Donald Trump’s "very fishy" remark about Vince Foster’s 1993 suicide reignites Clinton-era conspiracies, dismissed as baseless by Hillary and Bill, yet amplified by media hypocrisy—left-wing outlets mocking Trump while ignoring their own Katrina bias. His confrontational style clashes with Hillary’s teleprompter attacks, while Obama’s legacy gets ignored despite Obamacare backlash in WSJ. The host’s Christian faith contrasts with Shapiro’s views, wrapping up with Sparta’s lessons and Hollywood’s cultural grip—all framing truth as a battleground between narrative control and raw engagement. [Automatically generated summary]
Presumptive Republican nominee for humiliating president Donald Trump continues his out-of-control rampage of attacks and innuendos against Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democrat nominee for Grand Puba Femalissimus Maxima, a position that doesn't actually exist yet.
In Trump's latest outrage, he referred to the 1993 death of Vince Foster as, quote, very fishy.
Foster was the deputy White House counsel during the Clinton administration, who committed suicide in a Virginia park by shooting himself in the mouth.
The suicide spurred rumors that the Clintons had murdered Foster, especially after Bill and Hillary's aides apparently removed documents from Foster's office after his death.
But Foster's death has been investigated repeatedly and ruled a suicide, as has the death of Kathleen Willey's husband, Edward, who shot himself on the very same day Mrs. Willey says Bill Clinton chased her around the Oval Office, grabbing her private parts.
Mrs. Willey's accusations were thoroughly denied by Clinton operatives, as were charges that Hillary sold her influence as a senator in return for donations to the Clinton Foundation from Russian businessman Boris Payoff, who later committed suicide by throwing himself down a flight of stairs, then beating himself to death with an aluminum baseball bat.
Investigators have debunked those allegations, as they have the charges that Clinton's suspicious private email server was broken into by a Romanian hacker who later did himself in by shooting himself six times in the back of the head.
That death was ruled a suicide, as were the deaths of five people who witnessed the fatal attacks on the American compound in Benghazi and accused Clinton of lying about the attacks.
Those witnesses tragically ended their own lives by locking themselves in a cellar and setting the house on fire while screaming, help, help, please don't kill us.
Mrs. Clinton laughed off questions about these deaths as she laughed off charges that she accepted payoffs in the form of her husband's speaking fees, which mysteriously skyrocketed after she became Secretary of State.
These allegations were detailed in a book by a Hoover Institution journalist who later committed suicide by running very fast down a dark alley and then riddling himself with machine gun bullets.
Mrs. Clinton was absolved of all responsibility for the journalist's death, as she was absolved of charges that her private email server was wiped clean by a tech expert in New Jersey.
The expert later went home and left a suicide note reading, quote, dear God, I think someone is going to, unquote, and then killed himself by sticking his feet into a tub full of cement and hurling himself into the Atlantic Ocean about 135 miles offshore.
New York Times Shocks Again00:14:10
Mrs. Clinton responded to Trump's outrageous charges by saying, quote, Donald Trump's attacks on me have become increasingly irresponsible and absurd.
And by the way, I've noticed he's been looking a little depressed lately, unquote.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin show.
Don't start looking that stuff up.
I made up everything except the first two.
The first two are real, but I made them all up, and it's not, it's all, it's just kidding around.
But we'll get back to it.
I'm going to unpack that opening because it's unfair to leave you with all that stuff.
However, today it's the world famous Mailbag Day.
Hooray, hooray, and you can participate by subscribing and sending your questions in.
It's free for the first 30 days, and then I think me and Shapiro come to your house and take your furniture.
I think that's the way it works.
But you can not only listen if you subscribe, you can also watch.
All right, so let's talk about this.
Yesterday, we were talking about how the left-wing media was shocked, absolutely shocked, that Donald Trump would dare to talk about Bill Clinton's infidelities and Hillary Clinton's work in keeping those infidelities quiet and threatening the women who brought charges against them, their partnership basically in silencing these women who had been allegedly abused by Bill Clinton.
And the media was just absolutely stunned that this could come up, even though Hillary Clinton is running on the 90s economy and even saying that she's going to put Bill in charge of the economy so he can bring back the tech boom and Newt Gingrich's policies that made all those things happen and all the other things that she's against, the welfare reform, the crime reform, all those things that she is against.
She's running against, but she's saying, gee, things were great the last time somebody named Clinton was out there.
So Trump is quite legitimately, you know, attacking them.
And the left-wing media is shocked.
So now Trump has umped the ante because he's brought back Vince Foster.
And Vince Foster, as I say, deputy White House counsel, a depressive, had clinical depression, didn't like the limelight he was in, didn't like the scandals that kept hammering, the Whitewater scandals, the Travelgate scandals, and finally went out into a park and blew his brains out and did leave a message, a suicide note that was in pieces.
There is absolutely no evidence.
This has been investigated to death, as it were, and there is absolutely no evidence that the Clintons had anything to do with his death.
There is some evidence that Hillary and Bill's aides walked into Foster's office after his death and under the noses of the FBI investigators, walked off with some documents.
A lot of documents that had been missing showed up in typical Clintonian fashion two years later.
And of course, there was nothing in them to incriminate anybody.
But that's so typical of the Clintons.
So that when they complain that there are conspiracy theories around them, it's also because they're obviously corrupt.
And so those conspiracy theories grow up.
So now Trump has said, he went to the Washington Post and this is what he said.
He said, Trump, and by the way, just before I say that, Kathleen Willey's husband also did kill himself, and that had apparently nothing to do with the Clintons.
But if you go online and Google deaths connected to the Clintons, there are these long, long lists of people who knew Bill and Hillary who died under mysterious circumstances.
Many of them are untrustworthy.
There has never been any evidence that the Clintons were involved in any of them.
So, yeah, you know, I have nothing to say about that.
But Trump, that doesn't stop Donald Trump, because if it's been in the National Inquirer, Trump will talk about it.
So he told the Washington Post in an interview he thought Fisher's death was very, Foster's death was very fishy.
This is what he said, quote, he had intimate knowledge of what was going on.
Foster had intimate knowledge of what was going on.
He knew everything that was going on.
And then all of a sudden he committed suicide.
I don't bring Foster's death up because I don't know enough to really discuss it.
I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder.
I don't do that because I don't think it's fair.
So here's Bill Clinton's response.
This is just a replay of the same old 92 playbook.
Believe it or not, I went through the same thing we're doing today.
Heck, some of those right-wingers were sending videos out accusing me of murder.
So why would they accuse me of anything?
Yeah, it was a vast right-wing conspiracy that accused them of sleeping with Monica Lewinsky.
Oops.
So, I mean, you lie enough, you know, you lie enough, and the stuff starts to stick.
But don't forget, don't forget, Donald Trump is the same guy who accused Ted Cruz's father of essentially killing JFK.
So any stupid story that swims by, and when he was challenged on it, it was like, hey, he was in the National Inquirer.
That's a good paper.
He's like, I saw it on a bathroom wall.
How could it be untrue?
So Trump is the same guy.
And I know it's much more fun when he's doing it to them than when he's doing it to our guys.
But he's still, he's a terrible person.
He'll say anything.
However, I just want to point out that he is handling his post nomination, his post-presumptive nomination, really, really well.
His strategy has been very, very good.
It's all working.
He's solidifying his support in the GOP much faster than the media thought he was going to do.
The thing with the judge selections, even though it's all ridiculous, he never saw those.
He never saw that list of judges until he was on TV with Hannity and going, yeah, there's some guy I've heard of.
You know, so, but it's all been very clever and it's all working.
But the media is just reeling in shock that he would say any of this stuff.
We played this clip yesterday of Chris Cuomo.
I just want to play just a little bit of it today, just one little piece of it, where Cuomo is objecting to Trump's spokesman about Trump bringing up Bill's affairs.
Listen to this.
If you are not a sexist, what you usually say is, I'm not a sexist.
Here's all the things that prove that I'm not here, all the beautiful things, the beautiful women in my life.
Trump has done it.
You don't turn around and say, actually, you're the sexist.
If you call me a sexist, I call you a sexist.
Seems juvenile.
This is Chris Cuomo, Democrat hack, explaining to Trump's operative how it's supposed to work.
We do the attacking.
We, the left-wing media, do the attacking.
You get on defense and real.
And then we move on to the next attack before you can even defend yourself.
It worked with Mitt Romney.
That's how we did it with Mitt Romney.
We accused him of bullying somebody in high school.
We accused him of abusing his dog.
We accused him of having a war on women.
And he kept saying, no, no, I didn't do that.
You don't attack us.
What the hell's wrong with you?
We're the mainstream media.
You don't attack us.
So here's the New York Times saying the same thing.
As Donald Trump, and you can tell how scared they are of this guy, because this is all that's in the New York Times.
As Donald Trump pushes conspiracy theories, says the New York Times, this is the headline.
Right-wing media gets its wish.
Ever since talk radio, cable news, and the internet emerged in the 1990s as potent political forces on the right, Republicans have used those media to attack their opponents through a now familiar two-step.
Political operatives would secretly place damaging information with friendly outlets like the Drudge Report and Fox News and with radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, and then they would work to get the same information absorbed into the mainstream media.
Candidates themselves would avoid being seen slinging mud if possible so as to avoid coming across as undignified or desperate.
Yet, by personally broaching topics like Bill Clinton's marital indiscretions and the conspiracy theory surrounding the suicide of Vince Foster, a Clinton White House aide, a Clinton White House aide, Donald Trump is again defying the norms of presidential politics and fashioning his own outrageous style, one that has little use for a middleman, let alone usual ideas about dignity.
Okay, just to put this in context, right, this is the same newspaper that a week ago ran 20 pages of information proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Donald Trump was a billionaire heterosexual, which is shocking to the Times on both counts, that A, he has a lot of money and B, he sleeps with women.
That's what they proved.
And the women came out and said, no, we kind of like it.
You know, it was fine.
He was nice.
We had a good time.
And the New York Times just blows up in the New York Times' face.
And now they're telling us how awful.
And they continue to run these pieces.
Yesterday was David Brooks.
Why does everybody hate Hillary?
It's because she works too hard.
She works too hard.
I thought when I saw this, that's like the interview where you go in, the job interview, and they say, what's your biggest flaw?
And I'm too dedicated to the company.
I work too hard.
That's the thing.
They did it again today.
Today they have another one, an absolute gem from Thomas Edsall.
He says, how could a candidate with as much baggage as Trump be neck and neck with one of the most admired, best credentialed, and most broadly experienced nominees in the history of the Democratic Party?
It's like these guys have not got a clue.
See, when the Times singles out the right-wing media, they leave out the fact that they're the left-wing media.
They don't think they are.
They think, you know, I have heard this again and again.
I have seen New York Times editors going, no, no, no.
You know, we're an urban newspaper, so we're tolerant of gays and we have, you know, those values, but we report the news utterly straight.
I mean, these are the guys who blame George W. Bush for starting a hurricane that destroyed New Orleans.
I mean, this is like, you know, do you remember that?
That was the turning point in the Bush administration.
That was when they had been throwing these phony scandals, these non-scandal scandals.
In the Nixon administration, they had non-denial denials.
In the George W. Bush administration, they had non-scandal scandals, one after another after another.
But they never tagged him until they got all those things on with all those things on TV, with people suffering in New Orleans and guys saying George W. Bush hates black people and all this stuff.
Listen to this from National Review.
Just remember what that was like.
Because I remember I was out of town.
I was in Hawaii when the hurricane hit New Orleans, and I read the New York Times, which at the time I would never have done.
And I thought, wow, this is like hate speech.
It's like the things they're saying about George W. Bush are hateful.
Listen to this from National Review.
Virtually all of the gripping stories from Katrina were untrue.
All of those stories about, in Paula Zahn's words, bands of rapists going block to block, not true.
Tales of snipers firing on medevac helicopters, bogus.
The yarns peddled on Oprah Winfrey by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagan and the New Orleans police chief that little babies were getting raped in the superdome and that the bodies of the murdered were piling up completely false.
The stories about poor blacks dying in comparatively huge numbers because American society left them behind?
Nah-uh.
While most outlets limited themselves to taking Nagan's estimate of 10,000 dead at face value, editor and publisher, the watchdog of the media, ran the headline, Mortuary Director tells local paper 40,000 could be lost in the hurricane.
In all of Louisiana, not just New Orleans, the total dead from Katrina was roughly 1,500.
Blacks did not die disproportionately, nor did the poor.
In fact, it was the other way around in terms of blacks.
They were a little, it was a little disproportionate non-blacks.
The only group truly singled out in terms of mortality was, as always, the elderly.
This barely captures how badly the press bungled Katrina coverage, and yet an ubiquitous media chorus claims simultaneously that Katrina was Bush's worst hour and the press's best.
So when the New York Times talks about this pattern of right-wing politicians slipping news to the Drudge Report, it's because the Drudge Report was the only person who would report the news.
They were the only guys who would report Bill Clinton shtupping Monica Lewinsky in our Oval Office that we pay for.
Any other chief executive in America, fired.
Any other chief executive in America caught with a young girl like that in his office in the, you know, the board of directors tosses him out.
So, you know, this is the thing.
You know, they're so shocked because they don't realize that they have lied and lied and lying and lost their credibility with all of us.
So what's really interesting about this is just take a look at two clips from yesterday: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Now, outside the Donald Trump rally, right, there's this riot going on, essentially.
These guys starting all kinds of trouble, mostly Latinos with printed, suspiciously printed signs that looked like they had been made in a factory.
So these were not guys writing on cardboard boxes.
This was an organized rally.
Meanwhile, at Milo Yiannopoulos is talking at a college and people are storming.
Anyone who's talking for Trump is getting stormed and violent.
Take a look at the two candidates.
Take a look at Hillary first.
She's attacking, trying to hit back at Trump kind of weakly.
But we're not talking about any ordinary anti-union, anti-worker Republican.
A lot of Republicans themselves say Donald Trump is a disaster waiting to happen to America.
What little we know of his economic policies would be running up our debt, starting trade wars, letting Wall Street run wild.
All of that could cause another crash and devastate working families and our country.
Trump economics is a recipe for lower wages, fewer jobs, more debt.
He could bankrupt America like he's bankrupted his companies.
I mean, ask yourself, how can anybody lose money running a casino, really?
So there's Hillary Clinton looking like grim death.
You know, her voice is almost gone.
She's screeching.
She's got this horrible screech.
She just, she's reading straight off the teleprompter.
She looks like she's, you know, she's just her eyes doing back and forth, the whole Obama thing, reading it straight off the teleprompter.
And she's saying things, these kind of wild attacks on Trump.
Like yesterday she said, oh, you know, he said something at one point in 2007 that it looks like the housing market is going to crash.
And that wouldn't be such a bad thing for me because I can make a lot of money out of that.
And Trump said, yeah, that's what I do.
I'm a businessman.
I make money whether it's good times or bad times.
That's what a good businessman does.
And our country should be run like that.
Also, perfectly good point.
Perfectly reasonable point.
But that's grim Hillary Clinton.
Look at Trump.
This is hilarious.
Look at Trump.
Obamacare And Sleaze Back00:04:10
I've learned, don't even joke a little bit.
You know, don't even joke a little bit.
You know, Ed Randell, okay, he was the mayor of Philadelphia.
He's a big, big Hillary Clinton supporter.
Okay.
Think of this.
I was so angry when I heard him say this.
But Ed Randell, big, big women love, and I love women.
Shout it out.
Shout it out.
She said, women love you.
I love women.
Okay.
But Ed Randell, one of Hillary Clinton's biggest supporters, said that half the women in the United States, something to this effect, half the women in the United States are ugly.
Nobody even talks about it.
Nobody talks about it.
Can you imagine if I made that statement?
It would be the electric chair.
And I don't believe that either, by the way.
But he made that statement.
And I said, oh, he said, you don't even hear about it.
You don't even hear about it.
I mean, he was a big wheel, and now he's big in the Hillary Clinton campaign.
And you don't even hear about it because there's a double standard.
If you're a Republican, if you're a conservative, it's a total double standard from the sleaze back there.
The sleaze?
But first of all, look at him.
He's having a great time.
He's having the time of his life.
He looks like he's having fun.
I mean, it looks like you're sitting there looking, hey, maybe a Trump administration.
Okay, it'd be fascist.
But at least it'd be fun fascism.
At least we'd be having a good time.
At least we'd be laughing.
You know, that sleaze back there, he's talking about the press.
He's talking about the guys that every Republican for the last 50 years has been scared, witless of.
They've been trembling in their boots.
You wonder why they didn't stand up to Obama?
It's the press.
And he's just saying, those sleaze back.
He's pointing at them.
And there's those sleaze back there.
You know, you can't help but love it.
And the proof that he's right, the proof that he's right about the bias in the press is this.
Who are both candidates not talking about?
Who is the missing man, the invisible man, Barack Obama?
Nobody is saying a word about him.
Trump's not running against him, and Hillary's not running on him.
Hillary's talking about how much everybody's suffering, you know, but she never says a bad word about Obama.
Today in the Wall Street Journal, for the first time in the modern era, young adults are more likely to live with their parents than with a spouse or partner, according to a new study by Pew Research Center.
Young men, I mean, you know, these are college graduates, are living at home because they don't have good jobs.
Nobody has good jobs.
They keep quoting that stupid, you know, unemployment has dropped to 5%.
But these are not the same jobs that disappeared.
This is a suffering economy.
Any economy would have bounced back after the crash in 2008.
But he has made sure that that's a terrible economy.
Here's a piece in the Wall Street Journal by Marco Rubio about Obamacare, the one piece of big legislation which by hook and by crook Obama forced through.
The evidence keeps mounting, Rubio says.
Six years after being signed into law, Obamacare is a costly and unsustainable disaster.
Look at what has happened in the past month alone.
A federal court ruled that the Obama administration violated the law by spending money on Obamacare subsidies without an appropriation from Congress.
They're just keeping the thing afloat by illegally throwing our money at it.
In Florida, 15 health insurers are seeking an average increase in premiums of 17.7% increase in premiums for 2017.
The continued rating of Medicare Advantage, Obamacare was projected in 2012 to cut $156 billion from the program over a decade.
It hurts many seniors in my home state and nationwide.
The health law sweeping mandates continue to target faith-based organizations like the nuns of the Little Sisters of the Poor.
On and on, okay?
So here's a piece.
You know, there was a novel by Ralph Ellison about a famous novel about the black man in America called Invisible Man.
Barack Obama is the invisible man.
He is the invisible man.
Everybody loves him, but everything he's done has gone bad.
I mean, the guy has been a total incompetent.
And there's a piece in the Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago, last week, I think it was, where he says, how did he get away with this?
Religion And Relationships00:09:54
How did he get away with it?
And he says, Mr. Obama is able to avoid being a target.
The reason he's able to avoid being a target is that he is a deft manipulator of the media, probably more skillful at it than any president ever.
He heads a savvy public relations machine that markets him like a Hollywood celebrity, a role he obligingly and successfully plays.
And so all you ever see of Obama is him with people admiring him, him putting up a statue to women, him blowing bubbles with children, all this stuff.
That's all you ever see of him.
And that fact alone has sucked the credibility out of the media until when you, as I said yesterday, when you stand Donald Trump next to principles, he looks like a monster.
When you stand him up next to the media, he looks like a God.
It's like, it's that simple, and Trump knows it, and he's playing it brilliantly.
The mailbag.
Time for the mailbag.
You know, we got a lot of questions this time about religion, so I'm kind of going to weave a couple of them together.
Here's one from John.
It says, how do you and Ben connect when it comes to religion?
We just punched each other.
You know, that's what I don't know.
How do you and Ben connect when it comes to religion?
Since you're now a Christian and he practices Judaism, what fundamental differences do you two not agree on?
And it says, P.S., I love the show, and I bought two of your books from Amazon.
That's how you get in.
That's how you get in.
It's like, this is like the Bill O'Reilly show.
You have to buy my books, and then I answer your questions.
Look, I obviously, I can't speak for Ben.
You know, religion is so different from the inside than it is from the outside that usually when you're talking about another guy's religion, you're talking garbage.
You know, you really don't know what he's going through.
Obviously, I was born and raised a Jew, but I was born and raised, not a secular Jew, but a very, it was a very weird story.
You can read all about it in my book.
I hope you will pre-order my book, The Great Good Thing, a Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
And of course, Ben, you know, he looks at that story as a sad story.
I look at it as a happy story.
I found faith in Christ, salvation, happiness, joy in knowing Jesus.
But to Ben, like, I was lost to Judaism because of my upbringing and because of the way I was raised.
What I can say about my faith, because my faith is kind of eccentric even in Christianity, is I don't believe Christianity is a religion.
I believe it's a relationship.
I believe everything that Christians do should be looked at as a visual aid, a memory aid, a sensory aid to getting to know Jesus Christ.
And the reason we want to get to know Jesus Christ is he is all of God that we can know.
You know, there is a God, the Father, who is incomprehensible.
And when you talk to that amorphous God, that empty God, that empty room, I think you start to worship yourself.
I think that God takes on traits of your father, takes on traits of your mother, takes on traits of you, and pretty soon you're worshiping the world.
Jesus gives you a way to communicate through another human being with the divine.
And that relationship, everything else is just built to hone that relationship.
Even the Bible, the Bible keeps you from turning Jesus into yourself.
The Bible reminds you what he said, who he was, what he did, and that's how you get to know him better.
There's nothing you can do to win God's salvation in Christianity.
There's nothing to do.
There's no rules.
There's not.
Everybody who says, don't do this, don't do that, that's fine.
And the traditions are important.
The traditions help you to get to know him.
But basically, this is for me about a relationship with God.
And when I look back, it's been, I think it's been 12 years now since I was baptized.
When I look at those 12 years and how that relationship has progressed, sometimes through church, sometimes through scripture, often through prayer, a lot of by reading.
You know, you can't do it on your own because then you're just talking to yourself.
All those things that have developed that relationship.
When I look back, what I find over those 12 years is that I am now more myself than I ever have been.
It's a bizarre, bizarre thing.
All this garbage has fallen off me.
It's really amazing.
You know, when you look, there's a wonderful story in the Narnia book about one of the Narnia books about a little boy who turns into a dragon, and he keeps pulling, trying to pull his dragon skin off so he can become a boy again, but it just keeps growing back.
And finally, Aslam, the Christ-like lion, just rips it off him.
And it's excruciating, but he rips the scales off, and he becomes a human being.
And that has been pretty much my experience, that up until that moment, I did everything I could.
I meditated.
I used therapy, and all those things were really helpful, but the skin kept growing back.
But something about knowing Christ is transformative.
And I'm not preaching to you.
I'm just telling you my experience.
And that is the relationship that Judaism doesn't contain.
It has all kinds of other ways of dealing with God.
You know, the Jews are a chosen people, a special people in their relationship with God.
God doesn't break his promises.
He doesn't say, I'm going to do this for you, and then walk away.
Oh, Jesus has come, the deal is off.
I don't believe that at all.
I don't believe the notion that I write about this a lot in The Great Good Thing, this notion that the Jews killed Christ.
That's not even an English sentence to me.
You know, that's like saying the whites held slaves.
It's like saying the blacks rioted in Los Angeles.
Some guy who didn't do it, who wasn't there, who was on the other coast, rioted in Los Angeles because he was black.
That just doesn't make sense to me.
I do explain what I think that means in my book.
So anyway, what is not included in Judaism, obviously, this is the great dividing line, is the character of Jesus Christ as being the Son of God and a representative of God.
And that's something that is not in Ben's religion.
But what is in Ben's religion, I would have to leave it to him to say because only he can explain it to you in a proper way.
So that's my answer.
I just want to add that somebody else, Audrey Gail Grace, asked, who is my favorite character in the Chronicles of Narnia?
And I wanted to add that in because I'm not a big fan of C.S. Lewis's fiction.
I love his nonfiction.
I mean, The Weight of Glory is one of my favorite books, and that's saying something because I've read everything.
So I've read every book ever written.
So that's saying a lot.
But, you know, I like the Narnia books.
But the one point when the Narnia books really come to life is whenever Aslan, the Christly lion, is on the scene because C.S. Lewis's description of his relationship to human beings is so exact.
And it actually does develop this theme of a relationship, of the relationship being everything.
All right.
That's what I had to say about religion.
I hope that made some kind of sense.
I'll go through a couple of quick ones.
I'm running out of time.
Here's a guy, this does sound like Bill O'Reilly, but he says, I just finished reading your Homelander series, and they were great, and he's looking for more books for kids with good values.
This is from Jake.
I will say, I will advertise that I have other books for kids that are the same, a series called Mind War, a couple of books called Crazy Dangerous, If We Survive, Nightmare City, but also take a look at older books.
You know, look at the 101 Dalmatians, Shane the Western, If You Have a Boy.
I read that book five times when I was a boy.
It's a great, great Western.
The Hunger Games is a good series.
It actually is.
It's not just a bestseller.
It's actually good.
And Harry Potter, also a good series.
I noticed that you and Ben often use the same clips in your podcast.
Is that on purpose? asks Mary.
No, it's not.
It's simply that there's not really that much news in any given day.
And, you know, we're just going to the same sources, and that's basically the stuff that's there.
And some of it, you know, the guys are cutting the clips.
And if they already have the clip and Ben says, I want to hear from that guy, they throw in the same clip.
So it's not on purpose.
I got to stop.
I didn't leave myself enough time.
But we'll come back.
There were some questions I'd like to come back to.
Stuff I like.
That's the mailbag.
We'll do it again next Wednesday.
Subscribe.
Send your questions.
I will get as many of them as I can.
So this has been ancient Greeks.
And I'll come back and do the ancient Romans another time because they have a lot of stuff that is formative too.
But I just think these are things that I wanted to recommend.
I recommended the Pericles' funeral oration from Thucydides, Plato's Apology of Socrates.
And the reason I'm recommending these things is because they're easy reads.
They're good reads.
I'm not sending you like, you know, crazy stuff that'd be hard to read.
And they are what you are.
You think what you think because these books existed, because people wrote these books.
And another one, and this is just as entertaining as it gets, there's a book of history, the father of history, he's called Herodotus.
He wrote what is assumed to be kind of one of the earliest real histories.
And in Herodotus, if you don't want to read the book, I love this book.
I read it a long time ago, but I loved every page.
But it's like 800 pages long.
But if you don't want to read every page, read books six and seven of the histories, which includes the Battle of Marathon, the famous battle where the Persians invaded.
They way outnumbered the Greeks.
And the Greeks went out and fought them at Marathon.
And there's a famous legend that's actually not in Herodotus.
It's misremembered from Herodotus.
It's in Plutarch that a guy went running from the battlefield of Marathon, the 25 miles to Athens to announce the victory.
And that's how we get the marathon that's 24 point-something miles.
It's the distance from Marathon to Athens.
The next chapter involves the story of Leonidas at the Battle of Thermopylae, the 300 who stand up against the next Persian invasion and stand in this little pass, the Pass of Fire.
And we all remember it from the movie 300.
Let's take a quick look at this scene from the movie.
This is where we hold them!
This is where we fight!
This is where they die!
these shield boys remember this day man for it will be yours for all time Lay down your weapons!
Persians!
Mullen Lobby Callenge00:00:59
Come and get them!
Mullen lobby!
Come and take them!
Mullen lobby!
You know, have you heard the word laconic?
You know the word laconic?
Like Gary Cooper or John Wayne would be laconic.
They're guys who don't speak much, but what they say is really choice.
That comes from the area Laconia, which was the area that Spartan was in.
And they had a way of speaking that was very tense.
Mullen lobby.
Come and get them, pal.
You know, this stuff is formative because it talks a lot about why free men, why a small band of free men can beat a bigger band of slaves.
And that's really, really important.
All right.
Tomorrow, if there's not too much news, other news, I want to talk a little bit about Hollywood and some of the terrible things that are going there.
And have a friend of mine on who is a Christian critic.
I hope we'll get to interview him.
It should be interesting because there's a lot of really nasty stuff going on in Hollywood that's been, but that's affecting our minds.