be proud about, and that can actually appeal to a majority of Americans, that to me is what it takes to unify this party.
So just to unpack that a little bit, I mean, it's a very measured statement.
He's not withholding his endorsement, but he's being very firm and saying that he wants a candidate who act just a little bit more like Reagan and Lincoln and maybe a little bit less like Pee Wee Herman.
I mean, just a little dignity in the party.
But it's a very firm, steadfast statement.
And remember that Paul Ryan is going to be the chairman of the Republican Convention, which is supposed to be an uncommitted, neutral position.
So Trump is still only the presumptive nominee.
Everyone else has dropped out.
But I think many people are like casting spells and praying that someone will descend from the ceiling and take it away from him somehow.
So Ryan was being very measured.
And of course, Trump shot back with, well, he's not ready to support me.
I'm not ready to support him.
It was like a 10-year-old, you know, coming back on him.
And he also threatened to try and block him from serving as the chairman of the convention, which I think is interesting because I don't think he has any power to do that, but he can make a lot of noise about it.
So they're going to meet on Thursday, and they're going to have a conversation even worse than Trump's reaction, because Trump has held back.
He said he was blindsided by this and he was surprised by it.
And he has held back on going the full Trump on Ryan so far.
But Sarah Palin, I mean, you know, in the same way that Donald Trump seems to me to be the liberals' attacks on us come to life, all the nasty things that liberals have said about us over the years that I've been saying, no, no, that's not true.
It's not true.
We're not like that at all.
Suddenly, it was like they all congealed and became Donald Trump.
And I was like, uh-oh, you know, maybe we are a little like that.
Maybe some of us are like that.
You know, Sarah Palin has now become what the people who attacked her said she was.
You know, and I mean, and this is not a person, I'm not saying this personally, I'm saying as a political figure, she has now become this screechy, crazy, extreme person.
And she listened to how she responded to Paul Ryan's statement.
I think Paul Ryan is soon to be cantered as an Eric Cantor.
His political career is over, but for a miracle, because he has so disrespected the will of the people.
And yeah, as the leader of the GOP, the convention, certainly he is to remain neutral.
And for him to already come out and say who he will not support was not a wise decision of his.
You know, I think why Paul Ryan is doing this, Jake, is it kind of screws his chances for the 2020 presidential bid that he's gunning for.
If the GOP were to win now, that wouldn't vote well for his chances in 2020, and that's what he's shooting for.
So a lot of people with their never Trump or not right now Trump mantra going on, they have their different reasons.
I think that one is Paul Ryan's reason.
Yeah, Paul Ryan is afraid that if Trump wins, he won't be able to run in 2020.
It's either that or he thinks that Trump is a clownish reptile.
I mean, one or the other.
You know, that is absurd.
I mean, it's absurd.
First of all, he didn't say he wouldn't support Trump.
He said he wasn't ready to support Trump.
That is the most childish, it's complete crap.
I mean, it's completely, complete nonsense.
This idea that he's going to be cantered.
You know, we got rid of Eric Cantor.
Well, I'm not even sure that getting rid of Eric Cantor was such a good idea.
And it's so weird how the far-right purity test that we've all been yelling at people, oh, this guy's a traitor and Paul Ryan's a traitor.
I mean, this always really bugged me because I always thought Paul Ryan is a really good, thoughtful conservative.
I think he's a man of integrity.
I think he's been trying to do some.
I don't think he necessarily was a very good vice presidential candidate for various reasons that have really nothing to do with his personality.
It have to do with the fact that the people that are opposed to his reform of the entitlement system were votes we needed.
So I'm not sure that he wasn't better off serving us better in the House.
But he's obviously a man of principle.
He's taken a principled stand.
He's going to meet with Trump on the 12th, which is Thursday, I think.
And so I imagine what he's going to say to Trump is he's going to say, hey, you know, I need a statement from you telling us that you are going to stick to something that looks vaguely like Republican principles.
And what Trump is going to say is, I've got all these votes, millions and millions of votes, frankly.
You know, frankly, I mean, I won New York by everybody.
Even New York voted for me.
The entire state, you know, he won all these states that the Democrats are going to win.
All the states that Trump won are the states that the Democrats are going to win in the general election.
So it doesn't mean all that much.
But he says, you know, he says New York's in play.
It might be.
We don't know.
So Trump is going to go and say, I am the will of the people, and it's what I say now is the Republican Party.
So that's the conversation they're going to have.
And Trump basically said this.
He was talking to George Stephanopoulos, and he basically said it's not a conservative party.
Here's what he said.
I think it's a mistake not to do this.
We want to bring the party together.
Does the party have to be together?
Does it have to be unified?
I'm very different than everybody else perhaps that's ever run for office.
I actually don't think so.
I think that...
It doesn't have to be...
No, I don't think so.
I think it would be better if it were unified.
I think there would be something good about it, but I don't think it actually has to be unified in the tradition.
He said, I'm going to do what I have to do.
I have millions of people that voted for me because I have strong borders, because I want strong trade.
I want good trade.
I want trade.
I don't want to be an isolationist, but what's happening with China?
What's happening with Japan?
What's happening with Mexico?
They're just absolutely eating our lunch.
It's a shame.
It's terrible.
So I have to stay true to my principles also.
And I'm a conservative, but don't forget, this is called the Republican Party.
It's not called the Conservative Party.
You know, there are conservative parties.
It's called the Republican Party.
You know, obviously Trump knows where the opposition is coming from.
It's coming from us.
It's coming from the conservatives.
And this is, I think, this is kind of interesting.
If there are any honest people on the left paying attention, because you read the New York Times and the New York Times is skewing the news.
This is Donald Trump's party.
They're always Trump.
They're now Trump.
And then they're Trump, Trump, Lady Trump, Trump, Trump.
You know, that's the New York Times point of view.
But if any honest leftist is paying attention, he must be saying to himself, huh, maybe they weren't all Trump.
I mean, the fact that people are standing up against Trump might be telling to an honest left-winger who's suddenly looking at this and saying, gee, I thought this is who they were, that suddenly there are voices opposing.
What I want to know, though, is what can he say to Paul Ryan that Paul Ryan can believe?
What words could come out of Donald Trump's mouth where Ryan could say, oh, now I'm reassured.
I mean, if Ryan is looking for a fig leaf, if he's looking for a way of saying to the public, well, he told me this, kind of what Sean Hannity has been doing, Sean Hannity, you know, Trump goes on and babbles and Sean Hannity says, so you believe it's a matter for the states.
And, you know, and Trump goes, yeah, whatever.
And then Hannity says, well, he said it was a matter for the states.
And he goes, like, wait, wait, I'm sorry.
I lost.
I'm totally lost now.
So, you know, if that's what Ryan is looking for, if he's looking for a fig leaf, that's all he's going to get because everything that Trump says is up for grabs.
I mean, he did say, you know, that he was against the hike in the minimum wage.
Now he's going around saying, well, you know, how can anybody live on 725, which is the federal minimum wage?
First of all, 29 states have higher minimum wages.
That's the first thing.
I think 2% of full-time workers get minimum wage.
2% of people with a job.
And that's not a lot of money.
I mean, $7.25 an hour is not a lot.
Of course, it depends where you live, but it's still, there's nowhere where it's a lot of money.
But raising the minimum wage destroys those jobs.
So it's not like you go from getting $7.25 an hour to getting $15.
You go from $7.25 an hour to getting zip.
You're getting, you know, sitting at home and collecting the dole.
And that's the problem that economists and conservatives have with the minimum wage.
It's not meanness.
It's not like you don't deserve more money.
It's just that it's what the market will bear.
So he changed on that.
He opposes his own tax plan, which I love.
He had this tax plan that cut everybody's taxes.
So he cuts everybody's taxes and suddenly says, well, you know, the rich should pay more.
I'm a rich person and I'm willing to pay more.
An argument I always love because it doesn't really mean that the rich person is going to pay more.
What it means is the middle class are going to pay more because the rich never pay more.
The guys who have billions of dollars don't pay more taxes.
That's not going to happen.
So if he wants to pay more taxes, there's a little website on the Treasury.
They're always welcome to send the money in, but that's not really what.
So anything he says sticks.
You know, there was an article today in the New York Times by a philosophy professor, and the guy said that part of his power is the fact that he doesn't care if he completely contradicts himself.
That when he contradicts, when he says, well, I can't really, you know, deny or disrespect the Ku Klux Klan, and then he says, oh yeah, I completely reject the Ku Klux Klan, that people hear what they want to hear.
The guys who like the Klan say, well, he had to say that second thing, and the guys who want to be reassured say, well, he changed his mind, you know.
So if he says completely opposite things, it actually helps him.
And he's not held to the same standard as other candidates.
And the other thing the guy said was that it makes people feel that he's powerful.
If he's like, if he just lies in your face, if he just lies in your face, yeah, yeah, I'm for the Klan.
I'm against the Klan, whatever.
Two Principled Paths00:05:10
I say whatever I want to say because I don't care about, it makes people feel like he's a tough guy.
Like he's telling the press, you know, the media who we all hate, he's telling them, I don't care what you think.
You know, I'm just going to lie in your face.
People actually like it that this stuff is helping.
I mean, it's the stratagem of a scoundrel.
You know, it's a terrible thing to do.
And by the way, by the way, in answer to these people, and I've been getting this tweet and email a lot, in answer to the people who say, you're not respecting the people, did I miss the place where the people earned my respect?
I mean, did I miss that moment?
You know, the people voted for Barack Obama.
I mean, I respect the will of the people in the sense that I respect a hurricane.
You know, when a hurricane comes, I stay indoors because I know there's a lot of power there that I can't control.
I respect the people to that degree, but you've got to earn my respect, baby.
You know what I mean?
Like, you're voting, you're voting for a guy who's a thug and he's corrupt and he bullies people and everything about him.
Listen, I see two principled paths here.
I definitely see two principled paths.
It's not like I think everybody who supports Trump is in the wrong.
The first path, we'll call it the Shapiro option, okay, because as Ben was kind of talking about it last week on his show, and that is that we conservatives now retreat, essentially, from the political field.
We acknowledge that, you know, whether Gorgo, you know, whether Godzilla or Rodin wins the fight, the city's going to be destroyed.
So it doesn't matter.
We're just going to run screaming in Japanese through the streets of the city and get out of town and rebuild our conservative organization.
We are going to rebuild our movement.
We're going to start it here at the Daily Wire.
And that's, by the way, another great reason to subscribe.
If you want to be where the principled conservatives are and where the principled conservatives are thinking about how we're going to handle this disastrous situation, this is the place to be, because this is the place, because we are not in debt to anybody.
We are going to tell you exactly what we think every step of the way.
Both me and Ben, and everyone who writes here is going to say what we want to say.
Nobody is telling us what to say.
And we will take the principled option every time we can.
So this is one thing.
It's kind of like when Reagan lost to Ford, when he lost the nomination to Ford, he quoted a famous ballad, which goes kind of like a knight who's been hurt in battle says, I am wounded, sire, but I am not slain.
I will lay me down to bleed a while, then rise to fight again.
And that's kind of what, that's the Shapiro option.
That's what we're going to do.
And part of the logic beyond this was that Ross Duthot wrote in the New York Times this morning, part of the reason for doing that is that even a successful Trump presidency, a Trump presidency that people like, that maybe, you know, where maybe the economy recovers, is going to destroy conservatism.
It's going to destroy the Reagan coalition.
I mean, in the same way that a successful Clinton presidency was bad for conservatives, it was good for the country in a lot of ways because he did conservative things.
But it made people think, you know, the Democrat Party is rejecting everything that Clinton did because it was conservative.
So it made people think that it wasn't conservative, made them think, oh, this is the way Democrats behave, which is nonsense, you know.
So a Trump presidency, here's Ross Duthot.
He says, in a fully Trumpized GOP, Reagan's ideological coalition would crack up.
Hawks would drift toward the Democrats.
Supply-siders would fade into crankery.
Religious conservatives would enter a semi-permanent exile.
And in its place, a Trumpized Republican intelligentsia would arise with as little interest in Reaganism as today's conservatives have in the ideas of Nelson Rockefeller or Jacob Javits, famously liberal Republicans.
The things conservatives are telling themselves to justify supporting Trump, at least he might appoint good judges, for instance.
That's one of the things that people are saying to justify their support for Trump.
They miss the long-term point.
The Reagan coalition might get an acceptable Supreme Court appointment out of the Trump presidency.
It might, but that could easily be the last thing it ever got.
So if we jump on the Trump train, and another thing, by the way, that I would say is if we jump on the Trump train, Trump, just by virtue of his reptilian personality, soils us.
It's very hard for us to go back to responsible, reasonable people in the center and say, try our ideas once we've attached ourselves to a guy like Trump.
Now, the other principled point of view was in the Wall Street Journal today from Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana.
Basically, he said, it's the famous, I'm holding my nose.
You know, he's basically, Jindal has attacked Trump in no uncertain terms.
I mean, he has called him every name in the book.
But today he wrote this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
He said, I think electing Donald Trump would be the second worst thing we could do this November, better only than electing Hillary Clinton to serve as the third term for the Obama administration's radical policies.
I am not pretending that Mr. Trump has suddenly become a conservative champion or even a reliable Republican.
He is completely unpredictable.
The problem is that Hillary is predictably liberal.
So that is the other point of view.
And those are two principled points of views.
Governments Battle Over Control00:09:09
I respect them.
You know, I don't think as conservatives, as conservatives rebuilding our movement, because no matter what happens, we're going to have to rebuild our movement, I don't think we should be issuing purity tests.
I mean, men have consciences.
I think even women have consciences, do we?
Lindsay?
No?
Okay, sorry.
I misspoke.
No, but men and women have consciences, and a living, breathing, conservative movement has got to respect the consciences of principled men and women.
It's got to, or else we're just a kind of, we're ideologues.
We've become Barack Obama of the right, which is not what we want to do.
We want to say, you know, we allow people to change their mind.
I mean, this guy, but the one thing I cannot respect, I cannot bring myself to respect, is the enthusiastic love and support for this Cretanist bully.
I mean, the man is a creton.
You know, he's what the Jews have an expression, a shonda to the goim.
It means he shames us before the Gentiles.
And I think that that is a problem with this guy, with attaching ourselves to a guy who behaves in this manner, let alone his lies, let alone the fact that we don't know what he stands for, let alone the fact that he has no sense of constitutional limits on his authority.
Aside from that, his behavior is so bad that it shames the movement.
All right, but on to the other civil war among the Avengers, which is far more serious because they have all those powers and they tear things up.
So I went to see this movie.
I found it delightful.
I'm not a big superhero movie.
In fact, I've kind of stayed away from them for the past couple of years.
So this is part of the story that is, it's called Captain America, but it's really an Avengers movie.
So this is part of the Winter Soldier Avengers of Age of Ultron series.
So it's kind of a series part of that story.
But I could follow it and there was no problem.
It was not like Batman and Superman.
And by the way, there'll be no spoilers in this.
I'm not going to spoil anything in the movie.
However, the one thing I noticed was that the plot to this movie was exactly the same plot as Batman vs. Superman, which was a terrible movie.
Was it Batman vs. Superman or Superman vs. Batman?
I can't even remember.
But it's exactly the same plot.
They gin up this moral gray area, which wouldn't in real life be a moral gray area, which in that in saving the world, the superheroes commit collateral damage and that people are now upset that they're vigilantes.
Play just a little bit of the trailer so they can see the idea.
While a great many people see you as a hero, there are some who'd prefer the word vigilante.
You've operated with unlimited power and no supervision.
That's something the world can no longer tolerate.
I know how much Bucky means to you.
Stay out of this one.
Please.
You only make this worse.
You saying you'll arrest me?
There will be consequences.
Captain, you seem a little defensive.
Well, it's been a long day.
If you can't accept limitations, we're no better than bad guys.
That's not the way I see it.
Sometimes I want to punch you in your perfect teeth.
All right, so in both Batman and Superman and in this civil war, the authorities want to have some kind of governance over these superheroes.
So in Batman vs. Superman, it's the American government.
In this, it's the international government.
And there's a disagreement.
And this is all in the trailer, so I'm not giving anything away.
Iron Man takes one side.
He says, yes, we should be governed by the United Nations.
And Captain America says, no, you know, we don't have to serve the agenda of the people in government or the people in the UN.
And that's where the team becomes divided.
What's really fascinating about this is it's fascinating, first of all, the two immense superhero movies have the same, one from the DC universe, one from the Marvel universe, have exactly the same plots.
And I think the reason for that is they are reacting to something, whether they know it or not, I'm not sure whether they know it or not, they're reacting to our role in the war on terror.
They're reacting to the fact that we are obviously in the right in fighting Islamic terrorism, and we go into these countries like Iraq and we cause collateral damage.
People die, not just the bad guys, but children and women and people who are in innocence get killed in these wars.
And should the reason Batman v. Superman is such a bad movie, it's bad for a million reasons, but one is because it's the American government who wants control over Superman, which makes a lot more sense than the United Nations taking control of Captain America.
He is America.
So the question that they're raising is, are we now to be governed by the United Nations?
Are we now an international enterprise instead of our government?
And that's exactly the argument that is taking place in this election.
It is exactly, and it comes from the same place.
It comes from our reaction, I think it's an unconscious reaction, to our movement overseas to battle, to dislodge the government in Iraq, to fight the forces of Islamic extremism.
A lot of people, Trump really included, are saying, why are we the ones over there?
If I let them kill each other, what do we care?
We know they come over here, but maybe we should just pull back and protect ourselves.
Why should we be fighting?
Why should our guys be dying over there?
And so that's the question that's being answered.
And we have, you know, and we really have the same thing happening in our election.
On the one hand, you have Donald Trump who's saying, build a wall, keep out the world.
We're going to have trade wars with our trading partners.
If anybody tries to leave the country, if any business tries to leave the country, we're going to tariff them into the ground.
We're going to protect America first.
And then you have John Kerry, right, our new Secretary of State to replace Clinton.
He gave a commencement address at, I think it was Northwestern University.
I'm not sure.
He gave a commencement address in which he said, kids, get ready for a borderless world.
There's going to be a borderless world.
We're not going to let Donald Trump build any walls.
There's going to be a borderless world.
So John Kerry will call him Ironhead Man.
And on the other side, we have Donald Trump.
We'll call him Captain America first, right?
Having this battle over who is going to control.
Are we going to become an international, a global government?
And I think the thing is, both these guys, Trump and Kerry, I heard Trump give the commencement address at Yale, by the way, and I find the guy just a deadhead.
I think he's a knucklehead.
You know, I do not think this is an intelligent, very intelligent man.
And obviously, I don't think Trump is a very intelligent man.
But the argument they're having is real.
The borders are falling away.
The walls are falling away.
We have to do business with the world.
We have to do business with the world so we can have all the neat stuff that we like.
Nobody's going to get rid of the stuff that we like, the iPhones that don't cost $2,000, because part of them are made overseas, or cashews, which you can't get here.
All the things that we love that make the world rich are coming from this global economy.
And as you have a global economy, you're going to move toward global governance.
Trade follows the flag.
But to simply say, because the world is becoming global, we have to surrender our ideals and our ideas, which is basically the Obama doctrine.
It's like, you know, we're not exceptional.
We're not special.
We are special.
We are special.
We are the spearhead of a righteous idea.
And that idea is not fairness, it's fairness before the law and liberty.
Those are the ideas.
You know, in Germany, they are now telling women they have to dress differently to accommodate the immigrants who are molesting them.
They're even thinking of banning sexy women on commercials so that the Muslims will not be offended and I guess moved, excited, and moved to attack women.
That's the sign of a nation that has lost the sense of what it's about.
Not that women shouldn't be modest.
I would like to see women be a little bit more modest.
That has nothing to do with it.
It's their choice.
It's their decision how they dress, what they look like, how they present themselves.
It's not ours, and it's certainly not the right of thugs, these Islamic thugs, to tell women what they should be like.
They have lost their way.
If we lose our way, we're going to have to build a wall because when these people come in, they'll simply take over and transform the country.
If we say to people, yeah, you can come in, but you've got to become us.
You can deal with us, but you've got to deal fairly.
You've got to deal within the law.
You know, we can have more of a global world, but that global world is going to look like us and that it's going to be free.
The women are going to be free.
The religious people are going to be free.
There's not going to be any killing people when they convert.
It ain't going to happen.
And until we can make that strong statement, and if you think that's imperial, tough.
It doesn't matter.
And it's the imperialism of good ideas.
The imperialism of good ideas.
We have to stand for that.
And that's going to be the answer because otherwise we're all going to wind up like Iron Man and Captain America just beating the crap out of each other, which would be entertaining.
Imperialism of Good Ideas00:01:26
But, all right, stuff I like.
This week, we're going to do books that have gotten on the bestseller list that are actually good, okay?
Because that's pretty rare.
You know, most best-selling novels are not any good.
They're kind of trashy.
But these are books that I've read that I think are really good.
One of them was a phenomenon called The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins.
If you want to read a terrific, entertaining kind of beach read or just, you know, a vacation read or something like this, this thing is great.
It's just about a girl in London who travels on the train every day and looks out the window and it's kind of like a Hitchcockian thing that unravels and she, as you get into it, you get to learn more about this girl and her terrible problems, more about the people she's looking at through the train window.
And then something, I won't give it away, but something happens and it becomes this tremendous mystery suspense.
It's beautifully written, beautifully conceived, really well plotted.
That's always my thing.
Most of these people don't know how to put a plot together.
This is a really well-plotted story, kind of neo-girl Hitchcock, we'll call it.
Girl on a train.
All right, back into the week.
Things are going to develop quickly.
There's going to be a lot.
One thing we have to say about this election, the one positive thing we can say about it, it's going to be entertaining, and it's going to be even more entertaining if you experience it here.