Ep. 171 pits the "gangster" (leading by double digits amid scandals like influence peddling and document destruction) against the "psycho," whose extremism is amplified by media while her corruption is normalized, exposing a double standard. Clinton’s 2016 campaign featured Taliban-linked figures and pay-for-play schemes, yet Trump’s policies overshadowed his own gaffes—until media bias and satire-fueled conspiracy theories (e.g., Seth Rich) skewed perception. Clavin ties this to Hollywood’s stagnation, secularism’s rejection of spiritual truth in art, and the erosion of Christian moral frameworks, arguing voters face flawed choices shaped by cultural decline. [Automatically generated summary]
The latest polls are out and voters seem to be making up their minds that they'd prefer to have a gangster as president rather than a psycho.
The gangster is leading the psycho by double digits in some polls, while in state polls, the gangster looks as if she may win states that would normally go to the psycho if he weren't such a psycho, whereas gangster states will vote for the gangster even knowing she's a gangster for fear if they switch to the psycho, he'll turn out to be psycho.
News that the psycho had recommended assassinating the gangster shocked many potential psycho voters who thought that it meant the psycho was psycho.
Whereas news that the gangster might already be involved in an actual assassination did not disturb the gangster voters because they already knew the gangster was a gangster.
But what about the media?
Since most journalists are gangsters, they tend to treat gangster behavior as normal.
When it became clear, for instance, that the gangster had been influence peddling, destroying government documents, and repeatedly lying, the gangster said, well, sure, she's just being a gangster.
But when the psycho made a joke about a crying baby, the gangsters started screaming, that guy is psycho.
They said you'd never see a gangster that psycho.
Although, of course, since they're all gangsters, if gangsters were psycho, they wouldn't know because they'd be too psycho because they're all a bunch of gangsters.
Now, to be fair to the media, gangsters, though they are gangsters, they do have a point.
Over the years, many gangsters have run for president, but only the occasional psycho.
And whereas the gangster's party is full of gangsters, the psycho's party is not that psycho.
That's why the psycho's party won't back the psycho when he's psycho, but the gangster party backs their fellow gangster when she's being a gangster.
After a while, you get used to gangsters, and you stop thinking they're psycho.
So when the gangster announces she'll rip off over a trillion dollars in taxes and funnel it into scams and power grabs, we all think, well, yeah, of course, she's a gangster.
But then the psycho says he'll restrict illegal immigration because the gangster coddles illegal gangsters, which is psycho.
And everyone starts shouting the psycho is psycho and the gangster is psycho and the psycho is actually sane.
Well, wait, no, he's not sane, he's psycho, but he's not helping the gangsters, which would be psycho like the gangster.
All the same, many Americans have begun asking themselves, how did we get stuck with a choice between a psycho and a gangster?
Are we psycho?
Are we gangsters?
Or are we just so sick of gangsters we thought we'd settle for a psycho, but then realized, eh, we're not that psycho.
In any case, according to the polls, it now appears we're psycho enough to elect the gangster, but not so psycho we'd elect a psycho.
So get ready for government by gangster, which is psycho.
Government by Gangster00:13:34
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Just literally true.
All right, we're here.
It's mailbag day.
Woohoo!
Yay!
It's mailbag day.
It's special mailbag day because I've purposely selected questions that I get asked again and again.
You know, there are certain questions that keep coming up.
These are new questions, but they keep coming up every week, so I'm going to try and deal with them.
You will have to be here after the live feed on Facebook ends because we'll only be on Facebook for 15 minutes, then we're gone, and we'll do the mailbag at the Daily Wire.
You can hear it later on iTunes or SoundCloud.
And of course, you can subscribe, and then you can watch the entire thing, and next week you could be in the mailbag.
See?
And then all your questions would be answered.
Also, by the way, a lot of people have been asking me.
My memoir is coming out in a month, The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
I think it's really different.
It's not the usual conversion memoir.
It's something you've never heard before.
I think you'd like it.
A lot of people have asked me if you can pre-order it now.
Can you get a signed copy?
So I stole an idea from Ben Shapiro.
He looked like a smart guy.
So I stole an idea from him.
If you send me your online receipt at aclavin at dailywire.com, it will have your address on it.
I will mail to that address a signed sticker that you can put in the book.
Or maybe I'll have Shapiro mail sign it.
Whatever.
But anyways, you can do that.
All right, so this election is getting, it's getting to be like that scene in the horror movie where the guy has a nightmare and then he wakes up and then boo, he's still in the nightmare.
I mean, the thing just keeps happening.
The same thing keeps happening again and again.
The dream goes like this.
Hillary Clinton has the worst possible day, a day that would destroy any candidate on earth.
And then Donald Trump opens his mouth and says something incredibly stupid.
And the media, of course, runs with the stupid remark and completely ignores all the truly terrible things that Hillary Clinton has done.
And that's just, and basically, you know, I blame the globalist Jewish conspiracy for this.
I think, you know, Ben Shapiro and his cabal of never Trumpers are creeping into Trump's bedroom at night and stealing his IQ to make him just a buffoon.
He was brilliant before they got a hold of him, but now he's just a name.
So, okay, let's start with Hillary, though.
Instead of starting with the headlines, which are all about Donald Trump, you know, saying this crazy thing about the Second Amendment, and we'll get to that, but let's just start with what actually happened to Hillary over the last couple of days, which is amazing.
First of all, I'm sure you've all heard of this already, but there is Omar Mateen, the Orlando killer's father, sitting in back of her.
And she's giving a speech in Kissimmee, Florida, and there he is in back wearing a red Chevrolet hat or something like this.
Now, if he were just the father of this killer, of this Orlando killer, that would be one thing.
But he's also a guy who has gone on and called, what did he call the Taliban, our warrior brothers?
He released a YouTube video calling the Taliban our warrior brothers.
He made the comment that he didn't think his son should have killed all those gay people because God will punish the homosexuals.
So, you know, we shouldn't worry about that.
So, you know, so here he is.
Here's an interview.
Tori Dunham, WPTV, the local Florida station, captures this guy.
He wouldn't talk to her at the meeting, but later she bumped into him at a rest stop on the highway and she got this quick interview.
Clinton is good for the United States versus Donald Trump.
He wanted to do an interview and showed us a sign he made for Hillary Clinton.
So tell us why you wanted to stop and talk now.
Well, I feel like to tell you why I stopped to talk to you, because it's very important for the United States of America, especially the election.
I was invited by the Democratic Party.
Just like a come support Hillary, just a regular chain email or a personal invitation.
So it came, I'm a member, so as a member, I get the invitation, so it's nothing particular about it.
What went into your decision about going to this event right near Orlando where this Pulse nightclub shooting happens?
I wish we, because I spoke a lot about that, and I wish that my son joined the army and fought ISIS and destroyed ISIS.
That would be much better.
Yeah, I'll bet.
I trust you.
He has an honest face.
Come on, I trust him.
So obviously they put him behind Hillary Clinton because he looks diverse, as they would say.
He looks diverse.
He's kind of brownish and has, you know, he looks like, what does he look like?
He looks like a Taliban guy.
And so they put him in back of her.
And of course, he supports her because she wants the borders to be open.
So if you want your warrior brothers to be pouring into the country, go for Hillary.
That's it.
So now Trump makes the perfectly reasonable, we all remember when Donald Trump was asked to disavow David Duke and disavow anybody who comes near him who says things that he doesn't like.
And of course, Trump famously dropped the David Duke ball.
You know, he didn't disavow the Ku Klux Klan.
And Jake Tapper was practically begging him.
But he makes the point, this is the second cut, cut two.
He makes the point that he gets slightly different treatment.
And I saw the picture of him with a red hat, but it didn't have Make America Great on it, by the way.
And she did not disavow.
And if that were me, this would be a headline all over the world about Trump.
But she did not, as I understand it, disavow this man.
And he's got some pretty harsh views.
So I think it's, look, it's a whole double standard, but we're punching through it.
And I think the people understand.
I really think the people understand.
Well, you know, I just want to say that Hillary was asked the question about this, and she, you know, had this incredibly, you know, honest and open response.
Secretary Clinton, should your campaign have known that Omar Matine's father is at your campaign rally yesterday?
Thanks, both.
Secretary Crispin, do you have time for a question?
Thank you all very much.
Thank you.
And this is a woman who hasn't given a press conference in, what, 240 days or something like this.
It's amazing.
She just never talked to the press.
That's okay.
What would they want to ask her about?
What, you know, her fashion choices?
I mean, there's nothing to talk to her about.
So meanwhile, okay, so that's one thing.
Meanwhile, Judicial Watch, this is a great, great conservative watchdog organization that does nothing all day, these poor guys, but they file Freedom of Information Act requests for documents that nobody wants to show them.
Okay, so they got a new clutch of Clinton emails that the Clinton, you know, how honest and open she's been with these emails.
She keeps insisting she's giving them all over.
They get a new clutch of emails.
And in these emails are exchanges of the guy from the Clinton Foundation.
Hillary Clinton is now Secretary of State in these emails.
The guy from the Clinton Foundation, Doug Brand, who's running the foundation, is making requests to Huma Abadin, her aide, wink wink.
No, no, I'm sorry, I shouldn't be suggesting that they're lesbians.
That's a terrible thing to say.
And I didn't mean it.
I take it all back.
All right, so Huma Abaddon, who has, by the way, she has special dispensation to work for the State Department and to do other stuff.
You know, you're not supposed to be doing that, but she's doing that.
So Doug Brand is writing and setting up deals between big meetings between donors to the Clinton Foundation and important people that Hillary can get to because she's Secretary of State.
Among the donors is this guy, Gilbert Shiguri, a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire construction guy who gave the Clinton Foundation between a million and $5 million.
And he's asking her to set up meetings.
And this guy, I mean, this guy was, he was convicted in Switzerland of money laundering, and he, you know, but he paid a fine.
It's just a $66 million fine.
Same thing that would happen to you or me if we got caught laundering money.
You just go into your wallet and you take out $66 million.
You pay the fine, and then you go golfing with Bill Clinton, which is what this guy is doing.
He has long-standing ties, not just to the Clintons, but also to Nigeria's military dictator, a guy who has a very shady past.
While she's Secretary of State, these emails come out, and they're showing that they're setting up meetings with important people for this.
So it's pay-for-play for Hillary Clinton.
She's selling your government.
She's selling favors from your government to people for her personal gain.
Okay, that's number two.
Now, number three, I do this hesitantly because I am an anti-conspiracy theorist.
Most conspiracy theories to me just don't make sense.
I mean, this is a world in which you can literally fly a jet into the tallest building in Manhattan on TV, and somebody's going to say, well, they blew it up from inside.
I mean, that didn't happen.
It's like you can land on the moon on TV.
No, no, no.
It was all a fake.
So people buy into this stuff very, very quickly.
But this is a news story.
This is a news story because of Julian Assange in an interview he gave.
Julia Assange, the WikiLeak guy, we know he's out for blood.
We know he's out to get Clinton.
So he's got that slant in everything he says.
But he started talking about this guy, Seth Rich.
He's a 27-year-old DNC worker.
He works for the Democrats.
He was shot in the back while walking in Washington early July.
And the police say, well, it looked like robbery, except according to his parents, nothing was stolen.
So, and there was a, it looked like there was a fight and all this stuff.
Now, Julian Assange, you all remember he released these DNC emails that he had hacked and that showed that the DNC was conspiring against Bernie Sanders to make sure that Hillary Clinton won the nomination.
He goes on Dutch TV and he has this to say about the death, the murder of Seth Rich.
There's a 27-year-old that works for the DNC.
He was shot in the back, murdered, just two weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington.
So that was just a robbery, I believe, wasn't it?
No, there's no finding.
So what are you suggesting?
I'm suggesting that our sources take risks and they become concerned to see things occurring like that.
But was he one of your sources then?
I mean.
We don't comment on who our sources are.
But why make the suggestion about a young guy being shot in the streets of Washington?
Because we have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States and that our sources are, you know, our sources face serious risks.
That's why they come to us so we can protect their anonymity.
But it's quite something to suggest a murder.
That's basically what you're doing.
Well, others have suggested that we are investigating to understand what happened in that situation with Seth Rich.
I think it is a concerning situation.
There's not a conclusion yet.
We wouldn't be willing to state a conclusion, but we are concerned about it.
And more importantly, a variety of WikiLeaks sources are concerned when that kind of thing happens.
Okay, so he's saying he's accusing her of murder, offered $20,000 reward to find the people.
WikiLeaks has now put up $20,000, which I think adds to a $25,000 reward that was already up.
So that's Hillary's Day.
Okay, so Hillary's Day has got the killer's dad behind her, the terrorist supporting dad behind her, got new emails showing she's selling government secrets.
She's been accused by an important figure of being possibly involved in an assassination.
Here's Donald Trump taking advantage of this.
He gets up and he starts to talk about the comparison between his policies and Hillary's.
Hillary wants to raise taxes.
It's a comparison.
I want to lower them.
Hillary wants to expand regulations, which he does bigly.
Can you believe that?
I will reduce them very, very substantially.
Could be as much as 70, 75%.
Hillary wants to shut down energy production.
I want to expand it.
Lower electric, lower electric bills, folks.
Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment.
By the way, and if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks.
Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know.
So basically, basically, he's saying you can always shoot her.
I mean, that's like, it's not a bad thing.
Now, listen, I think this was a joke.
I think that is Trump's sense of humor, but it's a bad joke.
We don't want, you know, these are real people.
We don't want, you know what I think of Hillary Clinton.
I do think she's a gangster.
I still don't want her blown away.
I don't want elections decided that way.
Not a good joke, Donald.
And of course, that's the headline, even in the Wall Street Journal.
That's the headline.
All this stuff about Hillary wiped away.
And he gives the press the excuse to be as biased as they are.
They are biased.
I liked Rudy Giuliani's excuse: if he'd, you know, knowing Donald Trump, if he'd meant to tell you to assassinate her, he just would have said it.
So he's saying the guy is such a loose cannon that he just would have come out and said, all right, listen, we're going to have to leave you on Facebook and on YouTube as well, right?
Concerns About Modern Entertainment00:02:30
We're going to leave YouTube.
But we're going into the mailbag now.
Come over to the Daily Wire or iTunes or SoundCloud and hear the rest of the show.
And you can also subscribe.
We'll see you there.
Mailbag!
Woohoo!
I know, I miss Lindsay.
All right.
We're going to do the mailbag and we're going to talk about some culture in the second half of the show.
First question on the mailbag is from Ricardo B. Do you think the movie industry is stagnant with all of these remakes, reboots, sequels, and superhero movies?
Really good question.
I get it a lot.
Movies have always sucked up material.
They've always been based on books, on plays, on other things, and they continue to be.
I am, what movies have lost the ability to do.
Movies used to be able to make good movies that people saw.
Now they make good movies and they make tentpole movies, and those movies are not the same.
Entertainment movies and serious movies are now no longer the same.
I mean, when they made Casablanca, that's one of the greatest movies ever made, that's a hit, gone with the wind.
These are old movies at an art form's peak.
At an art form's peak, the popular and the great are the same.
People crowded into theaters to see Shakespeare's plays.
You know, now a play, a serious play gets six people while everybody goes and sees Les Miz for the 17th time.
You know, that's what happens when an art form starts to die.
Movies are starting to die, get old as an art form, and much of what has happened is on TV, now on TV.
You can make good dramas that people will watch and that cause excitement and all that.
I'm a little concerned, I have to admit, by the childishness of all entertainment, all the comic book stuff, all the fantasy stuff.
There is no drama for young people to go see that is actually about real people doing real stuff.
I mean, last night I was out in the streets of Westwood in LA, and they're celebrating Sausage Party.
And I thought, well, there's a film classic, if ever there was one.
And I'm not being a snob.
I'm just saying, you know, there should be a wider range.
And movies have just gotten focused into this very narrow corridor of childish entertainment.
And yes, I do think that that is a sign that the art form is aging and is starting to become less and less relevant.
All right, from Logan R. Hey, Andrew, I'm glad you turned to Jesus.
I'm a huge fan, I assume of Jesus, but maybe also of me.
I don't know.
I'm only 14.
Discussing Jesus00:05:30
So here is a big debate between Christians about if you should take the Bible literally.
I think you should.
What do you think?
Here is what I think.
I will only discuss this briefly.
I'm not going to get into a lot of specifics.
Nobody takes anything literally.
Language is not a literal thing, okay?
Unless you're talking about mathematics, people say they take the Bible literally, but they're not quite thinking it through.
If Jesus says to Peter after the resurrection, feed my sheep.
If Peter said, with grass, or, you know, you want to see, what do you want me to give them?
You know, what do they eat?
You know, you'd all think, like, what is he nuts?
Obviously, Jesus isn't talking about sheep.
We don't take that literally.
When Jesus tells a parable and he starts it and he says, there was a man who had two sons.
Nobody said to him, what were their names?
Where did he live?
Were they real?
Were they real?
He was making it up.
He was making it up.
Does that mean it's not true?
Of course it's true.
I believe, I truly, truly believe this, that every word in the Bible is true.
But I don't believe every word in the Bible is literal truth.
There are such a thing as genres.
If you're going to express deep truths, why do you think people write myths, for instance?
Why do they write novels?
Because there are truths that you can't express by simply speaking literally.
That's why Jesus told parables.
That's why he made up stories, okay?
There are parts of the Bible that I believe belong to other genres than history.
There's parts of the Bible that I believe are history.
There's parts that I believe are not history, but are meant to express truths so deep that history can't touch them.
And so I read different parts of the Bible differently.
And what I'm not going to discuss today, because it's a conversation for another day, is which parts are which.
But I will say this: I believe you can read the Bible as absolute truth and still believe in science, which is one of the great tools that God has given us to understand the world.
All right, let's do another one.
Do you have any advice for me or someone in a similar type of situation?
Basically, this is from Sam.
He is arguing how, he's asking, how do you argue with leftists who simply won't listen to you?
Now, this question I get all the time.
Let me give you a couple of pointers.
First of all, you have to decide what you want.
If you're trying to convince somebody of something, it's different than if you're just trying to beat him in an argument.
Beating someone in an argument feels great, but it doesn't really accomplish anything.
There are very few people who will change their minds having been beaten in an argument.
There are people who can listen to you if you discuss with them what you think versus what they think and just hold them up together.
So the first thing I would say to you is when you are discussing, if your intent is to convince somebody, don't be a jerk.
It's tough.
I have to tell you, it is tough because I have a very long fuse.
I can't remember the last time I got really angry, even inside.
I mean, I can remember it, but it's a long time ago.
I'm not a guy who gets angry.
But I do get impatient when you talk to people and they say dumb things.
You know, when you say, oh, you know, when they start telling you about poor Michael Brown killed by the police or whatever they say, or yes, I know a Muslim person and he's swell.
Shouldn't we let all the Muslims, you know, into why should Donald Trump be so mean?
You got to stay patient.
You have to stay patient.
And I confess to you that I don't always do it, but I'm telling you, do what I say, not what I do on that.
Know the basics, you know.
The issue frequently is not what's right and wrong, but who decides.
So sometimes you're arguing with somebody and they'll tell you, oh, the poor are doing this and you have to help the poor.
That's true.
The question is, who decides what's right and wrong?
Do you decide in your do you get to live by your lights, by your conscience, or does the government impose that on you?
So those are basic things.
Know what you're talking about.
You have to know the facts.
A lot of programs that sound great make people miserable.
You look at Detroit, believe me, those taxes that they took from people in Detroit that gutted that city were always for programs that sounded wonderful.
So if you're going to argue with something, you have to know the facts.
You also have to know your principles.
You have to know the principles of conservatism.
When people say to you, this is one thing leftists always say, government can do good things.
Look at this.
Government did this.
Anybody can do good things.
A fascist dictator can do good things.
An emperor can do good things.
The point is you want to be free.
You want a government that's limited, not because it can't do good things if it's unlimited.
It can do good things, but the very fact that it's unlimited is so bad that it overcomes the good things that you do.
And also, and this is with leftists, the key, the biggest key of all, don't discuss personalities.
Don't argue about what Donald Trump said.
Don't argue about what George W. Bush said.
Don't argue about whether this guy is good or this guy is bad.
Argue about principles and facts.
That's all you argue about.
Because, you know, politicians stink.
They do bad things.
They're corrupt.
They lie.
All of them almost.
I can't think of one that I would just think, yeah, I would trust that guy to walk away with my daughter.
I can't think of a politician I feel that way about.
So don't argue about personalities and try to keep them to the subject.
This is the other thing leftists do.
Leftists, you'll be arguing with them about welfare and you'll destroy their argument.
And they'll say, but what about guns?
All you people have guns.
And you go, well, wait, what happened to welfare?
So those are like the rules that I use.
The most important one, I have to tell you, is try not to be a jerk.
Try to discuss the thing with the person, even when you lose your patience a little bit.
Very tough to do.
All right, let's move on to stuff I like.
The Flesh and the Spirit Conflict00:09:33
We've been talking all week about the ways, the foundations of our culture.
And the reason I want to talk about this is so you understand, you know, conservatives have this really adversarial relationship with the arts.
They don't like the arts.
They feel quite rightly that leftists use the arts to propagandize for the left, and they feel, well, the answer is we have to propagandize for the right.
And I think that that is wrong.
I think what you have to do is you have to find the truth in art.
Art never works unless there's truth in it.
It never works unless there's truth in it.
So we talked about how all our culture grows out of Christianity.
It all grows out of Christianity.
People who think they are escaping Christianity are almost always talking in Christian terms.
They're almost always talking about tolerance and forgiveness.
They're just leaving Christianity out of it because it leads them to places they don't want to go.
And so they're always standing on the top of the tower without accepting the foundation, the cornerstone of the tower.
They're like Wily Coyote.
If they look down, they're suddenly going to go like, whoa, and fall 200 feet.
So we've talked about how the West deals with questions of the truth.
It comes right out of the Gospels.
We've talked about how the West invented the idea of the individual because of Christianity.
This is a thing that did not exist before the West, or the West invented you, the idea of yourself as a worthwhile individual.
And finally, I just want to talk about the idea of the flesh, the idea of the flesh and the spirit.
And the reason this is important is because the question is, which of them is a metaphor?
Is the flesh a metaphor that represents something else?
Or is everything else a metaphor that represents the flesh?
And these questions come right out of, first of all, the gospel, but they come out in such a complicated way that I don't have time to talk about it right now.
But it's in a lot of what Paul writes about.
He says, you know, in Galatians, he says, walk by the spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh, for the flesh desires what is contrary to the spirit and the spirit what is contrary to the flesh.
And that's not complicated or arguable.
We all know if you're married, you know that you promised your wife that you weren't going to sleep with other people.
You know that it's hard sometimes not to sleep with other people.
The flesh insists on it.
It tells you that you are violating some principle of life.
After about the 17th century, after Newton, basically, after science, there came to be what is called what C.S. Lewis called, gee, I can't even remember what he called it, it was the great inward turning or the great internalization, I think he called it.
And the idea was that everything that we thought was done by God, everything that we thought was done by the Spirit, was actually related to the flesh.
And everybody started creating systems in which everything became a symbol, a metaphor for the flesh.
The most important one and the most famous one is Sigmund Freud, who said, you know, that's a phallic symbol.
You're smoking that cigar because it reminds you of a male member.
You know, that kind of thing.
You're saying these things, but it's always about sex.
It always goes back to sex.
And that is now, that has been transformed now into evolutionary biology, where we say, you find that beautiful, you find that girl beautiful because she's throwing off signs that she is fertile.
You know, you find, you'll hear, they will truly say to you, you find a sunrise beautiful because man is safer during the day.
And you'll say, well, why do I find a sunset beautiful?
Well, because man is safer during the night in his cave.
I don't know.
You know, I mean, they explain everything in terms of the flesh.
And the question is, is that right?
Or is the flesh itself a metaphor for something more important?
Are the things that happen to you in your life symbolize, do they symbolize something more important than your physical being?
Because you can't really have a moral world unless life extends beyond life.
We all know that life is unfair.
A 20-year-old who goes to war and gets shot down so that maybe people can be free, that's not fair.
That's not right.
And we all kind of assume that there's something bigger that he is serving and that there is some kind of reward system in heaven.
We have lost that faith in the spirit.
That has gone out of the arts.
And you can see it.
And where you see this most is in supernatural stories, because supernatural stories tend to deal directly with the spirit.
If you look at vampires, just for instance, we have an image that I brought in.
This is the difference between the vampire Dracula, who's horrifying, because he was a damned soul.
He had lost his soul.
That was what was horrifying about being a vampire.
You had just become a hungry creature, a hungry animal, basically.
Now, because we've lost that, he's now a sexy guy from Twilight, right, with the twinkly sparkles when he comes along.
Because we don't think of him as having lost his soul.
We just think of him as having some kind of disease almost.
Where you see this most importantly is in zombie stories.
The reason zombie stories are now so popular, the reason they are, I would say, the central supernatural story that is being told, the central horror story that is being told, is because they are quite an honest reflection of what a man becomes if we really believe he has no soul.
He becomes food, and he becomes the person who eats the food.
There's no reason not to eat a human body.
The only reason not to eat a human body is because you respect it as a receptacle of the spirit.
Take a look at the first and the greatest zombie film, Night of the Living Dead.
The acting is bad, but the film is incredible.
This is how it opens: with a brother and sister in a graveyard, and in the background, what we will later find out is a zombie is walking around, and the brother is teasing the sister.
Hey, I mean, praying's for church, huh?
Come on.
I haven't seen you in church lately.
Well, there's not much sense in my going to church.
Do you remember one time when we were small, we were out here?
It was from right over there.
I jumped out at you from behind the tree, and Grandpa got all excited, and he shook his fist at me, and he said, Boy, you be done to hell.
Remember that right over there?
Well, you used to really be scared here.
Johnny.
You're still afraid.
Stop it now.
I mean it.
They're coming to get you, Barbara.
Stop it.
You're ignorant.
They're coming for you, Barbara.
Stop it.
You're acting like a child.
They're coming for you.
Look, there comes one of them now.
The one of them now turns out to be a zombie who then immediately devours the brother because this guy, having left the church, having left the spirit behind, has turned the body into what the body is.
It's an eating, screwing machine that really has no concern for the higher things.
And this is what that vision of a zombie apocalypse, as we've now come to call it, is a vision of the world, what it would be like if we truly stopped believing in the spirit.
That's why today, my stuff I like is The Sixth Sense, one of my favorite movies, one of my favorite ghost story movies.
I love ghost stories.
Excellent performance by Bruce Willis.
Here is the exchange, the famous exchange between Bruce Willis, a psychiatrist, and a little boy who is troubled and he's come to treat him.
And the little boy finally tells him what it is that's bothering him.
And remember, a psychiatrist is a Freudian who is used to taking the things that you think are spiritual and teaching you that they're really about your desires and your libido and your flesh.
And here, suddenly, those two points of view come smack into each other.
My secret now.
In your dreams?
while you're awake?
Did people like engraves and coffins?
Walking around like regular people.
They don't see each other.
They only see what they want to see.
They don't know they're dead.
How often do you see them?
All the time.
The look on Willis's face says it all.
He hears that, and he knows, as a trained psychiatrist, he knows this kid is psychotic.
He's having a psychotic break.
Because if you see dead people, something is terribly, terribly wrong with you.
And so this is the moment when he realizes this kid is truly sick.
Although, as we know, as we watch the movie, not so much.
And there's an entire theology, even in that one scene, but there's an entire theology in this movie that's really, really interesting and deep.
We don't have time to talk about it, but it's worth watching.
And the reason the film works, by the way, is because of this conflict.
You can see this film two and three times.
And even when you know the ending, which is obviously this big, you know, twist ending, when you know the ending, the film still works because of this relationship between the psychiatrist and the child.
That's all we have time for.
Tomorrow is our last day already, and the Clavenless weekend looms.
It's like a horrible cloud on the horizon, but there's one day left, and we'll do what we can to stave off the disaster.