Ep. 139 skewers "Professor Clueless von Quizkel" for absurdly linking gun ownership to extremism via climate change, mocking Obama’s self-pity over public failure and Clinton’s flip-flops on radical Islam—from denial to Saudi-funded backtracking. Krauthammer exposes Obama’s 2013 downplaying of al-Qaeda, fueling lone-wolf attacks, while Stevens ties it to post-9/11 jihadist growth. Klavan argues Western relativism, rejecting moral absolutes, leaves cultures vulnerable to extremism’s "cause-driven" appeal, praising Trump’s bluntness over Clinton’s hypocrisy and Obama’s delusions. The episode frames the clash as truth vs. self-serving evasion, ending with a noir film plug and audience call-to-action. [Automatically generated summary]
A new federally funded study has scientists investigating a mystery of nature.
Why does owning a gun change a person's name to Muhammad?
Federally funded scientists have long been aware that every time a shooting occurs in America, the perpetrator uses a gun, and they've therefore determined beyond a doubt that gun ownership causes people to become evil.
But recently, these same scientists have noticed that many of the people who have been made evil by guns have also developed the name Muhammad or some other name associated with the Middle East.
They are now trying to discover why gun ownership would cause someone to have such a name.
Federally funded scientist Professor Clueless von Quizkel told reporters, quote, we know that guns make people evil because we received over a billion dollars in federal grants to do a study called how guns make people evil.
If guns didn't make people evil, then I wouldn't own this Mercedes, and that just doesn't make any sense.
But why do all the gun-made evil people suddenly develop Middle Eastern names?
That's a mystery that could get me a Maserati, unquote.
Von Quizicle went on to say that he was also hoping to find a link between guns and climate change because he said, quote, if you can't find a connection to climate change, you are just leaving money on the table.
In a somber appearance after the latest incident of a gun turning a person's name Middle Eastern, future former President Barack Obama said, quote, how long, oh, how long will the American people fail to live up to my admittedly unreachable standards of insight and wisdom?
When, oh, when will this sinful generation hear my message and understand that it is guns, guns, guns, that make people evil and that also give them names like Ahmed, unquote.
Presumptive Democratic nominee for dishonest president Hillary Clinton reacted to the new information, telling reporters, quote, I have always said what I'm now saying, which I've never said before, and I completely deny it, yet will continue to say it without fear or compromise until it's disproven, when I will say something entirely different and pretend I've always said that, unquote.
Presumptive Republican nominee for outlandish president Donald Trump addressed the issue in a speech, saying, quote, after a certain amount of solitary reflection and with all respect for my honorable colleagues, it seems to me that they are confusing correlation with causation and are guilty of the intellectual fallacy that I like to call by its Latin name of come hoc ergo propterhoc, not to mention the similarly specious reasoning familiarly referred to as post hoc ergo propterhoc.
Of course, it's been a while since I studied computationally intensive statistical methods under Efron, Trump went on, but in my considered opinion, it would be far more efficacious, not to say laudatory, to simply work ourselves up into an hysterical frenzy and hunt down random Muslim guys.
Actually, Trump has never said anything remotely that intelligent.
He just sounds that intelligent compared to Obama and Hillary.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know, there's an old expression, in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
This is like in the country of the blind, stupid and dishonest.
The stupid and dishonest one-eyed man is king.
It's Trump.
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We're just going to stand behind me and point to Donald Trump.
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I think he's going to do a remote today, so he will be back.
I think Shapiro's just making this stuff up at this point.
I need a day off.
It's Hachmen Ganafanu.
It's when God gave the Jews olive oil to sell to the Italians.
It's like, all right, take the day off.
Just leave me alone.
All right.
So William McGurn, the great Bill McGurn, who writes a column at the Wall Street Journal, opens his column today quoting Voltaire.
And here's the quote from Voltaire: I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one, O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.
And God granted it.
And that is the story of Donald Trump yesterday in the aftermath of this horrific murder, multiple murder in Orlando.
I mean, we have Adam Bandler, our own Adam Bandler on the Daily Wire, has a piece up today of all the stupid things that leftists are saying to spin the narrative of this murder away from radical Islam.
So he's got, it's the gun that did it, it's Christians and conservatives because they've opposed gay marriage, you know, and it's on and on.
Toxic masculinity was my favorite one.
Now it turns out the guy may have been gay.
He was apparently, some of these witnesses said they had seen him on Grindr, you know, the gay dating app.
So is it going to become about toxic homosexuality?
I always love when they tell you these monsters are gay and you think, wow, I knew there was something I didn't like about the guy.
But now are they going to say, oh, well, it's toxic homosexuality?
No, because they're not looking for the truth.
They're just spinning the narrative.
So if the narrative goes a different way, they just distract you from everything, which all puts together makes Trump look brilliant.
I mean, it makes him look brilliant.
But before we listen to this whole argument, I just want to put forward how I see this, what I see people, what I think we're arguing about, okay?
Because you may wonder, like, why are they doing this?
And a lot of people say, well, oh, even Trump was kind of suggesting this yesterday that Obama must be secretly a Muslim.
That's not what this is about.
This is a very, very Western phenomenon that we are seeing.
This argument has been going on since Jesus met Pilate, okay?
When Jesus said, I am the way and the truth.
And Pilate said, what is truth?
You know, what is truth?
There's no truth.
And this argument intensified after the Reformation, when suddenly the Catholic Church lost its monopoly on truth.
And people started to ask, well, if there is no monopoly on truth, then how do we know what truth is?
That's the subject of Hamlet.
That is why Hamlet goes to school in Wittenberg, I guess the name, where the Reformation began.
That's why he can't make a decision, because he can't figure out what the truth is.
But this question got more and more intense.
Nietzsche, this is what Nietzsche dealt with, this is what Dostoevsky dealt with all through our culture.
This is the big question.
Is there such a thing as moral truth?
How do you know it?
And there's this one side, we'll call it the Pontius Pilate side, this is no, you know, what is truth?
Who knows?
Who can say?
The reason this becomes such a desperate, desperate question, especially after World War I and World War II, is because if there is such a thing as truth, if there's no such thing as truth, then you have multiculturalism.
Every culture is just as good as every other.
You don't know what's good, you don't know what's bad, you just think this because you're a Westerner.
You just think the tolerance is good because you're a Westerner.
Somebody else thinks something else is good because he's not a Westerner.
Who are you to say?
Who are you to say?
That's supposed to bring peace.
And in the wake of World War I, which was this devastating and meaningless war in which an entire generation of European manhood was wiped off the face of the earth, and at the end of it, nobody could tell why.
And World War II, which was really just a continuation of that war, which ended, remember, with the atom bomb, when suddenly the world could be destroyed, right?
If your culture is, if one culture can be better than another, then it's possible that this culture is the best, that this culture is the best we have.
Doesn't mean it's perfect.
It doesn't mean it's anywhere near perfect.
It just means it's the best one we've got.
If that's true, then you have to fight for it.
You have to defend it.
And if you have to defend it, that means whole generations of people may be wiped out.
It may mean atom bombs falling everywhere.
We don't know what it may mean with the current weaponry that we have.
So it's not that the left is being nasty, just trying to destroy everything.
They're acting, they may not know this, I mean, I think, but the argument has a certain amount of goodwill behind it.
It's just mistaken.
It just happens to be the wrong argument, okay?
And that's why they're so desperate for no one to say it's Islamism, and if Islamism, then it might be Islam.
That's why they are desperate for no one to get in the way of their relativism because they think their relativism means peace.
We know it means evil, because if you have no sense of what the good is, evil is going to win the day because evil is going to be aggressive.
So if you're not aggressive with good, evil is going to move into that spot.
We know that.
But they think they're going to give us peace because nobody's going to argue anymore.
That's what's happening in Europe.
Nobody's, you can't argue.
They come in and rape your women.
Don't say anything.
Just don't say anything because we'll have peace.
Well, we all know what that kind of peace leads to.
And that's why Trump looks like such a genius.
He gets up and he makes a speech yesterday.
Let's play Trump 3.
You just listen to him, and it's the sound.
Even I, who really dislike Trump, think, oh, thank you.
So go ahead, play it.
Many of the principles of radical Islam are incompatible with Western values and institutions.
Remember this.
Radical Islam is anti-woman, anti-gay, and anti-American.
I refuse to allow America to become a place where gay people, Christian people, Jewish people are targets of persecution and intimidation by radical Islamic preachers of hate and violence.
This is not just a national security issue It's a quality of life issue.
If we want to protect the quality of life for all Americans, women and children, gay and straight, Jews and Christians, and all people, then we need to tell the truth about radical Islam, and we need to do it now.
We need to tell the truth also about how radical Islam is coming to our shores and is coming With these people, folks, it's coming.
So, I mean, it's just, he just sounds like, it just sounds like common sense, doesn't it?
Now, to be fair, he said all kinds of nutbag things yesterday, too.
He was tweeting about how he, you know, basically he alone predicted that there would be more Islamic violence.
Like, like he's discovered this amazing thing that there are radical Islamics who want to kill us.
Like, nobody ever found this before.
Trump found it.
But in fact, Hillary Obama make him sound like that's true.
He also said this stuff, which if they don't rein him in on this, this is the kind of thing they could cost in the election, where he basically was suggesting, he kept saying, well, he would phrase it in mysterious ways, like, Obama may have either doesn't know what he's doing or he knows all too well.
You know, this kind of like, you know, like Ted Cruz killed Kennedy and now, you know, Obama's sitting there plotting to bring the caliphate to America.
He knows that there's a certain amount of crazy conspiratorial people on the right, and he's playing to those people, but it doesn't play with the rest of us because you just think, like, come on, you know, pull yourself together.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, the New York Times, a former newspaper, this is their headline, right, on the app on the iPad app.
Blaming Muslims after attack, Donald Trump tosses pluralism aside.
That's their objective.
That's their objective news headline.
Donald Trump left little doubt on Monday that he intends to run on the same proposals on immigration and terrorism that animated his primary campaign, using his first speech after the massacre in Orlando to propose sweeping measures against Muslims that pay little heed to American traditions of pluralism.
That's their objective news.
So, by the way, this comes out in the same day that a poll comes out showing that people have lost all confidence in the news media, all of it.
Like now, it says confidence in newspapers has hit an all-time low.
20% have confidence in newspapers, and they're like all Democrats.
They're all Democrats because they're hearing their own opinions come back at them.
So we know, and that goes along with a 10-point drop in confidence in TV news as well.
We know you're lying to us.
We know you're lying.
You know, it's like you're not invisible.
We see you.
We know you're lying.
So Trump goes on and he says all this stuff.
But he's right that he has smoked.
He says, you know, Hillary Clinton won't even mention this, and she should step down.
But she has started to sort of hint that maybe there is such a thing as Islam and maybe it's not, as she said, she said at one point, that has nothing, Muslims have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.
She's backpedaling that a little bit because of him, because of him.
He is forcing her to say stuff.
So she's still sticking with, she's still sticking with the guns.
You know, play Hillary II, the second Hillary Cutt.
We may have our disagreements about gun safety regulations, but we should all be able to agree on a few essential things.
If the FBI is watching you for suspected terrorist links, you shouldn't be able to just go buy a gun with no questions asked.
That's her.
I know.
That's her.
The FBI is watching her.
And you know, it is funny because she's so self-blind, like when she said all women who complain about being molested have to be believed.
She's so self-blind.
She's on auto-lie.
You know, she can't stop the lies from just rolling out of herself.
But it also, it's so offensive.
It is so offensive to have these people who are surrounded by guns telling us we can't defend ourselves.
If I could afford her Secret Service, I wouldn't own a gun.
I own a gun because I can't afford to secret service.
It's cheaper to have a gun than the Secret Service.
She has that, you know, and she is under FBI investigation no matter what she says.
So she shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a Secret Serviceman.
The Secret Servicemen should be edging away from it.
I'm sorry, we can't bring our guns too close to you.
The other thing she says, play cut number three about the funding.
For starters, it is long past time for the Saudis, the Gutteries, and the Kuwaitis and others to stop their citizens from funding extremist organizations.
And they should stop supporting radical schools and mosques around the world that have set too many young people on a path toward extremism.
Now, the reason she's saying this is because she wants them to continue to contribute to the Clinton Foundation because they gave her like 25, the Saudis gave her $25 million.
All these people who oppressed gays and oppressed women, they've given them funneled all this money.
Lone Wolf Extremism00:09:29
So that's why she's saying they've got to stop supporting extremism and save their money to give it to me because, you know, I've got to retire after this.
You know, in case I lose or after I'm president, you know, I've got to retire.
I need some money.
So send the money to me and stop funding extremism.
There was my favorite piece of commentary yesterday because now Hillary does this thing that she does.
It's not enough for her to change one lie for another lie.
She has to tell you, in spite of the fact that we all have YouTube and we can all see that it's not true, she has to tell you that she always said this.
I always said that I had a, you know, that I was selling secrets to the Russians.
I always, no, no, no, I never said that I didn't have a secret email, you know, private email server.
I always said, so now she's saying, I always said that it was radical Islam.
I just don't know what difference does it make, you know, if I call it that, as long as we kill the people and all this stuff.
So yesterday, Brett Baer on his panel called her out by showing this clip, and Krauthammer followed it up with one of the, I think he won the Day's Commentary Award with this comment, playlist.
Here's what Clinton said December about this.
So what's the problem with radical Islam?
Well, the problem is that that sounds like we are declaring war against a religion.
And that, to me, is number one wrong.
Even though the qualified radical is there?
No, because, look, you know enough about religion.
You've studied it.
And there are radicals, people who believe all kinds of things in every religion in the world.
And she reiterated that at the debate, a Democratic debate this primary season.
We're back with the panel.
The back and forth today, Charles.
Well, on Hillary and the term radical Islam, what has changed between the interview and today?
No Bernie Sanders.
The campaign is over.
She doesn't have to appeal to her left, so all of a sudden she discovers the term, which is the reason I really like completely cynical liberals who have no principles.
They will occasionally get it right.
With a principled liberal, they'll get it wrong every time.
But with Hillary, as soon as it is now convenient, she will continue to say radicalism, which is a good thing.
And one reason it's a good thing is what you guys were discussing about the attack on bar.
The fact is that unless you say what kind of extremism it is, you don't understand any connections.
That's what makes Obama's refusal so incomprehensible and unnerving.
He knows there's a connection.
When you say radical Islam, you are encompassing all of the elements of it, of which one is a radical opposition and hatred of gays.
I mean, it's a great piece of commentary, and it's one of the things that was actually great about Bill Clinton was that he had no principles and that he went bowed with the wind.
And when the voters voted out the Democratic Congress and voted in the Republicans, he changed.
He basically became a conservative president, at least at home.
And that really was a good thing.
She, the problem with her is that she just lies and then follows this ideology.
She's far more of a rock-ribbed left-winger than her husband ever was.
So Krauthammer is also right about Obama.
I mean, Obama is doing these two, the two big things they feel have some traction.
The left feels has some traction to keep us from looking at radical Islam and all the implications of that are the guns and the lone wolf idea.
You know, that it's not, it's not a movement, it's just a lone wolf.
And it's like the problem is that these guys get guns.
And by the way, you know, some people think that Obama is trolling the right.
And I have to admit that there are times when I think Obama is trolling the right.
He's just trying to make us angry.
But in general, in general, I think Obama is just a nincum poop.
And when I say that, what I mean is not that he has a low IQ.
He obviously has a very high IQ.
What I mean is that he's got this ideology.
It's wrong.
The ideology describes the world falsely.
But it has led him to the top of the world.
He is now one of the most powerful people, if not the most powerful people on earth.
So the ideology has served him well.
So he's got no reason to change it.
And he's a narcissist.
He's got a personality disorder.
He cannot admit he cannot be criticized.
He cannot take criticism.
And he cannot take self-criticism.
So he never says, I'm wrong.
I d he you'll hear him do the same thing Hillary does.
I never said, I never drew a red line.
I there's no red line.
You know, I'm not the one who talked about bathrooms where the uh transgender people should go in the bathroom.
I mean, it doesn't matter that it's all over YouTube.
He doesn't care.
It's just he cannot take criticism, so he can't change his mind.
So here he is yesterday talking to reporters about the lone wolf and the thing.
And he's not, this is not trolling.
I think he's self-blind.
He's self-blinded.
As far as we can tell right now, this is certainly an example of the kind of homegrown extremism that all of us have been so concerned about for a very long time.
It also appears that he was able to obtain these weapons legally because he did not have a criminal record that in some ways would prohibit him from purchasing these weapons.
It appears that one of those weapons he was able to just carry out of the store.
An assault rifle, a handgun, a block, which had a lot of clicks in it.
He was apparently required to wait for three days under foreign law.
But it does indicate the degree to which it was not difficult for him to obtain these kinds of weapons.
So I'm going to read, Brett Stevens has a column, the foreign, you know, he writes on foreign affairs in the Wall Street Journal.
Here's a column today.
I'm going to try, if I have time, I'm going to try and read as much of it as I possibly can because it tells you just about everything you need to know about what you just heard from Obama.
It's Brett Stevens, Wall Street Journal.
In the spring of 2013, Barack Obama delivered the defining speech of his presidency on the subject of terrorism.
Its premise was wrong, as was its thesis, as were its predictions and recommendations.
We are now paying the price for this cascade of folly.
Here's the quote.
Today, Osama bin Laden is dead, and so are most of his top lieutenants.
The president boasted at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. There have been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more secure.
The future of terrorism, he explained, consisted of less capable al-Qaeda affiliates.
Remember, this is the varsity team or whatever, the JV team.
Localized threats against Westerners in faraway places such as Algeria and homegrown killers like the Boston Marathon bombers.
Stevens goes on to say, all of this suggested that it was time to call it quits on what Mr. Obama derided as a boundless global war on terror.
That meant sharply curtailing drone strikes, completing the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and closing Guantanamo prison.
It meant renewing efforts to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians and seeking transitions to democracy in Libya and Egypt.
And it meant working with Congress to repeal the 2001 authorization for use of military force against al-Qaeda.
This war, like all wars, must end, Obama said.
That's what history advises.
That's what our democracy demands.
Now, Stevens says, King Knut of legend stood on an English shoreline and ordered the tide to recede.
President Knut stood before a Beltway audience and ordered the war to end.
Neither tide nor war obeyed.
Now, I just want to add here, by the way, that King Knut, this is a famous legend that King Knut attacked the waves.
King Knut was trying to show his advisors that there was a limit to the king's power.
He was putting on a demonstration.
President Obama was trying to do the opposite.
He was trying to show that there was no limit.
He was just going to declare the war over, and it didn't matter what the other side said.
Here goes Brett Stevens again.
In 2010, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Islamic State's predecessor, was dead on its feet, said Obama.
I'm sorry, as expert Michael Knight told Congress.
Worldwide, the U.S. government estimated al-Qaeda's total strength at no more than 4,000 fighters.
That was the result of George W. Bush's surge in Iraq, of Mr. Obama's own surge in Afghanistan, and of the aggressive campaign of drone killings in Pakistan and Yemen.
But then the Obama doctrine kicked in.
Between 2010 and 2013, the number of jihadists worldwide went up to 100,000, while the number of jihadist groups rose by 58%, according to a RAND Corporation study.
That was before ISIS declared its caliphate.
Apologists for Mr. Obama will rejoin that it's unfair to blame him for trends in terrorism, an argument that would have more credibility if he hadn't been so eager to take credit for those trends only three years ago.
The same apologists also claim that the U.S. cannot possibly cure what ails the Middle East and that no law enforcement agency can stop a lone wolf terrorist such as Omar Mateen, the guy in Orlando.
But these arguments fail.
The rise of ISIS was a predictable result of Mr. Obama's abdication in Iraq and especially Syria, a result Mr. Obama himself foresaw in his 2013 speech, quote, we must strengthen the opposition in Syria while isolating extremist elements, he said, because the end of a tyrant must not give way to the tyranny of terrorism.
Was the opposition strengthened, asked Stevens.
Young Men and Culture00:03:58
Were the extremists isolated?
As for lone wolves, one study from last year cited 38 cases of lone wolf terrorism, 38, listen carefully, between 1940 and 2001.
38 cases of lone wolf terrorism between 1940 and 2001, another 12 during the eight years of the Bush administration, and more than 50 since then.
The phenomenon is catching in part because ISIS is canny at using the internet and social media to attract and activate recruits.
But what ISIS mainly does is give aimless and insignificant young men what most young men secretly crave, a cause worth dying for, which brings me back to what I was talking about in the beginning, okay?
I've said this before, and some people take it as anti-female.
It's not.
A nation, a culture, goes where its young men go.
If young men go down the drain, the culture will go down the drain.
This is for a simple reason.
If you have two tribes, and one tribe is a tribe that is run by women on women's principles, and the other is a tribe run by men on men's principles, soon there will be only one tribe.
It will be the tribe of the men, because they will come over and kill the men in the women's tribe and take the women.
That's the way the world works.
The best we can hope for, the best we can hope for, is a civilization in which men pay attention to women and respect them and elevate them and listen to their opinion and outlook with respect and include it in the world.
That's why you have chivalry.
That is the point of opening doors for women.
That is the point of being polite to women.
It's to inculcate in young men and in the entire civilization the idea that these people are half the world.
They have an important point of view.
They matter.
You do that.
You do that by paying them respect and having them pay you respect as men.
When you lose that, when you have a world that becomes, a culture that becomes feminized, it will die.
It will be killed by cultures like the Muslim culture that are pure.
You know, you want to see what pure masculinity looks like.
That's it.
Killing, hating, destroying.
That's what men do without women to balance the world, okay?
So when Stevens talks about men wanting something worth dying for, that means the culture having something to believe in.
And if you have a culture that tells you day by day that there's no right, there's no wrong, it's all about your culture.
You say one thing and another person says one thing, as if it were like Chinese food versus American food.
You know, it's not.
It's not.
We have a different culture.
It was formed by Christianity and Christianity was like a container that included classical and Jewish thought and brought that in.
And that is what we believe.
It doesn't matter whether you believe in Christianity.
You believe in Christianity.
You don't know it, but you do.
You know, I was talking about this yesterday about the argument about gays being a family feud.
Listen to the way people argue.
They're arguing about who is more Christian.
The people who are openly evangelical Christian are saying, no, it's, you know, here it says in the Bible that, you know, sexual impropriety is bad, and among sexual sins is homosexuality.
It says it right there.
The other side is saying, well, you're not being forgiving.
You're not being loving.
You're not judging not a Christian principle.
They're arguing over who is more Christian without knowing what they're arguing about.
When we lose our basis, when we lose the basis of what we think, when we don't educate ourselves, where we come from and where our ideas come from, we lose the possibility of standing up for ourselves.
And that's what worries me, because Stevens is right.
ISIS is offering young men something to die for, and we're not.
And the left isn't.
And that's what this argument is about.
It's not about, oh, Muslims are to blame, guns are to blame.
It's about whether there is such a thing as right and wrong, whether it is a real thing, and whether maybe we see it in our culture overall better than the Middle Eastern culture sees it.
Okay, I think we're, that's all the time I have.
Father's Influence on Film Noir00:03:21
So let me, before I go into the stuff I like, one thing I want you to look at, if you will, please.
It's Father's Day is coming up.
If you go on PJ Media's parenting page, you will see an article that happens to be about me as a father.
It's called Three Things My Father Taught Me that I Hope One Day to Teach My Son.
It's written by my lovely daughter, Faith.
And you go on PJ Media and you hit the parenting thing at the top, and it will take you to three things my father taught me that I hope one day to teach my son.
And the reason you have to do this is because in the very first line, she tells you something about me.
I won't tell you what it is, but she tells you something important about me that will help you to listen to the show.
It will make you understand what you're hearing when you listen to the show.
So go and look at three things my father taught me that I hope one day to teach my son.
And very first sentence, it'll tell you everything you need to know about listening to the show.
All right, stuff I like.
We've been talking about film noir.
Here's one that is really exciting because you probably haven't seen it, and it's really an interesting movie called The Killing from 1956.
And what's interesting about it is it's one of Stanley Kubrick's earliest films.
Remember the guy who did 2001?
This is before he kind of went nuts.
I hate 2001, and I hate most of the films Kubrick made after that.
But this, I think, is, if this isn't his best film, it's certainly right up there.
He wrote it with Jim Thompson, the famous hard-boiled writer who wrote The Stranger Inside Me, The Grifters.
He wrote just a ton of things that you've seen at the movies.
And so he was one of the most famous, most, not in his lifetime, but afterwards, he became one of the most famous noir, tough guy writers.
Listen to this.
Here is Sterling Hayden, one of the forgotten great tough guy actors, telling it's about a heist, and Hayden is the lead guy, and one of his accomplices, Molls, has been listening in on their plan, and here he confronts her.
All right, sister.
That's a mighty pretty head you've got on your shoulders.
Do you want to keep it there or do you want to start carrying it around in your hands?
Maybe we could compromise and put it on your shoulder.
I think that'd be nice, don't you?
What were you doing outside that door?
Doing?
I was listening, naturally.
Trying to, I should say.
Oh, you admit it.
You admit you were out there snooping.
Yes, wasn't that naughty of me, but I'm afraid I was.
I found an address in George's pocket.
I thought he might be playing around with another woman, so I came over.
And you'd care if he was playing another game.
That would bother you.
You don't understand me, Johnny.
You don't know me very well.
I know you like a book.
You're a no-good, nosy little tramp.
You'd sell out your own mother for a piece of fudge, but you're smart along with it.
Smart enough to know when to sell and when to sit tight, and you know you better sit tight in this case.
I do.
You heard me.
You like money.
You got a great big dollar sign there where most women have a heart.
So play it smart.
Stay in character and you'll have money.
Plenty of it.
George will have it.
He'll blow it all on you.
Probably buy himself a five-cent cigar.
You don't know me very well, Johnny.
I wouldn't think of letting George throw his money away on cigars.
You're not even going to let him spend the five cents on his cigar.
A real femme fatale, one of the great last scenes in movie history.
Just a classic last scene, The Killing from 1956, directed by Stanley Kubrick, written by Kubrick and Jim Thompson from a novel I've never read.
Good stuff.
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