Ep. 162 dissects Michelle Obama’s DNC speech as hollow sentimentality, ignoring policy while framing voters as children needing role models, amid Bernie Sanders’ divisive Clinton endorsement and Congressman Johnson’s termite-Jews gaffe. It contrasts the DNC’s hacked bias with Trump’s stark rhetoric, slams Europe’s denial of Islamic extremism post-Paris/Berlin attacks, and ties decline to rejection of Christianity—citing Brett Stephens’ WSJ take—while dismissing David Brooks’ Clinton advice as naive. The episode frames Obama’s legacy as a progressive failure, Reagan-era success as the gold standard, and media bias as complicit in distorting both speeches, ending with frustration over conservative alternatives beyond Trump. [Automatically generated summary]
The Democratic National Convention kicked off its first day with the upbeat theme of Working Together, a celebration of party unity that left 15 people dead and 72 injured.
The division in the party was so bad that the convention actually opened with a rendition of Battle Hymn of the Republic, a song written to inspire the defeat of Democrats.
Democrats claim, however, that that was back in the bad old days when Democrats kept black people helplessly dependent and took actions to break up their families.
Wait, that's actually the party platform.
It's confusing.
Bernie Sanders tried to bring unity to the party by telling his supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton, and he was then booed by his own supporters.
As one Sanders voter put it, quote, it's disgusting that this idiot Bernie Sanders would support Hillary Clinton when Bernie Sanders is so much better.
If Sanders continues to support Clinton, I'll be so angry, I'll ditch Sanders and support Clinton.
Or wait, maybe I should support Sanders to get back at Sanders for supporting Clinton.
But then that would mean supporting Sanders when he supported Clinton when he should have supported Sanders, which would be wrong.
Anyway, the important thing is that no one in America should have to work to earn money, but everyone should be given money taken from the people who work to earn money, who should be no one, unquote.
The Sanders supporter then sank into a confused stupor, which lasted until it was time for him to anchor ABC Nightly News.
Meanwhile, Democratic Congressman Hank Johnson had to backtrack after comparing Jews to termites.
Johnson, who once expressed the fear that the island of Guam might capsize if too many people stood on one side of it, no, I'm just joking.
Oh, no, wait, I'm not joking.
He actually said that.
So he's like a Democrat congressman and an idiot.
But I repeat myself.
Anyway, Johnson told an anti-Israel group that Jews are moving into Palestinian settlements like termites moving into a house.
Johnson later issued an apology saying, quote, when I compared Jews to termites, I merely meant that Jewish people are like hideous flying insects who eat wood, unquote.
American Jews said they could get used to flying around and eating wood as long as it meant they could continue to support the anti-Semitic enemies of Israel by voting for Democrats.
In other bad news for Democrats, a new hack of DNC documents revealed a list of talking points the Democrats have been distributing to their representatives so that they can defend Hillary Clinton.
The talking points are as follows.
One, Hillary Clinton is one of the most knowledgeable people ever to run for president.
Unless there's a scandal, then she has absolutely no idea what's going on.
Two, Hillary Clinton is a wise foreign policy hand who pressed the reset button to establish friendly relations with Russia, and the Russians are out to destroy her.
And three, Hillary Clinton is a strong, independent woman, and Donald Trump is a bully for picking on a poor defenseless woman like Hillary Clinton.
The convention continues today with a theme of, I hate all you people, you're a bunch of jerks.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
What a delightful convention it is.
It's like if you watch the news, it's a wonderful convention.
Unfortunately, if you watch the convention, it's complete chaos.
But, you know, I noticed there was one word that was not spoken at the convention.
ISIS.
Not one time was it ever spoken, and one word that was not spoken in the news coverage, which was unrealistic.
So that never happened.
All right, we're live on Facebook for 15 minutes, and then your entire computer will shut down, and there'll just be a void unless you come over to the Daily Wire and hear the rest of it, where you can also subscribe, and then you can continue to watch us and be part of tomorrow's mailbag.
Yay, the mailbag is tomorrow, and you can be there for just a lousy eight bucks a month, which you're clinging to like greedy bums you are.
All right, so yesterday, Michelle Obama made a wonderful speech in a wonderful dress, and her smile was lovely, and the speech was the stupidest speech I have ever heard, and I will discuss that and talk about why I thought it was really a speech for idiots.
I mean, that's all you heard about after all this chaos, the DNC hack and all this stuff, all you heard about was, oh, how wonderful Michelle Obama's speech was.
And she looked lovely, and her dress was lovely, and she spoke well, and I think the speech was as stupid as it could possibly be.
Why Europe Fears Land Loss00:03:14
But before we talk about that, we have to talk about this other thing that happened that nobody was talking about at the convention, which is in France.
There's been three major terrorist attacks in Germany in a week.
And then yesterday in France, two Islamist knife men, I'm reading from the Daily Mail, butchered a French priest.
They basically broke into this church, cut the priest's head off in their charming way, and left the nun fighting for her life before they were both shot dead by the police in Normandy.
One of the men who stormed into the church was a 19-year-old French national who was being monitored by an electric tag after being jailed for trying to join the fanatics in Syria.
The priest was 86 years old.
He had his throat cut while a nun was critically injured.
And the guy was shouting, of course, Olihu Akbar.
French authorities say they have arrested a third man in connection with the attack.
French President Aland said France is at war with ISIS while the terror group has claimed responsibility for the killing.
It comes as it emerged that the building, this Catholic church, was one of a number of Catholic churches on a terrorist hit list found on a suspected ISIS extremist last April.
So this thing is, you know, so this has been going on and one of the French authorities says, well, we're just going to have to get used to terrorism.
And you're really hearing this quite a lot in Europe.
And one of the things is, is they don't understand, this is not terrorism as they're used to it.
You know, I lived in England during the 90s, and for about two years during the 90s, there was a spate of IRA bombings.
And I was standing on top of one of them when it went off, literally on top of it, as it went off in a tube station.
And it went off and it actually lifted me off the ground for a minute.
I kind of jumped on, you know, nobody was hurt.
Well, and that was the thing.
Usually, nobody was hurt.
Now, I'm not singing the praises of the IRA.
They killed a lot of people.
They kneecapped people.
They did horrible things.
But as they got more sophisticated, they would start to call the police and say, there's going to be a bomb go off, clear the area.
So it would cause all this damage.
It would shut down shops.
It would cause economic hardship and all this, but it wouldn't kill anybody.
And the reason was they were trying to accomplish something.
They were trying to affect hearts and minds.
Because most terrorism is about land.
Most terrorism is, you are occupying our land, get out.
And the excuse for it is, we're just ordinary people and you are a nation with an army and we want our nation back.
And it's usually this kind of, it's a separatist movement, give us this piece of territory because this is where we come from and it's not fair for you to take it over.
They're trying to accomplish something.
So they think when we got hit on 9-11, a lot of Europeans said, well, now you know what it's like.
But this is different.
See, this is a war of conquest.
This is an invasion.
They are not trying to get anything that belongs to them.
They're not saying, oh, we were in England first, give it back to us.
They're saying, you were in England and now we're coming to take it.
You were in France and now it's ours.
You are infidels and we have to defeat you and destroy you.
And that's an entirely different thing.
And if they don't understand they're at war, they can't fight back.
And that's why Obama's inability to speak the words Islamic extremism is such a joke, you know, because he doesn't understand the entire nature of what's going on.
They're not killing us to get anything.
There's nothing we can give them except our souls and our freedom that's going to stop them from doing this.
And that's the problem.
Brooks vs. Stevens00:15:02
So Brett Stevens wrote a brilliant column in the Wall Street Journal today.
He's their foreign correspondent, foreign columnist.
And he wanted to know if Europe is helpless under this onslaught.
And he said, this was just one quick paragraph.
He said, can the decline of Europe be stopped?
Yes, but that would require a great unlearning of the political mythologies on which modern Europe was built.
Among those mythologies, that the European Union is the result of a post-war moral commitment to peace, that Christianity is of merely historical importance to European identity.
That's a myth he says has to be gotten rid of.
That Christianity is of merely historical importance.
That there's no such thing as a military solution, that one's country isn't worth fighting for, that honor is atavistic and tolerance is the supreme value.
People who believe in nothing, says Brett Stevens, people who believe in nothing, including themselves, will ultimately submit to anything.
So we talked about this the other day about the scientist who went and tried to discover why ISIS has such good fighters and he found out through his brilliant scientific methods is because they believe in something.
They believe in something beyond themselves and people in the West don't.
So he's saying basically, and Brett Stevens is Jewish, I don't know if he's a religious Jew, but when he says that Christianity is of more than his, it's foundational.
Christianity is foundational.
It is the bottom Jenga block in the tower of Western civilization.
And if we get rid of it, the tower falls down.
Now, compare this to David Brooks, right, in the New York Times, a former newspaper.
David Brooks is one of the group that I call Knucklehead Row, the op-ed writers, the editorial writers at the New York Times.
And David Brooks may be the chief, would be the chief knucklehead if it weren't for all the rest of them.
And so he's talking now to Hillary Clinton because David Brooks is terrified of Donald Trump.
And he's telling Hillary Clinton what she has to do to make her party victorious, right?
The Democrats.
This, by the way, he was supposed to be, he was advertised as the conservative New York Times columnist, which, I don't know, is kind of like, has no meaning, I guess.
So this is Brooks telling Hillary Clinton, first, you're going to have to fight your party's materialistic mindset.
This is 2016, not 1992.
Over the past few years, economic and social anxiety has metastasized into something spiritual and existential.
Americans are no longer confident in their national project.
They no longer trust their institutions or have faith in their common destiny.
This is a crisis of national purpose.
It's about personal identity and the basic health of communal life.
Americans' anger and pessimism are more fundamental than anything that can be explained by GDP statistics.
Many Democrats, Brooks goes on, have trouble thinking in these terms.
When asked to explain any complex phenomenon, they instinctively reduce it to a materialist cause.
If there's terrorism, there must be lack of economic opportunity.
If marriage is declining, it must be because of joblessness.
This materialistic mindset means that many Democrats are perpetually surprised by events that involve cultural threats and national identity.
So Brooks is essentially saying the same thing to Hillary Clinton that Brett Stevens is saying to Europe.
The only difference is that Brooks doesn't understand that Hillary Clinton cannot embrace the spiritual because everything she believes is materialistic.
Socialism is a materialistic creed.
It says we can solve, it says everything you do is based on your economic situation and everything can be solved based on your economic situation.
So basically, Brooks is calling on Hillary Clinton not to be Hillary Clinton, which I would call on her to do too if I thought she could pull it off.
Believe me, I would call on her to be Ted Cruz.
I would say, please, Hillary, be Ted Cruz.
But this is, you know, these are two guys on two sides of the fence.
Brett Stevens is an elitist, but a conservative elitist.
Brooks is an elitist and a liberal elitist.
And both of them understand that the bottom stick in the Jenga Tower has been pulled out.
And this is something you have been hearing on this show now since this show has begun, that this is the solution.
The solution is going to come through religious revival or it's not going to come.
That's the only way it's going to happen.
And those of you who say to me, you know, I want to believe, but I can't believe, you better start thinking about it because if it doesn't make sense to you, possibly it's you.
It's possible that you are sinking in an atmosphere and in an intellectual current that is sweeping you away from the actual truth.
Okay, so now let's go from that to Michelle, all right?
The DNC is coming apart at the seams.
Debbie Wassman Schultz is being screamed at during her campaign.
You know, she's being booed off the stage.
People booed the prayer, the opening prayer.
When Cynthia Hale, the Reverend Cynthia Hale, mentioned Hillary Clinton during the opening prayer, they booed her and God had to be escorted off the stage under security.
And of course, the Democrats are screaming, you know, I told you yesterday that when there's a scandal on the left, the only thing that the press wants to talk about is how did you get that information?
How was that information obtained?
Never mind what it says.
Never mind the information itself.
So the Democrats have been saying, well, the Russians got this and they're trying to help Donald Trump, which may or may not be true.
Who knows what Putin is thinking?
It could well be true.
But the only thing about that is we know that Putin has got everything.
They said there was a story in the New York Post today where the guy said, you know, they stole Hillary Clinton's password off her machine.
It wasn't like they had to hack into her computer.
It was like they looked over her shoulder.
She was that careless with her security and that careless with our secrets.
So they just stole this thing.
So now Putin, she's basically in Putin's power.
I mean, at least Trump wants to be where she actually is.
And by the way, this idea that Putin, that Trump is not going to defend Eastern Europe from Putin because they're in cahoots, when has Obama done anything to defend Eastern Europe from Putin?
I mean, they're all the same people.
All right.
So now Michelle steps up.
And you have to watch, before we even play Michelle, I just have to play from our friends at Newsbusters, one of my favorite sites, Newsbusters, because they collect the bias of the press.
They put out a video of all the networks reacting to Michelle Obama's speech.
Listen to this.
I think it was about as pitch-perfect as an endorsement you can get.
It was a pretty succinct case for Hillary Clinton and against Donald Trump at Dawn with Trademark Michelle Obama Grace.
First Lady Michelle Obama, polished, passionate, and personal.
Said that only one person is truly qualified to be president of the United States.
That is Hillary Clinton.
Did not mention Donald Trump's name once, John Carr.
But hard to argue that it wasn't a speech against Donald Trump.
That may have been the most effective, one of the harshest speeches that we have heard against Donald Trump during the course of this campaign.
And not only a remarkable endorsement of Hillary Clinton, but without mentioning the name of Donald Trump, an extremely tough speech in which she said, don't let anyone ever tell you this country isn't great.
The imagery, too, of saying, I live in a house that slaves built.
Michelle Obama delivered this speech and talked about Donald Trump's rhetoric, not by name, but there was no mistaking it.
And she did it not as a politician or as a politician's wife, but as a mother, a mother who has famously raised two young daughters in the public eye who have turned out to be pretty poised.
And you know, it was a pretty rocky afternoon here at the Wells Fargo Center.
But when she said that her two daughters now know that they can be president because of Hillary Clinton, not only did I see any dissension in this hall, but there were a lot of moist eyes, too.
Oh, those moist eyes.
Of course, most of the moist eyes belong to the media.
And Van Jones, the leftist guy on, I guess he's on CNN, he was crying on air.
He was crying.
So just as a point of comparison, also from our friends at Newsbusters, let's look at how Trump's speech was received by the media.
This is the today.
Depending on who you ask, some saw a leader ready to put America back on track.
Others saw a lot of doom and gloom.
This wasn't exactly Ronald Reagan's shining city on the hill.
It wasn't George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism.
Trump cast himself as an angry and all-powerful national defender.
The GOP nominee hammering home nationalist themes, presenting the country as a dark place.
don't think he broadened his appeal here a little bit.
It was a very, I don't know how many people, I think there are some people that wake up and say, wow, the country is deteriorating.
But I think a lot of people didn't recognize that country that he described either.
So I think it's a very polarizing speech.
Yeah, let's, on your point there, this wasn't the shining city on the hill.
This wasn't morning in America.
He sounded like a wartime president last year.
It's just very dark.
So dark.
And speaking of dark, we have to say goodbye to our friends on Facebook.
You are going dark.
Come and join us at the Daily Wire.
So Trump is dark, dark, dark.
And that was on every report, dark, And this one was emotional.
It was emotional.
Even on YouTube, when you went up to look up the speech, it's like, here is Michelle Obama's emotional speech.
You went to look up the transcript.
Here's the transcript of her emotional speech.
I wonder, are there talking points they're spreading around?
I just wonder.
So an emotional speech.
And I will say she looked lovely.
And it was an effective speech.
I don't want to say that it wasn't an effective speech.
It did, you know, when she said it was a rocky day, that was not how they were describing, you know, there was a little bit of a floor fight.
There was a floor fight the first day of the Republican convention, and that was chaos.
That was repeatedly referred to as chaos.
There was chaos at the Democrat convention yesterday.
There was genuine chaos, and it was a little rocky.
It was a little rocky in the press.
A little rocky.
But then Michelle Obama brought everyone together.
So it was very effective.
She looked nice.
The dress looked nice.
She's pretty.
She smiled.
Let's take a look at the speech.
Let's listen to what she actually said.
She starts out by talking about the fact, her daughters, she's gotten, her husband's gotten elected president.
The daughters get into the big limousine with all these men, big men, as she described them, with guns.
And she says, I thought to myself, oh my God, what have we done?
Because now these girls are going to be brought up in their formative years in the White House.
So here's what she talks about.
With every word we utter, with every action we take, we know our kids are watching us.
We as parents are their most important role models.
And let me tell you, Barack and I take that same approach to our jobs as president and first lady because we know that our words and actions matter not just to our girls, but to children across this country.
Kids, kids who tell us, I saw you on TV.
I wrote a report on you for school.
Kids like the little black boy who looked up at my husband, his eyes wide with hope, and he wondered, is my hair like yours?
And make no mistake about it, this November when we go to the polls, that is what we're deciding.
Not Democrat or Republican, not left or right.
No, in this election and every election is about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of their lives.
What?
That's what we're deciding?
Obama said this in his first election, when he first ran, some reporter asked him why he wanted to be president.
And he didn't say to affect the country, to fundamentally transform the country.
He said, I want a black boy to be able to look and say, I can be president.
And I thought, I wrote at the time, I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal, which the journal wouldn't publish.
I said, you know, that's not a reason to be president.
That's a reason to pretend to be president.
That's a reason to play the president on TV, you know, to be a role model for children.
She's basically telling us that all of us are children that she is going to affect what they're, that's why we're voting for a role model.
And that's her hit at Trump, that Trump is not a good role model.
But we're not voting for a role model.
I don't need a role model.
In fact, in the neighborhoods that she should be most concerned about, they could use a dad at home for a role model.
They don't need the president for a role model.
The president may set the tone, but that's not his job.
His job is to, A, defend the country from foreign attackers, which Obama has failed at miserably, to manage the economy, to manage the legislative branches, all of which Obama has failed to do miserably.
Okay, so that's so basically she's telling us we're all children.
We're all their children and we're electing mommy.
That's what she's telling us.
Listen, she goes on, play the second cut.
I am here tonight because in this election, there is only one person who I trust with that responsibility.
Only one person who I believe is truly qualified to be president of the United States, and that is our friend, Hillary Clinton.
I trust Hillary to lead this country because I've seen her lifelong devotion to our nation's children.
Not just her own daughter, who she has raised to perfection, but every child who needs a champion.
Kids who take the long way to school to avoid the gangs.
Kids who wonder how they'll ever afford college kids whose parents don't speak a word of English but dream of a better life.
Kids who look to us to determine who and what they can be.
I mean, it's all about this.
It's all about that.
You know, we're elected.
She's running for mommy.
She's running to be my mom, you know.
She's like, by the way, not that good a job.
First of all, she ought to know.
It's a thankless, it's a thankless occupation in my particular case.
But on top of that, it's like, who needs them?
This paternalistic or maternalistic, you know, what difference does it make whether it's paternalistic or maternalistic?
You know, one of my big objections to Trump is his strongman attitude.
I alone can solve.
You know, it's going to be great.
When I do it, it's going to be great.
I don't need to tell you how I'm going to fix it.
I'm going to fix it.
It's going to be me.
It's going to be Trump.
It's going to have those big letters in the back of it.
So it's going to be terrific.
You know, I despise that stuff.
Tell me what you're going to do.
You're an executive.
You're an executive of a company.
You're running to be a chief executive of a company called America.
Just tell me what you're going to do, put on a tie and go do it.
Now, this is all they've got on the left.
They're the same damn people.
This is all they've got.
We are going to show you how to be.
We're going to be role models.
And the funny thing is, is people fall for this because even though a majority of people, a huge majority of people, think this country is going in the wrong direction, a lot of people approve of the job Barack Obama is doing.
Angry Michelle's Role Model Selling00:05:16
Because you know what?
This is what they approve of.
They approve of this job.
They think he makes a nice role model.
He's cool, he's hip, he's funny, he's relaxed.
You know, I mean, he comes on the late night shows and he does a good job.
And that's what they're talking about.
They're not talking about whether he's doing a good job as president.
They're talking about whether he's doing a good job playing the president.
And that's what Michelle Obama is selling you.
And the infantile press loves it.
They love it.
Please make us into children.
Let's let her finish up.
Don't let anyone ever tell you that this country isn't great.
That somehow we need to make it great again.
Because this right now is the greatest country on earth.
And as my daughters prepare to set out into the world, I want a leader who is worthy of that truth.
A leader who is worthy of my girl's promise and all our kids' promise.
Leader who will be guided every day by the love and hope and impossibly big dreams that we all have for our children.
This is an insane speech almost.
And the thing is, like I said, she looks great.
She's, you know, she sounds good.
She's upbeat.
I don't know what happened to this is the first time as an adult I've been proud of my country.
What happened to Angry Michelle?
I guess angry Michelle is off stage.
You know, like she goes back like they keep her in a cage.
You know, let me out.
No, no, you're angry, Michelle.
You have to stay in the cage.
We only let out nice Michelle.
Okay, I'm out.
And every, I love my country.
My country is great.
No, I hate my country.
Stay in the cage, angry Michelle.
You know, it's like suddenly they feel that the press, their minions in the press, sold to the people this idea that the Republican convention was chaotic and dark, so this is going to be unified and happy.
And the fact that they're all ripping each other's throats out doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
See, here's the problem.
You know, the Wall Street Journal has an op-ed, an editorial today, which means it comes from their editors and written without a signature.
And it talks about the fact that President Obama has succeeded in much of what he wants to do.
It says, President Obama said in 2008 that he wanted to be the reverse Ronald Reagan.
And in one sense, he has been.
As he takes the Democratic stage in Philadelphia, he's going to talk tonight.
I'm sorry, Wednesday.
He can rightly claim to have fulfilled most of his major progressive policy goals.
The difference is the results.
After eight years of Reagan, the Cold War was on the way to ending and the U.S. economy had grown by the size of Germany.
Mr. Obama is leaving to his successor a world of spreading disorder and a country as economically anxious and more politically polarized than he inherited.
In other words, Obama has been a successful leftist president.
He has done a lot of the things he said he was going to do.
He passed Obamacare with his supermajority, although nobody else has signed on for it.
He's nationalized the student loan industry.
He's turned banks into public utilities with Dodd-Frank.
And everybody's unhappy.
You know, at the end of the Reagan era, people were upbeat and thrilled.
They were thrilled because the economy was booming and it boomed for a quarter of a century afterwards.
It boomed right until the minute it crashed, you know, after George W. Bush.
You know, this is the important thing.
Hillary Clinton is taking over a leftist party, a party to the left of hers, and she does not have the strength of character or the affection to move it back to the center the way Bill Clinton did.
This is a party, this is Bernie Sanders' party that she is taking over.
And so while it may be funny to us as conservatives to watch them tearing each other apart, we better come up with an answer because we haven't got one right now.
I mean, what we've got is this nationalistic authoritarian.
And what drives me crazy, I mean, you can hear how much I dislike the press.
I think they are insanely corrupt.
I think they're insanely dishonest.
I don't even think that they pretend not to be biased anymore.
I mean, they used to at least be hypocrites.
They used to say, I remember the New York Times editor saying, you know, the New York Times plays it straight.
You know, I thought like, really?
I mean, do you really think that?
Maybe they did.
Who knows?
Maybe they did.
They don't even pretend anymore.
They hate Donald Trump.
There is an evil attack on Trump every day in the New York Times.
The problem is that what they're saying is true.
That's the problem with Donald Trump, that Trump is a bad candidate.
He's a bad person.
He's not a conservative.
He's a left-winger.
He's a guy who believes in government.
He believes in the strongman and all this stuff.
And we have given legitimacy to this dishonest press to now say what is untrue that Hillary Clinton is qualified to be president.
She's in no way qualified morally or in terms of her intelligence and experience to be president.
Like Obama, who has failed at everything he's touched, everything Obama has touched has turned bad.
And that was a success for him because his policies don't work.
The same thing has been true with Hillary Clinton.
Everything she has touched, you cannot name.
You cannot name something that she has made better.
You can't name it.
And we, you know, we who elevated, those of us who elevated Trump have given the press cover to tell us, to tell the truth about Trump, but tell us lies about Hillary Clinton.
It's a bad, bad situation.
Serial Killer Threat00:03:35
All right.
This brings me to stuff I like, okay?
Because yesterday I was talking about Hale Caesar and it caused me to reflect, you know, what shocked me about Hale Caesar was its depiction of Hollywood communists as the bad guys, because Hollywood has been moaning for years, for decades about, oh, we were blacklisted during the, you know, and I thought like, yeah, well, you were trying to sell people on this murderous, you know, Stalinist philosophy.
Maybe you should have been blacklisted.
Maybe, you know, if you had been selling people Nazi philosophy, nobody would care that you were blacklisted, but you were selling something just as bad.
So I was really shocked that Hale Caesar actually depicted them, at least somewhat in that way.
And I was thinking, you know, there aren't that many films that show you communism as it was at its height.
And here's one that's really, really obscure.
I'm not going to tell you this is a great movie, because it's not.
It's a TV movie, and so it has some cheap production values.
It has a good cast.
It has Donald Sutherland and Stephen Ray and Max Monsaido.
So it's an excellent, excellent cast.
But the story that it tells, which is an absolutely true story, is fascinating.
It's called Citizen X.
And it's based on a nonfiction book by Robert Cullen called The Killer Department.
And I started reading the book, but I got kind of lost in a forest of details, whereas the movie tells the story pretty clearly.
It's the story of a Soviet cop who admired American police procedures.
And he started to try and learn them.
And it was hard because it was hard to get information from the West.
But as he started to learn them, he started to realize that a serial killer was on the loose.
A vicious, vicious serial killer did terrible things to children.
So he went before the committee, which was the police were under the military, I think.
And Donald Sutherland plays the guy who's heading that committee.
And he goes and he tries to explain to them that a serial killer is on the loose.
This is in the 80s.
And listen to what they say.
It's clear that we have a serial killer on our hands.
Already the most prolific in Russian history.
We'll have to take extreme methods to stop him.
Did he say a serial killer?
We understood there were wide discrepancies between the wounds inflicted.
It's what you told us, Colonel.
And both boys and girls.
It could be two different men.
It could be a gang.
There are no serial killers in the Soviet state.
Well, that sounds more like visual thinking than it.
It is a decadent Western phenomenon.
Gentlemen, that's all we have for now.
Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules.
I'll keep you aggressive in the developments.
No pun intended.
This went on for decades.
It's a real story.
It went on for decades.
They refused to admit there could be a serial killer.
They said it must be a homosexual.
It must be a Jew.
It must be all the people that the Soviets disliked.
And they would bring in these poor guys and beat the, you know, the bejesus out of them and try and get them to confess while the serial killer went at large.
And the cop started to go insane.
The cop literally started to break down.
It's a great, great story and a really well-done movie.
I'm not going to tell you it's a great movie, but just so fascinating for its story and for its depiction of what the Soviet Union really was, Citizen X. That's it.
If the Democrats don't kill each other, well, maybe we'll kill them.